Monday, June 30, 2014

Oakland’s Garbage Mess: Just When You Thought It Was Safe!

Like the movie Jaws, Recology just doesn't seem to go away. A City Hall source says Recology's lobbyists are working hard to get into the already jumbled bidding for this $1.2 billion 20-year contract. Remember, on May 29 the City Council rejected staff's recommendation to retain Waste Management as Oakland’s primary garbage handler (along with a 50% rate increase!).

Recology unceremoniously withdrew from the bidding process last year when Minna Tao told the June 18 2013 City Council meeting, she was "dismayed" at the process and that the city's contract conditions made it "non-conducive" to bid. City Council President Pat Kernighan then called for changing the contract terms to 20 years and to allow Recology to rebid for the contract.

The council reacted negatively to Waste Management’s proposal, especially after spending nearly $1 million on consultants to bring in multiple bidders who never materialized. One can speculate that Council members are encouraging the likes of Recology to jump back into the mix. What's wrong with this?

Recology’s Minna Tao is the same person who, in a letter to the city’s Garrett Fitzgerald, encouraged Oakland to use public financing to build a local waste facility for it to manage. The fact that this multi-million dollar company, with a monopoly over San Francisco’s trash contract since 1932, is asking is insulting in itself. But floating this idea knowing Oakland’s dire financial situation is worse!

Recology must certainly smell blood, as the 'best and final offers' staff was directed to get from Waste Management and California Waste Solutions are likely not going to satisfy city council, particularly during an election year!

Don’t be surprised if council delays the garbage contract matter until after the November elections given that rates will inevitably be going up no matter who the city chooses.


Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Win-Win Is Turning into Stinking Garbage Mess in West Oakland

I picked up a flyer at the Lake Merritt Farmer's Market last weekend that almost knocked me off my feet. Remember how West Oakland celebrated a landmark agreement with the city two years ago to relocate two recycling businesses that had fouled that neighborhood with pollution and fumes from hundreds of trucks rumbling through that residential area?

Remember how Mayor Jean Quan and the City Council touted the win-win solution to relocate both California Waste Solutions (CWS) and Custom Alloy Scrap Sales (CASS) Metals from West Oakland to the former Oakland Army Base?

Guess what? That win-win solution is turning into a stinking mess. Debt problems for the Port of Oakland are impacting on redevelopment of the former Army Base. That seems to be creating delays that will push back the relocation of those two firms. Now, to make matters worse, one of them, CWS, wants to expand its Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) at 10th Street and Pine. CWS is bidding with the City of Oakland to handle garbage services and needs to expand the facility to do that work in the neighborhood it was going to leave!

This is not what they and the city promised when the City Council voted 7-0 in 2011 to pursue negotiations with CASS and CWS. It was a grand solution to a decades-old problem and promised to rid West Oakland of daily pollution from diesel recycling trucks rumbling through its streets. Now West Oakland may face garbage trucks as well.

Why is no one demanding that the City keep to its agreement? Nothing has changed for the people of West Oakland. These large West Oakland recycling companies can be moved from a residential area to vacant industrial land, namely the 28-acre acre North Gateway area of the former base CWS and CASS were going to buy adjacent to the East Bay Municipal Utility District's wastewater treatment plant. The win-win solution promised community benefits and new jobs resulting from the relocation as well.

Instead, CWS, which has a recycling contract with the city, is bidding for the city's garbage contract and needs to expand the same MRF that was going to move to the army base. If the City approves this proposal, hundreds more diesel trucks with pour into the West Oakland neighborhood to that facility located directly across the street from residential homes.

What is going on in this city? They put out an RFP which Waste Management apparently won with a low bid. They went through all this fancy secrecy about what they could or could not discuss in public about this contract and other shenanigans related to the Oakland garbage contract (see some earlier Mad Ivan rants on the subject: see Oakland's Zero-Waste Plans Are Commendable - But Can We Afford Them? and I'm still watching this Recology thing...Are You? and Something Stinks in EBMUD).

Who knows how this shambolic situation is going to end? In the meantime, the company that committed to West Oakland residents that it would relocate both of its MRF operations from West Oakland (the other in at 3300 Wood Street), now has no current time frame on when it will move to the former army base. It means the suffering isn't over for West Oakland - the poor air quality, the pollution and diesel truck traffic that perpetuates an injustice we thought was past. The community's health and well-being for children and families continues to be at risk, regardless of the promises of corporations and politicians.

As the flyer at the farmer's market says: We need to Clean West Oakland Now!

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Unfinished Business - Measure Y, Crime, Coliseum City, West Oakland

Even when Oakland's future looks so promising these days, beginning with the Swinging A's in 2014, this city continues to stumble badly on big initiatives that fail to materialize. Time and again, our political and civic leaders fail to rally and deliver step-changing tangible results, and the voters are left behind - whether it is a Measure Y to sustain police staffing levels, workable strategies to reduce crime, committing to push through major developments in West Oakland or facing facts about Howard Terminal versus Coliseum City.

Crime and the perception that Oakland can't or won't do anything about it is the thread that connects these four issues. This inability to deliver has sacrificed police manpower, hurt economic development across the city, delayed urban revival schemes in West Oakland, and cast doubt on grand, deep-pocket schemes like Coliseum City. It makes one wonder if our leaders really think Oakland can be great! Watch what they do, not what they say.

Lacking the political will to tackle crime has consequences beyond fear, injury and theft. Oakland has lost millions of dollars of retail spending to places like Emeryville and Walnut Creek because big retailers are reluctant to locate here. This retail leakage, estimated at about $1 billion a year, is what Oakland residents spent by shopping outside Oakland. It translates into more than $80 million in lost sales tax revenues that also go to Emeryville and Walnut Creek. Our tax dollars that could fund higher police staffing levels!

Measure Y was an attempt to provide additional funds to maintain minimum police staffing levels at 802 officers. Passed in 2004, it collected a parcel tax and parking assessments to generate $20 million a year to support police staffing. That stopped in 2010, when 80 police offcers were laid off and Oakland no longer met the minimum staffing requirement to collect the tax. How humiliating for us! Have our elected officials learned anything since then?

Now the city council wants to renew Measure Y, and this time, they hope it will turn out differently. This is a hot political potato, not just for the Council but for mayoral candidates with their different plans for increasing Oakland's police force to 800 or 900 officers or more. Here is where the rubber hits the road. Taxpayers funded Measure Y, violence prevention advocates received the funding they wanted, but police staffing plummeted, crime still dogs Oakland's reputation, and all this makes some big property investors wary of doing business here.

Civic leaders play a role in all of these threads of promise and despair as well. The mayors and city council members have been treading water over the West Oakland Specific Plan, and some 25 plans that preceded it, despite the best efforts of planners and community leaders to ask and answer what kind of housing, transport and new jobs could flourish there after the Cypress Freeway collapsed in the 1989 earthquake.

Just look at Howard Terminal and the close-minded greed of local businessmen who insist on seducing the public with glittering images of a new baseball stadium near Jack London Square, when they know that solution brings more problems and ignores others that will hurt Oakland far more than help it.

It's all very glamorous to see Don Knauss, Gary Rogers and Doug Boxer promote a downtown stadium, but they don't address the prohibitive costs of cleaning up a contaminated harbor site. They ignore the traffic and transit mayhem around a new ballpark that would draw 38,000 fans, cars, pedestrians and shuttle buses to an area without a nearby BART stop. DUH!! These conflicts arise from placing a Major League Baseball stadium inside a working port, but they just point to the pretty pictures and say Oakland can be like the Giants in San Francisco.

They prefer to ignore the fact that Oakland cannot afford infrastructure for two separate sports venues, that the city still carries $120 million bonded indebtedness for the Oracle Arena and Coliseum if Knauss, Rogers and Boxer persuade the A's to come downtown. The 50-acre Howard Terminal site in no way offers the scale of development, housing, jobs, retail and sports possibilities already proposed on the 800-acre site at Coliseum City.

I bring up all of these issues because The Chronicle's Chip Johnson wrote a column this week about Oakland City Council's current debate on extending Measure Y. He says the council wants to address the real issues about Measure Y this time. But he points out that the voters have been left behind before, and they know it. As he concludes, "if there is one thing Oakland residents want more than police on our streets, it's a government based on honesty, not deception, word games and personal political agendas."