EBMUD Questions Our Questions, But Only Muddies The Water

I got an email from The East Bay Municipal Utility District the other day. Seemingly polite, the "between the lines" message was a little unsettling.

The email from EBMUD (pasted below) seems to question facts in my previous post about a no-bid deal they got from Oakland City Council for Recology to build a food waste preprocessing plant onto their West Oakland wastewater plant site.

It's easy for them to offer a tour and say "this is an opportunity to get the facts", but I think we'd all like to know - which facts do they question, which facts do they challenge? Why throw "mud" at my blog posts without getting specific?

Just to be transparent, I'll post their email here, as well as the tour invite.

If anyone wants to go on their tour, I'm sure it would be interesting, but it's hard to tell whether or not their "facts" will clear the air or just further muddy the water.

---

From: "Chan, Gregory"
Date: May 1, 2013, 2:39:47 PM PDT
Subject: Tour Information for the EBMUD WW Treatment Plant

Dear Mr. Newhouse,

FYI, attached and below is information about various tour dates to EBMUD’s Wastewater Plant — with a particular look at water recycling, food waste and energy production.

For those members of your reader base that have read your recent blog and have expressed concerns -- this is an opportunity to get the facts.

Contact information and the reservation process are contained in the attached flyer as well as below.

Gregory L. Chan
Public Affairs Office
East Bay Municipal Utility District
375 Eleventh Street (MS 802)
P.O. Box 24055
Oakland, CA 94623-1055

Office: (510) 287-0135
Fax: (510) 287-0149
e-mail: gchan@ebmud.com
website: www.ebmud.com

TOUR EBMUD Wastewater Treatment Plant and Food Scrap Processing Facilities

Twilight Tours 5:30 pm
• Tuesday May 7
• Thursday May 23

Saturday Tours 10 am
• Saturday May 11
• Saturday June 15

Making sure that pollutants do not enter San Francisco Bay is a job we all share. Find out more about how EBMUD and our customers work together to conserve energy and water, and protect natural resources.

Tours will last about one hour and are limited to 10 people per tour. Participants must be able to walk one mile. Please wear comfortable clothes and closed toe shoes.

Location:
EBMUD Wastewater Treatment Plant
2020 Wake Avenue
Oakland, CA

Parking:
Park in small parking area at front gate

To reserve a spot, contact:
Allison Garrett
(510) 287-1445
agarrett@ebmud.com
www.ebmud.com

I'm still watching this Recology thing...Are You?

Something still stinks here.

For those who may have forgotten, the laudable goals of Recology and San Francisco - to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfills - have turned out to raise some serious questions about the city's and company's claims, and Recology's credibility.

This is not the first time that I've heard or written about Recology and waste issues in Oakland and San Francisco. Nor is it even the second time (that was back here).

What this episode with EBMUD raises are more questions, especially if you want to trust the credibility of a waste company from San Francisco that has operated there without competition for 80 years and now wants to increase its activity in Oakland.

In January a state appeals court reinstated a lawsuit brought by a former Recology employe who says the company made fraudulent overpayments in its recycling program and fired him for reporting it to superiors and police. The lawsuit was filed last year brought by Brian McVeigh, a former Recology manager turned whistle-blower. It has not gone away, it has been reinstated by a state appeals court, and McVeigh's lawyers claim the alleged fraud schemes in over-reporting could cost Recology $10 million in fines.

Remember as well, that a national waste industry publication, Waste 360, also raised questions about the credibility of claims by Recology and San Francisco that the only sends 20 percent of its waste to landfill and the rest is diverted to other purposes - recycling, energy to waste, composting, etc - all laudable goals. Except that Waste 360 points out San Francisco sent 440,000 tons of waste to landfills last year. If that is only 20 percent of the city's waste, then the city would have generated 2,220,000 tons of waste, about 2.73 tons of trash for every man, woman and child in the city. If that's true, it would be more than three times the national average.

Who was it that said "trust but verify"? Yeah, well - I think the time for trusting is over. I think we need to go straight to "watching these guys like a hawk."

Do we really want to be making deals with guys who look like they have a history of pulling fast ones?

A Good Omen for this A's Fan!

Regular season is FINALLY here! Life Has Meaning Again!

Yes, the Oakland A's had a good spring, yes they beat the World Champion Giants two out of three in last weekend's Bay Bridge series, but the real omen for their success in 2013 was found unexpectedly in a Walmart in San Leandro where yours truly and his girlfriend went for a new A's hat.

As my relatives, friends, clients, and fellow denizens of coffeehouses & saloons will find, that prominent symbol of white, gold and green will be evident every day for the next six (and hopefully seven!) months through this season. So spotting a bright adjustable hat in Walmart for $14.97 (maybe twenty bucks less than at the Coliseum) was a pretty good sign. And when it went through the register for $3.28 (!!), that was definitely an omen of great tidings. No questions, just a smile and "good luck" from the register girl.

Yes, after last year's amazing season, we've said goodbye to Johnny Gomes and Brandon McCarthy, and seen the backs of Cliff Pennington, Brandon Inge and Chris Carter, but our team is hitting Opening Night against the Mariners in high gear. The Cactus League saw the A's win 17 and lose 13. While that is normally pretty meaningless, it's worth noting what the A's did in their last 10 games - they won 8, tied one and lost one, including playing three games in front of 113,000 fans at the Giants AT&T Park (where they won 7-3 and lost 3-1) and at our dusky old Coliseum, where Yeonis Cespedes hit another tremendous home run for a 4-3 victory.

Tough to see Jemile Weeks go down to Triple-A, glad newcomer Hiro Nakijima has time to recover from his sprained hamstring, and a Big welcome to -- Jed Lowrie, Chris Young, John Jaso, Chris Respo and Nate Freiman -- may you be infused with the spirit of Moneyball!

Play Ball! See if you can get one of these A's hats for $3.28 - what a way to start the season!

Something Stinks in EBMUD...Stinks Like a Back-Room Deal.

Is anybody else fed up with toxic freeway pollution and garbage stink that hits you coming off the Bay Bridge from San Francisco?

Commuters driving on 880, 80, 580 and 24 catch a whiff of the stench that residents of Emeryville and West Oakland gag on every day where those freeways converge near the expanding waste complex that EBMUD operates in the Port of Oakland.

Now the Oakland City Council has given Recology, the San Francisco waste company, an exclusive contract to bring up to 600 tons a day of waste from San Francisco and the Bay Area to a new food waste preprocessing facility Recology will operate on EBMUD land. There is a lot about this deal that has not been explained or discussed in public.

All year we've heard about the ambitious West Oakland Specific Plan to bring in new jobs and housing while protecting the neighborhood. Polluting metals recycling facilities are headed to the former Oakland Army Base. This area got wacked in 1989 by an earthquake that collapsed the Cypress Freeway. For the past 25 years dozens of plans promised to make this area more livable, end illegal dumping and fix up the broken window syndrome in West Oakland.

Does that mean it's okay to start piling in again with more garbage trucks, more composting, more food waste that stinks up the area without even holding proper public hearings at City Hall, avoiding the need for a specific CEQA Environmental Impact Report that would discuss all of these issues in detail?

Recology has had a monopoly on garbage collection in San Francisco for 80 years and spent $1.75 million last summer to defeat a city referendum to open waste collection to competitive bidding. Now, Recology has won a no-bid exclusive contract to build a facility in Oakland for trash from our city and anywhere else their trucks can deliver garbage from! 600 tons a day, seven days a week, is almost 220,000 tons a year. Recology and EBMUD put forward a laudable goal, to convert food waste to methane energy. But EBMUD's anaerobic digester can handle only 100 tons a day, and Recology can bring in 600 tons a day! Does anyone care what happens with all this extra traffic into EBMUD/Recology and where will the extra 500 tons a day go after that? Does anyone care?

The Draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR) says there is an "significant and unavoidable risk" which the Recology food waste facility will pose to existing pollution cancer risks already facing West Oakland residents. The City Council never discussed the EIR in any detail, and the city's own Public Works Agency supervisor told the council not to worry: "This is a land use restriction within the Port of Oakland so it’s not within a land use restriction with the City of Oakland. Yes it is a deal between Recology East Bay Organics and East Bay MUD."

They didn't. The Council voted 6-2 to approve Recology's facility on February 5, 2013. Only Larry Reid and Desley Brooks opposed. No one wrote about the decision. No one seems to care. Sounds like a backroom deal.

Reid's last comment before the vote was: "I’m just gonna say this, I’m going to vote no, we’ve often made mistakes in the past and this is another one that we’re making, and we’re going to live to regret it."

In Praise of an Older Man (Leonard Cohen @ Oakland's Paramount)

Leonard Cohen is 78 years old and still giving everything he's got.

I was learning how to ask a girl out for a date in high school when this unkempt Canadian with a gravelly voice was strumming a guitar and singing about Suzanne.

If you said Leonard Cohen wasn't the coolest man alive, I'd say you were wrong.

Cohen gave two shows this weekend before two sell-out crowds at Oakland's priceless art-deco Paramount Theatre, treating 3,000 fans each night to more than three hours of his gracious, intimate and inspiring poetry and music. He was here in 2010 for a series of concerts at the same venue.

By all accounts, he is even more energized and more gracious. In the intervening two years, of course, he had to testify against his former manager, Kelley Lynch, before she was jailed for stealing more than $5 million from his accounts while he was in a Zen monastery.

That's him there, on the left, I think.

So this is a singer, entertainer and cult icon who is back to work on a 19-city tour with nine musicians and a big back-up team, and he is gracious, tender and generous in giving himself to his audience in marathon performances such as the two he gave in Oakland this past weekend.

He opened Sunday night's concert with a tilt towards his mortality and an affirmation of his state of mind: "I don't know, friends, when we’ll ever meet again – no one can know that – but tonight we'll give you everything we've got."

If you have a chance, between now and April 21, Cohen will appear at 17 venues across North America.

We in Oakland have been so fortunate to be on his radar. Rolling Stone pretty much has got it right in its write-up of Leonard Cohen singing here in Oakland.

Oakland Enlists Community to Make First Friday Safe

First Friday resumed peacefully last weekend with appeals to end violence in Oakland and moments of silence to commemorate the the fatal shooting of Kiante Campbell, an 18-year-old Oakland high school student at February's street fest.

I like the straightforward tone set by newly-elected Councilwoman Lynette Gibson McElhaney, who stood on a stage and called out: "If you love Oakland, thrown your peace signs up."

Oaklanders, including Mayor Jean Quan, wore green and white shirts that read "Respect Our City". The street festival, which draws thousands to its mix of food, music and arts and crafts, resumed in a smaller area with a shortened time format after the shooting that left one dead and three wounded last month.

Some elected officials still ask if Oakland is focusing its limited police resources at the right issues - directing traffic around the First Friday crowds in Uptown rather keeping the peace in some of Oakland's more crime-ridden neighborhoods.

It's not an easy question to answer. First Friday and the Art Murmur movement that organized the monthly open houses for galleries and clothing stores between Broadway and Telegraph Avenues from 19th to 25th Streets had grown from strength to strength, drawing Oaklanders and visitors from around the Bay.

The shooting erupted nearly an hour after the Feb. 1 street fest ended. An account in the Feb. 27 Chronicle still cannot pinpoint who shot Campbell, but he was one of three partiers who drew guns at each other at 20th and Telegraph, a few feet away from one of First Friday's most popular dessert vans that straddles that intersection.

For last week's First Friday, authorities shrank the area of the street fest to five blocks along Broadway and Telegraph,. curtailed the festivities to close by 9 pm, one hour earlier, and strictly enforced laws against drinking in the street.

"After what happened last month, we knew that we needed to change," a First Fridays spokesman said. "We had to look at how we were addressing this and recognize the gravity of it."

The Chronicle quoted a third generation East Oaklander, Lukas Brekke-Miesner, as saying, "We're not involved because violence happened at First Friday. We;re involved because this city has a violence problem."

Where First Fridays go remains to be seen. I want them to work, I want to take more friends to disabuse them of their bias about violence-prone Oakland. I guess it's up to all of us to make this effort.

Oakland Makes Bad Situation With the A's Even Worse

Messing with the A's is sort of like messing with my emotions.

A friend of mine who likes the Raiders, A's and Warriors is fretting that Oakland will lose ALL our major league franchises because we just keep screwing up! You may remember just before Christmas a story about Lew Wolff, the A's owner who wants to move the team to San Jose, writing a letter to the city offering to renew his lease with the City of Oakland to keep the American League West Division champions at the Coliseum for another five years.

I remember feeling a sigh of relief. At least five more years for the A's in Oakland, especially after the sensational 2012 season. Right?

Then it turns out that City Administrator Deanna Santana accused Wolff of leaking the letter to the press about the lease renewal instead of sending it to city, county and coliseum officials. Wolff got furious and produced proof that he had sent this letter to Major Jean Quan, the council and public officials.

Now Ms Santana is eating crow with an apology that due to "human error" she missed Wolff's email when it was sent on Dec 21. So on Monday night she takes a shot at Wolff, telling Oakland boosters Wolff never sent that letter to Oakland leaders, he just released it to the press. Then on Tuesday Wolff refutes Santana with proof he did what he was supposed to, not what she had accused him of doing. Today we're back to the negotiations the A's and City and coliseum must navigate to keep this wonderful team in our city.

What is wrong with our city leaders? How can they be so bloody-minded, taking unnecessary shots at our A's?

The Mercury News has an account of this shabby affair. I'd love to hear your comments and thoughts on this turn of events. I'm a little too sick to my stomach to write more about it right now (yes, I *do* take baseball a little too seriously, I know). PS - as I finished up this piece and went to the little "tag" box to categorize this piece, I see I'm clicking "Oakland" and "Baseball" and "A's" and..."City Council" and "Politics." It's a little telling, and even more frustrating to me...politics shouldn't get in the way of baseball. Grrrr.