Royal Council May Face Democracy

 

“Rather than a healthy give and take… city representatives have shut the door…even after the city council directed staff to meet with stake-holders, the message delivered by staff to those who participated was that although city staff was being required to tolerate public testimony on the subject, because the die had already been cast, nothing the public had to say was going to have any effect.” –  from “Celebrate Antioch Foundation” aka “The Yard,” to the Antioch City Council.

 

Lies, Secrets, Silence and the Antioch City Council

Monika Wilson ended the public comments with a gentle lecture. “Everyone needs to show everyone respect. We on the dais need to take the high road to set a good example. Yes, Mr. Duran, you’re looking at me, that’s good, you need to look at them too even if you don’t like what they say.”

City Manager Steve Duran was too obvious. He made a point of ignoring the speakers, typing on his phone, making faces; leaning back in his chair draining his can of soda, his back to the public.

Did you go to the September 22nd meeting to speak your mind, only to find you were talking to a row of bobbleheads? Or maybe you were one of the hundred or so interested citizens, waiting for answers that never came. Did you feel confused, conned, bamboozled?

Steve Duran blindsided the public in Closed Session on August 25. With approval from Mayor Wade Harper and council members Rocha, Wilson and Tiscareno, he gave first dibs on our waterfront to City Ventures, Inc.  Antioch had never heard of them, being unaware of Duran’s dealings in Hercules. Appearing for the first time on a list in the Closed Session Agenda, City Ventures has yet to make a public presentation of their vision. They have yet to show their corporate face in public. More than a month later, we have yet to learn the details.

Duran keeps telling us that his secret meeting with the developers was perfectly legal. It wasn’t. He said it in Hercules about a similar situation when he was their city manager and now he’s saying it to us. But in their open letter of 2012 Hercules residents showed how Duran and the Hercules City Council were violating the Brown Act and the Surplus Land Act, as he and the Antioch City Council are doing here.

No proper notice was given to the “priority entities” that had a right to bid on the properties, nor to the public. Ask the neighbors: Even down to the signs that were never posted, but should have been, there was no proper notice of the potential sale of the properties. On the “8/25/15 Antioch City Council Closed Session Announcement”, Duran says: “Under negotiation: price and terms of payment.” That wasn’t all that was under negotiation, but he had to pretend it was, didn’t he? Because under the “Real Property Exception” in the Bagley-Keene Open Meeting Act, only price and terms may be discussed, not land-use policy. He and the city council were inside making land-use policy with an outside corporation while the people of Antioch were kept in the dark.

So what was City Ventures, the supposed adverse party, doing in the same room where Duran was being “directed” in negotiations by the Council? “This provision has been the subject of considerable abuse. For example, government agencies involved in enormous, multi-faceted transactions have used a real property portion of the potential transaction to discuss the entire matter in secret. It has also been invoked to cover meetings attended by representatives of the adverse party in the negotiation.”

As the Council clucked their approval of the Constitution and proclaimed “Constitution Day,” it started to look like the City might show some respect for the will of the people. But they didn’t. The elephant in the room was their silence.  Ambitious Wade Harper, his behind-the-scenes campaign to be the next well-paid County Superintendent underway, was prudently absent. The council members who showed up, kept their mouths shut. Thirty people spoke out against the waterfront giveaway; they were answered with wooden smiles.

Finishing up on the high road, Monika Wilson continued to ignore the inconvenient public. Not even Lori Ogorchok gave them the courtesy of a response, although she did give three minutes to speak and read the emails – which the council doesn’t publish – out loud. Wade Harper would have cut their time to two minutes and gavelled them down if they went over, if he had been there. Did they make a unanimous decision in secret to stonewall us? That would be a violation of the serial meetings prohibition of the Brown Act if they did. Who would have advised them to do that?

The Brown Act can be a problem for councils who want to hold illegal secret meetings, yet still give the appearance of following the law.

It was a problem for Mary Rocha the night she bustled up to Celebrate Antioch Foundation members and commiserated in a low confidential voice, “They voted against us!” It was a four to one vote, against CAF’s park and recreation plan. Ah, so was Mary Rocha that one brave lonely voice, speaking out for the little people? Later in the meeting some citizen mentioned the Brown Act to the council, like waving a cross at a vampire. Rocha was shocked when for the first time the council revealed how the votes went – and threw her under the bus. Turns out, Lori Ogorchok was the dissenting vote, not Rocha.

Antioch bureaucrats hate the light of day. That’s why Duran, wary from his run-in with the Brown Act in Hercules, was lucky to hire a like-minded city attorney. In his blog, Derek Cole harks back wistfully to the days before the serial meetings prohibition was enacted.* Mr. Cole believes the sunshine laws are OK within limits, but cities can’t do business efficiently when they have to answer to a prying public. He should give the council – and Duran – advice on how to put up at least a pretense of open government.

“You sold us out, why can’t you even give us a reason for your decision?” someone asked. “Is there some kind of Robert’s Rules of Order saying you can’t answer us?” An exasperated woman blurted, “Why don’t you say something? You’re like puppets!”

“The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the
agencies which serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do
not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for
the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people
insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over the
instruments they have created."
   -GOVERNMENT CODE SECTION 11120-11132

 * [www.calimunilaw.com/2015/07/state-commission-finds-that-brown-acts-serial-meeting-prohibition-may-impede-good-government/]

 

 

 

 

 

Troll Blog Series

 

The Troll From City Hall

 

My neighbor Rich Buongiorno asked a really good question regarding a city-moderated Facebook page: “Do deletions constitute falsification or destruction of records?”

Tuesday, on the city Facebook the Antioch City Manager admonished the public to stop reading blogs written by trolls. Leaving us to guess who the trolls were, he told us to go through proper channels starting with himself, Steve Duran, to be fed the facts. He didn’t say what in particular he had in mind to educate the public on. Offense was taken as shown in the comment boxes, or was shown, before it was all deleted. By Wednesday forty replies had been posted but only five, ambiguous enough to slip by City Hall censors remained. “Very professional Steve;” “Wow. Very classy;” “Troll blogs? Seriously?” “Ya very!” “Lol.” By Thursday Steve “The Troll From City Hall” Duran’s post went down the memory hole. Except for the screen-shots.

If government pages are public forums do comments have to be agreeable to the bureaucrat in charge, or be “uplifting and appropriate and edifying?”   Was it right for city council member Lori Ogorchok to make Steve Duran disappear his post? Mayor Wade Harper and I think not. We believe in upholding Duran‘s First Amendment rights, although the mayor doesn’t think those rights should be extended to me or you. Even after Harper looked up “troll” in the dictionary (trolls are bad, he discovered) he stood firm in his belief that the Constitution protects unpopular speech, Duran’s anyway. And his own of course. Steve Duran and his defender Wade Harper could do a lot worse than add insult to injury on Facebook, and have.

“We wanted transparency, not invisibility,” Buongiorno wrote. “I posted a comment and noticed there were 24 comments (see capture). I went to look and see who else said what – NOT! Look at the other capture. There appears to have been some intentional hiding of comments, or deletes.”

So can bureaucrats delete comments they don’t like? They can in Antioch. But coast to coast and all the way to Hawaii cities are taking the law into account. The Honolulu Police Department was censoring comments posted by a gun-rights group on HPD Facebook. The gun-rights group sued and won, forcing the HPD to stop censoring comments.
 

 

Behind Closed Doors: Selling Rivertown, Cheap

“Reflections of Clouds and Sky” by Jody Mattison

 

This is Rivertown, Antioch, where the tule fog drifts like a ghost in winter, and the river smells sweet in summer. It has “existing charm and a sense of place,” both marketable items, and City Manager Steve Duran has plans to market them. But the people who live here don’t all go along with Mr. Duran’s plans. They don’t think of their home town as a commodity to be sold off to the developers. Rivertown is where there are plans afoot to wall off the river from the old town where the everyday people live and work, with a new town built of high-rise condos. Except for the low-income units – by law 15% must be – access to the river will be the exclusive province of them that can pay. This is a story of graft, greed, grifters and gratuities…

DURANTOWN

The Antioch City Council is known for being sneaky. Council member Mary Rocha calls it “making progress ‘Behind The Doors.’” You never see them discuss anything in open session yet almost every vote comes up unanimous. Do they all think alike? Or are they just violating open meeting laws by deciding things in secret behind the doors? 

They make decisions in secret. Nobody but those five council members, their hired recruiter, and Steve Duran know why he was their choice for City Manager. He’s been called charming and controlling, but those are only two of the traits on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. To be fair, no one really knows him well enough to check off any of the other traits, and we are cautioned by Hare that “two or three psychopathic traits do not a psychopath make.” Nonetheless Steve Duran, resident of Dublin not Antioch, is a perfect fit for the council. They must have been thrilled when they saw the open letter from Hercules residents accusing Duran and the Hercules City Council of violating not just the Brown Act but the Surplus Land Act. They had found a guy who gets the job done.

Mr. Duran is a big plus: he surpasses the city council in confusing the public. He can say just about anything because no one can understand what he’s saying – he talks fast, backtracks, scrambles his sentences and slurs his speech.

Steve Duran

Steve Duran formerly worked for:

~ “Too big to fail, too big to jail” AIG, doing no one knows for sure what.

~ Redevelopment agent for San Jose.

~ Economic Development Director for the city of Richmond, where he tried to sell a regional park to developers. He didn’t know it was a regional park, he said, a mistake anyone could make.

~ City Manager for Hercules, where he lobbied the City to secure a waterfront deal for City Ventures. There had been three bidders for the waterfront lot known as Victoria Crescent. The other two backed out. City Ventures was the low bid. They won. Duran didn’t abandon Hercules until after City Venture’s waterfront deal was secure.

Steve Duran works for the Antioch City Council now. Thanks to their generosity he’s getting $307,883 including benefits.* The average income of Antioch is $24,678, and the City is broke.

Where Duran goes, City Ventures, Inc follows. City Ventures is the aggressive, lawsuit-wielding corporation that started up “de novo” in 2009. Thanks to government bureaucrats, Steve Duran among them, they quickly became a successful grabber of city land all over California – real estate where they build pretty facades with shoddy interiors.

City Ventures is a pioneer of the “the lawsuit as cudgel” strategy – filing lawsuits against citizens who oppose them. They sued the town of Moraga for allowing citizens to file a referendum against them. From the Contra Costa Times: “The suit filed by property owner Russell J. Bruzzone, Inc. and developer City Ventures demands that the town reject a citizens referendum petition to halt zoning changes that allow the company to build 36 townhomes along Moraga Way.”**

Steve Duran’s first order of business – under orders from Mayor Wade Harper and the council – was to lay claim to the waterfront, ultimately securing it for City Ventures, behind closed doors, one year and eight months after he got his first paycheck from Antioch. We don’t know what kind of deal Duran has tied the City up with. The council won’t tell, they just want their cut. Whatever deal Duran made, City Ventures won’t let go without a costly legal battle.

That the waterfront was being sold off to a condo corporation came as a blow to the businesses and residents who make up the Celebrate Antioch Foundation. Long seeking permission to build a park on the historic Beede lot, which park activists call “The Yard,” the evasive City Council told them to wait until the new city manager settled in. Early on, the new manager told them they could forget about the park, because townhouses were planned for the site.

It was deja vu all over again. 

“We’re trying to make money from properties that are sitting around doing nothing.” – Steve Duran

Richmond needed money and as their economic development director, Duran had a plan: quickly, before the tree-huggers catch on, sell hundreds of acres of Richmond coast land  – including a Regional Wildlife Preserve – to developers for condos and a casino.*** The plan didn’t go through because the tree-huggers did catch on, but that was Richmond, and Duran is doing business in Antioch now.

Where’s the sensitivity? Didn’t Mr. Duran tell us last year, we weren’t allowed to feed the downtown cats anymore because cats are bad for “our environmentally sensitive waterfront?” He did, and it’s true, the Antioch shoreline is the only home of the endangered Lange’s metalmark butterfly. He was so sensitive then. What happened? Now he fails to explain how, if feeding wharf cats is bad for the environment, it is “environmentally sensitive” to bulldoze acres of butterfly habitat to build condos on landfill.

Steve Duran and the city council are proud of their role in “growing” the city to over 108,000 residents, now the second largest town in Contra Costa, with a crime rate 121% higher than the state average, thanks to that growth. Now they want to grow it some more with high-density condos downtown.

Duran tells of his vision to improve Rivertown, a revitalization plan to attract high-income residents. People who lived here their whole lives do have the sense of place Duran wants to sell out from under them. But they’re in the way; all that existing charm is wasted on them, and City Ventures grifter Phil Kerr knows what to do with charm – there’s money to be made. Here’s how:

First, Duran streamlines the re-zoning process – read “push it through.” Then Kerr destroys sense of place by enlivening the area with housing that can take advantage of the waterfront views – read “high-rise condos on unstable shoreline.”

Interestingly, City Venture’s blandishments in their ad to the City of Morgan Hill, sound a lot like Steve Duran’s in the 2015 Antioch City Report. That’s the report that landed in everyone’s mailbox three days after the City Council meeting on August 25,^th which espoused a land-use map that had already been printed in June, but supposedly had yet to be decided, by law in open session. The open meeting on August 25^th was when the City Council admitted that they had given no consideration to the park proposal, had illegally changed land-use in closed session, and announced their deal with City Ventures.

The sellout to City Ventures came de novo to Antioch locals, who had never heard of them before August. While the local bidders, Celebrate Antioch Foundation had long been denied the chance to present their plans, City Ventures never bothered to present their vision – standardized, high-density over-priced condos. We were kept in the dark.

* Public Employee Salary Database, San Jose Mercury News [www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area/2014]

** [www.contracostatimes.com/moraga/ci_28713694/moraga-sued-over-townhome-project-petition]

*** [www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/RICHMOND-Sale-of-city-parcels-protested-2763587.php]