“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 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 25th 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]
Creature Creek 
