By John Geluardi
Newspaper reporters who cover the city of Richmond like to say it’s a great town to write about because of the “Three Cs,” which refers to crime, corruption and Chevron.
The Richmond City Council has long been an easy date for any organization or business willing to plow money back into re-election campaigns.
In 2003, the council was cutting such sweet deals with city employee unions, particularly the police and fire unions, that the city found itself $35 million in debt. The financial meltdown cost hundreds of employees their jobs and critical city services were cut to the bone.
This year it was the Chevron refinery that was cutting backroom deals with the City Council so the oil giant can upgrade its facility to refine cruder oil or “dirty crude”, the type that can be drilled off the California coast. The council approved the upgrade by a pencil thin majority, but not without striking a deal. Chevron, which spewed 60,819 tons of toxins over troubled Richmond in 2003, promised to pour $61 million into public safety agencies, job training and local healthcare facilities.
By Benjamin Wachs
The Olympics are over; Gavin’s honeymoon’s done; the conventions are played out; the man has burned.
Try as they might, our city’s leaders can no longer come up with a single good reason not to be here. They could, I suppose, pretend to have a family crisis in the Midwest –- but that would mean admitting to having family in the Midwest. That they care about. Not going to happen.
So finally, at long last, the Mayor and our Board of Supervisors returns to us. And just in time. There’s crucially important work that city government has to pretend to do.
The first rule of politics, as a Very Important Politician once told me, is simple: LOOK BUSY! And the Supes, still dreaming about all the cutting things they could say about Sarah Palin if someone were only to ask (Tom Ammiano is just going to BURST if someone doesn’t ask!), are failing badly.
They’ve only got two meetings scheduled for this week: After taking a month off, most of them are only working a single day their first week back. Which raises a Very Important Question: Are they fooling anyone?
The politicians – the people’s representatives – don’t actually run this city. The bureaucracy does: which is why much of the shit the politicians tell the city to do doesn’t get done. Any city which can have its government out for 5 weeks without incident is a city that can have it out for 10. And a city that can effectively have no government for 10 weeks is probably paying too much for it.
Which is why I make a modest proposal to help solve our budget crisis: eliminate Democracy. We’re not using it: why should we pay for it?
Each Supe makes just shy of 100 grand annually. Multiply that by 11 Supes, and we’ve trimmed a million off the budget right there – plus the Mayor’s hefty salary, plus all the aides whom the public basically pays to make the Supes look pretty and Gavin look smart. (According to this interview he gave, the city actually pays Gavin’s aids to take notes on the books he reads for him. This is not healthy). Put it all together, along with the money we save by not having municipal elections, and we’ve cleared $10 million easy.
The alternative is to have meetings like these, in perpetuity. Think it over.
