This blog has two parts. The first part is an e-mail I received Wednesday from Dee Barnes, president of the Fresno City Employees Association — the city’s white-collar union.
Dee’s e-mail is a response to a blog I posted Tuesday evening. My blog was an analysis of how power works at City Hall in general, and how power works in the Measure G campaign in particular.
I give you Dee’s e-mail as she wrote it to me.
The second part of this blog is my Tuesday evening blog with a Wednesday morning correction and several additions.
The original blog had received 19 reader comments as of Thursday night. The reader comments are at the bottom of the original blog posted elsewhere on this site.
***
DEE BARNES’ E-MAIL
To say that I was disappointed with George Hostetter’s blog, titled “Measure G is about who gets the power,” is an extreme understatement. It is difficult to understand how a reputable and respected reporter could include so much misinformation and inflammatory anti-union statements in a newspaper blog. I am afraid that money and power are corrupting and changing the role of reporters and news organizations in our country.
I understand how much is at stake with the Measure G ballot issue on June 4th. There is a lot of money on the line and unfortunately too many see this as defining moment for power and political careers instead of what is best long term for our community. It is becoming more and more obvious that the Fresno Bee has chosen sides on Measure G and is no longer presenting facts in a fair and unbiased way to the residents. I believe ideology, money, and power are the major motives and George’s blog was catering to the segment of our population that already hates unions and public employees.
Our national economy has drastically changed since 2008 and many labor agreements should be scrutinized. However, salaries and benefits need to be looked at from the top down, including managers and elected politicians; not just the represented employees. The media should present actual facts and tell the entire story.
There were numerous inaccuracies in today’s blog and the article that was printed this past Sunday. Here are just a few of the inaccuracies:
Overtime wages are NOT pensionable. Please see page 23 of the attached retirement summary plan or confirm with the city retirement office.
Employees entering DROP have a variable interest rate and are no longer receiving a fixed 8%.
Council Members do not negotiate labor contracts. The City Manager works directly for the Mayor and is responsible for the negotiated labor contracts. Council ultimately approves labor contracts but they usually follow the recommendations of City Staff presented during CLOSED sessions with Council.
Staffing levels, overtime approval, and garbage routes are decided by managers, not employees. If drivers were consistently finishing routes in less than 7 or 8 hours, the problem lies with the decision makers, not the line-level employees.
Local 39 offered to make changes to the “task” overtime system in the past, but the city wasn’t interested. It had nothing to do with the threat of privatization. They, along with at least two other labor groups have made concession offers that the city is refusing to seriously consider.
Lee Brand claims the driver’s contract provides for 47 days of paid leave but doesn’t mention that the Fresno Municipal Code provides 45 days of paid leave to all employees with 20 years of service. You don’t have to be in a union to receive those benefits and the 12 days of sick leave are only paid when an employee is actually sick. ALL permanent city employees, whether union or non-union, receive at least 13 holidays, 12 sick days, and 8 vacation days unless they are the select few that receive annual leave instead of sick and vacation. You should also look into Administrative Leave.
I will not even bother asking where George got the information published in his blog; but he should certainly be questioning the motives of his source. It is disappointing that City Hall appears to be encouraging the demonization of public servants and the perception that all public employees receive bloated salaries, benefits, and retirements.
I realize that newspaper readership has severely declined over the years and like so many other print publications the Fresno Bee is struggling. I have shared with George on more than one occasion that even though I may go days without even opening my newspaper I have so far refused to cancel my subscription because I believe we need local news outlets. My husband and I have been loyal Fresno Bee customers for around 36 years and even added the electronic version of the Bee to our subscription when it became available.
I realize that George “updated” his blog sometime this afternoon and apologized for his error. However, the damage was done and how many will go back and read the “updated” version? Unless there is a new blog or printed story that addresses the mistake regarding overtime and retirement along with some of the other inaccuracies and omissions, we will be canceling our subscription and sharing our decision with others. I will no longer support a newspaper with such an obvious bias against working people.
Dee Barnes
******
MY ORIGINAL BLOG, WITH CORRECTION AND ADDITIONS
Measure G is about who gets the power
by George Hostetter on May 21, 2013
READER NOTE: This blog has been updated to correct an error I made. Overtime is not pensionable for the city’s home trash drivers. My thanks to Marina Magdaleno at Local 39, Stan McDivitt at the City of Fresno Pension System and Fresno City Council Lee Brand for providing information in this updated blog. I apologize for my error.
The pivotal number in the Measure G debate — 1.3 million.
The pivotal concept — a funnel.
The pivotal player — Mancur Olson.
You know all about Measure G. I’ll be spare with background. The June 4 election is two weeks away.
The key question: What is the fundamental dynamic here?
Here’s my stab: The big prize is the unusual power to be found in residential trash.
Let’s begin with 1.3 million.
The city serves more than 105,000 residential trash accounts. Each account-holder pays her bill each month. She does this 12 months a year.
For the sake of argument, let’s say everyone pays by check. To round-off, 1.3 million trash checks flow into City Hall annually.
The typical monthly bill is $25.37. That’s $33 million a year from all accounts.
That’s a lot of money. But a key when we talk about something like trash collection (a public good) is the source of all that cash.
It comes from 1.3 million individual checks. On top of that, each customer writes her 12 checks over the course of a year. A small check written once a month — it’s a habit.
A few extra dimes on the monthly bill are irrelevant to the average trash customer. But multiply 50 cents by 1.3 million and you get $650,000. That is a big deal.
(As an aside, I attended in January a Saturday morning rally held by outsourcing opponents. It was part of their successful petition drive to put the outsourcing ordinance on the ballot. I chatted with the wife of a trash driver. She said she tells voters who like the promised rate cut in the Mid Valley deal: “It’s only $4 a month. That’s nothing. But it’ll hurt the workers.”)
Now the funnel.
The $33 million flows into the funnel. The money pays for a cash-intensive service. The $33 million gets smaller and smaller. No one in the public pays attention. That’s the cost of doing business.
Then the funnel narrows. Left-over dimes tumble out at the bottom. Lots of them.
The money is enough to fight over.
What happens at the funnel’s bottom is out of the customers’ sight.
A very small group benefits from all those dimes. After all, a funnel concentrates the flow.
Now Mancur Olson.
Olson was an economist and social scientist. He died at age 66 in 1998. He wrote “The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups” in 1965.
Small groups — business associations, farmer coalitions, labor unions — can wield immense power in a large democracy, Olson said.
The small group has clear, specific aims. Each individual member gets something substantial if the group succeeds. Everyone works hard for a common goal.
Society at large doesn’t have these advantages. Too many factions, too much friction. Therefore, the small group often achieves stunning success.
We now come to Measure G, Mayor Ashley Swearengin, Stationary Engineers Local 39 (the city’s blue-collar union) and Mid Valley Disposal.
Local 39’s collective-action success has enabled it to grab a lot of the funnel’s left-over dimes.
This becomes clear in a three-page document I got last week at City Hall. The document lists the total pay and hours worked in 2012 by the city’s 95 trash drivers.
The list has regular hours worked, overtime hours, leave hours used, and total paid hours for each driver.
If you add regular hours worked, overtime hours and leave hours used, you get the total paid hours.
A veteran driver makes $22 to $23 an hour as regular pay. Let’s say $22.50 for this discussion.
A regular work week is eight hours a day, five days a week. There are 52 weeks in a year. That’s a total of 2,080 work hours in a year.
Council Member Lee Brand says the drivers’ contract provides for 13 paid holidays per year, 12 days of sick leave per year and up to 22 days of vacation per year for an employee with more than 20 years’ service. That’s 47 paid days — 376 hours of so-called leave at regular pay.
The means the typical driver works 213 days a year at regular pay — slightly less than 43 weeks, or 1,704 hours of labor at regular pay. He’s paid $22.50 an hour.
Add it all up — 1,704 hours of work at regular pay and 376 hours of leave time at regular pay — and you get a base salary for a veteran driver of $46,800 for 2,080 total hours.
The list shows that only nine of 95 city trash drivers worked at least 1,704 hours at regular pay in 2012. However, 69 of the 95 drivers made more than $46,800.
One driver worked 1,239 hours at regular pay (29 hours a week for a 42.5-week work year) and made $66,086.
Another driver worked 951 hours at regular pay (22 hours a week for a 42.5-week work year) and made $59,707.
Another driver worked 517 hours at regular pay (12 hours a week for a 42.5-week work year) and made $46,056.
The list goes on and on in this fashion. The list shines a spotlight on how top elected officials and Local 39 decided trash drivers should be paid.
I don’t recall such a list ever being discussed by the City Council in open session.
The Local 39 contract and something called the task system explain why drivers get so much overtime.
Drivers are paid for at the standard rate for an eight-hour day. A driver who finishes his route in five hours can do the route of someone else (perhaps someone on vacation) over those other three hours and get paid overtime.
Bottom line: The task system encourages drivers to use leave hours in a way that leads to more overtime and fewer hours of work paid at regular pay.
This series of events has many advantages for elected officials and drivers.
It keeps labor peace.
It’s easily hidden from ratepayers. The solid waste division is an enterprise department. It seeks no profit. It merely charges ratepayers the cost of providing the service. Labor costs are simply added to the monthly bill. Ratepayers are told: We’re not gouging you — as an enterprise department, we’re only charging you the cost of the service. Labor costs are what they are. Pay no attention.
Overtime costs are spread over 1.3 million annual checks — the broad top of the funnel.
Overtime costs are hardly noticed because they benefit fewer than 100 workers — the narrow bottom of the funnel).
(READER NOTE: It was here that I explored the implications of overtime as pensionable compensation. This is where I made my error. Again, my thanks to Marina, Stan and Lee for correcting me. With their information in hand, let’s explore driver salaries and pensions.)
Trash drivers aren’t part of Social Security. The formula for their defined benefit pension pays 2% of final wages for each year worked to a maximum of 25 years and 1% for each year after that.
The drivers’ wages have seen steady growth. According to an e-mail from Brand, Local 39 received 3% raises per year from 2007 through 2010 and a 2% raise in 2011.
If trash driver John Doe’s wages for his last year are $46,800 and he worked 40 years, he would get $30,420 in annual pension (25 years at 2% each and 15 years at 1% each equals 65% — 65% of $46,800 is $30,420).
There’s another wrinkle in this. The city’s pension system has something called DROP — the Deferred Retirement Option Program. DROP allows a city worker to stay on the job after retirement, collect a paycheck and bank his pension checks in an investment account run by the pension system’s experts. The worker gets this investment account when he retires for good.
The worker can be in DROP for a maximum of 10 years.
Let’s say John Doe works 30 years, then enters DROP. His wages in his final year before entering DROP are $46,800. His annual retirement pension is $25,740 (55% of $46,800).
John Doe then works for another 10 years. His $25,740 annual pension is deposited every year in his DROP account. That totals $257,400 after 10 years. The city’s retirement system on average gets an 8% annual return on its investments.
Thanks to the magic of compound interest, John Doe when he retires could expect to have $400,000 in his DROP account.
John Doe would retire after 40 years with an annual pension until death of $25,740 and a DROP annuity that figures to pay him $25,000 a year for 20 years.
That’s a total annual retirement income of $50,740 for John Doe. His standard annual wage for his final year of work was $46,800. John Doe doesn’t get Social Security, but he does retire with income of 108% of his final standard annual wage.
There are many variations to this formula. Each worker’s situation is different. For example, if John Doe worked 30 years and then an additional five years in DROP, his expected annual city retirement (pension and DROP payouts) could be in the $37,000 range — 79% of his final year’s wages.
(An aside: Mid Valley Disposal will pay $17 an hour to city drivers who transition to the private hauler should Measure G pass. Mid Valley has a defined contribution, not a defined benefit, pension program.)
(Another aside: Make no mistake, pensions among workers in all of the city’s other unions are a factor in the complex politics of Measure G. Swearengin has said she wants 4% wage/benefit concessions from all labor groups, whether they’re in general fund or enterprise departments. She says she’ll get them through negotiation or, when contracts are up and an impasse hits, simply by imposing new deals. The handwriting is on the wall for the other unions: If Measure G passes, Swearengin gets her steady stream of Mid Valley franchise fees, and the economy picks up, she may lighten up a bit on the wage-concession demand. That could mean a bit higher final salary for these other union members when they retire and a bit higher pension in their golden years. I’m not saying this possible calculation of worker self-interest is right or wrong. I’m just saying it’s part of the rough, behind-the-scenes fight that is Measure G in an era of tight city budgets.)
The are three reasons why such wages and pensions are possible at the city of Fresno.
1.) The 1.3 million ratepayer checks.
2.) The magic of the funnel.
3.) The dynamic best described by Mancur Olson — small and highly-focused special-interest groups can dominate the majority.
I’m not saying this is good or bad. It’s simply the way the city’s home trash system works. Voters on June 4 will decide if they like this system or not.
But voters must keep in mind that the 1.3 million checks, the funnel and Mancur Olson’s principles work the same way on the other side of Measure G’s coin.
The city’s outsourcing deal promises a 17.6% rate cut for nearly two years. Future rate hikes are capped in the nearly nine-year deal. Mayor Swearengin says Mid Valley’s rates won’t hit their current level until 2020.
The Mid Valley deal includes 10 years of options with rate-hike caps.
The math is clear. Mid Valley in its first few years wouldn’t be pulling in the approximately $33 million that the city’s solid waste division now gets.
But Mid Valley right out of the chute would be getting 1.3 million checks a year at about $21 each. That’s not chicken feed.
And as the years move on, the number of checks flowing into Mid Valley would rise steadily. So, too, would the size of those checks.
This represents concentrated power in the trash industry on a scale never before seen in any central Valley city or region.
Critics of outsourcing say this power would be used to leverage City Hall into raising consumer rates far above the contract’s maximum. I understand why the critics say this. This fear might influence with voters.
But I’ve never thought this to be a likely scenario. There’s simply no reason for Mid Valley to risk losing a highly-politicized deal when the contractual limits already contain so much power and possibilities.
All Mid Valley has to do is follow the contract to the letter and it’s all but guaranteed to be the Willie Mays among Valley trash companies for years to come, if not for the rest of the century.
Just imagine 10 years from now. The extension has been signed. Mid Valley is getting 1.5 million checks a year from Fresno residential trash customers. The average rate is, say, $26.50 a month. That’s $40 million a year — guaranteed as long as the trash is hauled away.
The contract puts a limit on Mid Valley’s profit margin. But the funnel works the same way for Mid Valley as it does for Local 39. There are all sorts of ways to shake out an unseen dime here and an unseen quarter there (unseen by the public) in the course of managing all that money. All those dimes and quarters, in addition to the contractual profits, will add up.
They’ll add up year after year.
All of that money and power would, as Mancur Olson might say, be concentrated in a small, highly-focused special interest unit with goals determined behind closed doors at Mid Valley headquarters.
What would Mid Valley do with that all that money and power? Based on its track record, Mid Valley would try to continue to aggressively expand in the Valley.
Mid Valley would have to compete with all the other private haulers (some of national scale) for government contracts. But Mid Valley, thanks to its city of Fresno residential accounts, would certainly have a strong grub-stake.
I’m not saying any of this is good or bad.
I do know many outsourcing critics — among them community activist Susan Good, Fresno City Council Member Oliver Baines, and former Fresno County supervisors Susan Anderson and Doug Vagim — say this issue is the elephant in the room when it comes to Measure G.
The unacknowledged elephant.
READER NOTE: This blog has been updated to correct an error I made. Overtime is not pensionable for the city’s home trash drivers. My thanks to Marina Magdaleno at Local 39, Stan McDivitt at the City of Fresno Pension System and Fresno City Council Lee Brand for providing information in this updated blog. I apologize for my error.
The pivotal number in the Measure G debate — 1.3 million.
The pivotal concept — a funnel.
The pivotal player — Mancur Olson.
You know all about Measure G. I’ll be spare with background. The June 4 election is two weeks away.
The key question: What is the fundamental dynamic here?
Here’s my stab: The big prize is the unusual power to be found in residential trash.
Let’s begin with 1.3 million.
The city serves more than 105,000 residential trash accounts. Each account-holder pays her bill each month. She does this 12 months a year.
For the sake of argument, let’s say everyone pays by check. To round-off, 1.3 million trash checks flow into City Hall annually.
The typical monthly bill is $25.37. That’s $33 million a year from all accounts.
That’s a lot of money. But a key when we talk about something like trash collection (a public good) is the source of all that cash.
It comes from 1.3 million individual checks. On top of that, each customer writes her 12 checks over the course of a year. A small check written once a month — it’s a habit.
A few extra dimes on the monthly bill are irrelevant to the average trash customer. But multiply 50 cents by 1.3 million and you get $650,000. That is a big deal.
(As an aside, I attended in January a Saturday morning rally held by outsourcing opponents. It was part of their successful petition drive to put the outsourcing ordinance on the ballot. I chatted with the wife of a trash driver. She said she tells voters who like the promised rate cut in the Mid Valley deal: “It’s only $4 a month. That’s nothing. But it’ll hurt the workers.”)
Now the funnel.
The $33 million flows into the funnel. The money pays for a cash-intensive service. The $33 million gets smaller and smaller. No one in the public pays attention. That’s the cost of doing business.
Then the funnel narrows. Left-over dimes tumble out at the bottom. Lots of them.
The money is enough to fight over.
What happens at the funnel’s bottom is out of the customers’ sight.
A very small group benefits from all those dimes. After all, a funnel concentrates the flow.
Now Mancur Olson.
Olson was an economist and social scientist. He died at age 66 in 1998. He wrote “The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups” in 1965.
Small groups — business associations, farmer coalitions, labor unions — can wield immense power in a large democracy, Olson said.
The small group has clear, specific aims. Each individual member gets something substantial if the group succeeds. Everyone works hard for a common goal.
Society at large doesn’t have these advantages. Too many factions, too much friction. Therefore, the small group often achieves stunning success.
We now come to Measure G, Mayor Ashley Swearengin, Stationary Engineers Local 39 (the city’s blue-collar union) and Mid Valley Disposal.
Local 39’s collective-action success has enabled it to grab a lot of the funnel’s left-over dimes.
This becomes clear in a three-page document I got last week at City Hall. The document lists the total pay and hours worked in 2012 by the city’s 95 trash drivers.
The list has regular hours worked, overtime hours, leave hours used, and total paid hours for each driver.
If you add regular hours worked, overtime hours and leave hours used, you get the total paid hours.
A veteran driver makes $22 to $23 an hour as regular pay. Let’s say $22.50 for this discussion.
A regular work week is eight hours a day, five days a week. There are 52 weeks in a year. That’s a total of 2,080 work hours in a year.
Council Member Lee Brand says the drivers’ contract provides for 13 paid holidays per year, 12 days of sick leave per year and up to 22 days of vacation per year for an employee with more than 20 years’ service. That’s 47 paid days — 376 hours of so-called leave at regular pay.
The means the typical driver works 213 days a year at regular pay — slightly less than 43 weeks, or 1,704 hours of labor at regular pay. He’s paid $22.50 an hour.
Add it all up — 1,704 hours of work at regular pay and 376 hours of leave time at regular pay — and you get a base salary for a veteran driver of $46,800 for 2,080 total hours.
The list shows that only nine of 95 city trash drivers worked at least 1,704 hours at regular pay in 2012. However, 69 of the 95 drivers made more than $46,800.
One driver worked 1,239 hours at regular pay (29 hours a week for a 42.5-week work year) and made $66,086.
Another driver worked 951 hours at regular pay (22 hours a week for a 42.5-week work year) and made $59,707.
Another driver worked 517 hours at regular pay (12 hours a week for a 42.5-week work year) and made $46,056.
The list goes on and on in this fashion. The list shines a spotlight on how top elected officials and Local 39 decided trash drivers should be paid.
I don’t recall such a list ever being discussed by the City Council in open session.
The Local 39 contract and something called the task system explain why drivers get so much overtime.
Drivers are paid for at the standard rate for an eight-hour day. A driver who finishes his route in five hours can do the route of someone else (perhaps someone on vacation) over those other three hours and get paid overtime.
Bottom line: The task system encourages drivers to use leave hours in a way that leads to more overtime and fewer hours of work paid at regular pay.
This series of events has many advantages for elected officials and drivers.
It keeps labor peace.
It’s easily hidden from ratepayers. The solid waste division is an enterprise department. It seeks no profit. It merely charges ratepayers the cost of providing the service. Labor costs are simply added to the monthly bill. Ratepayers are told: We’re not gouging you — as an enterprise department, we’re only charging you the cost of the service. Labor costs are what they are. Pay no attention.
Overtime costs are spread over 1.3 million annual checks — the broad top of the funnel.
Overtime costs are hardly noticed because they benefit fewer than 100 workers — the narrow bottom of the funnel).
(READER NOTE: It was here that I explored the implications of overtime as pensionable compensation. This is where I made my error. Again, my thanks to Marina, Stan and Lee for correcting me. With their information in hand, let’s explore driver salaries and pensions.)
Trash drivers aren’t part of Social Security. The formula for their defined benefit pension pays 2% of final wages for each year worked to a maximum of 25 years and 1% for each year after that.
The drivers’ wages have seen steady growth. According to an e-mail from Brand, Local 39 received 3% raises per year from 2007 through 2010 and a 2% raise in 2011.
If trash driver John Doe’s wages for his last year are $46,800 and he worked 40 years, he would get $30,420 in annual pension (25 years at 2% each and 15 years at 1% each equals 65% — 65% of $46,800 is $30,420).
There’s another wrinkle in this. The city’s pension system has something called DROP — the Deferred Retirement Option Program. DROP allows a city worker to stay on the job after retirement, collect a paycheck and bank his pension checks in an investment account run by the pension system’s experts. The worker gets this investment account when he retires for good.
The worker can be in DROP for a maximum of 10 years.
Let’s say John Doe works 30 years, then enters DROP. His wages in his final year before entering DROP are $46,800. His annual retirement pension is $25,740 (55% of $46,800).
John Doe then works for another 10 years. His $25,740 annual pension is deposited every year in his DROP account. That totals $257,400 after 10 years. The city’s retirement system on average gets an 8% annual return on its investments.
Thanks to the magic of compound interest, John Doe when he retires could expect to have $400,000 in his DROP account.
John Doe would retire after 40 years with an annual pension until death of $25,740 and a DROP annuity that figures to pay him $25,000 a year for 20 years.
That’s a total annual retirement income of $50,740 for John Doe. His standard annual wage for his final year of work was $46,800. John Doe doesn’t get Social Security, but he does retire with income of 108% of his final standard annual wage.
There are many variations to this formula. Each worker’s situation is different. For example, if John Doe worked 30 years and then an additional five years in DROP, his expected annual city retirement (pension and DROP payouts) could be in the $37,000 range — 79% of his final year’s wages.
(An aside: Mid Valley Disposal will pay $17 an hour to city drivers who transition to the private hauler should Measure G pass. Mid Valley has a defined contribution, not a defined benefit, pension program.)
(Another aside: Make no mistake, pensions among workers in all of the city’s other unions are a factor in the complex politics of Measure G. Swearengin has said she wants 4% wage/benefit concessions from all labor groups, whether they’re in general fund or enterprise departments. She says she’ll get them through negotiation or, when contracts are up and an impasse hits, simply by imposing new deals. The handwriting is on the wall for the other unions: If Measure G passes, Swearengin gets her steady stream of Mid Valley franchise fees, and the economy picks up, she may lighten up a bit on the wage-concession demand. That could mean a bit higher final salary for these other union members when they retire and a bit higher pension in their golden years. I’m not saying this possible calculation of worker self-interest is right or wrong. I’m just saying it’s part of the rough, behind-the-scenes fight that is Measure G in an era of tight city budgets.)
The are three reasons why such wages and pensions are possible at the city of Fresno.
1.) The 1.3 million ratepayer checks.
2.) The magic of the funnel.
3.) The dynamic best described by Mancur Olson — small and highly-focused special-interest groups can dominate the majority.
I’m not saying this is good or bad. It’s simply the way the city’s home trash system works. Voters on June 4 will decide if they like this system or not.
But voters must keep in mind that the 1.3 million checks, the funnel and Mancur Olson’s principles work the same way on the other side of Measure G’s coin.
The city’s outsourcing deal promises a 17.6% rate cut for nearly two years. Future rate hikes are capped in the nearly nine-year deal. Mayor Swearengin says Mid Valley’s rates won’t hit their current level until 2020.
The Mid Valley deal includes 10 years of options with rate-hike caps.
The math is clear. Mid Valley in its first few years wouldn’t be pulling in the approximately $33 million that the city’s solid waste division now gets.
But Mid Valley right out of the chute would be getting 1.3 million checks a year at about $21 each. That’s not chicken feed.
And as the years move on, the number of checks flowing into Mid Valley would rise steadily. So, too, would the size of those checks.
This represents concentrated power in the trash industry on a scale never before seen in any central Valley city or region.
Critics of outsourcing say this power would be used to leverage City Hall into raising consumer rates far above the contract’s maximum. I understand why the critics say this. This fear might influence with voters.
But I’ve never thought this to be a likely scenario. There’s simply no reason for Mid Valley to risk losing a highly-politicized deal when the contractual limits already contain so much power and possibilities.
All Mid Valley has to do is follow the contract to the letter and it’s all but guaranteed to be the Willie Mays among Valley trash companies for years to come, if not for the rest of the century.
Just imagine 10 years from now. The extension has been signed. Mid Valley is getting 1.5 million checks a year from Fresno residential trash customers. The average rate is, say, $26.50 a month. That’s $40 million a year — guaranteed as long as the trash is hauled away.
The contract puts a limit on Mid Valley’s profit margin. But the funnel works the same way for Mid Valley as it does for Local 39. There are all sorts of ways to shake out an unseen dime here and an unseen quarter there (unseen by the public) in the course of managing all that money. All those dimes and quarters, in addition to the contractual profits, will add up.
They’ll add up year after year.
All of that money and power would, as Mancur Olson might say, be concentrated in a small, highly-focused special interest unit with goals determined behind closed doors at Mid Valley headquarters.
What would Mid Valley do with that all that money and power? Based on its track record, Mid Valley would try to continue to aggressively expand in the Valley.
Mid Valley would have to compete with all the other private haulers (some of national scale) for government contracts. But Mid Valley, thanks to its city of Fresno residential accounts, would certainly have a strong grub-stake.
I’m not saying any of this is good or bad.
I do know many outsourcing critics — among them community activist Susan Good, Fresno City Council Member Oliver Baines, and former Fresno County supervisors Susan Anderson and Doug Vagim — say this issue is the elephant in the room when it comes to Measure G.
The unacknowledged elephant.
The Fresno City Council has taken another crack at resolving a city charter problem: How does the mayor get confidential legal advice?
The council’s answer: Maintain the status quo, but pretend it’s something new.
The council on Thursday approved a resolution that outlines the rules when the city attorney does business with the Mayor’s Office.
In short, the city attorney will serve the mayor when called and keep the talks confidential, but only until the city attorney figures it’s time to tell the council everything that was said.
Since it’s the council that hires and fires the city attorney — and the city attorney usually is fond of staying employed — it’s far from clear whether the new rules will advance city attorney-mayor trust.
This issue goes back about 20 years. That’s when a committee of community leaders proposed a new form of government for Fresno. In the end, voters decided to scrap the council-manager government and go with a strong mayor.
There would be two equal branches at City Hall — legislative (seven council members) and executive (mayor). Jim Patterson took office in January 1997 as city’s first strong mayor.
A major sticking point in the charter debate was the City Attorney’s Office. This office in part would serve as a quasi-Supreme Court, weighing in on legal conflicts between the two branches. The city attorney’s opinion wouldn’t be final, but would carry much weight.
The council in the council-manager government hired and fired the city manager. That meant the council controlled just about everything.
But everyone recognized that a strong-mayor government would greatly change the focus of power at City Hall. More than 16 years of real-world experience has confirmed this analysis. Council members from the get-go have complained that the strong mayor, with its control of the purse strings and the bureaucracy, has too much power.
The original Charter Review Committee said the City Attorney’s Office should be under the mayor’s authority. The City Council in the early 1990s said no, the office should stay under the council’s umbrella.
Fresno’s voters approved a revised charter that gave the council the authority to hire and fire the city attorney.
The effect has been to turn the City Attorney’s Office into a potential stool pigeon. The city attorney, as Thursday’s resolution makes clear, serves the entire city government. But the city attorney can have only one boss, and that (per the city charter) is the City Council. If the city attorney meets privately with the mayor, and the council later asks the city attorney to tell all, the city attorney has no legal authority to keep quiet.
As Mayor Ashley Swearengin has made clear, this does not build trust in the Mayor’s Office.
All of this came to a head in 2010 when Council Member Lee Brand and then-Council Member Andreas Borgeas (now a Fresno County supervisor) got the council to approve the creation of a new Charter Review Committee. Their thinking was that the charter hadn’t had a top-to-bottom review in years — and it was time for one.
A team of community leaders held months of hearings. Voters last year approved several charter changes dealing mostly with financial matters.
The city attorney-mayor relationship briefly played a role in the committee’s work. One of the potential charter amendments debated early in the process would have given the Mayor’s Office its own legal counsel. Committee members also briefly discussed whether the mayor should have money and authority to hire outside counsel on an as-needed basis.
The committee and City Council rejected such ideas. One of their concerns was the impact on city affairs if the City Attorney’s Office and the mayor’s lawyer came up with conflicting opinions.
But the problem persisted: How does Swearengin, or any or her successors, get good legal advice on complex matters (which mostly likely have a high degree of political volatility) without the city attorney blabbing it all to the council before day’s end?
Fresnans saw the latest fix on Thursday. The resolution’s first two points say it all:
“1. The City Attorney shall provide timely, complete information to the Council pertaining to all matters within the Council’s jurisdiction, as provided herein.
“2. The City Attorney shall be free to communicate with and preliminarily advise Councilmembers, the Mayor, City Manager, and staff on all City legal matters without the necessity of the City Attorney sharing the substance or fact of those communications and advice with the entire Council until such time as the City Attorney reasonably believes there is an immediate need for the Council to be informed, or such a matter may be brought before the Council for its consideration.”
Near as I can tell, the resolution leaves everyone right where they started.
Doug Sloan, the current city attorney, has always been available to Swearengin and City Manager Mark Scott for legal advice.
But Sloan (like city managers in the old form of government) always has to be able to count to four when he comes to work. He’s got to keep a council majority on his side to keep his job. Council majorities don’t like to be blindsided by mayoral politics.
Council majority: “Hey, Doug, what’s the mayor talking to you about?”
Doug: “Funny you should ask. I’ve just decided that, based on your May 9, 2013 resolution, it’s my reasonable belief that the mayoral communication to me has suddenly risen to the level where the council must be immediately informed of the content.”
Sloan in a Friday phone conversation acknowledged that serving two clients when only one can hire/fire him “requires some judgment.” He said he anticipates no problems.
For example, Sloan said, he’d tell the council if Swearengin is considering something that may get the city sued.
I thought to myself: What action at City Hall doesn’t involve that risk?
Sloan said he’d first tell the mayor if he was going to divulge any of their business to the council.
“It wouldn’t be a behind-the-back kind of thing,” Sloan said.
I thought to myself: Only a very innocent mayor would assume anything said to the city attorney would stay confidential.
Council Member Brand said the answer isn’t dueling city attorneys. The answer, he said, is a compromise.
The City Council should have authority to approve the mayor’s choice for city manager.
And the mayor should have authority to approve the council’s choice for city attorney.
The council, however, would retain sole authority to fire the city attorney and the mayor would have sole authority to fire the city manager.
“That’s your check and balance,” Brand said.
It’ll all have to wait until there’s money and political will to amend the charter, Brand added.
This may seem like a tempest in a teapot. But rest assured that the city attorney’s role in the strong-mayor form of government is taken quite seriously at City Hall.
More than three years ago, the council and then-City Manager Andy Souza got into a seven-hour budget debate that centered on the legal and political definition of “materiality.”
Anybody who saw a frustrated Souza ask for a 15-minute recess so he could meet with then-City Attorney Jim Sanchez behind closed doors knows what I mean.
I guarantee a printed resolution was of no help in that chat.
Jacky Parks on Thursday greatly eased the working lives of Fresno’s reporters.
The Measure G campaign as a news story has now gone from the complex to the absurd. Reporters, editors and producers learned long ago how to deal with absurd stories — ignore ‘em, for the most part. After all, that’s what readers, viewers and listeners usually do.
The threat to Mayor Ashley Swearengin and blue-collar union leader Marina Magdaleno is that voters might do the same.
We all know about Measure G. That’s the June 4 special election in Fresno that determines the fate of City Hall’s outsourcing ordinance.
Swearengin wants an eight-year deal that would hand the city’s 105,000 residential trash accounts to Mid Valley Disposal. The locally-based company would pay a $1.5 million signing bonus and enough in franchise fees to boost the city’s general fund by about $2.5 million a year.
The City Council in late last year on a series of 4-3 votes passed an ordinance that was supposed to turn the Mid Valley deal into law.
Most of the affected city workers belong to Magdaleno’s union. She and a wide variety of outsourcing opponents gathered enough voter signatures to give the final say to voters. Measure G asks: Should the outsourcing ordinance be adopted?
The successful petition drive turned a legislative act into a political campaign. Swearengin’s side has to come up with the right campaign issues to get a majority of the votes. Magdaleno’s side has the same challenge.
I sat at my desk one day and came up with 100 Measure G campaign issues that, at one time or another, have been pitched to me as a matter of life or death in the campaign.
* The city trash trucks — sold to Mid Valley for a song or at market rates?
* The city trash bins — sold to Mid Valley for a song or at market rates?
* The residential trash division’s reserve — a slush fund for Mid Valley?
* The residential trash division’s reserve — return everything to the ratepayers?
* The residential trash division’s reserve — needed for upkeep of toxic dump west of town?
* The residential trash division’s reserve — is it fair to return the money to current ratepayers if they weren’t in Fresno when the reserve was built up?
* The residential trash division’s reserve — is it $16 million or $17 million or $20 million or $25 million?
* The residential trash division’s reserve — where did it come from?
* The Mid Valley money — will Fresno go bankrupt without it?
* The Mid Valley money — will criminals run free without it?
* The Mid Valley money — will Fresno ever buy a new cop car without it?
* The Mid Valley money — why isn’t a percentage of it guaranteed for public safety?
* The Mid Valley money — is it a hidden tax?
* The Mid Valley money — is it $2.5 million a year or $4.5 million a year?
* The Mid Valley money — why is much of it being used to backfill City Hall in-house obligations now covered by monthly checks from ratepayers?
* The Mid Valley deal — why does the company get the entire city when the commercial outsourcing deal split Fresno between two companies?
* The Mid Valley deal — why didn’t the losing companies raise a stink if they didn’t like it?
* The Mid Valley deal — what happens if the company can’t handle 105,000 accounts?
* The Mid Valley deal — what happens if the company fails and Fresnans die by the truckful because of all the unhealthy garbage piling up on our streets?
* The Mid Valley deal — what happens if the company fails and the many other companies that would like to take over the service decide that, on second thought, they really don’t want 105,000 paying accounts?
* The Mid Valley deal — how does that square with the city charter’s mandates on enterprise departments?
* The Mid Valley deal — is “enterprise department” just another term for union-dominated government scam?
* The union contract — why do some trash-truck drivers make $70,000 to $80,000 a year with a defined benefit pension and gold-plated healthcare?
* The union contract — what’s with this “task” system, where union drivers finish a day’s work in a half-day, then pick up another route at overtime?
* Measure G — why is white-collar union President Dee Barnes pushing for its defeat when, should outsourcing fail, white-collar workers are likely to be laid off?
* Measure G — is the 17.6% promised rate cut in the first year too good to be true?
* Measure G — why shouldn’t ratepayers believe the mayor when she says the 17.6% rate cut is good as gold?
* Trash-truck drivers — will their one-year’s guaranteed labor with Mid Valley turn into long-term employement?
* Trash-truck drivers — fair for them to see their wage/benefit package shrink dramatically at Mid Valley?
* Lawyers — what about that Sunset Waste lawsuit regarding recylables?
That’s just 30. You could square that number and under-estimate the number of life-or-death outsourcing issues pitched by both sides. And both sides insist that voters’ spend the time to grasp them all.
And this comes after both sides have pitched all these outsourcing issues in countless public forums over the past six months.
Well, that’s American democracy in action.
Then Parks, president of the Fresno Police Officers Association, went to the council chamber’s public microphone Thursday morning and, in less than three minutes, made the thousand or so outscourcing issues look like child’s play.
What Parks did was offer what he described as $8.3 million in FPOA contract concessions over the next two years to Swearengin, City Manager Mark Scott and the seven council members.
What are Mr. and Mrs. Fresno, already overwhelmed with outsourcing/Measure G pitches, to do with this news?
That’s got to be the big question keeping the No on G and the Yes on G consultants awake late into tonight.
The stresses between Swearengin and Parks are no secret. The cops’ contract expires in two years. Swearengin wants the cops to work for a lot less money. Parks wants his members to keep their current standard of living forever.
Swearengin would love to keep the city’s finances in the black for the next two years, then give the cops a take-it-or-leave-it contract offer. Parks would love to see Swearengin in such a hurt for money before then that she’s forced to take the cops’ concessions and give up on crushing the union.
The outsourcing drama and the police contract drama normally would be confined to the council chamber and City Hall’s backrooms. People paid good money to dig into every little detail would spend months at the thankless task, then make some decisions in open session.
Representative democracy at its best.
But January’s successful petition drive that put Measure G on the June 4 ballot changed all that. Now it’s Mr. and Mrs. Fresno who must dig into every little detail before going to the polls because what Parks offered on Thursday is directly connected to outsourcing and Measure G.
Mr. and Mrs. Fresno might say to themselves over the kitchen table as they review their Measure G mail-in ballot: “The mayor says she needs $4 million cash ($1.5 million signing bonus and $2.5 million net franchise fee to the general fund) from Mid Valley next fiscal year to make ends meet. She says she needs $2.5 million from Mid Valley in Fiscal Year 2015 to make ends meet and keep public safety in good shape. But now Jacky Parks says his police union will give the city $8.3 million for those two years in exchange for a little ol’ contract extension. The mayor makes good points about the Mid Valley deal. But Marina also makes good points. We don’t want to hurt anyone. Perhaps we should handle this Measure G mess — something we didn’t ask for in the first place — by telling the mayor to accept Jacky’s money. And while she’s saying yes to Jacky, we’ll vote no on Measure G. Then everything will be A-OK.”
Mr. and Mrs. Fresno will say to themselves — Whew! that’s settled — then head into the TV room.
First, though, Mr. and Mrs. Fresno must be convinced about the fundamental value and integrity of Parks’ $8.3 million concession offer. To get there, Mr. and Mrs. Fresno will need some understanding of the offer itself and how it fits into the overall scheme of City Hall finances and politics.
Swearengin knows this. She wants Mr. and Mrs. Fresno to vote yes on Measure G. Therefore, she must convince the couple that Parks’ offer is not what it seems. And to do this, she must make sure Mr. and Mrs. Fresno have some understanding of what’s wrong with the cops’ offer and how it harms the overall scheme of City Hall finances and politics.
Take a look at just seven of the items in Parks’ offer:
* “FPOA Basic and Management Unite active members agree to give up the June 2013 uniform check. This is for one time and does not impact future uniform checks. Value — $527,038.”
* “FPOA Basic and Management Unit active members agree to freeze Holiday Time accrual for twelve months. Holiday time accrual turns back on automatically July 1, 2014. Value — $3,461,382.”
* “FPOA basic and Management Unit active members agree to eiliminate the Wellness Program, and agree to give up the 2013, 2014, and 2015 well checks. Value — $715,283.”
* “FPOA Basic and Management Unit active members agree to give up the June 2014 uniform check. This is for one time and does not impact future uniform checks. Value — $527,038.”
* “FPOA Basic and Management Unit active members agree to reduce Sick Leave accrual from 8 hours a month to 7.5 hours a month. Annual accrual changes from 96 hours to 90 hours. Value — $150,570.”
* “The FPOA Basic and Management Unit active members agree to allow the City to offer an option to cash out unused Sick Leave at 25 cents on the dollar. The cash out must occur thirty days prior to the member separating from City service, instead of participating in the HRA program. If the member does not separate from City service on their own accord within thirty days, they must pay the full amount received back to the City within 90 days. Value — To be determined.”
* “The FPOA Basic and Management Unit active members agree to freeze regular Holiday Time Bank voluntary pay downs from July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2014. Regular Holiday Time Bank pay downs automatically turn back on July 1, 2014, at the limits outlined in the current MOU/side letter. This does not include current MOU/side letter Special Holiday Leave Time Banks pay downs. Value — To be determined.”
There are 13 more such concession items on Parks’ list.
City Manager Scott on Thursday afternoon issued the following written statement in response to Parks’ offer:
“The offer by the FPOA today is a positive step, only in that they recognize the need to be part of the solution to the City’s financial challenges. However, the proposal presented is not a step forward. The City simply cannot afford the conditions they apply to the concessions. The proposal mirrors one offered a year ago that merely pushes the problems further down the road by not addressing extraordinarily expensive FPOA benefit costs the City cannot afford.
“Their proposal offers to talk about pension tiers for new hires, but guarantees nothing.
“It offers to talk about medical programs but FPOA has proposed no new options.
“It does not address extraordinary paid leave allowances or the DROP (deferred retirement option program) program that pays retirees a guaranteed 8% on their annuity.
“It does not address pension spiking or cost of living increases that far outpace those paid in other cities.
“What this proposal does is to grant some short-term freezes on ‘extra pays’ for things like uniform allowances, leave payoffs or fitness bonuses, in return for another 18-month extension to a contract that includes compensation benefits the City cannot afford.
“Another extension would make this a 10-year contract that pre-dates the economic downturn. If FPOA is serious about helping, they will agree to meet with the City’s labor negotiators and engage in real negotiations on a new contract – not taking the public stage seeking to create the impression that meaningful concessions are being offered.
“As always, it is important to acknowledge the great service provided the citizens of Fresno by the members of the Fresno Police Department. While it is impossible to place a true value on their courageous service, the City must match our expenses to our resources given today’s economic realities. FPOA knows that their members have been well protected during the years of the downturn. We remain committed to providing the best possible compensation for them and their families just as it is important that the City maintain service levels to the public they serve. We look forward to fruitful negotiations with the FPOA in the months that follow.”
So, Mr. and Mrs. Fresno, got it?
In addition to the hundreds of outsourcing topics, you must now become experts on all the nuances and intricacies of wellness programs, HRA programs, sick leave accruals, pension tiers, deferred retirement option programs, the impact of demotions on a shrinking police department’s morale, memorandums of understanding, side letters, “basic” and “management” units, holiday time accruals, healthcare co-pays, healthcare board membership rules, fiscal sustainability policies, expected general fund shortfalls in FY 2014, FY 2015, FY 2016 and FY 2017.
On and on and on the list goes.
And if Mr. and Mrs. Fresno aren’t up to speed on everything involving outsourcing and FPOA’s concessions and the city budget, then they won’t know for sure how to vote on the color of the uniform of the guy who picks up their trash once a week.
How did Fresno get into this mess?
I’m sorry, Ashley and Marina, but I think Fresnans as of Thursday have had enough. They’re exhausted. They’re tossing absentee ballots into the trash. They’re making other plans for June 4. They’re tuning out the TV stories. They’re turning off the radio stories. They’re ignoring my stories.
Not all of the 222,000 voters, but the vast majority.
They’re good citizens. They don’t want the city to go bankrupt. They don’t want an unfair deal for labor.
But the administration and labor are treating them like playthings.
Bad idea.
A letter to Warren Paboojian.
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Dear Warren,
Well, my friend, the time has come. You can go ahead and make that down payment on your dream of buying the entire chain of Hawaiian Islands. You’ll soon have more than enough money.
How do I know? Fresno State is picking a new president. The way they’re going about things guarantees the university and the California State University system will continue to be easy pickings for a lawyer with your immense skills.
You might have seen the story Pablo and I had in today’s paper. If not, I’ll recap with Paboojian-esque brevity:
Sixty-four presidential candidates whittled down to four; the finalists to be interviewed Friday in LA; members of selection committee and advisory committee to do the questioning; final pick to be made later this month by the system’s board and chancellor; Fresno State’s future in the balance; so, too, the Valley’s hope of shedding its “Appalachia of the West” shame; local people you know and admire on both committees; these local leaders refuse to publicly identify the four finalists; our leaders say the finalists have super fragile egos and can’t bear the stigma of publicly coming in second place; our leaders say the grown-ups’ hyper-sensitivity trumps the people’s right to know what’s happening with the people’s university.
Quite a story, huh?
Yet, isn’t the essential message sent by today’s story the same one that you and Dan Siegel pitched throughout the Stacy Johnson-Klein trial?
That message isn’t that the California State University system spends huge amounts of the people’s money, but doesn’t play fair (though you and Dan certainly did an able job of conveying that idea).
No, I understood your fundamental message during the SJK trial to be this: The California State University system can’t help itself. It is so big, so rich, so powerful, so unaccountable and so sure of itself that it has no choice but to be anti-democratic.
Stupid, someone might say.
You and Dan told jurors that Johnson-Klein wasn’t the main source of her misfortunes. You said she was the victim of an institution that cared only for its own skin.
You and Dan did a pretty darn good job of selling your analysis of the California State University culture. The jury said Johnson-Klein deserved $19.1 million.
I admit I had my doubts at the time. But now this Fresno State presidential search comes along, and suddenly I’m seeing things your way.
A part of me also says you and Dan are to blame for this Fresno State mess. On second thought, blame is the wrong word. “Responsible” fits better.
You see, Warren, to this day I don’t think you and Dan fully appreciate how thoroughly you devastated the California State University folks with your smashing SJK victory.
Of course, it’s only human nature for them to think they’d win. The jury headed out of the courtroom on that Thursday afternoon and everyone who had followed the trial from Day One figured the deliberations would go well into the following week. You and Dan did a great job. So did Mick and Dawn on the other side. The decision could go either way.
What happened? The jury stuck around just long enough for lunch on Friday, then delivered that $19 million verdict. The courtroom was packed, the place was dead silent. Point by point, the jury said you and Dan were right. The millions in damages kept piling up.
Two hours after the verdict, top folks on the losing side were walking around private offices like zombies. I know.
This is what they thought: The people did them wrong. The people were not to be trusted ever again.
You know, Warren, you and Dan had another message as you laid out your case for SJK.
She wasn’t perfect. There were some bumps along the way during her years as Fresno State women’s basketball coach. University officials had a moral and legal duty to protect the interests of their students.
You and Dan acknowledged all that.
But you two kept hammering the jury with this theme: How could an institution as wealthy and sophisticated and powerful as Fresno State and a system as wealthy and sophisticated and powerful as California State University be confronted with such a relatively modest personnel challenge as Stacy Johnson-Klein only to respond in such a ham-handed (and, in your eyes, illegal) manner?
Here’s what I think, Warren. I think, in the hours and days after the SJK verdict, the Fresno State and California State University folks vowed to make sure nothing connected to their affairs ever again caused that kind of institutional agony. So, they combined the two lessons that you and Dan taught them.
The Fresno State/California State University folks made it a permanent part of their policy (unwritten, of course) that the average people of the Valley won’t be trusted. The common masses are too emotional, too ignorant, too burdened with envy and grievance to fully comprehend the nature of higher-education policy — let alone influence its course through direct action.
And the Fresno State/California State University folks decided to display more cunning in the exercise of their power. Not “sly” or “slick” or “smart.” Cunning — like Kissinger in Paris.
So, John Welty retires. I have the highest respect for Dr. Welty. He’s done great things in his 22 years at Cedar and Shaw. He’ll be 69 this summer. May he and his wife have a long and healthy and happy retirement.
But Welty must be replaced. The Fresno State/California State University folks could vet the presidential finalists in front of the same public that sent them reeling five-and-a-half years ago in the SJK trial. Or they could decide everything from start to finish behind closed doors and use a bunch of selection and advisory committees as protective buffer. The committees would be Poland.
The Fresno State/California State University folks opted for the latter course. It’s a mistake. It bespeaks a university/CSU culture unable to handle the public’s trust.
You know full well what that means, Warren. There will be more SJK-type mistakes. You and Dan will go to work again. You will win. And win. And win.
The Paboojian Islands — has a nice ring to it.
My best to the family,
George
Attention, all you business-poaching cities in Texas. Fresno, courtesy of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, is ripe for a raid.
That’s the message that came through loud and clear at Thursday’s Fresno City Council workshop on high-speed rail.
Three high-speed rail officials came to the council chamber to pitch an old message: This really fast train is coming soon, and it’ll do everything — thrill passengers, create jobs, reinvigorate Fresno — exactly as planned.
Of course, the first chore is getting it built. Fresno is to be California’s guinea pig for cramming something this big and complex into the middle of a 21st century city.
The train’s path through Fresno starts by the San Joaquin River up in the northwest corner of town and ends way down in the southwest corner. Dozens (perhaps hundreds) of businesses are in this path. They’ve got to be booted out of the way. Hundreds of businesses are near the construction zone, and they figure to be impacted by all that work and temporarily closed streets.
The specter of all this has worried Mayor Ashley Swearengin, City Manager Mark Scott and the City Council for a good two years. Simply put, Fresno needs every job-producing, tax-paying business it can get. The private sector, not the government sector, creates America’s wealth.
With Swearengin and former Council Member Larry Westerlund leading the way, City Hall some months ago crafted a plan to minimize high-speed rail’s damage to these local businesses and the workload all this will dump on city departments.
In essence, the answer was to be a One-Stop Shop at City Hall.
The high-speed rail folks promise to pay fair-market value for property in the train’s Fresno alignment. The authority also has made vague promises about providing fair compensation to nearby businesses affected by construction. The authority also promises to make City Hall whole for all its worked connected to the project.
That’s a tall, complicated and ever-changing task. The plan was to create a One-Stop Shop at City Hall where just about anyone in Fresno affected adversely by the construction project could go for answers.
Need a new site in Fresno for your displaced business? Go to One-Stop Shop.
Need help on all the City Hall red tape? Go to One-Stop Shop.
Need to find out why that street to your malt shop is being closed by construction? Go to One-Stop Shop.
There are other factors behind the One-Stop Shop idea.
Staffing in City Hall departments has been drastically reduced during the Great Recession. Swearengin and Scott didn’t want workers in, say, Public Works and the planning department spending too much time on the high-speed rail issue on the Fresno taxpayers’ dime and letting other city business fall by the wayside.
And City Hall didn’t want Fresno businessowners in the path of the bullet train to throw up their hands in frustration and say: I’m moving to Visalia. City Hall wanted to do some handholding for these businessowners.
The folks at the Fresno County Economic Development Corporation felt the same way.
So, a deal was made. The players in this deal are Fresno City Hall, the High-Speed Rail Authority and the Fresno County EDC.
The authority would spend $4.6 million over two to three years to fund the One-Stop Shop inside City Hall. City officials would use some of the money to hire extra staffers to work just on bullet train issues and help businesses in or along the train’s path through town.
The EDC was hired to help, especially with the business community. The EDC’s first goal was to keep Fresno businesses in Fresno. If that wasn’t possible, the goal was to keep the businesses in Fresno County.
The EDC’s role was to come to the forefront when the High-Speed Rail Authority began sending “offer letters” to Fresno property-owners. These letters tell the property-owners how much the authority is willing to pay for the property. This is a big step. The arrival of an offer letter in the mail means the construction project is really gearing up. Such a letter is sure to trigger all sorts of money and strategy questions in a property-owner’s brain, especially if she has her own business on the site. The answers to these questions, in turn, have serious public policy consequences for City Hall.
This is why the three-way deal (City Hall, train folks, EDC) included a provision that requires the High-Speed Rail Authority to give Fresno a heads-up before the offer letters go out. Swearengin was to get the heads-up. The council was to get the heads-up. Lee Ann Eager, the EDC’s president/chief executive, was to get the heads-up.
This way, Eager and City Hall could get ahead of the curve. They’d know who was to get the letters. The get to the property-owners early and say: We’re here to help.
It’s all pretty involved, yet the key elements are simple. The High-Speed Rail Authority funds the One-Stop Shop; the authority keeps City Hall and the EDC in the loop on the distribution of offer letters; City Hall and the EDC do all they can to keep local businesses here and thriving; the public doesn’t get angry with Jerry Brown’s beloved train project before the first rail is laid.
Near as I can tell from Thursday’s workshop, it’s all a disaster.
The high-speed rail folks told the council that they’re sending out their first offer letters (five to ten of them) to Fresno property-owners. These letters either went out Thursday or will go out Friday.
City and EDC officials have no idea who’s getting these letters. The train folks didn’t tell them, as promised. As of Thursday, the train folks still aren’t telling.
The train folks in the council chamber on Thursday said they have no idea who’s getting the letters.
The One-Stop Shop remains nothing but a dream. The $4.6 million contract to fund it sits on a desk somewhere in Sacramento, unsigned by the train folks.
City Hall and the EDC are using their own money to do the job that the High-Speed Rail Authority was supposed to fund. Most of the new One-Stop Shop employees haven’t been hired. In other words, even if the $4.6 million contract is signed Friday, it’s too late for the One-Stop Shop to get off the ground in time to actually help the first batch of property-owners with offer letters in their hands.
Near as I can tell, the situation is this: Fresno City Hall for the past two years has been huffing and puffing about how it would make the high-speed rail folks do right by Fresno businesses and Fresno taxpayers — and the high-speed rail folks are treating Fresno like it’s something smelly on the bottom of their shoes.
Council Member Steve Brandau, who represents northwest Fresno, got the picture on Thursday.
“The high-speed rail (officials) should be here, on the frontline, showing what they can do to impress the people of Fresno,” Brandau said. “I don’t want those guys to get this thing (One-Stop Shop) fired up 10 weeks before the shovels are in the ground and then there’s a bunch of disruption. It’s crunch-time here.”
Council Member Clint Olivier added: “I’m hoping this won’t be a huge catastrophe.”
Texas — or Tulare County — loves it.
Sanger Unified School District Superintendent Marc Johnson hosts a luncheon once a year that goes far in explaining why the Assemi family has become a force in Fresno business unlike any other in city history.
I begin by reviewing Wednesday morning’s Home of Hope ground-breaking ceremony in southeast Fresno.
Home of Hope is a fund-raiser sponsored by Assemi-owned Granville Homes.
The concept is simple. Granville builds a new house. People buy tickets — $100 each. A drawing is held. The winner gets the house for free. Ticket proceeds (100 cents on the dollar) go to local non-profits.
This is year No. 8 for Home of Hope. The event raised a total of $2.4 million in the previous seven years (four of them representing the nation’s worst economic downturn since the Great Depression).
The goal this year is at least 4,000 tickets. That would be $400,000 to be divided among eight recipients:
* Community Food Bank
* Poverello House
* Hinds Hospice’s Angel Babies Program
* Assistance League’s Operation School Bell
* Foundation for Clovis Schools’ Students of Promise program
* Foundation for Clovis Schools
* Foundation for Sanger Schools
* Fresno State’s Renaissance Scholars program
The 2013 Home of Hope will be built on a lot in Granville’s Sunnyside Grove project on Church Avenue, a bit west of Fowler Avenue. The house on the lot’s east side belongs to the 2012 Home of Hope winner.
Sunnyside Grove will have 213 single-family homes. It’s well on its way to full build-out. The 2013 Home of Hope’s design will be what the project calls the “Mia” plan: 2,216 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, 2-car garage, loft, stainless steel appliances, granite counters, front yard and backyard.
Estimated value: $270,000.
The site currently is nothing but dirt — perfect for a photo op.
I’m guessing 75 people showed up for Wednesday’s ceremony kicking off the 2013 ticket-selling campaign. Some took advantage of the chairs beneath a large canopy. Many stood on the edge of the road.
This was a well-run event. No microphone problems. The speeches were brief and to the point — sincere with occasional bits of humor.
Fresno City Council Member Sal Quintero (whose district includes Sunnyside Grove) bought the first ticket while standing at the microphone.
The big Home of Hope drawing is on Oct. 19. To spur ticket sales and maintain momentum, Granville in partnership with Fresno’s Mathews Harley-Davidson is sponsoring an “Early Bird” drawing on Aug. 3. A lucky ticket-buyer will win a 2013 Harley-Davidson Breakout motorcycle.
I sure would like to win that motorcycle, Quintero said. He’s a pro. He knows how to get a tactful chuckle from a crowd.
Then he got serious. Home of Hope’s funds have done a lot of good for a lot of people, he said.
Speaking to Granville President Darius Assemi, Quintero said in conclusion, “Thank you so much to you and the Assemi family.”
Council Member Paul Caprioglio (whose district borders Quintero’s district to the north) also bought a ticket while at the mic. Caprioglio predicted he would win the Harley-Davidson. He said he’d put Quintero on the back “and we’ll cruise Blackstone Avenue together.”
Caprioglio is no rookie at working the crowd, either.
But Caprioglio also got serious. Looking at Darius Assemi, he praised “the quality of the Assemi family.”
Sanger Unified’s Johnson was among those speaking between Quintero and Caprioglio.
“Welcome to Sanger Unified,” Johnson said. “Many of you didn’t realize that you’d come to paradise when you came to this part of Fresno.”
Granville’s Sunnyside Grove is in the Sanger district, even though Sanger High and its Apaches football team are 10 or so miles to the east. Many of the new housing tracts to the north of Sunnyside Grove are in Clovis Unified.
Southeast Fresno is growing, despite the Great Recession.
“You’re truly making a difference,” Johnson said to Darius Assemi.
All of the speakers, but Johnson in particular, worked the generosity of Granville and the Assemi family into a bigger theme: The Valley is a wonderful place to live; at the same time, there are many challenges; teamwork is pivotal to the spread of opportunity and success.
“We have to come together as a community,” Johnson said.
Darius Assemi made only a few comments. Modesty and gratitude were the common threads.
Then 17 people gathered on the 2013 Home of Hope site and somehow got their hands on the handles of 15 shovels. Fresno County Supervisor Debbie Poochigian was there. So was former Fresno City Manager Andy Souza, now head of the Community Food Bank.
The plan: Everyone digs up a load of the Valley’s rich earth, then smiles for the cameras while tossing the dirt in front of them.
Those 17 strong backs managed to collectively move about 20 ounces of soil. Somebody shouted “do it again.” The second effort moved enough earth to at least raise some dust.
All in all, the 2013 Granville Home of Hope ground-breaking was most impressive. Best wishes on the ticket sales.
I cornered Marc Johnson as everyone drifted away. He had mentioned in his formal comments that Home of Hope funds are important to Sanger Unified’s foundation. I wanted Johnson to expand on that thought.
The foundation is about five years old. In that time, it has raised nearly $500,000. Sanger is like a lot of Valley cities — not real big, tied closely to the surrounding farms, plenty of small mom-and-pop businesses in town but none of the big companies capable of writing five- or six-figure checks to the local school district’s foundation.
Of that half-million, Johnson said, at least 30% has come from “Granville and the Assemi family. That’s phenomenal.”
Is the money important to the district?
“It’s incredibly important,” Johnson said. “You’ve got to understand the nature of Sanger Unified. We’re a high-poverty district. We have one of the lowest funding rates in the state of California. We have so many needs.”
The Home of Hope money buys things for the classroom, Johnson said. It funds scholarships. It puts food on the family table when household budgets are tight during the holidays.
The Assemi money “has, in many cases, helped a family turn the corner when they saw no opportunity,” Johnson said. “I don’t know anybody else in this region with the heart of the Assemi family.”
Keep in mind the numbers we’re talking about. Home of Hope has raised $2.4 million-plus in seven years. It’ll probably raise another $400,000 this year. That’s not chicken feed. Every penny goes to worthy non-profits.
It’s not just Sanger that’s lacking Microsofts and Googles and other corporate residents with the deep pockets and organizing skill to raise big money for the local needy. Fresno is in the same boat.
How many other Fresno-area companies raise that kind of money for the needy? Not many is my guess.
I asked Johnson: Fresno is a good distance from the city of Sanger. Do the regular folks in Sanger know of the Assemi family’s contribution to their community?
Johnson answered my question with a story. Once every three months, he hosts what he calls a “Superintendent’s Forum.” The principals from each of Sanger Unified’s 20 schools gather with Johnson. Each principal brings a parent from the school. The parent is always someone who has shown some leadership talents, a knack for connecting with other parents. It’s a parent with the kind influence among other parents that school big-wigs aren’t likely to have.
I’m guessing about 50 people (including other staffers) show up at Johnson’s forums. He feeds everyone lunch and they talk.
Johnson gets a call each year from Granville: Your Home of Hope check is ready. Johnson replies: Tell Darius to hold off until our next Superintendent’s Forum.
“We have Darius come in and bring that check,” Johnson said. “We take time out to do the presentation in front of (the parents). Then the PTA leaders, the leaders of our community, they all go throughout the 185 square miles of Sanger Unified and carry with them a message. It is a message of the incredible generosity of the Assemi family and Granville Homes and all of their business partners who contribute to this.”
Step back for a moment and think this through.
Fifteen years ago, Fresno’s Uptown District was desperate for investment. Today, you can’t walk a hundred yards without seeing an Assemi family project.
Fifteen months ago, Running Horse in southwest Fresno was a one-and-a-half-mile-long hole with no future except as an illegal dumping ground. Today, it belongs to the Assemi family. Tomorrow, it’ll be almonds. The day after tomorrow, it’ll be the sea of new homes that District 3 council members have dreamed of for decades.
A couple of miles west of Highway 99, out in the Grantland Avenue/Ashlan Avenue area, is the site of the nearly 500-acre Westlake project. There will be a couple of thousand homes, a man-made lake and retail galore. The project is going through the EIR phase at City Hall as we speak. The area west of 99 will change forever when it’s built. Westlake is an Assemi family project.
Along the shores of Millerton Lake, just a short flight from the northeast tip of Clovis if you’re a crow, is about 500 acres destined to be homes, retail and an array of colleges that’ll help generations of Valley go-getters land good-paying jobs in a healthcare industry that figures never to stop growing. Might as well call it Assemi University, because this, too, is an Assemi family project.
That’s just a hint of the force of nature that the Assemi family has become locally in the past decade or two.
And while all this is going on, there’s a mother in Centerville who sits in her living room one evening and tells a friend about the lunch she had that day with a bunch of principals and Sanger Unified’s superintendent and this stranger from Fresno.
“What’d he want?” the friend asks.
“He gave us a check,” she says. “A big one.”
“Any strings?”
“No strings.”
“What’s his name?”
“Assemi.”
A stranger no more.
The Fresno City Council this Thursday will get the Mother of All Paragraphs.
It could set the stage for a very interesting council debate, especially in light of the Measure G outsourcing election on June 4.
The council at 8:45 a.m. is scheduled to receive the City of Fresno Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2012.
This is the so-called CAFR, City Manager Mark Scott’s favorite acronym. In government jargon, it’s pronounced “caf-fer.” The council gets one every year.
A budget is an educated guess about what City Hall expects to get and spend in the coming year. The CAFR explains the city’s financial shape on a given date.
Budgets get all the limelight. Scott in his three years at City Hall has been trying hard to give the CAFR its due.
The FY 2012 CAFR was prepared by an outside accounting firm — Macias Gini & O’Connell, LLP. Karen Bradley, the city’s assistant controller, wrote the staff report accompanying the 300-page CAFR. She discusses something called GASB 56. This stands for Governmental Accounting Standards Board statement No. 56.
“It should be noted that the Auditor’s Opinion on the CAFR … contains a Going-Concern paragraph,” Bradley writes. “GASB 56 requires that financial statement preparers (the City) as well as its auditors have a responsibility to evaluate whether there is a substantial doubt about the governments’ ability to continue as a going concern for at least twelve months beyond the financial date. Moreover, if there is information known to the government that may raise substantial doubt shortly thereafter (for example within an additional three months), this should also be considered. Both City Management and the City Auditors concur on the necessity of the Going-Concern paragraph ….”
The CAFR’s “Going-Concern” paragraph is actually 14 paragraphs containing a total of more than 1,200 words. I sense that the meaning of Bradley’s statement in her staff report plus the auditor’s “Going-Concern” paragraph is this: The city of Fresno has its financial head above water — but barely.
I include the “Going-Concern” paragraph for your review. I also include a couple of quotes.
Council President Blong Xiong: “We need to have a broader policy discussion.” It’s among Xiong’s favorite quotes on budget issues.
Mayor Ashley Swearengin on the FY 2012 CAFR report: “Our auditors have raised a serious concern. It’s as if they put lights and neon signs around this point: The city of Fresno is in severe financial distress. Their report should put to rest any comment or debate from labor leaders that would suggest that the city of Fresno is not in financially difficult times.”
Xiong (along with council members Oliver Baines and Sal Quintero) is a strong opponent of efforts to outsource the city’s residential trash service to Mid Valley Disposal in exchange for millions in a signing bonus and annual franchise fees. Xiong says the city-run service is just fine, and the city can weather the financial storm without Mid Valley’s money.
Swearengin is a strong supporter of the Mid Valley deal. She says service to Fresno’s 105,000 customers would stay the same or improve. She says the millions of dollars are vital to city’s financial health and maintaining levels of public-safety service.
The June 4 special election on Measure G asks a simple question: Should the ordinance authorizing the Mid Valley deal be adopted?
The council on Thursday must decide whether to accept the FY 2012 CAFR. The “Going-Concern” paragraph figures to be a perfect opportunity for City Hall’s “Yes on Measure G” and “No on Measure G” supporters to duke it out over the election’s fundamental dispute.
Is Swearengin crying wolf so she can bust the unions? Or is the other side willing to push Fresno over the cliff to save union jobs?
Here is the “Going-Concern” paragraph in the city of Fresno’s FY 2012 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report:
“The City continues to weather severe financial distress. Despite extensive and painful cuts in staffing and service delivery, financial projections continue to reflect a difficult road ahead, unless certain critical assumptions used to build those projections come to fruition.
“As of June 30, 2012, the City has depleted nearly all of its emergency reserve, to the extent that it is dangerously low and plainly imprudent. This, in addition to long-standing negative fund balances, along with the overall poor financial health of the City, and the factors discussed below, have resulted in the significant downgrades in the City’s bond ratings by all major rating agencies. Reports from the City’s administration as well as reports from the bond rating agencies concur that restoring the City’s financial health will depend on the City’s ability to pay back negative fund balances, restore a long-term operating balance in the General Fund, and rebuild the emergency reserve in the General Fund, as well as reserves in other Funds. The City’s emergency reserve remains at $1.48 million with no prospect of near term increases.
“Unassigned fund balance in the General Fund at June 30, 2012 is a meager $483,340. Fund deficits at June 30, 2012 are reflected in the Stadium Fund ($3.87 million), Parking Fund ($11.9 million), Billing and Collection Fund ($292 thousand) and Risk Management Fund ($95.2 million).
“The ongoing continuation of the decline of the City’s financial health has resulted in multiple downgrades in the City’s bond ratings. Early in Fiscal Year 2013 the first wave of downgrades began and continued on to as most recently as January 2013.
“The City, like other California cities, is limited in its ability to enhance existing revenue resources or its ability to create new ones. The City’s top three revenue generators, Property Tax, Sales Tax, and Charges for Services have been pummeled by the economic downturn, which affected all cities within California. Property tax revenues were directly affected by the decline in assessed valuation of property and high levels of home foreclosures. In Fiscal Year 2011, property tax revenue made up 35% of General Fund revenue sources, while in Fiscal Year 2012 it had dropped to 29%. While the housing market appears to be making a small recovery, it is fragile none the less. All the while revenues were declining, labor costs have been increasing. Long-term employment contracts (MOUs), entered into when the economy was growing, have prevented a full realignment of expenditures with available revenues. Personnel costs, which include salaries and fringe, retirement contributions and the pension obligation bonds, encompassed 73% of the General Fund in Fiscal Year 2012 climbing from 70% in Fiscal Year 2009. It is estimated that these costs will continue to increase to over 74% in the near term.
“A variety of factors, in addition to the economic downturn and MOUs, have also caused the City’s financial distress, including unsuccessful local investment decisions, an increase in indebtedness burdening the General Fund (entered into when the economy was growing) as well as other unaffordable future commitments, such as the Health Benefit Plans, the Health Reimbursement Arrangement (HRA), the DROP program, and Accumulated Leave Balances. While not the only cause, employee compensation constitutes a major portion (approximately 73%) of the General Fund, as well as a significant portion of other funds.
“Beginning in February 2009, the City, working with its employees and the public, has undertaken seven major rounds of budget reductions to address the budgetary shortfalls. City-wide, the workforce has been reduced by attrition and lay-offs from 4,171 employees in January to 2009 to 3,217 in January 2012, and as of March 29, 2013, down to 2,943. Furloughs affecting all unrepresented employees, and all but one City bargaining unit, were implemented in December 2009. Two-year concessions were agreed to by three employee bargaining units, and deferrals of compensation were agreed to by others. Essential City services have been reduced to the minimum level possible without jeopardizing the overall health and safety of residents.
“Non-essential City services have been eliminated or severely curtailed. In mid-year 2009 costs were trimmed $6.8 million primarily through maintenance deferrals. As part of the adopted budget in Fiscal Year 2010, $26.7 million was saved through the elimination of 39 civilian positions; 23 Parks positions and reducing community center staffing and hours.
“Video policing was reduced and the City sought grant funding to maintain service levels in Police. At mid-year in Fiscal Year 2010 an additional $3.4 million was saved by eliminating 145 non-sworn positions resulting in the reduction in the hours that the Police Department’s record bureau was open to the public. On-line crime reporting was also introduced due to lack of Community Service Officers, 37 of which were as a result of the loss of the competitive Byrne grant. Sworn fire personnel were required to take 96 hours of furlough and did not respond to lower level Priority 2 medical calls. An 11 additional Parks positions were eliminated, reducing daily hours of operations for 13 community centers. Mandatory furloughs were also implemented for most City employees.
“The budget for Fiscal Year 2011 was revised downward three times during the year; $30.6 million (hardest hit was Parks, Public Works and Police particularly in the area of service impacts for all three), $10.2 million in midyear (City Hall refinancing, Fire overtime savings, the holding positions vacant across the City and legal service reductions). Spring of 2011 saw another cut of $2.7 million primarily in the area of Public Works by reducing or eliminating infrastructure repairs.
“The adoption of the Fiscal Year 2012 budget reflected cost savings of $18.5 million resulting from the contraction of personnel in the spring, departmental operating cuts, employee concessions of 3%, postponement of a data base software investment, requiring the Airport to fund police positions at the Airport and the deferral of deficit fund recovery. Revenue enhancements included the establishment of the Roll-Off container franchise.
“Fiscal Year 2013 projected a $12 million dollar deficit going into the year but is anticipated to end the year with a slight deficit of approximately $1.3 million due to better than expected sales tax receipts, former RDA tax increment coming in earlier than expected, smaller deficit recovery paydowns and reductions in employee costs primarily from Police attrition, which was greater than anticipated.
“The City also sought opportunities on the revenue side, including adoption of Commercial Solid Waste and Commercial Recycling franchises which greatly aided the General Fund. The City also negotiated an increase in the PG&E gas service franchise fee, has increased the Building Permit fees, and has engaged in an aggressive Business License Tax audit program.
“In March 2012, the Mayor and City Manager presented a Fiscal Sustainability Policy (FSP) to the City Council which clearly establishes a policy framework to enable the City to accomplish four outcomes: 1) to set a course to restore the City’s overall financial health and credit rating; 2) to achieve spending and minimum financial reserve targets; 3) to adopt employee compensation policy changes to be negotiated as employee contracts are opened for negotiations; and 4) to direct immediate actions seeking to match expenditures to revenues and to identify options for savings in employee compensation and other operating costs. The City Council unanimously adopted the Policy. The FSP sets a ten-year path for the City to regain fiscal health.”
Thursday, April 18, 2013 is the 45th anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy’s 13-hour stop in Fresno during the amazing 1968 political campaign. The Bee in years past has reviewed that remarkable visit. It merits another quick look.
RFK, of course, was a Democratic senator from New York running for his party’s presidential nomination. Just 19 days earlier, on March 31, President Lyndon Johnson had stunned the nation by going on TV to say he would not run for re-election.
Who would carry the Democrats’ banner? Sen. Eugene McCarthy? Vice President Hubert Humphrey? Or the younger brother of John F. Kennedy?
It’s impossible today to capture the spirit of the time. U.S.S. Pueblo, Tet Offensive, more than a half-million American troops in Vietnam, LBJ calling it a career, Martin Luther King assassinated in Memphis just two weeks before RFK came to Fresno.
All this in just the first 100 days of 1968. The rest of the year was more of the same.
The context for RFK’s visit was the California Democratic primary election on June 4. The Bee at the time was an afternoon paper Monday through Saturday (plus Sunday mornings).
RFK got to town late on the night of April 18, too late for a story in that day’s edition. The Bee gave his visit big same-day coverage on Friday, April 19.
RFK’s first stop was at the Fresno State College amphitheater.
“Sen. Robert F. Kennedy today called for a new ‘spirit of youth’ in the nation’s approach to foreign policy and to the domestic problems which face the United States,” wrote James Bort Jr. in the A-1 lead story.
More than 5,000 students crammed into that relatively tiny space. RFK ripped into LBJ, criticizing the president for allegedly failing to settle on a site for peace talks with the North Vietnamese.
“People around the world don’t really believe we want to seek a peaceful solution to our agonizing troubles in Southeast Asia,” RFK said.
Washington, D.C. was obsessed with the war, RFK said, to the detriment of a nation with huge problems of its own. Not the least of these, he said, was misplaced priorities.
“We need a new leadership that understands that the needs of this nation are not fulfilled merely by the accumulation of wealth,” RFK said.
It was the Sixties — youth had to receive its due even though 21 was the minimum voting age.
The spirit of youth, RFK said, is “not a time of life but a state of mind.” The most dangerous threat to world peace wasn’t to be found in international or racial conflict but “between those bound by the past and those freed for the future — I stand with the spirit of youth and I think that is where America stands,” said the 42-year-old RFK.
That surely was heady stuff to a crowd mostly full of students still wet behind the ears. I was 18 at the time (and did not attend any of the RFK events in Fresno). A lot of young people in the America of 1968 were a bit crazy.
RFK had a busy morning on that April 19th — a campaign breakfast, the Fresno State speech, another speech at Fresno City College to a crowd of 2,000.
End poverty. Stop the war. Get rid of the draft. Those were among the big political topics of the day. RFK hit them all in Fresno.
Issues of local interest were also tackled. RFK in April 1968 was no stranger to the San Joaquin Valley. He was with Cesar Chavez in Delano just five weeks earlier when the farmworker advocate broke his historic 25-day fast. RFK on April 19 said the government should open day-care centers for the children of migrant farmworkers.
“I feel very strongly about it,” RFK said. “I think they can be terribly beneficial.”
But RFK knew which buttons to push to get the biggest cheers.
The draft is “unfair and inequitable,” RFK told the City College crowd. It causes the biggest burden of fighting in Vietnam to be “borne by the poor — the black man, the Mexican-American, the poor whites.”
Shortly before noon on April 19, 1968, RFK boarded his chartered plane and flew to Los Angeles.
Two other stories in that day’s Bee give more perspective on RFK’s effect on his Valley supporters.
The first, started on A-1, was written by Ray Steele Jr. (he would become The Bee’s publisher). Steele’s story covered RFK’s arrival at the Fresno Air Terminal on Thursday, April 18.
“More than 4,500 persons jammed the Fresno Air Terminal concourse last night to see Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the candidate for the Democratic nomination for president,” Steele wrote.
“But Kennedy, as is usual for candidates, was late — nearly an hour later than his scheduled arrival at 9:30 p.m.
“The youngsters, oldsters and the many, many in-betweeners waited. Patiently and shivering they waited. Some were curious as to what makes up the Kennedy magic. Others simply admit that they feel he is the best qualified to be the next president and they want to show him their support.
“They braved a half dozen obstacles to see ‘the man.’ At first there was the lack of parking places as cars lined up along the road or parked in the field across from the air terminal. Some were parked as far as a half a mile away.
“Then there was the long walk. For many it meant getting thorns in their socks from that weedy field and dirty trousers from the foot-high weeds.
“Once inside the terminal they were met by concessionaires. One was selling a newspaper, another was distributing literature supporting Sen. Eugene McCarthy for president.
“The most prominent were two men selling Kennedy hats and buttons.
“ ‘Get your Kennedy buttons here,’ one yelled.
“The buttons sold for 50 cents and the hats for three times that.
“Admittedly the button business was brisk as was evidenced by the large number of persons who proudly displayed them on their shirts, blouses (and) coats.
“And the people. Thousands of them lined up between the railings, surrounding the concourse.
“ ‘Jammed together like sardines,’ said one police officer.”
There was a story on page 10 without a byline. The headline: “Chief Morton, RFK Aides Clash; Police Withdrawn”.
The story is just 10 paragraphs. But in light of what happened on Nov. 22, 1963, and what happened two days later in 1963 to Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas Police headquarters, and what happened some six weeks after RFK’s April 1968 visit to Fresno, and what happened at the 1968 Democratic National Convention that summer in Chicago, those 10 paragraphs speak volumes about the era’s collective mindset.
“A hassle developed between Fresno Police Chief H.R. Morton and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s aides yesterday (Thursday, April 18),” The Bee wrote. “Consequently Morton withdrew all policemen from Kennedy functions last night and today, adding:
“ ‘I have never at any time encountered such a group of ill-mannered, uncouth and deliberately obnoxious people anywhere as those on Sen. Kennedy’s staff.’
“Morton says he withdrew the men following requests from Kennedy aides who declared ‘the senator does not like policemen and does not like blue uniforms.’
“The chief added the request to withdraw all policemen was changed after a Kennedy aide asked that four officers remain.
“Morton was on hand for Kennedy’s arrival with 35 uniformed officers on overtime, 32 reserve policemen, numerous plainclothes officers and the entire 16-man motorcycle squad.
“Before the men were withdrawn Morton says several potentially dangerous situations arose and his men took action to prevent trouble or injury to the thousands of spectators.
“ ‘During the entire four hours officers were subjected to constant abuse and filthy language by advance men of Sen. Kennedy’s staff,’ he said. ‘I received the same treatment.’
“He (Morton) said hundreds of spectators attempted to climb to the roof of the concourse and others pressed against rails and fences and there was danger of injuries.
“Morton said he moved his men from the immediate area of the concourse.
“He said at one point, as the Kennedy party was driving through the crowd, a boy about 12 was knocked to the ground by the vehicle ‘and no attempt was made by any member of Kennedy’s staff to determine his injuries which fortunately proved minor.’ ”
I close this blog by returning to Bort’s comprehensive story on RFK’s 13 hours in Fresno. As is standard in the newspaper business, Bort devoted most of his story to breaking news — RFK’s words and movement on April 19. He concluded his piece with a bit of “old” news — RFK’s arrival at the Fresno airport late on April 18.
As he stepped from his plane, Bort wrote, “Kennedy was welcomed by Mayor Floyd H. Hyde, Assemblyman George N. Zenovich, Rep. Phillip Burton of San Francisco, Supervisor Joseph Reich and the Kennedy county chairmen, Louis Golden and Richard Lehman.
“In his short remarks, Kennedy said he is facing a difficult campaign ‘but I think we can win it if we make the kind of effort that is necessary. If we win in California, we will win in Chicago in August and we will win in November and it will make a major difference in California and in the United States.’ ”
RFK won the June 4 California primary. He gave a victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in the first few minutes of June 5. Then he walked through the hotel’s kitchen, where he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan.
Robert F. Kennedy died in the early hours of June 6, 1968.
Robert F. Kennedy arrives at the Fresno Airport during his April 1968 campaign stop.
A crowd surrounds Robert F. Kennedy in April 1968 during a campaign stop in Fresno.
Robert F. Kennedy at Fresno State during his April 1968 campaign stop.
What are TOD funds? Near as I can tell, they’re nothing but a taxpayer slush fund for developers.
Mind you, I see nothing wrong with that. Our free-market society has many benefits, and developers get credit for some of the most important. May the development community always thrive.
But this “transit-oriented development” (TOD) money has me stumped. Last Thursday’s Fresno City Council meeting did nothing to clear the fog.
In theory, the matter before the council was simple. Council Member Sal Quintero is unhappy with all the darkened street lights in his southeast Fresno district. Mayor Ashley Swearengin wants to send in an application for $1.3 million of TOD funds. Let’s spend a few of those bucks on street light repairs, Quintero said.
In reality, nothing about the council debate was simple.
Let’s back-up a bit. The TOD program was born in 2006 when voters approved the Measure C sales tax extension. The goal, according to the TOD web page, is to “support community-based transit projects.”
Good TOD projects “are developed through an inclusive planning process with broad private-public partnerships and outreach,” the web site says.
Good TOD projects “improve the range of transportation choices by supporting transit facilities and improving links between facilities and activity nodes.”
Good TOD projects “support well-designed, high-density housing and mixed uses near transit.”
Permit me to quote at length about “eligible activities” for TOD’s capital improvement program:
“Eligible capital improvement projects include pedestrian, bicycle, transit facilities and other infrastructure improvement that will support and enhance transit oriented development. Applicants should document how the proposed projects will increase ‘location efficiency’ so people can walk, bike and take transit; boost ridership and minimize traffic; provide a rich mix of housing, shopping and transportation choices; generate revenue for the public and private sectors and provide value for both new and existing residents and create a sense of place.”
This part of the TOD web site goes on to state:
“Capital Improvement Projects include but (are) not limited to: Improvements to transit facilities; Improvements to bike and pedestrian facilities; Public plazas; Streetscape enhancement; Parking structure; Other infrastructure upgrade to support transit oriented development (e.g. water & sewers).
“Funds can be used for preliminary design, environmental studies, engineering, land acquisition and construction.”
The web site estimates a total of $14.5 million of TOD funds will be collected through 2030. There currently is about $2.7 million available for projects.
A city has to apply for TOD money. There’s a complicated approval process. The Fresno County Transportation Authority has the final word.
A project, in order to get TOD money, must be in a “priority transit oriented development area.” There are only three such areas in the current funding cycle. The first priority is downtown Fresno. The second priority is the Blackstone Avenue-Ventura/Kings Canyon corridor in Fresno. The third priority is the Shaw Avenue corridor (largely in Fresno).
You get the picture. There’s a ton of TOD money out there. It can be spent only in three areas of Fresno. The projects must have something to do with transit (in other words, the movement of human beings from Point A to Point B).
And you get a sense of where Quintero was coming from on April 11. Most of the Ventura/Kings Canyon corridor is in his district. He’s got a bunch of darkened street lights along (or near) this corridor. It’s a corridor ripe for the kind of mixed-use (residential/commercial) development that City Hall gushes over. Lots of people walk along (or near) this corridor. The lack of working street lights along (or near) this corridor discourages lots of people from walking there. No developer in her right mind will build along this corridor with all those worthless street lights.
Quintero told the council on April 11: Ventura/Kings Canyon’s street lights were made for TOD money. I don’t need $2.7 million. I don’t need $1.3 million. Just give me enough to make sure Mrs. Southeast Fresno has working street lights when she walks to a store on Kings Canyon in the evening.
Quintero got hammered.
The administration of Mayor Ashley Swearengin wants all $1.3 million of the TOD application to go toward four projects:
1.) $700,000 for the Downtown Development Incentive Program. With the Redevelopment Agency now dead, City Hall needs a way to waive impact fees for developers willing to build downtown. At the same time, City Hall doesn’t want to further deplete its coffers by waiving a bunch of fees. This money would backfill those waived fees.
2.) $456,250 for the undergrounding of overhead utilities and reconstruction of the Broadway-Fulton alley between Calaveras and San Joaquin streets.
3.) $63,000 for reconstruction of the Broadway-Fulton alley between San Joaquin and Amador streets.
4.) $89,680 for construction of storm drain facilities on L Street between Calaveras and San Joaquin streets.
We’ll have to wait and see if City Hall gets the $1.3 million and, if it does, which developers benefit most from these investments.
But for this blog, it’s sufficient to state the obvious: The administration didn’t want to be bothered with Quintero’s ideas.
The council debate went in a million different directions.
Sal, officials said, the Ventura/Kings Canyon corridor isn’t eligible for TOD money because the council has yet to give its OK to the corridor for the proposed Bus Rapid Transit system.
Not true, said Elizabeth Jonasson, a local clear-air/Measure C activist.
Sal, officials said, street-light repair is a maintenance issue. TOD money can’t be spent on maintenance.
Not true, said Jonasson.
Sal, officials said, repairing a few street lights causes more administrative trouble than the job is worth. Oh, the agony of all that paperwork!
What?! said Quintero.
Sal, officials said, TOD money can only be spent on improvements that spur and enhance green-type transportation and development in inner city areas where we’d like to see less automobile traffic. Fixing street lights to make Ventura/Kings Canyon safer and more pleasant for walkers doesn’t fit the bill.
“I’m confused,” said Council Member Steve Brandau.
Sal, officials said, TOD money might (in rare instances) be used to fix the metal canopies at run-down bus shelters along Ventura/Kings Canyon because the Measure C folks could view the improved protection provided by repaired canopies as enhancing the sense of security of FAX customers. But TOD money can’t be used to fix street lights that would provide a canopy of night-time illumination along Ventura/Kings Canyon, thereby enhancing the sense of security of Fresnans who decide their preferred method of transit is walking rather than a bus.
You gotta be kidding, Quintero said.
All this brings us back to our original questions. What are TOD funds? Are they just a way to put money in the pockets of favored developers? Or are they truly a way to improve the transportation experience of local travelers?
I got the distinct impression at the April 11 council meeting that TOD money is perfect for a developer who wants to build a shiny new residential project in downtown that includes a spiffy walking trail. Walking trails are hip. They’re cool. They look good on Power Point shows.
I’m completely indifferent to walking trails. I love to walk, and any old sidewalk in Fresno is good enough for me. There are a lot of people like me. What I hate is a sidewalk at night with a broken street light. I’m guessing there are a lot of people like me.
If this TOD funding issue is any indication, I sense everything about Measure C is elitist. It struck me that Quintero was saying pretty much the same thing on April 11. Fresno County residents are sending millions to a special account to improve the “transit” of human beings in a way that makes high-density urban development better, safer and more profitable. These are all worthy goals (including profits). But Quintero can’t get a dime for his southeast Fresno streets lights. All those TOD millions have to go for things like aristocratic walking trails and remodeled back alleys.
Maybe it’s time to reconsider the wisdom of Measure C.