San Jose Mayor's "Millions" Comment; Forget The A's

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed can kiss the Oakland A's goodbye! Mayor Reed opened up and let fly the one sentence Lew Wolff and Major League Baseball don't want to hear: "Make us millions" or words to that effect, and "pay for your own stadium" or words to that effect.

I don't know what the guy was smoking but look, I want some. What the heck, they'll probably legalize it anyway! The bottom line truth is in this recession the A's want someone to pay for the stadium now, and they will kick in money when the economy gets better. That "someone" is the government, because the Athletics sure don't have the money to do it and have lost over $24 million on the effort to date. After all that, they can't be hungry to build a privately financed stadium at all, regardless of their statements now or next week beyond this post.

The Oakland A's are counting on a city to get stimulus money, but they'll have to stand in line behind the other needs of the public sector, especially if San Jose has to cut police and fire services.

Wolff, Major League Baseball and the San Jose pipe dreamers should just give up the fight and go home, or stay at home and save some money. The state of California's fiscal and economic picture is still so bad even the pigeons are sharing food with the locals, and they want to spend almost a billion to build a stadium?

Now?

Why do you think I quit the Oakland Task Force? Other than the stomach ache I was getting from the politics, I could see the hand writing on the walls of my Oakland Baseball Simworld. There's no way you can make a real stadium proposal pencil out -- pay for itself -- in this political economic climate, and anyone who argues otherwise is just plain nuts.

Period.

Beer By BART Interesting But Leaves Out Places

Greetings from Georgia, where I'm visiting my Mom. (Humid here.) I ran across a cool website called Beer By BART and it has some rather interesting listings but what's more curious is what was left out of the website.

But first, what is it? It's a simple site that you can use to find where to go to get beer near a BART Station. In Oakland's Rockridge District, for example, the site lists just two places: Ben and Nick's and Barclay's and that's it. In reality, there's The Hut just across from Ben and Nick's and closer to BART than Barclay's, as well as Zachary's Pizza which is on the way to Ben and Nick's. So why those two made the cut's a wonder to me.

Berkeley BART? Same problem. List just Jupiter and Triple Rock, forgetting "Downtown" which is on the way. What is this, the anti-yuppie beer site? Well, visit the site and give Steve Shapiro & Gail Ann Williams your views. Regardless of the omits, it's a great resource to have around online.

TV Show "The Blog Report" Features Oakland's Young Politicos

 

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Last weekend's installment of "The Blog Report with Zennie62" features the 16th District Delegate Election that was held in Alameda in January. The show segment, which is shown here, covers the election process and why its important to the political future of the Democratic Party in the Bay Area.

But the real stars of the show are Oakland's young political activists who are bringing a new energy to the scene here. East Bay Young Democrats President Frieda Edgette, union leader Dan Rush, and Peralta Community College Trustee Abel Guillen are just some of the faces interviewed in the second Episode of "The Blog Report."

Personally, I think Frieda Edgette's the one to watch. The leader of the East Bay Young Dems and "MixitUp East Bay" has a unique combination of energy, intelligence, empathy and direction to rise to the level of congressional representative or senator, and I'm not writing anything here I've not personally told her. In fact, once Frieda learns to ignore the voices that say either directly or indirectly "she can't", she will.

I don't make that statement lightly. The Oakland / East Bay Area political establishment is not known for growing and mentoring future leaders; that happens by the next generation of voters elevating its own officials for the future. In Edgette's case she and others in her organization and many who were former Obama volunteers but not in the East Bay Young Dems have formed new groups of friends and other informal alliances that go out and do everything from raise money for causes to gain votes for delegate candidates like Edgette and Rush; both won the January election.

Take one look at the slate cards made by the organizations aligned with Senator Don Perata last year and one would be hard pressed to find a young political star in the group. Nothing against Senator Perata but it's a wake up call to him that there's a powerful anti-establishment wind blowing and people like Frieda are being carried by it. Perata should get on the right side of it.

Is Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums Firing His Chief Of Staff?

I'm getting a bunch of emails on the happenings in the Oakland Mayor's Office just days after my decision to expell the bad food that was in me: dealing with Oakland's mess of a sports politics situation, of which the Oakland Athletics - not Mayor Dellums - have created. The latest news is David K. Chai, Dellums Chief of Staff is on his way out and possibly but at this point not certain that Dellums' executive assistant Marisol Lopez would take the top spot.

One email described the situation like this:

his (Dellums') choices for COS (chief of staff) (wonderful at first with Dan Boggan, then unproductive with David Chai, and now completely disorienting with Marisol Lopez his most likely choice) are distancing him from even his own, most loyal supporters.

The emails have also allowed me to see why our current Sports and Entertainment Task Force was being undermined by Dellums' dealings to create a new baseball task force: no consistent mayor's staff contact at the meetings. I noticed this from my second task force meeting when a Mayor's aide was present and taking notes, then we never saw her again. Without someone to directly brief the Mayor and using contemporary information, our task force was just spinning its wheels.

I've told the chair of the task force again and again that he must be aggressive with Dellums staff because they were going to act as if we as a group didn't exist just by the way that office works. The email described David Chai as "unproductive" but from my conversations with him he sounded frustrated and that was from being stonewalled not by the Mayor so much as the staff in general, which is why to the outside person it looks like Chai's "unproductive".

I've seen this problem hurt many good people including by the now-departed Leslie Littleton, who was the Mayor's deputy chief of staff: that it's hard to get Dellums to take the normal actions a Mayor takes to solve a problem. I saw her impacted by this at Fruitvale BART after the murder of Oscar Grant and just hours before the first riot took place. I was asking why Dellums wasn't there, and she agreed he should be there but took the "boos" and insults - some terrible - from the crowd in his place, which totally wore on her.

In effect, Dellums' own personality is preventing his staffers from being effective, so frustration sets in, and departures result. A revolving door.

Now I'm going to temper that point of view by stating that some staffers try to exercize too much direction of the Mayor when it's least necessary, like a certain KTOP television staffer who I have a great deal of respect for. But the bottom line is no Mayor's staff group should be in this terrible turf war battle that is taking place down there. Since 2006 when Dellums took office, Dan Boggin, Michael Hunt, Leslie Littleton, and now David Chai and others have either departed or are on their way out. When I worked for Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris, we had a core group of people that lasted longer than one or two years and in my case from 1995 to 1999. Chai joined in 2007; Littleton came to the office just last fall.

I like David Chai and I hope he's able to stick around. He means well and actually cares about the City of Oakland beyond the Mayor. But as I told him he's got to remember to be "more than his position."

What I mean is as I told Chai: no one cares about his title, they care about what he does, period. If he uses his title as a tool to lord over people and show power in the office he will lose under the weight of their displeasure; if he remembers to develop relationships that will last beyond his time in office, he will be rewarded for making the connections. When I worked for Mayor Harris I developed a long list of friends who continue to help me today and vice versa.

Chai listened to me lecture him - at first painfully, then attentively - on how to make the best of his time in office. Now, he's got to show he actually put my advice into practice.