Live-blogging the Oakland Council meeting on The Army Base

I'm writing this from the comfort of a suburban Atlanta home office, listening to Darrel Carrey talk to the Oakland City Council regarding the need for jobs and the importance of redeveloping the Army Base. He is one of 75 speakers and 165 speaker cards (double-counting plus?) and there's a lot of emotion.

While the favorite to win the right to negotiate with the Oakland Redevelopment Agency is AMB/CCG over Federal Oakland Partners, it seems in failing to communicate with the Oakland Film Center people, Phil Tagami, who represents the developer team, has angered a ton of folks and they've come to the Oakland City Council to express their anger.

Well, not Darrel.

Long-time Oakland activist Joyce Roy asked how a developer could get this far without talking to the Oakland Film community. Yikes. This is going to be a long agenda item.

After about 50 speakers, the council's talking. Even with the film community's issues with how they perceive Phil treated them, the Exclusive Negotiating Agreement (ENA) which will lead to a Disposition and Development Agreement (DDA) barring a southward turn in the discussions.

The council's main concerns are 1) the film center, 2) open space, 3) fiscal capacity, 4) the recycling center, 5) local hiring and business retention. Councilmember Nadel wants a commitment to the produce market, the film center, and wants the agency administrator to come back to council in closed session in September. Well, she's presented two motions over the phone but as one motions and the council made them into two motions. (Got it?)

The motion passed.

Congratulations, Phil and the AMB/CCG team, you've won.

Steve Saldivar of OaklandNorth did a great job of live-blogging every speaker I didn't want to sit and record. Here's his excellent work: OaklandNorth

Oakland Shootout and Sideshow on YouTube

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It was only a matter of time. Just a matter of a few years before the crime we read about and see in the mainstream media news outlets hit the new media circuit, specifically video distribution services like YouTube and now it's a regular happening, largely ignored by the blogs. No more, at least here in my blog network.

I warn you. What you're about to see are a series of videos created in Oakland, California that are violent but give a real view of what's happening in East Oakland. The YouTube channel creating the videos in this case, there are other examples, is called "EASTOAKAND106" which is to give the location that's the focal point of their vlogging activity: the neighborhood around 106th avenue and Mac Arthur Boulevard in East Oakland and the nightime (and some times, daytime) "sideshows" that take place.

The sideshow is a variation of cruising in the summer, where one gets in their car and drives up and down a street just to look at others in their cars doing the same thing. It's that simple. Teenage girls wear little at all and guys come out to see them and the cars, but in recent years its turned into a "skid mark" competition where at times someone fires a gun.

Street Justice

The first video I posted at Oakland Focus few days ago and it shows a couple of young black men seemingly harassing a white man wearing little in the way of clothes because it apparently from the video they made him take them off. But they claim - or at least someone who sent a message to me - that man was trying to sell drugs on their block and himself was harming a homeless man. Moreover, in the video, he reportedly asked them "What kind of African are you?" - smart move, right? So from their point of view, they were just administering justice:



The Sideshow

This second video gives one an idea of what a night at "The Sideshow" is like. Here, cars burn rubber in a circle in the middle of an intersection while some of the passengers, like the young fellow in the white shirt who steps out of the Lexus sedan, run out of the cars in a kind of game to try and get out of the way of the vehicles as they move.



The third video below was uploaded on July 21st and is best described by using the video makers own words on the video's YouTube page:

Grey Mustang at the sideshow putting it down hard as he always do. This was at 90th & Bancroft which is one of the main spots it goes down. The starting on 1:33--end of vid it isa live shoot out. it was some people shooting at each other. This happens all the time at the sideshows people shooting or being shot at. It seems this is a normal night in a East Oakland Sideshow.

Here's that video:



Video uploads like that are common on YouTube, but ignored by the blogs and news bureaus, while city government just doesn't know they're there. But if coverage of this side of urban life were common, perhaps we could bring these dangerous activities to a peaceful end. I certainly hope that Oakland government officials don't try to have the videos taken down - that would be a mistake. Regardless of how you feel about the videos they're the only window we have to see what's really happening in East Oakland.

It's the same story as it has been in Oakland for some time: black kids with nothing to do and little supervision making their own fun and games using cars and in some cases guns and with a potentially dangerous outcome.

Oakland Army Base - Pick AMB / CCG for developer

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To some the title of this blog may seem like a turnabout considering that I suggested mixing the development teams with AMB/CCG as master developer and Federal Oakland Associates working for them in redeveloping the Oakland Army Base, and it is just that. After a lot of thinking about this matter I decided to go with the AMB / CCG team flat out.

My initial reasons for suggesting a mix of the teams were borne of my concern that the Federal Oakland Assocates / AMB/CCG organizations show a racial split - the first black and of color, the latter far less so when AMB Properties is considered. But with that, and I've noted this before, the AMB/CCG team brings credibility and California Commercial Investments President Phil Tagami has worked hard to bring to Oakland a billion-dollar organization that normally would have looked past our city.

Give Phil credit for his hard work.

It would have been easy for me to just push Phil's team because he's my friend in much the same way that Oakland City Attorney John Russo is my friend. I've known him since 1991, that's 16 years and going back to when he was just a poor community activist and housing redeveloper who constantly complained of being "equity rich and cash poor." I know his brother Ted Tagami well and for an equally long time; we're both active players in the new media space today. So because of that, I largely stayed away from the matter, but still wrote about Phil's other new accomplishment, the Fox Theater in downtown Oakland.

I stayed away even though someone-I-will-not name approached me in front of the downtown Oakland restaurant Osumo last year and said they would need my help "digging negative information up" about Phil. "Well, I can't do that; he's my friend," I explained. I had no idea why this person wanted to do that because we never talked again.

But now in hindsight and with the recent actions of the Mayor's Office - a study of the Army Base created without the Mayor's knowledge and secretly calling me to get it delivered in an effort to get a split vote decision on developer selection - I see that some had to work in a less-than-above board way to get what they wanted. Meanwhile, all Phil did was work his ass off.

That's all he ever does.

There are Oaklanders who are openly jealous of Phil for all the wrong reasons. Oakland's a crabbarrel town where people seem to dislike ambition or the ambitious, then complain about where they're going to get the dough to pay the rent. Phil's openly ambitious. (So am I.) Yeah, sometimes he can be overbearing. (Me too.) At times, he doesn't listen (Me too.) But one thing I can say is Phil cares. (So do I.) It's not just business for him, he enjoys the work of making Oakland better through development. (I prefer via the media.) It's something we've talked about for a heck of a long time. This is his dream come true; of course he's going to have to work his tail off even more to get it done.

So I thought about that and an email exchange with District Three Councilmember Nancy Nadel, who seemed to forget she was communicating with a vlogger (or just plain old blogger in this case).

But in that transmission with her, I realized that Nancy has lived the reality of problems of environmental damage and air pollution and had a particular vision for the area that as an effective representative for her people - and I'm one of them even though I'm over at Lake Merritt - she should be able to see through to reality. I also recalled the countless number of West Oakland community meetings I've attended where the mostly African American audience complained of the toxics from industrial activity. If Nadel feels AMB/CCG has the right land use mix and can get the job done, I'm behind her 100 percent.

So after decades of debate and a dormant West Oakland, it's time to turn the page. The Oakland Redevelopment Agency should enter into an exclusive negotiating agreement with the AMB / CCG team for the Oakland Army Base.

John Edwards has a sex tape?

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In the story that will not die, we now learn that John Edwards, the former North Carolina Senator and VP running mate to John Kerry, now reportedly has a sex tape. According to Rush & Molloy, the gossip columnists of the New York Daily News, Edwards former aide Andrew Young just finished a book proposal that described first, that he is not the father of the child of Rielle Hunter, John Edwards mistress, second, that Young just happened to see a sexually-explicit videotape as he was unpacking after moving to California from the East Coast, where he lived with Rielle Hunter, Edwards' mistress, and Young's wife and family.

The story is known by now: in August of 2008, after the heat of the Democratic Primary had cleared and just before the Democratic National Convention, former Senator Edwards admitted he cheated on his wife Elizabeth starting in 2006, while she was battling breast cancer. The scandal was originally reported by the Enquirer as far back as November of 2007, and just a few blogs, including Zennie62, then called "Zennie's Zeitgeist" followed it.

Rielle Hunter was an amateur film-maker Edwards befriended in New York City in 2006, but the friendship turned into two things: a $200,000 video job for Hunter and an affair for Edwards. Then - aide Andrew Young told the media - or those new media types paying attention - that he was the person who had the affair with Hunter and evntually got her pregnant.

This video I created gives you a look at what Rielle Hunter did for Edwards on the campaign trail:



Now Young's changing his story, claiming there's a sex tape and he has it, stating that he's not the father of Hunter's child and that Edwards is, and throwing Edwards so far under the bus he's going to be ran over by it and have skid marks on his back.

Yikes.

The question is why, after all this time, would Andrew Young do this to his former boss? Loyalty can last forever, can't it? According to the Huffington Post, Young feels "betrayed" by the "once-friendly" Edwards family. That turnabout may have come at the hands of Elizabeth Edwards, as the NY Daily News claims it was she who blamed Young for being an "enabler" of Edwards affair with Hunter, even to the point of arranging cell phone calls between Edwards and Hunter. Reportedly, Ms. Edwards threatened to leak information about Young's criminal past.

Yikes.

And The Enquirer, which rose from tabloid obscurity to gain mainstream media attention by breaking this story, reports that Young expressed displeasure with Edwards after he visited Hunter just after the child was born last year. Then, just after Edwards admitted his affair in August of 2008, Fox News ran a post presenting Young's unfortunate past of arrests. Young, with his image damaged, felt backed into a corner and like any wounded animal, struck back with this new story. The real story.

(Some websites, like the Enquirer claim the story of Young's past came up in The Daily Beast, but that's not true. It was Fox News.)

That the Edwards matter has degenerated to this point is sad to say the least. A once-promising man and family have essentially reduced themselves to the point of slinging mud at former friends and vice versa and who knows who else is next, given that Elizabeth Edwards is writing a book too.

Yikes!