On the first Saturday morning that has felt like summer in Richmond, a group of volunteers hit the city’s neighborhoods to knock on doors and talk with people. Their mission: Get Mayor Gale McLaughlin reelected in November. This was the first precinct walk for McLaughlin’s re-election campaign. About 40 volunteers gathered at the office of the Richmond Progressive Alliance, a non-partisan liberal group that supports both Mayor McLaughlin and Jovanka Beckles, a Democrat who is running for City Council, and who shares many political ideas with the Green Party mayor. The volunteers were of all ages and backgrounds. Their goal was to talk with as many Richmond residents as they could. “This is not a ‘me’ campaign, this is going to be a ‘we’ campaign,” Beckles told the volunteers. “We have to come together to become one Richmond,” she said, and the volunteers cheered. “We are here today because we will not be pushed back,” said the mayor, who spoke about her accomplishments over the last four years as well as about future campaigning challenges. “Just as Chevron has spent thousands of dollars in the past to defeat our efforts, we expect it to happen again,” she said. Since both candidates are proud to say that they don’t receive corporate donations, a grassroots campaign is key for them to win the election this coming November. McLaughlin said that their campaigns will only take donations from ordinary people, progressive organizations and unions. “We support responsible corporations but don’t take their donations,” she said. According to the mayor, there were hundreds of people involved in her campaign during the last election in 2006. “We expect to have more because we see it as a continuation of our previous efforts,” said McLaughlin. On Saturday, the mayor had other city council obligations and couldn’t join the precinct walk, but Beckles did. She started in the Richmond Heights neighborhood, where she lives. Whether they had met her before or not, the neighbors were receptive. They listened attentively and took the handouts with information that were given to them by Beckles. She made notes about who agreed to post window and/or garden signs for her and McLaughlin’s campaigns. Beckles made sure to mention how she and McLaughlin stand for the same principles of “community empowerment” and that they aren’t taking corporate donations. “You know what happens when corporations have way to much power over politicians. It doesn’t usually works out in the best interests of the community,” Beckles told a neighbor who responded, “It’s not going to stop in Washington, is it?” They broke into laughter, then began to discuss the need to start change at a local level. Silvia Hopkins, a member of Communities for a Better Environment, a non-profit organization with a focus on environmental health and justice, walked precincts to campaign for McLaughlin in the 2006 election and is doing it again this year. “She is known for representing the interests of the people in this city,” said Hopkins before going out to campaign door to door. Is not clear yet who will be officially running for mayor in November’s election —the hopefuls have until July 12 to officially declare their candidacy — but both Beckles and McLaughlin feel optimistic about winning. Beckles ran for City Council for the first time in 2008. “It was a very close election, I lost for something like 400 votes,” she said. She added that at that time not many people in the community knew her, but now more people do so she expects to have a better outcome. McLaughlin is California’s first elected Green Party mayor. She said she’s gotten support because in Richmond people had struggled for decades and they didn’t see any progress. She thinks that’s why she was elected and will be re-elected. “People had been ready and are now actively and vocally ready for change,” she said. June 15, 2010 Richmond Confidential

At the Richmond City Council meeting this past Tuesday, most of the Latino residents in attendance were wearing green T-shirts supporting the controversial building of a casino in Point Molate in the hope that it might create new construction jobs. The casino project is supported by  Union Labor Local 324, and the construction workers who belong to the union are almost all Latino and African-American. “The casino is going to bring jobs to Richmond,” said Ruben Salazar, a 55-year-old laborer and resident of North Richmond who has been unemployed for a year.  Salazar is a member of Union Labor Local 324 and so are the friends who sat next to him during the council meeting. Laborers who are facing unemployment, like Salazar, see the casino project as hope for future construction jobs. They support the creation of jobs more than the idea of the casino itself. “We go to council meetings because we need a job,” said Antonio Sanchez, another union member who is facing unemployment. Salazar and Sanchez said that they learned about the council meeting through word of mouth. Both got their T-shirts from the supporters of the casino who had a table outside of the Community Services Building where council meetings take place. Nearby, a group opposing the casino project had a table too; both groups were giving away sandwiches, pamphlets, signs and sodas. “Why oppose it if it’s going to bring jobs?” asked Salazar, referring to the group that is against the project. Salazar and his wife, the parents of four children, are not working. The unemployment insurance money that Salazar gets is their only income. “If people don’t have the means to make ends meet, they are going to find other ways,” said Salazar, he fears that the crime rate will climb if unemployment in Richmond continues to rise. But not all Latinos at the meeting supported the casino idea. One of the few Latinos that spoke up against the casino project was Andrés Soto, a member of the Richmond Progressive Alliance, a non-partisan liberal group. Soto is a 54-year-old musician employed part time. “Not all jobs are good jobs,” he said. Soto alleged that developer Jim Levine of Upstream, which has partnered with the Guidiville Band of Pomo Indians to turn what used to be the Point Molate Naval Fuel Depot into a casino-hotel resort, had organized the leaders of the labor unions in order to get people of color show their support for the project. The T-shirts given away by Upstream promised “17,000 new jobs.” But Soto contested those figures. “The number of jobs has been inflated,” Soto said. He also said that Latinos, who have been hit hard by the recession, are vulnerable to believing a sugar-coated story that promises jobs. Salazar and other members of his union were a strong presence at the beginning of the council meeting, which started off with a full house. Some attendees were standing unable to find chairs to sit down. But the number of attendees faded away as the meeting stretched past midnight. At 10:00 pm the council started discussing the city’s right to explore various development alternatives for the Point Molate site. Mayor Gayle McLaughlin read part of a 2006 settlement agreement that stated that the city had the right to look at other projects. But by this point, more than half of the attendees had left. Salazar, who left a few hours into the meeting, was unaware of the possibility of other projects. When later asked if he would support a different plan, he said, “If it brings jobs and we are all content, I would support other projects.” May 20, 2010 Richmond Confidential

Starting next July, sewer rates for residents within the Richmond Municipal Sewer District will go up 5 percent annually until July 2014. The rate increase will affect about half of Richmond residents, including more than 16,000 single-family residential units and approximately 2,000 multifamily residential units and 2,000 commercial units. The rate fees for the Richmond Municipal Sewer District started climbing in 2000 and haven’t stopped ever since. In 2000, the annual fee for a single unit residence was $195. Today it is $506. With the fee increase it will be $633 in the year 2014. Chad Davisson, city of Richmond’s wastewater manager, said that the city needed to increase the rates because the sewer system is so old. Richmond’s Water Pollution Control Plant at 601 Canal Boulevard was built in 1953 and the pipes are 60 to 90 years old. Much of the city’s infrastructure is at the end of its service life; that’s the cause of sewer spills into the bay, he said. According Davisson, in 2009 there were 22 spills—a total of nearly 2.2 million gallons. So far in 2010 there have been 36 spills, a total of 12.3 million gallons. Davisson said that the rate increases since 1999 have been to pay for projects to fix the Richmond Municipal Sewer District plant and the city’s sewer collection system. Since 1999, the city has spent approximately $51 million on different projects related to the upgrade of the collection system, plant or its administration. At least $11 million of that has been spent on plant improvements. The upcoming rate increase, however, will help to fix only the collection system, not the plant, said Davisson. The increase is to pay a $30 million bond to rebuild the infrastructure. The upgrades are mandated as part of a 2006 settlement between the city of Richmond and Baykeeper, a nonprofit environmental watchdog based in San Francisco. In 2006, Baykeeper filed a lawsuit stating that the City of Richmond had been spilling hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage into the bay every year. The city agreed to reduce spills 90 percent by the year 2014. Davisson said that having an old collection system that needs to be fixed is a problem that affects many Bay Area cities. “Discovery Bay, San Carlos, Vacaville are raising their sewer rates,” he said, citing a few examples. Deb Self, the executive director of Baykeeper, agrees with Davisson that many cities have sewage leak problems. (Click here for a Google map that shows the sewage system overflows in the Bay Area.) In fact, this year, Baykeeper sued Alameda, Albany, Berkeley, Emeryville, Oakland, Piedmont, and the Stege Sanitary District (which serves Kensington, El Cerrito and part of the Richmond Annex) for illegal sewage spills. The nonprofit alleged that these cities are accountable for leaky sewage collection systems that inundate the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) treatment plant with massive amounts of rainwater and sewage and cause major spills in the bay. While EBMUD is responsible for wastewater treatment, it does not own, and therefore cannot repair, the cities’ collection systems. Some residents blame Richmond’s recent sewer rate hikes on Veolia, the French multinational that contracted with the city of Richmond to take over the treatment plant in 2002. Two years later the city contracted it to run the collection system as well. Charles Smith, a retired Richmond resident who worked for EBMUD for 25 years as a wastewater operator, is the Richmond plant’s most outspoken critic. He said that instead of contracting with Veolia, the city should have accepted EBMUD’s proposal eight years ago, which was to close the Richmond plant and build a pipeline—at no extra cost—that would take the sewage to their plant in Oakland. Smith said that if the city had contracted with EBMUD on the first place, then it wouldn’t have to charge residents to fix an obsolete plant. Before the city approved the rate increase, Smith produced fliers claiming  “Sewer tax hikes mean big profits for Veolia at ratepayers’ expense.” But Davisson says rate hikes are caused by the need for repairs and have nothing to do with the company’s profits. “Sewer rates increases don’t go in Veolias’s pocket,” he said. According to Davisson, Veolia’s contract with the city is a fixed fee contract and the increased fees go to pay for the projects, not to Veolia. Davisson said that the city is considering the possibility of working with EBMUD in the future. However, based on a study by Carollo Engineers, building a pipeline from Richmond to the EBMUD plant in Oakland could cost as much as $95 million. That is more expensive than making improvements to the current treatment plant, said Davison. EBMUD engineer Ben Horenstein, who headed the bidding for EBMUD eight years ago and is now the utility’s manager of wastewater environmental services, said that while the $95 million estimate for EBMUD to build the pipeline “seems fairly high to me,” things have changed since 2002. “I don’t know if EBMUD can replicate the proposal we made 10 years ago about not charging for the pipeline. Those are decisions that will have to be made by our board,” Horenstein said. Horenstein said that EBMUD would have to do an engineering analysis to see whether they are even able to handle additional flows from Richmond to the EBMUD plant. Davisson said that many other Bay Area cities are now facing similar problems with outdated infrastructure.  “This is not unique to Richmond,” he said. “The Bay Area is very old and a lot of the communities are dealing with the same issue.”  July 30, 2010 Richmond Confidential