City Of Oakland Should Forget Appeal Of Coal Lawsuit, Seek Tech Answer For Bulk Terminal
While I support the view that our own activities are and have contributed to climate change, to think that shutting down construction of the Oakland Bulk Terminal will be the key action in turning the tide is purely silly. First, coal is and has never been the only commodity the facility is to handle.
Second, if one sits down and runs the numbers, they would find that a flow of coal-only shipments would not be enough to pay the annual operating cost of the facility.
Third, the City of Oakland knew, from the start, that coal and iron ore and grain would be some of the many shipments the terminal would handle – and signed contracts to allow it to do so. Those to rail against the Development Agreement, fail to not the Lease Disposition Development Agreement, and supporting documents, some written by Betsy Lake, a lawyer who was consultant to the City of Oakland, and is now Assistant City Administrator, and use the work “coal.”
Now, because of an effort led by Tom Steyer, who has invested $140 million to fight any threat to the climate that he perceives is just that, all of a sudden, Oakland acts like it was lied to. Not so. Oakland politicians are just bowing to what could be called a “climate industrial complex” which has managed to help form a political climate that got us Donald Trump as POTUS.
Also, lost in all of this, is the need to make low-skilled, high paying jobs for blacks in Oakland. People will say “we don’t want African Americans to be subject to bad air in West Oakland”, but none of those same people will say “We want blacks in Oakland to have well-paying jobs”. They have zero problem with writing a check to a white college student who has an idea for a tech startup, but will come up with any reason not to give money to a homeless black man with a college degree who has an idea for a tech startup.
When someone like Oakland District Six Councilmember Desley Brooks says it, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and District Four Councilmember Annie Campbell Washington step forward to call her names like “Donald Trump of Oakland”. Meanwhile no one else has addressed the problem of black unemployment other than Brooks.
A sad fact is that many of the homeless in Oakland are black, and are working. The simple problem is we don’t have well-paying jobs for them because Oakland has chased them away over time. Oakland elected officials at the City and County level have preached a message of “biotech”, “biotech”, “tech” for 25 years, and never once considering how Oakland’s people of color would be impacted. I know, because I was there. I tried to save Oakland’s Apparel Industry with what would have been an incubator in 1988, only to be shut down because the Oakland Office Of Economic Development thought I went beyond my role as an intern! In 1996, I created a way to do redevelopment that would have netted Oakland $4 billion in additional revenue, a legal loophole according to our bond counsel. The City Council unbelievably went with the City Attorney’s lie that because it was “untested in court”, we shouldn’t do the idea.
I have seen Oakland again, and again, wiggle out of ways to help its less than in wealth become greater than. Fixing the problem of black unemployment and under-employment is the holy grail problem that only Desley Brooks has shown any desire to fix. Mayor Schaaf could do it, but this. I am calling on my long-time friend to so it.
The City of Oakland should not file an appeal, and for a simple reason: the courts of appeal tend to favor development agreements. People who have said the City should appeal don’t act as if they actually read the 37-page decision, just skimmed over it. The case was for a breach of contract.
The agenda of the Bay Area climate industrial complex is not really clean energy, and its certainly not clean jobs – it’s clearing land for market rate housing. Ask yourself: what would happen if the Oakland Bulk And Oversized Terminal wasn’t built? Aside from the government lawsuits that would happen due to breach of contract (the idea for the initial grants to build the new use at the Army base was to have a use that would replace the lost low-skilled, high wage jobs lost when the Army Base was closed), the land sale would almost certainly go to a land developer who would then build market-rate housing. That would certainly continue the chasing-away of low-income Oaklanders, many black, and either out of Oakland or to the streets as new homeless.
We need a new solution. The answer is tech: there is a tech-based solution that can be applied to the Oakland Bulk And Oversized Terminal matter. We’re in the middle of the tech capital of the world – we can solve the problem. We just have to want to.
Stay tuned.
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