.Seven Days

Replacing Aroner: Count Chris Worthington in; the fallout from webvan collapse

_Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood: Once upon a time, People’s Lawyer Jim Rogers — yes, he of the late-night ads for the Lotto-buying, whiplash-suffering crowd — was a force to be reckoned with in East Bay politics. In the early ’90s, Mr. Rogers made his mark with a victorious bid for the Richmond City Council. He then chased his career-ambulance to the Contra Costa Board of Supervisors in 1994, defeating Maria Viramontes. But then it all came crashing down. He failed to win the Democratic nomination to the 14th Assembly District seat in 1996 despite dumping more than $200K of his family’s dough into the cause. Two years later, incumbent Rogers couldn’t even retain his own supervisorial seat (having been tagged by the courts for overcharging clients certainly didn’t help his credibility). Two years ago, the People’s Carrot Top couldn’t even manage to place in the race for Richmond City Council.

Nonetheless, Jimbo confesses to 7 Days that he’s pondering another attempt for the Richmond City Council in November. Rogers says he has been discussing his options with local operatives including political fixer Darrell Reese, the convicted tax-evader who, according to press reports, was under investigation by the FBI for allegedly bribing elected city officials. (Such pesky allegations don’t prevent Reese from still being a player in Refinery Town politics.)

So is Rogers looking for redemption after his fall from the dais? Nah. “Some things,” he explains, “still need to be done.” Unfortunately, we can’t recall what those things are because we were more curious about persistent rumors that even back in 1999, when Rogers unsuccessfully ran for council, rumors abounded that he really lived in Berkeley (where he studied as an undergrad). Rogers assures us that just ain’t true. “There’s a lot of BS that goes on,” he sighs.

Meanwhile, we hear that Rogers’ old nemesis, Maria Viramontes, plans to toss her tiara in the ring. And that ain’t no BS.

_Driven to Protest: We’re betting things don’t feel too friendly around the Friendly Cab Company in Oakland this month. Friendly is one of the largest taxi services in the East Bay, part of the cab monopoly held by Baljin and Surinder Singh. Years ago, the Singhs found a loophole in the city’s rule that one person cannot own more than thirty percent of taxi permits in the city, and since then, their cabbie employers complain, they’ve raised fees for drivers to intolerable levels. Last spring, cabbies staged a strike and started organizing a union, but the Singhs held a trump card: As independent contractors, the drivers were not eligible for unionization. But Teamsters Local 70 organizer Odus Hall says that doesn’t mean the movement is dead. “We’re setting things in motion to create a Teamsters-Alameda County cabdrivers association,” he says. “We’ve already met a few times and have a meeting scheduled for next week. The association would lobby the city and the county for improved conditions for cabdrivers and set up industry standards that would assist them in gaining dignity and respect as workers.”

And then last week attorneys from the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund stuck another thorn in the taxi giant’s side: They sued the company under California law for allegedly discriminating against people with disabilities. The DREDF says two of their clients have repeatedly been refused service by Friendly Cab when waiting for a ride with their guide dogs. “California law explicitly provides that individuals with disabilities who rely on guide dogs are to enjoy the same access to businesses, including taxi services, as anyone else,” DREDF attorney Sherri Rita said in a statement. “Friendly cannot just decide that it won’t pick up customers who use guide dogs.”

_Logging Off: The lights are off and the computer screens are dark at Webvan, the Foster City-based online grocer that maintained its Bay Area distribution hub at a massive warehouse in East Oakland. Last week, the company laid off its remaining 2,000 employees and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy after burning through $1.2 billion in funding. Webvan’s stock price, once as high as $34 dollars a share, had dropped to about six cents by the time management decided to call it quits.

Despite the organizing efforts of the Teamsters and the United Commercial Food Workers, Webvan’s employees — which include truck drivers, meat cutters, and other warehouse workers — were never unionized. “It’s unfortunate because they would have had some options; now they don’t have any,” says UCFW spokesman Rich Hedges. “They’re absolutely unprotected; there’s no one to negotiate severance for them.” Despite the lavish severance packages previously offered to Webvan higher-ups like former CEO George Shaheen, who was promised $31,250 a month for life when he resigned in April, departing workers collected only their salaries through Sunday, reimbursement for remaining vacation time, and a $900 check from an anonymous donor. (However, Shaheen, as an unsecured creditor, will have to get in line with everyone else to collect his cash.) According to Hedges, Webvan administrators threw a party at the Foster City office on Friday night, but failed to alert blue-collar workers about the company’s shutdown until the following Monday morning, when employees began turning up to work at the company’s various warehouses. (Workers at the San Carlos facility got an even less nice good-bye when Webvan’s loss protection department, presumably worried about sacked employees looting the place, requested police help in guarding the facility, resulting in a countywide “Phase One Tactical Alert.”)

Now throughout the land, there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Or at least you’d think so if you read Salon.com, which, in an article documenting the guilt and grief of former customers of departed e-tailers like Kozmo, Eve, and Pets.com who wished they’d just ordered more, unironically quoted the plaintive wails of those recently deprived of same-day home delivery: “After sitting at home in my bathrobe, and having some nice man hand me my movie, how can I ever go back to Blockbusters [sic]?” asked one woman. “It’s like living in a Third World country.” Said a young man, a retail clerk: “I’m just so tired now. I’m tired all the time.”

Oh, dear souls, please try to be brave. Remember that even after Webvan and Kozmo, there are plenty of enterprising retailers eager to provide you with instant grocery gratification. Just moments after Webvan’s bankruptcy announcement, grocer planetorganics.com hustled out a press release headlined “Webvan’s gone — where will home delivery addicts turn?” advertising a bevy of local organic growers who will deliver produce to your doorstep.

_You’ve Got Male: The race to replace state Assemblymember Dion Aroner has narrowed to four candidates, and the big question is clearly whether anyone can give North Oakland City Councilmember Jane Brunner a run for her money. Brunner’s position as frontrunner can be summed up in two words: Don Perata. The state senator has cast his shadow over East Bay politics for more than a decade, when he was drafting state gun control legislation while still an Alameda County supervisor, and his fund-raising machine is second to none, which means his protégée Brunner can tap into wads of cash to supplement her connections to organized labor and the expertise of consultant Larry Tramutola. But Berkeley progressives, whose city comprises the heart of the fourteenth Assembly district, have long reviled what they regard as the moral compromises and unseemly deal-making required of membership in the Perata machine, and they searched long and hard for an electable — read female — alternative to Brunner. Having found none, Berkeley City Councilmember Kriss Worthington finally decided to run himself, and he has already outdistanced West County School Board member Charles Ramsey and Oakland’s David Brown.

Everyone expects that Worthington’s race will be an uphill one, and it didn’t help that he spent the first two months of the traditional campaign season looking for a challenger to Brunner. But Worthington and his supporters like to recall the fall of 1996, when he challenged incumbent councilmember Carla Woodworth and, despite having joined the race five minutes before the filing deadline expired, overcame Woodworth’s endorsements and money with a remarkably deep volunteer base. According to Don Jelinek, the former progressive mayoral candidate and longtime Worthington ally, the challenger is hoping to replicate the enthusiasm of his 1996 race, energizing a network of volunteers steadily cultivated by his years of work on the council and with the Sierra Club. “He’s not Perata, but he’s got thirty years of working for gay and environmental organizations,” Jelinek says. “People always underestimate the depth and sincerity of his support. There’s a lot of people in the hills who would never vote for Kriss in a city election, but to have somebody like him representing them in the state Assembly would be very appealing. It’s just like Ron Dellums; in some districts, he would never have stood a chance in a city race.”

Meanwhile, Southside is already buzzing over who will run to replace Worthington on the council, and some people have already floated the idea of Rob Wrenn, who sits on the Planning Commission and has garnered widespread support in the Le Conte neighborhood over the years. There’s just one problem: Wrenn doesn’t actually live in Worthington’s district — yet. But Wrenn’s home is less than half a block west of the district line, and redistricting will almost certainly absorb Wrenn into District 7. Wrenn says he hasn’t ruled out a run for the Council seat, but he was amused that people are already talking about it. Meanwhile, moderate politicos are rather mischievously floating the name of Randy Silverman, the rent board member whose connections to Woodworth and her former soulmate Peter Tannenbaum poisoned his relationship with the rest of the Berkeley progressive machine.

_Tidal Wave II: The housing crisis. Transportation and parking nightmares. These are among the biggest problems confronting Berkeley, problems that would rightly occupy every minute of the city’s planning director — if we had one, that is. The sad fact is that ever since Gil Kelley‘s ignominious departure in 1998, the city’s Planning Department has been absent a director to tackle some of our greatest challenges, and the result has been a demoralized staff and a meandering vision that has rendered bold, creative action next to impossible. Now, after almost three years, City Manager Weldon Rucker has finally settled on a candidate for this critical position: Carol Barrett, an assistant director of planning in Austin, Texas.

But Barrett had barely gotten the nod when questions about her leadership began leaking out of City Hall. In fact, Barrett was not Rucker’s first choice; he had originally settled on a planner from Gainesville, Florida, but that candidate declined the position. After Barrett was tapped, she had no fewer than nineteen meetings with city staff, directors of local nonprofits, and developers such as Patrick Kennedy in order to suss out her qualifications and give her a chance to get to know the city. Soon, Rucker began fielding reports that city staff was not exactly impressed with her dynamism, but he remains confident in her leadership. “The criticism that most people have brought forward has to do with her energy or something,” he says. “But in all fairness, she had a cold and endured these meetings as well as the City Council meetings, staying up till one in the morning. At this point, we need someone who can the boost the morale of the organization, get some restructuring going that can enable the department to meet the many demands of the city. And it was with an eye to that that we arranged with her to meet so many different people. It’s very difficult to do this job, and to mislead someone that working for the city is a walk down Primrose Lane is unfair.”

According to Barrett, she had a special reason for coming to Berkeley. “One of the reasons why I would take the job is that my son has just finished his freshman year at UC Berkeley,” she says. “And one of the reasons I had for not taking the job is that my son would be appalled at the notion that his mother would follow him to college. On the other hand, how’s this for a pick-up line: ‘Hey, my mom can get you a zoning variance just like that.'”

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