Politics have come to Alameda, and they ain’t pretty. In a season in which most East Bay races are somnolent affairs, it has fallen to this quiet island of playgrounds and Victorians to produce all the poison and ruthlessness we usually expect at this time of year. Rival factions have traded body blows, organized anonymous smear campaigns, and accused one another of everything from racism to pimping for big developers. Haunting this campaign are nothing less than the city’s legacy of distrust for the African Americans across the estuary in Oakland, and the fear that Alameda’s beloved Mayberry atmosphere may be smothered by traffic, big box stores, and, as one resident put it, “gangsters, shoplifters, and general rabble from neighboring cities.”
When incumbent Mayor Beverly Johnson was elected in 2002, she won with considerable help from state Senator Don Perata, the Alameda native and swaggering leader of the East Bay’s political machine. Just weeks before the election, a political action committee called Californians for Neighborhood Preservation spent more than $15,000 blanketing the island with mailers promoting Johnson’s candidacy. Its chairman, Perata crony Joe Camicia, tried to keep the donors secret, but Oakland Tribune reporters finally forced him to reveal the names, which included big-shot developers and Perata associates Ron Cowan, Phil Tagami, Ed De Silva, and Signature Properties. In addition, Centex Homes, a group negotiating for the rights to develop waterfront property at the old Navy base on Alameda Point, donated $25,000. Johnson denied any knowledge of the group’s activities, but the scandal left a bad taste with residents, especially those who jealously guarded Alameda’s modest scale.
Late last year, those same residents began raising hell. The city council proposed renovating the grand, crumbling Alameda Theater by spending $23.7 million in mostly public funds to build a multistory parking garage and seven-screen multiplex. Opponents claimed the project’s scale would overwhelm the homespun character of downtown and bring crime, vandalism, and unsavory elements into the city; one critic told the Berkeley Daily Planet that the makeover would amount to “raping the downtown.” More than three thousand people signed a petition opposing the project, but the council voted to proceed, angering Councilman Doug DeHaan. “The council just ignored the community input, and that became a real concerning factor,” he says.
Several months later, the owner of the Alameda Towne Centre, an old retail area that had fallen on hard times, announced a plan to renovate the strip mall by bringing in a 145,000-square-foot Target store. For residents already worried about the new multiplex, as well as the plan to build 1,700 units of housing at the old Naval Air Station, this was the last straw. Alameda Island has only five points of entry, and all this new development, they worried, would jam traffic at the Webster Street Tube. Eugenie Thomson, an Alameda resident and traffic engineer, claims that the proposed new growth would cause gridlock. “I looked at the total growth that is approved, and the additional trips generated is 150,000 cars per day,” she says. “That is overwhelming, much too large for the island. My question is, why has the council not looked at that?”
Fed up with their leaders, Thomson, DeHaan, and longtime resident Pat Bail decided to shake things up. They formed a new “reform” slate, Action Alameda, and vowed to unseat Johnson and incumbent Councilman Frank Matarrese; DeHaan challenged Beverly Johnson for the mayor’s seat, while Thomson and Bail ran for city council. The three candidates rather pointedly promised not to take any campaign donations from land developers, and vowed to hold sacred the tenets of Measure A, an old Alameda law that limited the construction of new housing to single-family homes or duplexes. “We all had the same battle cry, which was ‘Let’s take a close look at it and build growth that fits,'” DeHaan says.
The challengers have clearly exasperated Johnson, who has lately taken great pains to present herself as someone who shares voter concerns about overdevelopment, even going so far as to demand that the Navy scale back the plans for Alameda Point. But the city should be proud of its new construction, Johnson says, pointing to the new main library, which at least one of her opponents opposed. She accuses the Action Alameda slate of whipping residents into a frenzy with hysterical stories of runaway growth. “I don’t think people are against redevelopment of blighted areas, which is what we’ve been doing,” the mayor says. “Our population has declined a little more than 15,000 people since 1990, so this fear tactic they’re using with people just isn’t true.”
Her argument hasn’t worked with everyone. The Alameda Times-Star endorsed her opponent two weeks ago. “By declaring that almost everyone is happy about the direction Alameda is heading and dismissing criticism as the product of a vocal minority,” its editors wrote, “Mayor Beverly Johnson fuels the arguments of opponents who suggest City Hall isn’t always accessible or listening.”
But then someone with a lot of money stepped forward to help out Johnson’s campaign. Several Alameda residents have received calls from people ostensibly conducting an election poll but framing the questions to smear Pat Bail, one of the Action candidates. The pollsters mentioned that Bail had spent more than $100,000 of her own money in a previous run for city council and suggested that she might try the same thing again.
So far, the accusation hasn’t hit its mark, as the Action slate has promised to spend only campaign donations from friends and supporters. But Johnson recently made a more potent suggestion: that some of the Action slate’s supporters may be motivated by their city’s old racist prejudices. In a council meeting last year, she noted, her opponent Doug DeHaan casually referred to a problem the city was facing as a “tar baby,” not slurring black residents per se, but employing an idiom offensive to some. DeHaan has since apologized for the remark.
Johnson also called attention to interviews in which Bail makes some dubious remarks. “You probably oughta see it,” the mayor says of the interviews, which were distributed on YouTube and on a blog hostile to the Action slate. “It’s Pat Bail in her own words. And it’s a pretty offensive discussion.”
The video is distributed anonymously and edited so heavily that Bail speaks only one or two sentences at a time, with no context. In the most damaging clip, Bail says, “I have a problem with low-cost housing and homeless housing; I have a serious problem. Now, moderate-cost housing is one thing. Homeless, and the dregs of society coming from every portion of the Bay Area, is quite another issue. … You don’t want to have to arm yourself or put barbed wire around your backyard because the parolees are in town, or the drug addicts are here.”
Bail is perhaps the embodiment of Alameda’s old white, blue-collar proletariat. She grew up in housing projects near the Coliseum, albeit back in the late 1940s and early ’50s, when public housing had a decidedly different character. She has been a housewife, a mother, and a longtime supporter of children’s baseball and football leagues, working with “West End kids” who are often poor and African American. Nonetheless, she stands by her comments.
“I don’t have a problem with low-cost housing per se, and maybe I misspoke on that,” she says. “What I have a problem with is putting criminals down there on the base when we’re not prepared to deal with it. … This was when they were putting the parolees down at the base, and I objected to that then, and I object to that now. These are not people who lived in Alameda, particularly; these are parolees from all over.” Claiming that crime is alarmingly high near the old Naval Air Station, Bail concludes, “I have no problem with them going somewhere, but the citizens of Alameda are carrying the price tag for this. We have better than forty parolees from prison in Alameda that would not necessarily come to Alameda unless they’re placed there.”
Assistant city manager David Brandt says there is no program to place parolees in housing anywhere in the city. The city houses about two hundred formerly homeless families at the Naval Air Station, he says, but “they’re screened, so they’re not supposed to be ex-felons or anything like that.” And according to police chief Walter Tibbet, crime is declining. Former police chief Bernie Matthews says remarks such as Bail’s do the city a disservice. “It’s a shame that some people will utilize and exaggerate their statistics that perhaps are not accurate for their own purpose,” he says. “And shame on them. It’s politicians like that who give the electorate, the voters, the sense that you don’t know who to trust.”
Alameda has a history of finding ways to keep its African-American neighbors in Oakland. In 1990, after years of settling lawsuits stemming from the abuse and mistreatment of black motorists, the Alameda Police Department was rocked by revelations that its officers were using patrol car computers to exchange racist comments. The cops tapped out witticisms such as “stuck in Alameda going to kill me a n—–,” and “how many negros does it take to BBQ a 2 LB. Steak?” One officer, referring to hip-hop clubs along the waterfront, typed, “Any objections to us painting our faces like Al Jolson and doing bar checks?” A second officer replied, “None at all; bring your white sheet while you’re at it.” Hundreds of outraged people called for an investigation. As the scandal deepened, a small bomb was set off at the home of a member of the Alameda chapter of the NAACP.
With such a legacy, you may be forgiven for wondering if some residents’ traffic concerns mask a darker fear. In a letter to the editor of the Alameda Journal, for example, Mike Fennelly recently wrote, “As we invite more of the gangsters, shoplifters, and general rabble from neighboring cities to come to Alameda, what will the real cost be?”
In response, Alameda Journal editor Jeff Mitchell penned an editorial denouncing such sentiments. Noting that some development opponents have publicly claimed that new retail and entertainment will bring “‘those people’ or the ‘riff-raff’ or, when really emboldened, ‘those folks from Oakland,'” Mitchell warned, “Hidden just past the shiny SUVs, the perfectly manicured lawns, and the precisely restored Victorians, Alameda is home to an old-school class of ignorant hillbillies.”
This infuriated Bail, whom Mitchell indirectly accused of employing vaguely racist language. The incident in question was pretty dubious. Bail referred to an African-American councilmember as occupying the council’s “black seat,” when the term merely recognizes the island’s voting patterns. But Bail accused Mitchell of sandbagging her during a harmless “get to know you” conversation. “He’s a fucking snake,” she snarls. “You can quote me on that. I wouldn’t spit on that man if he was on fire.”
For the last several weeks, Alamedans have argued over the character of their city. But sometimes it’s hard to know what they’re really talking about. Are they standing up to the Don Perata machine and to big developers? Are they parochial xenophobes, a retrograde enclave of white and Asian homeowners who call 911 at the first hyphy thump on a car stereo? What do they talk about when they talk about traffic? As strange as it may sound, Alameda politics have boiled down to a question of semiotics.
One of Mayor Johnson’s greatest assets in this race has been Bayport Blogging Alameda (LaurenDo.wordpress.com), a blog whose author obsessively posts detailed items about every aspect of city politics, and has relentlessly criticized the Action Alameda slate. It was here that the Pat Bail hit pieces got the most exposure.
The blog is the product of Lauren Do, a housewife and stay-at-home mom with lots of free time and a fat T1 line. Desperate to fill the tedium, she began blogging about local affairs and was soon hooked. “I started off really slow, and then I ramped up,” she says. “It took me a long time to understand the politics of this community. … It’s small-town in its sort of feel, and you never really thought that politics would be so divisive.”
But Do certainly has contributed to the divisiveness. She has an arrangement with critics of the Action Alameda slate: They send her their hit pieces, and she posts them. She declines to identify these operatives. “It’s a collective of people that have come together to, I guess, shine a light on the people on the slate,” she says. As for the ethics of posting anonymous attacks on someone running for a small office, Do says that in the Internet world of flaming and pseudonyms, everything is fair game: “I don’t censor people on my blog, even if they’re insulting me. … I’ve left up almost every instance where I’ve been attacked in that way. I’ve put myself out there where I can be criticized. Pat Bail has put herself out there, and she’s open to criticism.”
Alameda is steeped in history, insofar as its racist legacy still defines its public language. But it’s also barreling toward the future, in that a mother in pajamas and slippers can learn in five months what it took Karl Rove a lifetime to figure out.
