|
| 
As with most recent City Council meetings, we adjourned last night without dealing with multiple agenda items, some of which have been continuously held over for weeks. And it was not for lack of time. The City Council met for 7 hours, beginning at 4:30 PM in closed session, 6:25 PM in open session and finally winding up at 11:30 PM, the mandatory adjournment time unless five councilmembers vote to suspend the rules and continue the meeting. I’m pretty sure that if Johnson and Willis had been present, the five votes would have been there, and we would have continued well into this morning.
This is the most dysfunctional and unproductive City Council since the days of Corky Booze, from 2011 to 2015 (elected 2010, lost reelection in 2014). Corky’s four years on the City Council overlapped half of Gayle McLaughlin’s eight years as mayor, and he did everything he could to make her mayoral life miserable. He taunted her (and Jovanka Beckles), constantly interrupted her and encouraged a band of similar-minded individuals in the audience to do the same. City Council meetings routinely became uncontrolled melees, with McLaughlin frequently declaring multiple recesses to try calm both the audience and City Council members. Corky’s soliloquies could seemingly go on forever, often as long as 20-30 minutes or more. As a result, the City Council adopted the “Corky Booze Rule,” a 5-minute limitation on councilmembers’ questions and comments that still stands. Corky was personally responsible for prolonging typical City Council meetings for hours. To his supporters, Corky Boozé personifies his city. Blunt, colorful and earthy, with boundless energy and a bootstrap style, the councilman and the hardscrabble industrial town of Richmond pair like peanut butter and jelly. But critics see Boozé as a viper-tongued, loose-lipped provocateur who plays by his own rules, flouting city laws, inciting the body politic’s darkest impulses and pitting racial groups against one another. He gleefully tosses verbal matches on the powder kegs of rancor commonly known as Richmond’s City Council meetings, and his rough-and-tumble style has reportedly turned physical on occasion (https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2013/08/16/richmond-councilman-corky-booz-public-nuisance-or-peoples-champion/#).
Why is that history important? Because the RPA City Council members are now using the same tactics Booze once used to stall and prolong meetings and avoid taking up subjects they are not passionate about. They do not always mimic Booze’s brash and confrontational style, but the effect is the same. Like Corky, they simply can’t stop talking and asking questions, the answers to which can often be found in the City Council packet or could have been obtained by private communication with staff. Staff and consultants pander to them, with responses like, “That’s a great question; I’m glad you asked.” Like Corky, they have a loyal following of the same individuals who speak at every meeting, saying the same thing about the same subjects over and over again. Take Point Molate. Speakers identifying themselves as members of the Point Molate Alliance praised RPA City Council members in open session before closed session for stopping the Point Molate SunCal project and then blamed me for making them sell it for $400!
I try to move meetings along, mostly in vain. Whenever I use the chair’s (mayor’s) prerogative to try to expedite meetings, I almost always get overruled by the RPA majority.
The downside of these late and prolonged meetings is that the public tires and tunes out. Important business is unaddressed. Last night, there was a young lady who wanted to Zoom in to read a Juneteenth Poem when the Juneteenth Proclamation came up, but she couldn’t wait up that late. Instead, the City Council spent an hour discussing a proposal about how to spend even more money on the Rydin Road homeless camp. Because RPA City Council members could not stop talking about it, we ran out of time, and the meeting had to be adjourned. |
