Investigative journalist John Geluardi died yesterday after suffering a stroke.

 

John was an extraordinary, award-winning investigative reporter, writing for multiple publications, including
the West County Times, Pacific Sun,
East Bay Express,
Oakland Magazine, and
North Coast Journal. He is the author of
Cannabiz:
The Explosive Rise of the Medical Marijuana Industry, one of the first books to examine the transformation of cannabis from a social movement into a thriving business. He served as a guest lecturer at the UC School of Journalism.

 

His award-winning work includes:

 

• Investigating
  shoddy homicide investigations in the San Francisco Police Department.
• Covering
  Matt Gonzales’ vice presidential candidacy.
• Reporting on the
  history and culture of Caffe Trieste in San Francisco.
• The Trial of Charles Hurwitz,
  The beginning and end of the fraud suit against the former Pacific Lumber chief.

 

In addition to his byline work, Geluardi has been a
lead investigator for Trovare Investigations for the past five years, focusing on
criminal and civil cases.
His investigative background spans more than 20 years, with a strong emphasis on
crime, law enforcement, courts, and politics.

 

Geluardi wrote prolifically about Richmond politics. Below is a sampling, many of which have been preserved in the TOM BUTT E-FORUM Archives:

 

• Richmond Councilman Gets Called On His Junk,
  March 13, 2013.
• Strife Doesn’t Throw Council Off Course, August 18, 2007
• Dissection of “In a Poor Corner of the Bay Area, the Pandemic Has Yet to rage,”
  
• Richmond City Council Haplessly Fires City
  Manager, July 25, 2019
• Analysis: Progressives failed in Richmond,
  December 4, 2018
• Conservative Regains Council Seat
  in Liberal Richmond, December 3, 2018
• Charges Dropped Against
  Richmond Bicycle Activist Najari “Naj” Smith, August 21, 2028
• Richmond Developer Pushes Two Ballot Measures, November 11, 2015
• Progressive Brinksmanship Mounts in Richmond,
  February 18, 2025.
• The Battle for Richmond’s Soul,
  September 24, 2014
• Richmond Rethinks
  Hasty Decision About Troubled Housing Complex, April 8, 2014
• The New Progressive
  Leader, December 24, 2013
• Richmond Councilman Uses Position to Avoid Fines,
  November 20, 2013
• The Richmond Soda War,
  October 13, 2012
• Big Oil Targets Little Richmond Again,
  October 16, 2012
• Tom Butt Goes to War With the Port,
  May 23, 2012
• The Man Behind Richmond’s Renaissance,
  May 18, 2011

 

Strife doesn’t throw council off course

 

” Despite setbacks, Richmond’s leaders say, city has regained respect and its bond rating

By John Geluardi

STAFF WRITER Contra Costa Times

Article Launched:08/18/2007 03:05:22 AM PDT

 

Since January, the new Richmond City Council has been effective in moving the city in a positive direction,
though bickering and some spite votes have caused setbacks.

 

“Yes, there has been a lot of personal stuff,” said Councilwoman Maria Viramontes, a leading member of the
council majority. “But we actually made a lot of hard decisions together, and if all of the fighting, crying and whining are part of that, I guess we’ll have to work with it.”

The council’s summer break began July 31, and its next meeting is scheduled for Sept. 11. When they return,
council members will consider the expansion of the Chevron Refinery, a potential scandal involving the city’s wastewater management company, Veolia Water, and the ongoing process to update the general plan.

 

The council’s composition changed dramatically after the November election, with Green Party member Gayle
McLaughlin winning the nonpartisan mayor’s seat after serving two years as a councilwoman. With very little money, McLaughlin unseated Mayor Irma Anderson, who had a formidable campaign war chest stuffed with contributions from Chevron.

 

McLaughlin’s membership in the Green Party has had no effect on her ability to find common ground with her
council colleagues, who have been like-minded on many environmental and social issues.

 

McLaughlin also has been successful at increasing grass-roots participation at City Council and community
meetings, which has helped to somewhat loosen the stranglehold industry, developers and city unions have long had on city policy.

 

Council neophytes Ludmyrna Lopez and Harpreet Sandhu still are finding their way on the council and largely
have voted in lockstep with their council mentors, Viramontes, Councilman John Marquez and, to a lesser degree, Vice Mayor Nat Bates.

 

Those five form the council majority and often vote in opposition to a loose-knit rival faction of McLaughlin
and Councilmen Tom Butt, Tony Thurmond and occasionally Jim Rogers.

 

Despite the dustups, the council has successfully continued to regain the respect of city residents and
the Bay Area.

 

Perhaps most significantly, the city regained its favored bond ratings from both Moody’s Investor Service
and Standard & Poors thanks to the council’s consistent fiscal discipline. The favored bond rating is doubtless a sign of financial recovery from a $35 million budget crisis in 2004 that resulted from six years of gross mismanagement under former City Manager
Isiah Turner.

 

The council also doubled the annual funding for critically needed street repairs and launched the $111 million
first phase of the Civic Center renovation.

 

Under McLaughlin’s leadership, Richmond has become more environmentally friendly. The council rolled out
the welcome mat to green businesses by declaring Richmond a Green Economic Development Area, reduced solar fees to the lowest in the Bay Area and approved the Green Building Ordinance, which governs construction of all city-funded projects greater than $300,000.

 

The council formed the Office of Neighborhood Safety to coordinate anti-violence programs among city departments,
the West Contra Costa Unified School District and nonprofit groups.

 

And the council took steps to get the Chevron Refinery to verify its annual utility users tax payment. In
July 2006, the refinery suddenly and without explanation reduced its payment by $4 million, dealing the city a financial blow as it recovered from its budget crisis.

 

Although the council was thoughtful and effective on the majority of issues, there were times during the
past seven months when good government took a back seat to personal bickering. Name-calling and spite votes were costly for residents, employees and the city’s long-suffering image.

The best example is the council’s 5-4 vote against windows that open — also called “operable windows” —
in the renovated Civic Center. In June, the council majority voted down operable windows despite a presentation by a nationally respected environmental engineer on employee health and productivity benefits of an operable-window system.

 

Operable windows have been popular in civic buildings across the country and particularly in the Bay Area.
The council’s narrow rejection reaffirmed an image of petty personal politics and backwardness the city has been struggling to overcome.

Frustrated by the majority’s vote, Butt fired off a nasty installment of his popular e-mail forum denouncing
the council majority for a series of what he called heavy-handed votes on commission appointments, the dissolution of the Design Review Board and the formation of a blue-ribbon committee to consider amendments to the City Charter.

 

Viramontes responded by covering Butt’s City Hall office with funeral flower arrangements, each bouquet
festooned with the quotes of prominent women such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Elizabeth Browning and Helen Keller.

 

Viramontes’ colorful response seemed to have a calming effect, and the final few council meetings before
the break took a more collegial tone.

 

“There’s always going to be debate on any city council,” Butt said. “I guess in my dreams, I would like
to see a council that’s rational and less political and less personal. If we can do that, we’d have a pretty good functioning council.”

 

Reach John Geluardi at 510-262-2787 or
jgeluardi@bayareanewsgroup.com.

Richmond manager wins high praise

 

” Council seeks ways to retain Lindsay, whose contract expires next year

By John Geluardi

STAFF WRITER Contra Costa Times

Article Launched:08/15/2007 03:04:38 AM PDT

 

Two-and-a-half years after City Manager Bill Lindsay came to a very troubled Richmond, leaders are asking
whether the city is a better place.

And the answer so far is a resounding “yes.”

 

The soft-spoken Lindsay is getting credit as a major force in rooting out dysfunction that in the not-so-distant
past resulted in rampant and pernicious cronyism, 100 corruption-busting FBI agents swarming City Hall and ruinous financial mismanagement that cost 300 city jobs and the decimation of city services.

 

“What pops into my mind is an ocean liner — a very, very big one — that was pointed in the wrong direction,”
City Councilman Jim Rogers said. “And with the help of Bill Lindsay, we are in the process of getting pointed in the right direction.”

Lindsay’s contract with the city expires Feb. 13, and the council opened negotiations earlier this month;
currently, he earns $200,000 a year. A straw poll Monday showed that council members are happy with Lindsay, and they would like to settle his new contract in short order after they return from summer break on Sept. 11.

 

Since coming to Richmond from Orinda, Lindsay’s effect on city operations has been far-reaching. Chief among
his accomplishments are the hiring of nearly all new department heads, three consecutive balanced budgets, reinstatement of the city’s favored bond rating, and groundbreaking on the largest public works project in city history: the $111 million renovation
of the Civic Center complex.

 

Under his leadership, the Richmond Police Department has returned to a community policing model, the Main
Library is operating at full capacity and two branches will soon reopen, and the city has more than doubled funding to repair its roads, among the worst in the Bay Area.

Lindsay also has developed a reputation for confronting city problems in a straightforward manner. He supported
a residents’ survey that sought public opinion on a variety of issues such as crime, road conditions, job training, traffic, and city employee responsiveness. Such surveys are common in wealthier communities in Contra Costa County.

 

But such surveys are unusual in troubled cities such as Richmond, which long has been plagued by chronic
violent crime, high unemployment, industrial pollution, and a tradition of indifferent city officials.

 

“He’s the first city manager we’ve had who actually implemented a city survey and then put the information
out so people could see all its warts and boils,” Councilman Tom Butt said. “Bill’s not afraid to tell you where we have problems and what we’re going to do about fixing them.”

Councilwoman Marie Viramontes also is a Lindsay supporter, though she said she would like him to be more
persuasive with the council and his staff on agenda items he thinks are important.

 

“I would like him to tell us, ‘I like option B and here’s why,’ and get city staff to support him,” she
said. “He can do that — there are no shrinking violets on this council.”

 

For Lindsay’s part, he has said on numerous occasions that he wants to complete the work he has started
here.

 

“The issues that are facing Richmond don’t lend themselves to short-term fixes,” he said. “I am committed
to the community for the long term … for as long as they will have me.”

 

And the community appears to be equally committed to him. Sandi Genser-Mack, president of the Richmond Neighborhood
Coordinating Council, which represents 35 community councils, said Lindsay has done a remarkable job of supporting resident participation.

 

“He comes to our meetings as much as he can, and he’s appointed a liaison from his office, Michele Monk,
to come to all of our meetings,” Genser-Mack said. “He’s even apologized to me when he can’t make the meetings. We haven’t had that kind of support in the past.”

Lindsay has been effective in bringing together divergent community groups and interests to work together
toward a common goal, said the Rev. Andre Shumake, president of the faith-based Richmond Improvement Association.

 

“He has demonstrated the ability to bring people together into performance partnerships, men and women working
together to improve the lives of everyone who lives and works in Richmond,” Shumake said. “He listens to the community and tries to incorporate what he hears into his leadership, and that’s invaluable.”

 

Despite the praise, Lindsay is the first to say that much remains to be done.

 

“We still need to focus on issues associated with crime, continue to rebuild our infrastructure, city staff
has to improve on basic service delivery, especially public works and parks and recreation,” he said. “I can tell you that being city manager is a very hard job, but I was very optimistic about Richmond when I first came here and I’m even more so now.”

 

Reach John Geluardi at 510-262-2787 or
jgeluardi@bayareanewsgroup.com.

 

Parachute Journalism The LA Times drops into Richmond and gets it all wrong.

By

John Geluardi SUCCESS STORY:

 

National Guard troops help outfit Craneway Pavilion as an emergency medical facility. Richmond, the second
largest city in Contra Costa County, has had remarkable success fighting the coronavirus — so much so that it and the county are national models.

 

Officials acted quickly and decisively to mobilize resources, info, and healthcare services while providing
economic protections for renters and homeowners.

 

The aggressive response resulted in some of the lowest infection rates in densely populated Bay Area counties
and the nation.

 

Coronavirus hospitalizations are down to 25 from a high of 44 on April 11, and new cases have steadily decreased,
despite increased testing. Such results prompted the county and five of its Bay Area peers to jointly announce a new health order this week that will cautiously ease some shelter-in-place restrictions. It’s because of these successes that Richmond residents
were dismayed on Friday when the Los Angeles Times ran a story that described the city as isolated, backward, and diseased.

 

“By all accounts amid this pandemic, the city of Richmond should be sitting at the precipice of disaster,”
reporter Susanne Rust wrote, basing her conclusion on the city’s ethnic makeup, homeless population, and proximity to pollution. Rust swooped into town last week to report on the pandemic, but apparently didn’t speak to any city or county officials, including
Richmond Mayor Tom Butt or Supervisor John Gioia, who represents the area that includes Richmond.

 

Instead, Rust appears to have relied on a single local activist with political aspirations as the primary
source of her critique.

 

As a result, many of the facts in her story were wrong. Some of the story’s errors included using death
statistics from Richmond, Virginia instead of Richmond, California.

 

It grossly exaggerated Richmond’s unemployment rate as 15 percent, when it was actually 3 percent prior
to the pandemic.

 

It described the city as so failed it could not care for potential coronavirus patients. And it falsely
claimed there was little virus testing available.

 

“So far, however, Richmond hasn’t seen the kind of outbreaks documented in other parts of Contra Costa County,”
the story said.

 

“Community advocates think there is a reason for that. There’s been little testing in Richmond and other
economically challenged, isolated cities and towns around the state.”

 

Some Hispanic and African-American residents felt stigmatized by the story. Wayne Greene, a 31-year Richmond
resident said that as an African American he was offended by Rust’s assumption. “People of color in Richmond have been dealing, for decades, with all kinds of environmental and industrial assaults and accidents from Chevron to PG&E,” Greene said.

 

“We are fully aware of how to protect ourselves and navigate around shrinking health resources when we need
to. Poor doesn’t mean stupid.”

 

Some of these misrepresentations were changed in the paper’s online version after city and county leaders
complained to Times editors. Rust and her editors have not responded to Express requests for comment.

 

Of the story’s many sins, the biggest is its failure to mention all of the actions taken by the county Board
of Supervisors.

 

Gioia, a leader in the battle against the virus, said the county has so far spent $100 million of its reserve
funds responding to the pandemic, including $11 million for community-based organizations to provide health and human services to county residents.

 

He said the county is prepared to approve another $15 million service-based nonprofits.

 

The story mentioned Richmond’s homeless population to support its dire assessment.

 

But it overlooked the fact that the county’s three homeless shelters, including two in Richmond, were emptied
out and the 250 residents were placed in individual motel rooms.

 

There were no virus outbreaks in any of the shelters nor in the county’s homeless encampments, which were
supplied with washing stations and porta potties.

 

Rust also ignored that the county has taken over the waterside Craneway Pavilion and had the National Guard
outfit it as an emergency medical facility with hospital supplies and 250 beds.

 

However, since virus hospitalizations have begun to flatten, it’s likely the overflow space won’t be needed.

 

The story claimed that renters and homeowners were at risk of losing their homes, which is true, but failed
to include the extent of the county’s protections again eviction.

 

Sheriff David O. Livingston is not a popular figure around Richmond on immigration issues, but he nonetheless
immediately enacted a moratorium on evictions prior to the state order to do so.

 

Livingston’s quick action gave the Board of Supervisors time to include protections against eviction during
the crisis and for up to four months afterward.

 

The protections shield renters and homeowners from late fees and back payment penalties.

 

In Richmond, residents are protected for six months after the crisis ends. “I’m proud that in Contra Costa
County we stepped up to protect residents from this health and economic crisis,” Supervisor Gioia said.

 

David Sharple, the director of the Richmond housing nonprofit ACCE, worked with Gioia and other supervisors
to craft the eviction protections.

 

Sharple reservedly praised the supervisors for their quick actions though he would rather that protections
went further. “I would have liked to see a longer grace period after the pandemic is over,” Sharples said. “For example, back-rents should be forgiven like it was in Alameda County in order to prevent an explosion of evictions after the crisis is over.”

 

There are some lingering mysteries about the story. For example, why did the paper rely only on a single
primary source — activist Claudia Jimenez — for its dubious information?

 

Jimenez is a member of the Richmond Progressive Alliance and has announced that she is running for a city
council seat.

 

That was not mentioned in Rust’s story, which described Jimenez and her husband Eli Moore working at home
and the couple’s two children doing their homework in the living room.

 

Rust did not respond to questions regarding why she selected Jimenez as her primary source of criticism,
or whether she previously knew the couple.

 

Jimenez denied that she knew the reporter before the story, but would not say whether her husband knew Rust.

 

Mayor Butt is frustrated with out-of-town reporters who parachute into town with preconceived ideas, intent
on portraying a city teaming with crime, poverty, pollution and now contagious disease. “I’m tired of journalists coming to Richmond and looking for reasons to trash the city,” said Butt who has served on the city council for 25 years. “These journalist hits
on the city keep businesses and jobs away and there’s no attempt at balance or objectivity anymore”

 

Butt said he invited Rust and the Times to return to Richmond for a more accurate story, but he doesn’t
expect them to accept.