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Pinole’s recall
We’ve got some pretty damn unpleasant, reactionary politics going on in this little town these days. Unpleasant and complex. And notable enough to have made the pages of the local paper on a number of occasions.
Here’s the excruciatingly oversimplified context: there are two kinds of people who live in Pinole. There are people who want a walkable downtown and a diverse set of neighbors, and there are people who don’t. The latter group is throwing a tantrum in Pinole politics in the form of a recall campaign. That tantrum, which would cost taxpayers some unspecified amount of money, plays on racist, homophobic, and generally jerkwaddish sentiment, with no justification that doesn’t fall apart after a moment’s thought.
The people who don’t want a walkable downtown or diverse neighbors seem to have an image of Pinole as a Brady Bunch suburb, where people go Somewhere Else to work and then drive home to a comfortable suburb with no sidewalks, having picked up dinner from one of the many chain take-out food places along the interstate. They prefer their Old Town (downtown) Pinole to be a place where there are a few real estate agencies and some dentists’ offices, and no one on foot, especially after 7 pm.
There isn’t much to attract people to Old Town Pinole after 7, honestly. There are two good restaurants, one of them CRN’s favorite, the other one, Pear Street Bistro, fatally embroiled so to speak in the current unnecessary political battle. There’s a boring sports bar and a reasonably good taqueria, and a few blocks uphill there’s a biker bar and a tiny Italian deli. There’s an empty storefront whose window sign promising a new cafe I am beginning, after half a year of nothing, to disbelieve. But there’s a huge amount of potential, with a beautiful park and old brick buildings and a Trader Joes and Peets theoretically going into the moribund plaza just up the creek.
To a first approximation — and there are CRN readers who defy this generalization — the people who don’t favor a walkable, diverse Pinole live in Pinole Valley. Pinole Valley is the more suburban part of Pinole, with cul-de-sacs and streets without sidewalks. When we first moved to Pinole the city had just restriped Pinole Valley Road — a very lightly traveled road — to set aside a bicycle lane. The people of Pinole Valley howled in outrage. How dare those meddling bureaucrats take one of their lanes away? They made the traffic get so bad that sometimes there’d be four cars backed up at the stop sign at Pinole Valley and Simas! The City Council backed down and had the road repainted so that Pinole Valley residents could once again run subversive bicyclists off the road with impunity.
In the last general election, a Pinole Valley booster, Betty Boyle, lost her long-time seat on the City Council. This happened because faced with one more in a years-long string of elections in which the only people running for seats on the city council were incumbents, a Pinole resident not previously involved in politics decided to run for office and won, unseating her. Mary Horton, another long-time incumbent on the council, just barely held on to her seat.
It’s worth noting that when a number of my Old Town neighbors were fighting an ill-advised development project on our hill here, Betty Boyle was the only councilperson who couldn’t even be bothered to return neighbors’ phone calls. (The other council member solidly identified with Pinole Valley, Peter Murray, was incredibly responsive to our concerns, perhaps due to his strong environmentalist ethic: he promised to join me in a tree-sit if the developers threatened a large live oak behind our house.) When Boyle lost her seat, she sold her house and moved to Wyoming.
But not before initiating a recall campaign against the new council member, Stephen Tilton, as well as David Cole and Maria Alegria, the two other vote leaders in the recent Council election.
It’s full disclosure time: I have a dog in this fight. You can see a picture of that dog here. Stephen Tilton is a neighbor of mine, a fervent admirer of Zeke, and one of a handful of neighbors who actually got teary-eyed when they got the news back in February. I knew Stephen, and liked him, before he decided to run for office. I don’t agree with his politics entirely, but he’s a good guy and I’d vote for him again.
Boyle’s gang of recall advocates have a few main reasons for targeting Tilton, Cole, and Alegria;
1) The three were responsible for the firing of Pinole’s City Manager Belinda Espinoza, whom Boyle and a couple other council members backed;
2) The three are perceived as in cahoots with the owner of Pear Street Bistro, Gary Wong, who is behind in payments on half a million dollars in Redevelopment Agency loans, continuing to hold official functions there despite the delinquency, and declining to renew Espinoza’s contract in retaliation for her getting tough on the loan;
3) Alegria allegedly got drunk and tried to interfere with an arrest outside the Pear Street Bistro one evening;
4) Tilton was overheard using a bad word at a nearby Farmers’ Market.
Dealing with these briefly, then:
1) Anyone who talks to City Staff off the record will likely feel the firing was inevitable. Some city staff have told me, in the course of conversations during their near-daily stops to pet Zeke, that Espinoza did little things like assigning “troublemakers” to work at the sewage treatment plant. Pinole either fired her or faced certain eventual worker safety and whistleblower protection lawsuits, if you ask me.
2) The interrelationship of Espinoza and Gary Wong is complex, and much of it is either conflicting or secret pending legal outcomes or both. For his part Wong, who is apparently being forced to sell the restaurant, has said that once that sale is final his side of the story will be made public, involving deliberate stonewalling by City staff (read: Espinoza.) Wong also says that City staff who oversaw the loan assured him that redevelopment projects in progress would bring new foot traffic to Old Town. That’s starting, but about six years after Wong took the loan.
In any event, the recall backer’s allegations of corruption are either disingenuous or stupid, or both. In particular, criticism of the council holding events at Pear Street Bistro is just weird. The place is having trouble paying off a loan to the City, and the city’s supposed to withhold business? Would driving Wong out of business get the money back faster, or at all?
3) I don’t know what happened between Alegria and the cops. I don’t care what happened between Alegria and the cops. As long as the officer in question didn’t see that the incident was important enough to even cite Alegria, it’s a non-issue. Except, of course, to those people who feel cops are to be obeyed without question, without civilian oversight or institutions like CopWatch keeping them in check, and if you ask me such people are a much more destructive presence in a town like this than an elected official who allegedly has one cocktail too many.
4) This allegation is too stupid for me to waste my time on.
Recall proponents persist, leveling charges like “corruption.” You’d think that, given the fact that most forms of corruption in municipal office are against the law, there would be some sort of push for an investigation, or for charges to be filed, or a civil suit, or what have you. Nope! The recall backers have declared themselves plaintiff, judge, jury, and executioner. No need for the messy process of actually determining whether corruption exists. That’s a shame, too, because it’s always a possibility. I don’t know Tilton that well. Show me even a little bit of actual evidence that he, or Cole, or Alegria, have violated the public trust, and I’ll be the first one to call for their being brought up on criminal charges.
But the recallistas don’t have to provide evidence to motivate their base. Their base seizes on any pretext it can that sounds classier than their root racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like. I hasten to add that I’m not leveling that charge at everyone who supports the recall. But it’s written on the wall. Look at the comment threads on Contra Costa Times articles on the recall: opponents are asked whether they “moved in from Richmond,” as opposed to being “originally from Pinole.” (Richmond, which I did in fact move to Pinole from though the commenter wasn’t addressing me, is a majority African-American town, a literal bête noire for Pinole racists for decades, prompting cross-burnings as late as the 1970s.) Wong probably comes in for a bit of racism himself, despite a smattering of Asian-Americans among recall proponents. The very fact that he’s targeted for attention, when actual evidence of corruption exists between long-term Pinole politicos and certain other white business owners, suggests a bit of sub rosa racism at work.
Or it could be homophobia, regrettably on the rise in an increasingly out gay and lesbian Pinole. I don’t know anything about Wong’s personal life, but whether or not he’s gay doesn’t really matter for purposes of this discussion. He’s seen as gay by the local yahoos, and that’s all that matters. His restaurant is gay-friendly. He briefly ran a wine and tapas bar down the street. Said wine and tapas bar was called “Swish.” That’s enough to make him a target of homophobia. It doesn’t matter who he falls in love with.
And to Pinole’s reactionaries, that means Wong is part of the creeping conspiracy to bring Pinole out of the 1950s, to make the town something more than Stepford with pickup trucks. He is thus a prime target for their manipulated resentment. They wouldn’t have thought of the recall on their own: it took Betty Boyle’s surprising and nasty tantrum to motivate them. And people like Stephen Tilton, who thought he’d try to give something back to his community and is serving on the Council without pay, get smeared in the press for their efforts.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
I didn’t realize you were a Contra Costa person. I largely grew up in El Sobrante (but it was way different then, I think). I lived a couple blocks down from the Hillview School. We lived there because there was a Communist Party campaign to integrate the neighborhood, and besides the various brave neighbors of color, there were the communists, who were supposed to make the whole thing bearable. It almost worked, but my friend Donna Now’s family moved to Richmond after a while, I think because the neighbors on her street were threatening. There weren’t any communists that I know about on her street.
Anyway, Pinole was where the fire trucks used to come from when we had grass fires, whch was several times a summer, and once or twice at other times of the year when the Zgadlow boys played with matches.
I’m glad there’s politics in Pinole, anyway. I’m sorry about Gary Wong.
By: By Lucy Kemnitzer on 2007 08 14
I guess I take for granted the lovely seawalls,
parks, hiking trails, bike routes, urban community gardens, like this one, rooftop gardens, farm plots, and spaces for pedestrian traffic only. In the future, Vancouver is likely to discourage vehicles from entering the downtown core altogether (except for delivery vehicles and such), and that would suit a lot of us inner city dwellers just fine. I’m quite used to walking the 5 miles to work instead of taking the bus (it only takes an hour and a half) and the route is a very pleasant one (thanks to City planners who value greenery and heritage buildings). I would love to see roads and bridges reserved for bicycles, skateboarders and pedestrians. I’ve been told that in Portland, Oregon alleys have been transformed into decorative bike routes. I’d like to see that develop here.
P.S. It’s lovely to see that photo of Zeke again. When I look at it I want to coo “Who’s the cute doggie, who!?” and tickle his chin.
By: By Lesley on 2007 08 15
At the risk of stupefying CRN readers from elsewhere, a few comments from a <gasp> Pinole *Valley* resident.
1. The re-striped road was done so poorly that even the bicyclists hated it (imagine Salvador Dali driving the road-painting truck). And the benefit was minor as the revised section was only six blocks of an arterial several miles long, still heavily used now by riders, bike races, etc.
2. Espinoza was Pinole’s first non-white non-male city manager, I think. So it might be jumping the gun to say those who supported her are motivated by racism.
3. On the other hand, Mayor Alegria, a Latina, might be the dimmest public elected official I have ever seen. But (up until now) she has easily won her elections to Pinole council over white men and women.
4. Cole, the 2nd recall target, has been caught up in a conflict of interest involving his landscaping business and a development company contracting with the city. He’s the Ted Stevens of Pinole.
5. Tilton (target #3) is essentially the victim of a political drive-by. CRN’s take on him is spot-on.
6. Recall leader Boyle was the [elected] city clerk of Pinole for 20 yrs.(?) before standing for council, served eight years including as Mayor before being narrowly ousted by Tilton in the election last Nov. She calls Espinosa the “best city manager ever.” Sour grapes? Axe-grinding?
7. Wong, the delinquent restaurateur, artfully arranged a half-million dollar loan from the city and then behaved like making the loan payments was beneath him. And the city, seemingly, didn’t seem to mind. In earlier times, Pinole had traded on its established reputation for fiscal probity and asked for, and received, a big utility (electric/phone) surtax approved by the voters to supplement city services. This is quite unusual for suburban communities in California in the post-Jarvis/Reagan era.
So, lathered up for Occam’s razor, my face is telling me that this whole dust-up is best explained first by the greed, pettiness, and stupidity of many of the original moving parties, followed by a festival of guilt-by-association, and then jumped on and now exploited by a few of the louder local bigots. I do hope Tilton, at least, retains his seat, he seems to have gotten run over by a bunch of old crazies at the wheel of an out-of-control city street stripe painting truck.
By: By omegapet on 2007 08 15
Really glad you weighed in, omegapet. You make some fine points for which I may have responses after some thought. And it was you (and Jane) I had in mind in writing that thing about some CRN readers defying my odious generalizations.
I did laugh at your description of the bike lanes. Fair enough.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2007 08 15
I noticed this morning that in fact there is now a conventional bike lane marked out on that section of
Pinole Valley Road.
//CRASH!//
45 CRN readers from other towns just fell face first into their keyboards in a stuporous daze.
We now return you to our regularly scheduled discussion of Ogliocene rodent dentition.
By: By omegapet on 2007 08 16
What’s more, David Cole has joined the Army.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2007 08 16
It seems Councilman Cole found out that the Army would (sometimes) feed him hot meals at boot camp.
He just got tired of waiting for those Café bozos to move into the empty Old Town storefront and finally bring proper breakfasting options to Pinole.
See
http://faultline.org/index.php/site/comments/breakfast_in_pinole/
By: By omegapet on 2007 08 16
Lucy--are you related to the late Luis Kemnitzer? I’m a retired SP brakeman and hoghead, knew him when I took some courses at SF State and wrote a paper (not for him, but I cited his work) on railroaders’ hand signals. Email me at
john [dot] burke [at] mindspring [dot] com
if you want.
By: By john v burke on 2007 08 17
=v= Bike lanes may or may not be a win, depending on numerous factors. They are bitterly contested amongst bike advocates. Outside of biker wonkery, though, I’ve found that the underlying issues hinge on the classically conservative fear of the unknown, in its various guises.
When Valencia Street in San Francisco was redesigned to calm traffic and accommodate bikes, merchants feared and opposed it. It carried the day, the street became more livable, and it’s a much more thriving commercial district than it had been. It’s actually become a model for the rest of the country, but plans to do more modest redesigns elsewhere in the city met the same opposition from the business community. D’oh!
In Omaha we had to fight for a stretch of bike trail from the University of Nebraska to North Omaha (birthplace of Malcolm X), through a section named Happy Hollow (a whiter shade of pale). Some of the hollow folk opposued this, using extremely coded language about “outsiders” gaining access to “our” streets, don’tcha know.
(The Sierra Club and Critical Mass worked together and won the trail, though in the final design it became more lanes than trails. A second leg of the trail, from the birthplace of Malcolm X to the birthplace of Gerald R. Ford, is still delayed for some reason.)
By: By Jym on 2007 08 20
Hi Chris,
Thank you for your take on the Recall fiasco here in Pinole. I agree with you, homophobia, dirty politics, and the good ole yeehaww attitude prevail in Pinole.
As long-time insider, I can tell you that the corruption runs deep. But like a good “story” there are plot twists: Murray, Boyle, and Horton are behind this nasty recall. While Murray down plays his involvement, I can assure you he is waist deep in the power struggle. His ego and vanity have gotten the best of him. While I’m happy that Murray was willing to sit in a tree with you - I would be surprised if he actually showed up to keep his committment.
Unfortunately, Murray is huge part of the problem. He wants his downtown to be as “white-bread” as yester-year. Ever notice his comments about “the other element” when refering to problems in our schools? He refering to the African-Americans in our school district.
A perfect example, Murray wanted to remove the basketball courts to decrease the “undesirable elements” from Fernandez Park. He stated that no Pinole residents are able to utilize the courts because of the undesirables (read black) using the court. This was in reaction to the shooting that occurred about a 1 1/2 years ago in the park and his efforts to clean-up the city. Apparently, in Murray’s mid, basketball courts, “undesirables”, and shootings go together.
As a devote Catholic, Murray doesn’t like gays. I have personally heard him express concerns that downtown will be taken over by “fags”. He wants his community to be like “Orinda or Walnut Creek”. Read rich, white, STRAIGHT, people.
Murray and Horton are unlike allies, but nothing brings two people closer than mutual enemies.
What’s peculiar, and not mentioned in the press, is that Horton and Espinosa are good friends. Were talking...girlfriends...let’s hang out and eat popcorn and movie friends.
Horton was so blown away that she almost lost the election that she was clinging onto her friend. She would be alone on an island without Espinosa. She had burnt her bridges with the other council members. She (Horton) had to save Espinosa’s job. Why she didn’t recuse herself based on their friendship - no one knows. That some how hasn’t come out in the media.
Horton is primarily responsible for putting all this garbage out in the media. In August/September 2006, she sought Gary Wong’s endorsement for the election. Confident that she would receive Wong’s approval, Horton printed his name on her campaign flyers. Wong did not endorse her. When he requested that she remove his name from any of the materials, all of the negative press began.
Horton has always prided herself on her media contacts. She called Tom Lochner and started spewing information, setting all of this up.
Sounds like Horton and Espinosa got together for a slumber party and put the plot together.
Yes, Wong was delinquent on his loans. What’s crazy is Espinosa didn’t know. Wong was the one who told Murray, Boyle, and Espinosa that he had not made his payments for 6 months (at that time)! Is this the City Manager we want protecting the purse strings?
It is not unusual for business owners to request loan restructuring. Espinosa was so inept, she kept Wong dangling for almost 2 years, when a deal normally could have been put together in less than 3 months. When the RDA sub-committe learned of the non-payment (several months before Alegria, Cole, Horton, & Tilton became aware). They hid the information. That’s corruption!!
Apparently, Murray and Boyle didn’t feel it was such a big deal that Wong was behind on his payment, because they held their campaign dinners there on November 7, 2007. Before the information was public, but definately after Wong told them in the sub-committee meeting.
Boyle spent over $500 on hosting dinner for the candidates. She bought dinner, appetizers, and wine and used her campaign money to pay for it.
She was stunned when she didn’t win. The bitterness started that evening.
Recallistas are filled with homophobics, rascists, and good ole boys and girls. They are attacking Alegria, Cole, and Tilton personally, because they cannot attack them on their politics. Why? Most votes - up until Espinosa have been unanimous.
So if the recall is about politics, why not recall all 5 members and start over. To target the three is moronic.
This is about power and ego.
**To clarify, Wong owns the Pear Street Bistro (rest), as well as the building that houses the Bistro. Wong is selling the building, not being forced to sell the restaurant. He will maintain ownership of the Bistro.
By: By D. Ono on 2007 08 28
Categories:
The Neighborhood
