Refinery Town

by Steve Early

  In regard to Chevron, that was pretty wishful thinking, as the company’s 2015 annual meeting confirmed. When shareholders and protestors from around the world gathered at corporate headquarters in San Ramon six months after the Richmond election, money in politics had plenty of competition as a contentious issue. During the question-and-answer period, critics “raised questions about Chevron’s track record regarding oil pollution in the rain forest of Ecuador, a gas explosion off the coast of Nigeria, hydro-fracking in the United States, cost overruns in its liquefied natural gas field in Western Australia, its ties to a dictatorship in Myanmar and its connections to the Taliban in the Middle East.”20 In short, a lot to answer for all around the world.

  The Sierra Club, through Green Century Funds, had submitted a proxy proposal calling for “cessation of the use of corporate funds for political purposes.” CEO John Watson was already dealing with “the toughest year for the American oil industry in more than a decade, due to the worldwide decline in crude oil prices.” So he was in no mood for too much shareholder democracy.21 Nor was he willing to change political course, based on a single Richmond election—or even a series of them.

  In a bit of verbal sparring from the floor, Andrew Behar, head of a corporate social responsibility group called As You Sow, tried to engage Watson in a discussion of our planetary future. He urged Chevron to reduce its carbon footprint to help avert further global warming and resulting human catastrophe. “If Chevron does business as usual,” he pointed out, “its actions will create tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of energy refugees.”

  Watson responded that “the pathway to prosperity is through affordable energy”—generated by oil, gas, and coal. When the topic of Richmond finally came up, Watson was bullish about the future of our local refinery because of its continued profitability and operational flexibility. After a billion dollars’ worth of modernization, Chevron Richmond would be even “more efficient and reliable,” he predicted.

  But then there was the matter of another local investment in 2014 that particularly rankled one speaker at the meeting. Richmond’s own allegedly Occupy-inspired “anarchist,” Eduardo Martinez, now a Richmond city councilor, took the microphone. He confronted Watson about the unsuccessful attacks on him by Moving Forward, pointing out that “the three million dollars spent by Chevron in the Richmond city council elections produced nothing other than ill will.”

  “The election was six months ago,” Watson informed him. “And we have moved on.” The proposed curb on Chevron’s future political spending was then defeated, as expected, by the shareholders.

  SIX

  CELEBRATING OUR DIFFERENCES?

  RICHMOND’S FOUR SUCCESSFUL COUNCIL candidates and its new mayor were officially sworn in on January 13, 2015. Swooping down from Sacramento to do the honors for two of them was Gavin Newsom, California’s Hollywood-handsome lieutenant governor. Newsom praised Richmond for its diversity and for demonstrating “that it’s possible to live together and prosper together across every conceivable and imaginable difference.” Newsom offered to assist the new city hall administration in any way he could because, he said, “the state’s vision can only be realized on the local level.” Since Governor Jerry Brown’s own administration had reduced Newsom to near irrelevance, it was unclear what help he could actually provide before replacing Brown, if elected as his successor in 2018.

  Interviewed by the Richmond Pulse, RPA cofounder Juan Reardon offered a diplomatic assessment of the city hall transition. “Each mayor has their own strengths and weakness,” he said. “I’m sure that they will come into play. We will get some good things from Tom Butt being mayor and perhaps we will miss a few things that Gayle had. But I’m confident that the strong presence of Gayle and the progressives on the city council will help the new mayor reaffirm the direction that we want this city to realize.” Richmond park ranger Betty Reid Soskin, who in a private capacity campaigned for Jovanka Beckles, was another witness to the swearing in. She was equally satisfied with our election results: “I think the city has found its direction, and that direction is going to need more discipline. This mayor is going to provide that. I think it’s all good.”

  It was not long, however, before the new mayor’s preferred direction—described by the Pulse as “pro-development centrist”—and the RPA’s own priorities began to diverge, testing the limits of an electoral coalition born out of Chevron-inspired necessity. At one of his first public speeches after being inaugurated, a first-ever address to the Richmond Chamber of Commerce, Butt briefly laid out an ambitious agenda. In a State of the City report to the city council several days later, he provided additional detail. The content of each presentation was impressive, but his upbeat, forward-looking message was certainly not delivered in the language of the “movement mayor” he replaced.

  Despite four decades spent building a successful Point Richmond architecture and engineering firm, Butt noted that he had long “been considered an outsider or even an adversary” by organizations, like the chamber, that represent the local business community. Now, he said, various people hoped he would become “the environmental mayor, the solar mayor, the education mayor, the history mayor, or even the farming mayor, rattlesnake mayor, or hillbilly mayor.” He promised he would “be a bit of each,” while suggesting that his professional training and entrepreneurial experience made him “uniquely qualified to be the business mayor.”

  “What architects do is make order out of chaos,” he said. “Even though everyone wants something different, you have to end up with one building that works for all. Government has to do the same thing.”

  Butt’s policy blueprint placed a high priority on continuing to attract new businesses like Nutiva, a food products firm, and Alta Vista, a construction services company, that are now among the Bay Area’s hundred fastest-growing companies. By the end of the year, as things turned out, the market for Richmond manufacturing space reached an all-time-low vacancy rate, down 50 percent from the year before. Plus, local unemployment was headed toward 5.1 percent by the end of Butt’s first year in office, one of the lowest local rates of joblessness since the end of World War II.

  To encourage further job creation, the new mayor planned to host a series of business roundtables, where local firms would discuss their plant or office relocation decision and offer feedback on city programs and services that might attract more small and medium-sized businesses to join them in Richmond. Butt launched a campaign to raise private funds for “rebranding” and marketing the city better. “The old Richmond that many people around the Bay Area continue to perceive as a dangerous industrial city no longer exists,” he declared, in a bit of overstatement. “We need to get out and sell the new Richmond.” Among the city improvements he wanted to accelerate was the resumption of ferry service between Richmond and San Francisco, to discourage commuting by car on the East Bay’s already clogged bridges and freeways.

  Butt also put his young and energetic staff of three—Terrance Cheung, David Gray, and Alex Knox—to work on long-standing city challenges such as the incorporation of crime-ridden, poverty-stricken North Richmond into the city. He also pledged to find a “successful future for the Hilltop Mall,” which had “sucked the life out of downtown Richmond” only to become, forty years later, “an out-of-date retail model” itself and a bank foreclosure target.1 Along Macdonald Avenue, the business district that Hilltop had helped devastate, Butt foresaw a retail comeback supported by the private-public partnership known as the Richmond Main Street Initiative.

  The warm glow of left-liberal victory wore off fairly soon, with the onset of political jockeying over who should fill the city council vacancy created by Butt’s election as mayor. At a post-election debriefing attended by about thirty people in the RPA office, two of the RPA’s three elected council members, Beckles and Martinez, viewed this as an opportunity to add another person of color to the council, preferably someone younger, Asian, or Latina. Tarnel Abbott, a founding member
of the RPA, disagreed and called for the appointment of Marilyn Langlois. After privately interviewing an undisclosed list of candidates, the RPA steering committee agreed that Langlois was indeed “the best qualified and best prepared person for the job.”

  Unfortunately, as a sixty-five-year-old white woman, Langlois did not fit the profile initially favored by Beckles and Martinez. Nor was she likely to be embraced by Butt or Myrick. She was a founder of the RPA with five years of valuable city hall experience under McLaughlin, dedicated service on the Richmond Planning Commission, and a 2012 council race under her belt. But her council campaign had suffered from her online speculation about US government involvement in the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington. Langlois is also a federal war tax resister whose $15,000 worth of past IRS tax liens made her additionally vulnerable to Chevron-funded smears.

  When the RPA leadership unveiled its “informal consensus” in favor of Langlois at a big RPA general meeting in January 2015, there was no membership discussion or vote. Members were simply exhorted to bombard Butt and councilor Jael Myrick with phone calls and e-mail messages demanding that they back Langlois. As Beckles, now a Langlois supporter, told a reporter later, after the battle lines had hardened, “The mayor and Jael . . . would not be there if the people hadn’t supported them, and now they are going against the people.”2

  This RPA lobbying for Langlois did not succeed on the council, in the press, or even among some of “the people.” Unfairly or not, Marilyn’s past role as McLaughlin’s mayoral assistant seemed to count for less, in the minds of some, than her alleged connection to “9/11 Trutherism.” Even a leading African American supporter of Beckles disagreed with the RPA’s pick. “Marilyn’s such an ideologue,” she told me, with distaste, indicating her preference for a non-RPA candidate instead. By the filing deadline, Butt’s vacant council seat had eighteen seekers. Among the contenders were former Richmond mayor Rosemary Corbin, recently defeated city council member Jim Rogers, and former mayoral candidate Uche Uwahemu. If the new council could not agree on a replacement, Richmond would have to wait eight months and spend $500,000 to hold a special election to fill the job. Meanwhile, votes might easily be deadlocked, 3–3, on any number of issues, as long as the council was short one member.

  Of the two targets of the RPA’s pressure campaign, Butt was the first to invoke the specter of “bloc voting” if progressives gained a four-person majority on the council via the appointment process rather than voter mandate. In one press interview, Butt threatened to resign if the RPA gained a majority that rendered him irrelevant. “I have better things to do than be a figurehead,” he said. At a council meeting during the controversy, Myrick echoed Butt’s concern. “If so much power is going to be concentrated in one organization,” he said. “I think it needs to be done through an election.”

  John Geluardi of the East Bay Express, a reporter usually sympathetic to the RPA, accused it of making “an awkward power grab” and thought its “attempts to demonize Butt and Myrick” were ill-advised. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Chip Johnson, a past critic of McLaughlin, penned a distinctly unflattering and inaccurate account of how RPA members function on the city council. According to Johnson: “[They] carry forward decisions made by a steering committee and don’t have the authority to compromise on proposals without checking with their membership first. . . . If [the RPA] gained a majority, there would be nothing to stop it from deciding public policy from behind the doors of their offices on Macdonald Avenue, taking it to the council and simply dictating city policy.”3

  The most compelling outside defense of the RPA, amid accusations that it was an undemocratic political machine, bent on making Butt its fifth wheel, came from Tim Redmond, a Bay Area political consultant and former columnist for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. On his online local news outlet, 48Hills, Redmond argued that the real question posed by Richmond’s appointment controversy was this: “What’s the proper role for an active community group that becomes the equivalent of a political party in a city where, of course, all elections are non-partisan?”4

  In Redmond’s view, “the concept of a grassroots organization electing candidates to local office and then holding them accountable” was quite constructive and much needed elsewhere. The alternative model, as he pointed out, was “the Democratic Party, which elects people who turn out to be far more centrist than they promised, and then fails to hold them accountable . . . to the progressive agenda. . . . As long as the community group is open, elects officers freely, holds regular meetings, and represents a legitimate grassroots base (and not some big-money interests),” its efforts to develop and maintain a principled, programmatic voting bloc should be encouraged, Redmond argued.5

  Mike Parker, Team Richmond campaign coordinator in 2014, denied that the RPA sought to function as a “shadow government.” He also publicly addressed several of Redmond’s concerns about organizational transparency and internal democracy. Parker explained that, as the RPA grew, “we set up a steering committee of the most active people. We added to it as more people became active.” Now, he said, “We have decided to be a membership organization, and we’ve set up a committee to figure out how to restructure.”6

  This announcement struck some RPA dues-payers (including me) as a little odd. After all, when we paid twelve dollars a year, what were we joining—and encouraging others to join—if not a membership organization? In several post-election presentations, Parker seemed less concerned about member recruitment than training and developing “cadre,” as he called them. By this he meant the RPA’s most active members—those who had become part of its inner circle. In his view, there were “problems with the current cadre due to the aging of the RPA’s core.”

  Particularly during nonelection years, Parker explained, the “people who have the most time are the most active.” Thus, RPA’s hardest-working volunteers tended to be older, white, retired, or semiretired. They included past or present teachers, public employees and nonprofit organization staffers, health-care workers, former union activists, and several retirees with private sector management experience. The racial and ethnic composition of the RPA’s activist core was not reflective of the demographics of an 80 percent nonwhite city, a perennial source of embarrassment to the veteran antiracists in its predominantly white leadership.

  In addition, as Parker reported at a conference in Chicago on left and independent political action, key RPA activists are mostly registered Greens, while “the membership is overwhelmingly registered Democrats.” To maintain unity and avoid divisive ideological squabbles (of the sort that often plague left groups), the RPA “fudges over questions about the nature of the system, focusing on local issues instead.”

  Parker also acknowledged the challenge the RPA faced in maintaining a “relationship between Richmond’s local elected officials and the activists who elected them.” Progressive city councilors—such as Jeff Ritterman during his single term—do not always agree with each other or the leadership of their de facto political party. When Ritterman favored a controversial waterfront development project, he was reproached by some RPA steering committee members who opposed it. In her forthcoming book, Against All Odds: A Decade of Progress in Richmond, McLaughlin also chides Ritterman for being insufficiently collaborative with her during negotiations settling Chevron’s tax disputes with the city.

  “No one expects them to vote together on every question,” Parker said, about RPA representatives on the council. “But we expect them to vote in accord with our basic principles. Where the RPA has adopted a position, our expectation is that the elected officials will pay close attention to what the RPA has to say. . . . But there are a lot of gray areas. One person’s tactical issue is another person’s principle.”

  Eduardo Martinez provided an example of non-bloc voting early in his first term. After several council meetings, where no one got enough votes, Martinez broke the political deadlock over filling Tom Butt’s vacant seat by throwing his support to Vina
y Pimple. Forty-seven-year-old Pimple (pronounced “Pim-play”) certainly added diversity to the council. He is blind, a person of color, and a South Asian immigrant, with multiple professional degrees and job experience in the telecom industry. However, as Butt noted, “Pimple seldom, if ever, sided with the RPA on anything controversial”—an outcome that could have been avoided, in his view, if RPA leaders “had not been so intransigent.”7

  By this point in the vacancy-filling process, the candidacy of Langlois had been dead and buried for several weeks due to Butt’s and Myrick’s refusal to support her. Claudia Jimenez, a thirty-six-year-old immigrant from Colombia and former organizer for the Contra Costa Interfaith Supporting Community Organization (CCISCO) emerged as the RPA’s second unsuccessful choice for the job. In Tim Redmond’s apt description, Jimenez was “friendly with RPA but not, ahem, a Card Carrying Member.”8 Fellow traveler or not, she proved to be no more acceptable as a compromise candidate than Langlois. Although Jimenez is, like Butt, an architect by training, and has a master’s degree in environmental design from UC-Berkeley, Butt and Myrick considered her less qualified than several other self-nominated contenders with a longer history of community engagement.

  Throughout the appointment dispute, Butt insisted that there were multiple candidates who met his criteria of having “held or run for office and endured the public scrutiny and rigors of campaigning for office or . . . have served with distinction on one or more city boards or commissions.” One person he found acceptable—and even nominated—was Ben Choi, a Richmond Planning Commission member appointed by McLaughlin who works for Marin Clean Energy. (Fifteen months later, Choi became a candidate for election to the council. Yet, in 2016, he no longer met Butt’s approval because he had joined the RPA, secured its formal endorsement, and favored rent control.)