{crossposted from InAlameda}
Happy New Year!
Despite many things to write about, I took the last couple of weeks off to recharge the old batteries. But it’s a new week and back to normal business, I hope the end of the year was good for you all.
I don’t even know where to start: celebrate the complete collapse of the hateful Alameda School Boardmember Recall? Questions about the City’s “public benefits” calculations for the SunCal proposal? Curiosity over the lack of Transportation Commission meetings and how they compare to the Golf Commission who apparently calls their own meetings without Brown Act consideration? Clarifications from the City on why they state that their fiscal calculations show SunCal’s plan achieving fiscal neutrality, but that they decided to leave that our of their election report?
How about a mea culpa. A while back, I wrote about how the City posted a press release on their website in a manner that was incredibly inappropriate. {http://johnknoxwhite.com/2009/10/20/whos-minding-the-alameda-general-store/} And it’s fair to suggest that my characterization of the incident leaned towards it being a purposeful act on the part of the City (read: staff). I tend to favor “incompetence” over “conspiracy” most of the time, and in this instance, I would have done well to go with my general fallback.
A public records request turned up a couple of interesting things. One, the city was apparently AWOL on the press release issue beyond sending the release to their third party website vendor who decided to make a splash by taking everything off the site and posting the Mayor’s personal press release as the only news on the homepage. Secondly, once the City Attorney saw what had happened, she demanded it be taken down immediately and removed from the archives (thus backing up the assertion that it was completely inappropriate).
It turns out, this has happened a couple of other times with the city’s web-vendor. It’s just that this time they chose to go all in with a release that put the City in a very precarious position, vis-à-vis the City’s “neutral” stance on the Alameda Point Initiative.
It’s taken me a while to get to this, but I wanted to start off the new year clearing up the issue and correcting my initial presentation.
Onward and upward!
To all of those at S.E.R.V.E. who worked so diligently without sucess to divide this community