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What does Picayune, Mississipi have that we don't?

8/11/2010

Just read a newspaper article on-line that made me sit up and grin. Picture this: small town, supervisors' meeting, 90 folks in attendance, consultant standing at the front making his pitch and delivering what the supervisors have paid him a small town fortune to come up with. Smart Growth. And guess what?
Those folks won't have it. Their comments surprised me. They have done their homework and they learned about UN Agenda 21, the un-sustainable stacked and packed housing model, and THEY DON'T WANT IT.

Take a look:
Picayune Supervisors Meeting!

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Civil Unions?

8/6/2010

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I was a union member for nearly 30 years: 7 with Communication Workers of America (CWA), and 22 with SEIU. I encouraged others to become members of the union, and asked them where they'd be without it---minorities, women---would they even be employed? When the issue came up regarding whether union dues should be used to support candidates I was in favor of it.

Now, however, I realize that as a rank and file member I had no idea what was going on with my money or how the unions had morphed from the Cesar Chavez model of fair representation for the voiceless to the gorilla in the room playing back door politics.

The creation of ever-fragmenting groups here in Sonoma County is an example of this. We've been accused of picking on poor Michael Allen but he is the nexus around which much of this swirls.

Look under the rock and he is invariably there with one of his hats on and with his hand out.

The Accountable Development Coalition (creating artificial community consensus to forward a self-serving machine): He was a founder

The North Bay Labor Council (Lisa Maldonado is executive director, need we say more): He was president

Solar Sonoma County (using pressure to enact legislation requiring labor-installed solar installations): He was a founder

Santa Rosa Planning Commission: As a planning commissioner appointed by Gary Wysocky, he tried to get a requirement into the General Plan which would force all property owners to have energy tests on their homes (union) and mandatory energy upgrades (union work)

Who were his biggest campaign contributors for his runs for City Council (he lost) and 7th Assembly District? Unions. Electrical Unions. Potential installers of solar. In both races he raised tens of thousands more than anyone else. Union money. My money. Your money.

Who is the big boss now? Who is carrying the big stick? Who is not accountable to the people who pay the bills? Who needs a light shone on their bullying tactics? No union should be able to rest on the saintly laurels of Cesar Chavez or those who fought for workers rights in the early days of organizing. If it's dirty we don't want it. Root them out. Clean up the unions.

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Who paid to kill Lowes in SR?

8/6/2010

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Great job by the person who revealed that Lisa Maldonado (North Bay Labor Council) helps train people to use community coalitions to do the bidding for the unions. Now she is saying people should be more transparent. She is hand in glove with the ADC and Michael Allen. The local green movement has been hijacked by the ADC which claims to represent the entire community. No one owns green. It’s just conservation and efficiency. They are making it into a social agenda that’s designed for them to be able to control which developers get approvals and which companies get the jobs. They also engage in political campaigns, like Michael Allen’s.

The ADC should be the last group that anyone listens to. They have more conflicts of interest than any local group I’ve ever heard of. Let’s face it, they get money to lobby on the behalf of select private interests and have no place in the decision making process. The audacity of the ADC is shocking. Santa Rosa, I now refer to it as Little Chicago, is an embarrassment to all those who still believe that our opinions and votes matter.

This is an important debate about community coalitions that seek to have more influence or even exclusive influence over elected officials’ actions. Do they own these officials? If they do, it is a very sad day. Do we need to have a ballot initiative to ban the use of Community Benefits Agreements that give exclusive rights to a small select group of people? Who are they anyway, and how many of them are there? Does anyone know who paid them to kill the Lowe’s project in Santa Rosa?

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It's as easy as ADC....in Little Chicago

8/5/2010

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The Press Democrat has recently published two Close to Home articles, one from the Accountable Development Coalition touting their impact on area land use planning, and the other from Keith Woods of the North Bay Builders Association telling it like it is.

Lisa Maldonado, wearing so many hats that you can barely see her, is the executive director of North Bay Labor Council (hired by Michael Allen and his biggest supporter) and plenty more. She's spending her time posting on the Watch Sonoma County website supporting the ADC (founded by Michael Allen) and trashing anyone who opposes Michael Allen. Now someone on WSC has posted this revealing information:

TroublemakersAugust 4, 2010 at 11:37 amAccording to a website devoted to Bay Area labor “troublemakers” Lisa Maldonado and Martin Bennett are among the instructors.

http://labornotes.org/bayarea

Bay Area Troublemakers School
Turning Crisis Into Opportunity

May 30
Laney College, Oakland
Workshops including: Nuts & Bolts Organizing Skills; Youth in the Labor Movement; Aggressive Grievance Handling; The Fight for Single-Payer Health Care; Community-Labor Alliances. Scroll down for a complete list!

REGISTRATION
Register at the door!
Regular registration: $20

Building Solidarity County by County: Central Labor Councils and Organizing [Panel & Discussion]: How Central Labor Councils use community coalitions and advocacy to assist unions in moving and coordinating organizing campaigns. Panelists will address the fight for the Employee Free Choice Act and organizing efforts at the Port of Oakland, among others. T.C. Wilson, Alameda CLC, Martin Bennett, North Bay CLC, Lisa Maldonado, North Bay CLC

***
Using community coalitions and neighborhood groups, and then fragmenting themselves into as many subgroups as possible, these people manufacture consent and make themselves the spokespeople for our community.

This is completely unacceptable to us and we will fight it.

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And a bit more on the Neighborhood Summit...

8/3/2010

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The city of Santa Rosa has announced that there will be a Neighborhood Summit in August 2010. A planning meeting was convened, chaired by Tanya Narath, executive director of the Leadership Institute of Ecology and the Economy and a member of the Community Advisory Board. The LIEE is the source group for the 'green' members of the city council, a political incubator, and espouses the virtues of smart growth, form-based zoning, visioning, redevelopment, transit-oriented development, high density development, UN Agenda 21 et al. The other group sponsoring this 'summit' is the Neighborhood Alliance (see below)*.

I attended the first meeting of the 'summit' planning group. It appears to be a 'farming' operation to create city-sponsored neighborhood associations in areas that don't have them. The presumed purpose of that is to then have them join the neighborhood alliance and manufacture consensus with city plans. I'm sure they'll identify 'troublemakers' and sideline them since this is the manner in which the 'visioning meetings' are conducted.

Artificial neighborhood associations to use when public buy-in is needed. Anyone not in the official association will be ignored, slimed, and lied about if they bring up any issues not officially sanctioned.

The 'summit' is tentatively planned to be on two days, the first being an evening lecture by someone who is a Seattle expert, so called by organizers, in creating neighborhood associations. The next day will be two sessions on making a neighborhood association. No need for a planning session, it was already planned before the actual neighbors were brought in. They'll get to decide what food will be served. Tables or booths will be provided for city sanctioned groups, like this one ;>

I don't suppose it will matter if anyone shows up for this since it's just window dressing. There were only about 10 unconnected neighborhood people in attendance. There didn't appear to be much enthusiasm and there was confusion among the actual real people there about what it was all about. Apparently, though, things have heated up and there are now more participants than at first.

*Our experience with the Neighborhood Alliance was that Kay Tokerud found out about it when she had been president of the Junior College Neighborhood Association (the largest in the city) for about 2 months. She asked former president Jenny Bard where the meetings were and said that she wanted to represent the JCNA since she was clearly a ‘neighborhood leader’ and this group purported to be made up of such people. Jenny Bard refused to tell her and said she wanted to continue to represent the JCNA. John Sutter was the chair of the NA at the time. I called him and asked where the meetings were held and he intially refused to tell me, saying that the meetings were private. After I talked with him for a while he said proudly that the NA was ‘the shadow city council’ and finally gave us the address. They met in a back room at Keller-Williams Realty offices over on Stony Point.

Kay and I went over to the meeting and were coldly brought into a room with John Sutter, Jack Swearingen, Jim Wilkinson, Judy Kennedy, Fred Kruger, Jenny Bard, Denise Hill, Karen Macken, and a couple of others. They decided that we could be there for the first couple of items on the agenda but would have to leave. Then Kay was attacked systematically by each person for as long as that person wanted to speak. Kay objected saying it seemed to be a trial of some kind, a kangaroo court. She and I were each given one minute to respond, and John Sutter as chair, took off his watch and placed it in front of him on the table so that he could be sure not to give us more than one minute. We spoke calmly and articulately about our concerns, Kay’s as a neighborhood leader, and mine as an American. After we spoke we were told to leave and we were escorted out and the door was locked behind us.

This group was not open to the public and was not open to all neighborhood leaders. It was a travesty and a shameful embarrassment to all who participated. I was stunned that such a group purporting to represent all neighborhoods in Santa Rosa could operate in this country in this manner.

Rosa Koire

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Manufacturing Consensus aka Neighborhood Associations

8/3/2010

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The City of Santa Rosa along with the Neighborhood Alliance, and the Leadership Institute of Ecology and Economy (Tanya Narath is the executive director and also the chair of the city's Community Advisory Board) is putting on a "Neighborhood Summit". They're very excited about it. For some reason they've decided that they want to 'empower' the neighborhoods and create more neighborhood associations.
From our experience with the Junior College Neighborhood Association (JCNA) this doesn't seem to be a good thing. The JCNA is run like a closed club and has a definite agenda: high density urban development, transit oriented development, pro-redevelopment, pro-bike to the point that they would endanger all street-users in order to push their ideology, and a zealotry that allows no dissent. Jenny Bard, the defacto president, is employed as a spokesperson/advocate by the Lung Association, which advocates for these same positions on its website. Ms. Bard has control over the only two JCNA bulletin boards in the area and refuses to allow anything that conflicts with these views to be posted in them, although they were paid for with community funds.

Back to the 'Summit'. This two day event will be include an evening lecture by Jim Diers, who was in charge of creating neighborhood associations in Seattle. Mr. Diers now works for Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD). That is new-speak for figuring out ways to use the skills of residents in an area for free, apparently, and touting it as a new method of managing communities with those who are completely non-governmental and not accountable to the voters. Changing the community without accountability and directing the change without looking like it's being done.

I looked up ABCD on wikipedia to see what it was.
Since wikipedia noted that the article sounded like a press release I made a few changes to it.
***

Asset-based community development: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section reads like a news release, or is otherwise written in an overly promotional tone. Please help by either rewrite this article from a neutral point of view or by moving to Wikinews. When appropriate, blatant advertising may be marked for speedy deletion with {{db-spam}}.

(May 2010)Asset-based community development (ABCD) is a methodology that seeks to uncover and utilize the strengths within communities as a means for sustainable development. The basic tenet is that a capacities-focused approach is more likely to empower the community and therefore mobilize citizens to create positive and meaningful change from within. Instead of focusing on a community's needs, deficiencies and problems, the ABCD approach helps them become stronger and more self-reliant by discovering, mapping and mobilizing all their local assets. Few people realize how many assets any community has, for example:

Skills of its citizens, from youth to people with disabilities, from thriving professionals to starving artists
Dedication of its citizens associations — churches, culture groups, clubs, neighborhood associations
Resources of its formal institutions — businesses, schools, libraries, community colleges, hospitals, parks, social service agencies

By the late 1990s, communities around the country were mapping and using these resources in imaginative ways, bringing them out of the closet and into creative synergy with each other, with dramatic results. Asset-based community development has provided leaders and institutions in all sectors with an approach that is relatively cheap, effective and empowering, that avoids paternalism and dependence — an approach that can be supported by all parts of the political spectrum and initiated at any level of civic life.

The first step in the process of community development is to assess the resources of a community through a capacity inventory [1] or through another process of talking to the residents to determine what types of skills and experience are available to a community organization. The next step is to consult with the community and find out what improvements the residents would like to make. The final, and most challenging step, is to determine how the residents' skills can be leveraged into achieving those goals.[1]

Using this model, the communities who hire ABCD speakers to influence their citizens are looking for an opportunity to create artificial community consensus. By creating farmed neighborhood associations they sideline actual community participants who often do not agree with the city policies. These artificial groups use the Delphi technique to block participation by real community members who raise points that are avoided by city-sponsored neighborhood groups. Under the guise of creating 'sustainable communities' neighborhood associations will be developed that are run by hand-picked city insiders who will rubberstamp city programs like redeveloping neighborhoods and redesigning streets. This visioning is supposedly community based but is not. They shut down any dissenting voices and marginalize, ridicule, attack, silence, and ignore those who do not agree.

'Mapping community assets' is a way of controlling and managing a group of people and directing them to use their skills in a pre-determined way to 'benefit' the community. Who decides what benefits the community? The hand-picked 'leaders'. By mapping a community are these groups determining who has something to offer the collective and who does not? What happens to those who do not contribute to the collective? How are they 'leveraged' into contributing?

The Asset-Based Community Development Institute[2] is located at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Its founders, John Kretzmann and John L. McKnight, are the major proponents of this community development philosophy.

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Follow the money: Petaluma settlement on Target

8/3/2010

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What is the $100,000 for? We were told by a leader of Petaluma Community Coalition that the developer had already made all the concessions they would make and that their lawsuit would be unsuccessful if they continued.

What is left? What’s left is the promise that they won’t oppose the Friedman’s project. Today’s PD article plainly states that the group may oppose a future Lowe’s project in Petaluma that would compete with Friedman’s. Friedman’s benefits by this deal. The $100,000 could fund the opposition to the proposed Lowes. Paul Francis of the Petaluma Community Coalition told us that he has communicated with the Accountable Development Coalition about opposing Lowes.

In Santa Rosa, the Accountable Development Coalition suddenly was awash in funds when they opposed the Lowe’s project here. The Grand Jury, which investigated the ADC and members of the Santa Rosa Planning Commission including Michael Allen and Nick Caston, said that $95,000 was used by the ADC in that effort. Rumor had it that Friedman’s funded them. In both of these cases, community coalitions have taken actions that benefitted Friedman’s. Michael Allen’s other non-profit, NEWS, lists the Friedman Family Foundation at the top of their list of donors. There’s also a long list of labor unions that support NEWS.

Are these community coalitions just hit teams for a big box retailer (Friedman’s)? If so, what a travesty it is that the SMART board has agreed to use the Accountable Development Coalition to represent the community in the Railroad Square project. We need to get to the bottom of who is influencing these groups and who’s paying them. If it is Friedman’s and they want to lobby on their own behalf, then they should do so and not hide behind these shady so-called community groups that do their bidding.

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What does Picayune, Mississipi have that we don't?

Civil Unions?

Who paid to kill Lowes in SR?

It's as easy as ADC....in Little Chicago

And a bit more on the Neighborhood Summit...

Manufacturing Consensus aka Neighborhood Associations

Follow the money: Petaluma settlement on Target

Eyes on Santa Rosa

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