Delta college alum, north side scum
But make no mistake I never fake when I’m from
Local hip-hop trio G.L.U. (Guy Like Us) debuted a song, “Stockton ‘The Anthem,” at last weekend’s Miracle Mile Night Street Festival. The proud homage to Stockton is part of G.L.U’s new rock hip-hop CD, which trio member Esteban Aguila describes as ”like, Pink Floyd and the Flaming Lips meets the Beatles.”
Want to hear it?
The owner of the famous peace boat The Phoenix of Hiroshima, who let the boat sink in the Delta, takes the granddaughter of the boat’s pacifist owner, Naomi Reynolds, to the spot where it lies and hands the boat over to her.
“We’ll take it in stages,” writes Jessica Renshaw, another granddaughter of the boat’s first owner. “Get her out of the water, rebuild her, equip her if at all possible to sail again. Naomi will be looking into salvage companies, divers, drydocks, workers in wood–and loans.”
Despite Renshaw’s happiness, raising the Phoenix is a big, expensive task. Even finding a drydock big enough for the boat will be difficult. We’ll follow their efforts as this great Delta story unfolds.
Today’s column has fun with some of the offbeat inventions noodled out of the fertile minds of Stocktonians over the last 150 years. Here, by contrast, are some of the important and successful inventions.
The first Caterpillar-type tractor
The Duraflame log
The clamshell dredge
Buhach insectiside
Watching Mayor Ann Johnston’s live online chat this week, I was struck by how deeply unhappy the public is with the state of the city.
As well it should be. Homicides have doubled, the city is bringing SMG into the management of its money-losing venues too slowly and the public employee unions, particularly Stockton Fire, still live in a dreamland of perpetual raises.
The city is in a crisis partly of its own creation. Nobody forced City Hall to give the store away to the unions. Or to give the store away to IFG, the current management company of city venues. Nobody forced upon city leaders the mentality that Stockton should equal or even surpass more affluent communities in the lavish construction of its amenities. We did all that to ourselves.
And then the recession.
I believe Johnston, the council and city staff have pointed the ship in the right direction. The problem is the current is dragging it backwards anyway. Changing the flow is a big task. The public has to support revisions to the city charter. I have no idea whether they will. Those likeable fire union guys are canvassing the city, assuring the public they’ve done all they should be expected to do and needed cuts aren’t needed. The public snoozed its way into its fiscal mess with unions. They may snooze through the chance to clean it up.
The city also has to prevail in court. Prevail against both police and fire unions suing, in effect, for raises that are blind to the recession and which actually hamper the city’s ability to staff police and ensure public safety.
Then the times need to get better. That’s a big wish list.
By way of optimism I can point to new City Manager Bob Deis, Economic Development Director Gustavo Duran and global venue management company SMG. All reflect the council’s awareness of the need to profoundly revise city economics. So, for that matter, does the General Plan Settlement Agreement.
The team — minus SMG, for the moment — is in place for a fundamentally better city governance. But so are the contracts thwarting this governance. And lawsuits, and recession just complicate the picture. As may conservative Paul Canepa, now running unopposed to replace council member Leslie Martin. Canepa may reduce the council’s smart growth majority to 4-3. Then the Old School starts looking to influence the swing vote.
And yet despite all the moving parts and wayward special interests there’s a sense the city has the potential for a re-do so sweeping the city is, in a way, a big blank slate. At stake is a better-managed city, one better able to realize its potential, a state of perpetual progress to be handed down to the next generation. A legacy.
The Democratic Central Committee of San Joaquin County, evidently disturbed by the fatal shooting of the teenager James Rivera Jr., is calling for a “calm and a reasoned response to the growing tension between community and law enforcement within the City of Stockton.”
“We urge our local, state and federal elected representatives (as well as those candidates running for office) to take seriously the concerns that the Social Justice Coalition has raised,” the DCC says in a press release. “Regardless of the outcome of this investigation, it is apparent that there is a growing divide between community and law enforcement.”
This statement is a complete tautology. Of course leaders and police are taking the inquest seriously. Is there a shred of evidence anyone has taken the Rivera case lightly? And the statement smacks of a double standard. Government is not the entity in need of calming. The Dems’ statement should be directed at demagogues, race-baiters and people who can’t take responsibility for anything. They abound in this case.
Activist Ralph Lee White has been coming before the council to demand the resignation of council members who accepted Asparagus Festival freebies.
Asparagus Festival Director Kate Post, or someone in her organization, offered each Council member 12 $10 tickets each, and a festival T-shirt, valued at $25.
Some council members accepted these alms, a $145 value.
This is not merely activism on White’s part. He is running to unseat Councilwoman Susan Eggman. He has an agenda.
Still, after the council-packing controversy following the firing of Deputy City Manager Johnny Ford, which was over free tickets, and one earlier ticket controversy, you wonder why any Stockton official in their right mind would accept comps, legal or not.
And they are legal, said City Attorney John Luebberke.
“I don’t know how we can equate something as de minimis (minor) as that as having any measurable impact on the behavior of council members,” he added.
In other words, such chicken feed does not change anything council members do.
Is it enough to assert that? By way of dissenting, White posed a valid ethical scenario: Post’s contract comes up for renewal. A rival applies to replace her.
“If you and I are going in for a contract,” White said hypothetically, “but I been giving everybody tickets every year—taking care of them if their family wants tickets or shirts—and you haven’t been giving them nothing … who do you think they’re going to favor, me or you?”
A fair question. For his part, Luebburke already answered it. The gifts don’t sway leaders.
But many reasonable observers will disagree. They will agree with White that the gifts are compromising.
Not illegal, perhaps, as White asserts. Just wrong somehow.
How? Well, with due respect to the interim city attorney, working stiffs don’t dismiss a $145 gift as minor (even subtracting the t-shirts, as their value is inflated).
No, if somebody gives me a $120 gift, I do not consider it “de minimus.” I am thankfulus. I may want to do something niceimus for the giver in returnimus.
I think this is how most ordinary folks feel. And expect council members to feel. And if council members feel gratitude, well …
Still, if this issue was just about the darned tickets and t-shirts, there’d be no call to drain the ink truck. But this is the third scuffle over tickets in the last couple years.
If Council members or city staffers have legitimate city business at the Asparagus Festival, let them through the door. If they want 10 more tickets, let them get out their wallets.
My proposed new policy: don’t accept anything – anything – valued over $25. And be leery enough to refuse most freebies valued under that amount.
Or, in three words: Don’t take them.
Remember the Juggalo trial? A drifter with an ax — and Insane Clown Posse tatoos, and an ICP CD in his rucksack – turned on his road buddy and savaged him with a hatchet in Stockton last November. A Stockton prosecutor sought a gang enhancement to the charges, contending a segment of ICP fans have degenerated into a violent cult that fits the legal creteria of a criminal gang.
He lost that motion (though it made for an interesting column). Wonder if he’s seen this story about angry Juggalos mobbing Tia Tequila?
A word of warning: do not follow the Insane Clown Posse link unless you have a high tolerance for profanity.
An online comic artist has me punching out a Senator. Didn’t see that one coming.
“Like dear relatives or close friends, Dr. Mark’s care and council were ever present as I was growing up, became a part of the child I was, the teenager and adult I grew into, and the man I am now.”
A Stockton native living in Chicago mourns “The real Marcus Welby, M.D.” here.
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Many youths face a Hobson’s choice: join no gang and be prey; join and be protected. But at a cost. The cost of bad choices.
It’s pointless to lament the way Southeast Asian groups were ill-prepared to immigrate. Vietnam is history. But its social pathologies smolder on like napalm in communities such as Stockton. Containing the blaze requires effective anti-gang programs such as Peacekeepers. The programs, in turn, require money, and we all know how that’s going.
Immigration is a multi-generational phenomenon. Three generations and — presto! — assimilation. But woe is the second generation, and the community that harbors its desperate anger.