Less than a week after the conclusion of a three-hour trial to decide the fate of a deal to develop housing on county-owned acreage surrounding an abandoned public hospital complex called Chanate, a superior court judge has issued a deal-breaking decision.

On Thursday, Judge René Auguste Chouteaur ruled that the Sonoma County Board of Supervisor’s approval last year of an agreement to develop Chanate with developer William Gallaher must be “vacated.” The controversial deal cannot go forward as planned.

A lawsuit filed by the 200-member grassroots organization Friends of Chanate called for the development agreement to be overturned on several counts. Chouteau agreed with only one of the counts, but that was enough to send it back to the board of supervisors for the indefinite future. The deal can only be revived if the county and the developer conduct an environmental review of the proposed project, which is a lengthy, expensive process that doesn’t guarantee the housing and commercial project will be approved.

Attorney Noreen Evans successfully argued the case for the Friends against Gallaher’s Santa Rosa attorney, Tina Wallis and Deputy County Counsel Debbie F. Latham. Evans argued that the less than $12.5 million price that the county accepted for the land was so far below its fair market value that it was a “gift of public funds.” Chouteau disagreed.

It is true, he said, that a 2016 appraisal projected the worth of the Chanate improvements at $275 million, and the land at more than $30 million. But he was more comfortable with a 2014 appraisal of the property that did not consider the projected value of the improvements.
He declined to value the land at its fully developed market value because, he wrote, the improvements are not guaranteed to occur. Therefore, there was no gift of public funds.

Evans then argued that the supervisors had violated the Brown Act by holding secret deliberations on terms of the development beyond its price. Chouteau’s 25-page decision does not seem to disagree that the proceedings may have violated the spirit and letter of the Brown Act. But the proceedings were held behind closed doors, so there is no public record of what transpired, he noted. Because Evans could not present evidence of wrongdoing, such as a transcript of the secret session, she could not prove the facts of the suspected mischief.

Evan’s final and fatal argument was that the deal is invalid because the county sold the land to Gallaher based on his proposal to develop nearly a thousand homes in a forested, riparian area riffling with wildlife without doing an environmental review of the impacts.

The county’s and the developer’s lawyers argued that the supervisor’s approval of the Chanate development “agreement,” signed last year, is not the same thing as approving a development “project.” And since it is not a “project”, they parsed, it is not subject to environmental review. The judge laughed that argument out of court last week and in his written decision he eviscerated it. And that is enough to spike the deal for the time being.

We are reaching out to Gallaher, Wallis, Evans and the supervisors for comment and will keep you posted.

More than 20 labor, environmental and social- and economic-justice organizations banded together July 19 to endorse the Alliance for a Just Recovery’s 25-point plan to ensure a “just recovery” following last October’s unprecedented wildfires.

The self-described grassroots organization called for unity and action from community members and politicians to address problems plaguing Sonoma County, such as lack of affordable housing, good jobs, living wages, environmental sustainability and equality across language divides.
Local city councilmembers and representatives of Congressmen Mike Thompson and Jared Huffman joined more than a hundred other attendees in Santa Rosa’s Christ Church United Methodist multipurpose room, where chairs were added to accommodate the crowd.

In their mission statement, the Alliance for a Just Recovery (AJR) demanded Santa Rosa take immediate action to address income inequality by adopting rent control and implementing the state-mandated $15 minimum wage three years earlier than required. It also proposed penalizing construction contractors for exploiting immigrant labor and establishing a worker’s rights clinic to protect disenfranchised workers.

Marty Bennett, co-chair for North Bay Jobs with Justice and spokesperson for AJR, said the fires, which destroyed 5 percent of Santa Rosa’s housing stock, also caused a 36 percent increase in rents.

“Our Alliance for a Just Recovery is fundamentally about building a multiracial, democratic, grassroots movement for a just, equitable and sustainable recovery,” Bennett said. “Only through building a people-powered movement and a coalition from the bottom up can we address the root causes of inequality, the housing and homeless crisis, racial and gender discrimination, exploitation of immigrant labor, the climate crisis and the increased threat of more devastating wildfires.”

Sonoma County was already fraught with income inequality and skyrocketing rents when last year’s North Bay wildfires killed 42 and turned the region on its head. The loss of 5,550 homes across the North Bay exacerbated the already unstable housing market, which, according to a report by the Sonoma County League of Women Voters, posted a 1.5 percent vacancy rate pre-fire, a .5 percent vacancy rate post-fire and a lack of affordable housing.

According to the AJR, median-income families cannot afford to purchase median-priced homes; 44 percent of Sonoma County’s Latino families and 35 percent of total families are “working poor,” making less than $50,000 each year.

“We can start here in Santa Rosa to build a movement for a just recovery during the 2018 election cycle,” Bennett said.

Fire victims gave testimonials of their plight, some accompanied by translators; Spanish-speaking attendees received translations of English speakers through portable headsets.

Ofelia Alcala, housekeeper of 28 years at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Rosa, spoke through a translator about the plight of Spanish-speaking workers in the hospitality industry. She said she recently attempted to unionize Hyatt employees, but the company refused to negotiate.

“My daughter has a dream,” Alcala said. “Her dream is to be able to go to Sonoma State University. I want to make sure that I’m able to help her achieve her dream, but I make so little wages that I don’t think I’ll be able to help her.”

A representative from the Graton Day Labor Center, which created the donation-based UndocuFund last fall to provide financial relief for undocumented residents not entitled to public assistance, said the undocumented still fall prey to wage theft and exploitative, illegal housing arrangements.

Laura Neish, executive director of the environmental advocacy group 350 Bay Area, said the wildfires were caused by climate change and underscored the need for sustainable policies in the recovery.

“The fires in Santa Rosa and the North Bay brought climate change right to our doorsteps,” Neish said. “Climate change has left its fingerprints all over these disasters. We must address these root causes now.”

Other speakers decried the insufficient insurance payouts for low- to moderate-income homeowners trying to rebuild and the increasing rents driving many Sonoma County citizens, including retired seniors, out of the region.

MEDICARE FOR ALL?

Last week, some 70 Democrats in the U.S. Congress, seemingly emboldened by surprise primary victories by the likes of progressive New Yorker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, announced the formation of the house Medicare for All caucus, which pledged to push for a single-payer healthcare bill. It’s a noble if pie-in-sky push given the current Republican makeup of Congress, but these things could change come the November mid-terms.

A scan of the newly formed caucus, which says it will embark on a teach-in to educate members on the benefits of a single-payer system, finds Jared Huffman as one of the California representatives who signed on. He was joined by, among others, outspoken Trump critic Maxine Waters.

Mike Thompson? Nope. The other North Bay Congressman is not on board with the Medicare for All Caucus.

CANNA CRIME SLIDES

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has just released the annual state crime report from 2017—and wouldn’t you know it, legalizing cannabis has led to a big drop in the number of pot-related criminal charges around the state. The AG reports that 6,065 people were locked up on weed-related charges last year—a 56 percent drop from 2016, when 13,810 were imprisoned for possession or consumption of the dread plant.

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) ran the numbers from Becerra’s report in a press release from last week and noted that the decline in felony dope charges was even greater between 2016 and 2017. Those arrests “fell by a whopping 74 percent,” as 2,086 citizens were pinched on felony charges in 2017, compared to 7,949 the year before.

But NORML also cited the ongoing and disproportionate numbers of African-American and Latino citizens arrested on pot charges in 2017. For example, even as misdemeanor drug arrests dropped from 5,861 to 3,979 between 2016 and 2017, Latinos “represented the highest percentage of arrestees,” at 46 percent.

Whites accounted for 24 percent of all felony arrests, NORML noted—while Latinos accounted for 40 percent and African Americans 21 percent. California’s population, according to the U.S. census, is about 38 percent Latino and 6.5 percent African-American.