by Steve Early
NOT EASY BEING GREEN
Gayle McLaughlin presided over a city with nearly 20 percent of its population living in poverty and a local jobless rate that was, at its peak, twice the national average. During her first term, Richmond city hall tried to generate new employment, particularly for young people who might otherwise be drawn to gangs, drugs, or street crime leading to jail. The mayor took credit for attracting one thousand new jobs via businesses relocating to or starting up in Richmond. McLaughlin’s enviro-friendly electoral base favored green jobs. But, without far greater federal funding for them, job creation of any kind, on the scale needed, was a major challenge. Richmond did launch the Worker Cooperative Revolving Loan Fund (WCRLF) as a grant-funded stopgap measure and demonstration that “another world is possible.” The fund aided local worker-run enterprises, few and small.
The private sector had a very different job creation plan for Richmond. In 2009–10 it became the center of a heated community-wide debate about what kind of economic development was good or bad for the city. The battleground was a 422-acre section of the Richmond shoreline with sweeping views of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, across the bay. There, at Point Molate, a wealthy East Bay developer named Jim Levine sought city approval for construction of a hotel and casino complex. In place of an abandoned winery and a former US Navy fuel depot, Levine promised to erect what local environmentalist David Helvarg caustically described as “the greenest most eco-sustainable billion dollar casino, high-rise hotel, and parking structure this side of Las Vegas.”11
Backers of the project argued that it would generate much-needed tax revenue for Richmond, while providing thousands of new jobs in construction and then hospitality. “You put a casino out there and you’ll be manufacturing money,” one building trades leader predicted. Since the crash and burn of Atlantic City was several years away, such claims quickly gained traction. Casino gambling still retained considerable cachet as an engine of economic development in depressed communities. And, as Helvarg wryly observed, “moving from alcohol to petroleum to gambling” on this particular Richmond site did “make sense in terms of the continuity of human addiction.”
The pro-gaming forces included many influential local players, plus a Native American ally from out of town, the Guidiville band of Pomos. They hailed from Mendocino County, had no historical connection to Richmond, and were enlisted to provide tribal cover for a piece of the action. Levine’s firm, Upstream LLC, spearheaded the campaign for city hall approval, aided by a very enthusiastic Contra Costa County Building and Construction Trades Council. A majority of Richmond council members favored the project, including its senior member, Nat Bates, a declared candidate for mayor in 2010. Bates rallied his longtime supporters in the African American community, including many ministers, behind the casino idea. He promoted the project on his weekly cable TV public affairs show, which was funded, in part, by Levine. Joining this “pro-growth” faction were two surprising partners, the Sierra Club and Audubon Society. Both conservation groups got seduced by the promise of shoreline preservation outside of Richmond—funded with $48 million in slot machine revenue—if Point Molate itself was sacrificed to the developer’s plan.
For much of Richmond’s modern history, residents had limited access to its thirty-two miles of shoreline. Users of the waterfront like Standard Oil (now Chevron), Kaiser and other manufacturers, the Port of Richmond, and the US Navy kept things off-limits to local people, unless they were employees or uniformed personnel. Now, local hikers, bicyclists, bird-watchers, and would-be expanders of public space were not eager to trade the sound of wind and waves at Point Molate for the whir, chimes, and beeps of four thousand slot machines. As Upstream’s environmental impact report confirmed, “a 182,000 square foot casino . . . up to two hotels . . . with ancillary restaurants and retail, a 150,000 square foot business, conference and entertainment center, and approximately 5,000 parking spaces” was not exactly “balanced development” of the site.12 Organizing as Citizens for a Sustainable Point Molate, community critics stressed the traffic congestion, over-building, and visual blight that casino gambling would bring, along with its other well-documented ills.
McLaughlin and the RPA joined the opposition during an election year in which the Green mayor was seeking her second term. “Our point of view was that whatever you build at Point Molate is going to create a lot of jobs,” she explained. “And we’re for good, healthy, sustainable development that benefits the whole community rather than takes advantage of poor people by picking their pockets.”
In the ensuing propaganda war, casino backers spent $500,000 to win voter approval of Measure U, a citywide advisory referendum on the project, held in November 2010. But operators of local card clubs, a gambling interest group already well entrenched in the Richmond area, did not want to see their own low-income customer base eroded by new slot machine competition at Point Molate. A combination of their self-interested spending, grassroots organizing, and community education produced a 57.5 percent vote against Levine’s scheme. When Richmond’s new city council reaffirmed those results in early 2011, the developer—apparently not a gambler himself—sued Richmond to get his $15 million “non-refundable deposit” back.13
Just as gambling interests were helpfully divided over the future of Point Molate, so were McLaughlin’s critics when they had their opportunity to oust her. By the fall of 2010, Richmond business interests and allied labor organizations had plenty of reasons to deny her a second term. Fortunately they couldn’t agree on a single candidate against her. Furious about the mayor’s opposition to the Point Molate project, the county building trades council backed John Ziesenhenne, former president of the Richmond Chamber of Commerce. The construction unions even opened a campaign office in Richmond to help get him elected. City councilor Nat Bates ran with his usual strong financial backing from Chevron. Bates’s other business donors included an auto importers association with a big stake in Richmond port operations and Veolia, a global firm that operates Richmond’s privatized sewage treatment system.
Amid the resulting blizzard of negative ads and mailers directed at McLaughlin, the top prize for personal vilification was won by two familiar foes, the firefighters and the police association. Their mailers detailed a past personal bankruptcy filing by the mayor, triggered by $119,000 in credit card and student loan debt, and trumpeted her alleged inability to “hold down a job.” The most infamous hit piece in this series disclosed that McLaughlin had once been treated for depression and was for a time eligible to collect social security disability benefits.
As would later prove true of Chevron-funded smears in 2014, the dark portrait of McLaughlin painted by her political enemies seemed unrecognizable to the many residents of Richmond who had personally encountered her. “Gayle is so committed and indefatigable,” observes Robert Rogers, who covered the 2010 campaign for the Contra Costa Times. “She’s totally authentic, and you can see the natural affinity she has with the underdog, because of her own life experiences—and she draws her strength from that.”
McLaughlin’s reservoir of goodwill and respect, even among those who disagreed with her, fed the widespread backlash against those prying into her past for political gain. She handled their disclosures with grace and candor. She acknowledged having suffered “debilitating illnesses” and “personal finances that suffered as a result.” She urged voters to remember her six-year record on the city council, including her role in achieving the city’s $114 million tax settlement with Chevron. She emphasized her continuing commitment to “transparent and participatory government” and curbing “the influence of large corporations and developers on public policy.”
In his campaign for McLaughlin’s job, her strongest opponent took a higher road than his public safety union backers. Nat Bates claimed that his “background as a retired probation officer provided him with unique knowledge in fighting crime.” Alienating many Latino voters, he promised to “reinstate police checkpoints and hold them on a
regular basis throughout the city to protect the safety of the community.” Bates also stressed that he was a “lifetime Democrat,” with close ties to California senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and then congressman George Miller, whose district included Richmond. He urged the 69 percent of the city’s voters who had registered as Democrats to “stand strong and united” against the “loyal Green Party member” who had regularly failed to support Democratic presidential candidates but now “wants Democrats to vote for her.” A tiny party such as the Greens, with only 462 registered voters in Richmond (1 percent of its total electorate), “should not control this city,” he declared.14
Neither Green-baiting nor his allies’ vilification of McLaughlin proved to be a winning strategy for Bates. The mayor was reelected with 40 percent of the vote in her three-way race. When all the ballots were counted, the results, as in 2008, reflected further erosion of Chevron influence and the emergence of a strengthened left-liberal majority. It was now composed of McLaughlin and Ritterman, their frequent allies, Democrats Tom Butt and Jim Rogers, as well as forty-seven-year-old Jovanka Beckles, a leader of the RPA (and registered Democrat) who worked for the county. Beckles’s victory in 2010 was both a personal triumph and a major organizational breakthrough for Richmond progressives. In a majority minority city, their only previously successful candidates were white.
DR. RITTERMAN’S PRESCRIPTION
Amid its many charms and allures, one small downside of life in Richmond is the need for a bigger mailbox at election time. Any extra roominess comes in handy when special interest groups, with millions of dollars to spend, decide to bombard the electorate with direct mail deriding local progressives and their latest controversial schemes. During the 2012 election cycle, Big Soda became the biggest spender on such glossy, full-color junk mail. The industry’s target was a much-needed public health initiative promoted by Jeff Ritterman.
Through his work as a doctor in Richmond, Ritterman became familiar with all the refinery-related health problems common among Chevron’s low-income neighbors, including high childhood asthma rates, cancer clusters, and lower than average life expectancies. In his medical practice, he also treated hundreds of African American and Latino patients suffering from heart disease, type-2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and other weight-related ailments. Ritterman watched with mounting concern as a leading local cause of heart attacks and strokes began to spread to younger people in the community; nearly half the city’s children were growing up overweight or obese.
Increased US consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages is a major factor in the development of obesity, type-2 diabetes, hypertension, heart attacks, strokes, and some forms of cancer. If current trends continue, nearly half of all Americans will be obese by 2030, putting a huge additional strain on US medical spending and guaranteeing a life of pain, misery, and disability for many. According to California health researchers, a tax on soda, to discourage its consumption, would produce the greatest health benefits among blacks and Latinos in the state. In Richmond, these groups represent two-thirds of the population currently most at risk for diabetes and heart disease.
In response to this public health crisis, Ritterman and the RPA launched a citywide drive to raise $3 million annually in new tax revenue for youth sports programs and health education. The funding mechanism was a penny-per-ounce tax on sugary drinks. Ritterman decided not to run for reelection to the city council, preferring instead to focus on voter education about the soda tax. In countless community meetings and forums, he explained how this new tax revenue could “provide adequate sports fields and teams for Richmond children,” plus fund “programs that prevent childhood obesity, like healthy school gardens and nutrition and cooking classes in the schools.”
Ritterman’s cause was bravely embraced by only a few African American ministers and health workers. The Reverend Alvin Bernstine of the Bethlehem Missionary Baptist Church proudly maintains a “no fry/no soda zone” in his congregation’s social hall and is quick to invoke the historical connection between sugar plantations and slavery. “The soda companies have been exploiting black people for too long—with products that have no nutritional benefit and no community economic benefit. Our people want to be healthy because healthy physicality is a sign of healthy spirituality.”
Local soda tax opposition was soon ginned up by its perennial national foe, the American Beverage Association (ABA). The ABA hired Whitehurst/Mosher Campaign Strategy and Media, a high-powered Bay Area political consulting firm, whose past clients have included Governor Jerry Brown and liberal state legislator Mark Leno.15 Whitehurst/Mosher was simultaneously working for Chevron’s political action committee, Moving Forward, which ended up spending $1.2 million on Richmond’s 2012 election. Coca-Cola deployed its own lower-level Bay Area managers to personally canvass Richmond neighborhoods. Just before the 2012 election, two men from Coke knocked on my door. They were working in tandem, like a pair of young Mormon missionaries. The pamphlet I was offered by the Coke brothers was entitled Our Position on Obesity. It disputed claims by doctors and medical researchers that Americans are overweight because we drink too much soda.
The ABA’s local consultants recruited and deployed teams of paid canvassers to distribute “Vote No on N” lawn signs in black and Latino neighborhoods. They enlisted Latino grocery store owners and hired former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown to deliver an anti–soda tax speech to NAACP members and Richmond ministers. In a West Coast replay of the industry-orchestrated minority community backlash against soft drink regulation in New York City, Measure N supporters in Richmond were accused of being racist and elitist, plus proponents of a regressive tax on low-income people. As sociology professor Edward Walker documents in Grassroots for Hire: Public Affairs Consultants in American Democracy, this approach is part of the broader “Uber-ization of activism.” By that Walker means that when individual firms like Uber and Airbnb or a trade association like the ABA fights taxation or regulation these days, they do far more than deploy “traditional public relations tools: TV ads, robocalls, mass mailings, celebrity endorsements, and political operatives.” Their campaigns also mobilize consumers, urging them to join a “social-media assault” on public officials critical of the corporate behavior or new business model in dispute. According to Walker, these new “protest-on-demand movements” blur the distinction between genuine grassroots organizing and its “astroturf” counterpart.16
The ABA’s Richmond front group was dubbed the Community Coalition Against Beverage Taxes. It’s “No on N” materials focused on the higher cost of sports drinks, baby formulas, and commercially made horchata and agua fresca (the latter two consumed largely by Hispanic residents). Campaign materials said, “Richmond needs real solutions like more jobs, better schools and safer streets. No more taxes on working people!” The Vote No campaign’s paid canvassers were largely young men of color in need of a summer job. By the end of the campaign, their duties included engaging in some minor vandalism outside the Vote Yes campaign headquarters (the RPA office). An attempt by the city to mandate greater disclosure of Community Coalition funding sources did not survive an industry challenge in federal court. The ABA propaganda campaign did remain subject to California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) reporting requirements, which are less stringent.
For the RPA’s year-round foes, Measure N was the wedge issue from heaven. It enabled them to depict would-be soda taxers as racist, elitist social engineering agents of a local nanny state opposed even to the simple pleasures of an ice-cold Coke. As city council member Nat Bates complained to the New York Times: “They’re using the black community to pass a measure for us without consulting us. . . . We’re tired of this Progressive Alliance coming in and telling us what to do. I’ve renamed them ‘the Plantation Alliance.’”17 Bates’s leading ally on the council, Corky Booze, questioned whether sweet potato pie, candied yams, and cupcakes might be the next targets of taxation.
The Contra Costa labor council urge
d its affiliates to reject Measure N because it might reduce employment for Teamster delivery drivers and bottling plant workers. “We can’t make Richmond healthier with a new tax that takes money out of people’s pockets,” argued Don Gosney, a retired plumbers’ union official. Ritterman tried in vain to remind organized labor about “the additional health care cost and loss of wages suffered by every union family member with a preventable chronic condition related to sugary drinks,” Some local unions, including the Service Employees International Union Local 1021 (which shares office space with the RPA) and the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555, representing BART workers, heeded his message and urged their members to support the soda tax.
Overall the ABA spent about $2.5 million to defeat Dr. Ritterman’s prescription for a healthier community by a 2 to 1 margin. (Ritterman and the RPA raised less than $70,000 to defend Measure N.) Ritterman went on to promote similar soda tax proposals in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Mexico. In November 2014, a majority of voters in Berkeley embraced the idea after a $650,000 Bloomberg Philanthropies grant helped pay for advertising that only the industry could afford in Richmond. According to Marion Nestle, author of Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda, the Berkeley campaign became a more “inclusive effort with a very strong diverse coalition” that avoided the bad “racial dynamics of Richmond.” As a result, the ABA was less able to depict the ballot measure as a “regressive tax backed by white elitists that would boost grocery bills of working class people of color.”18
