by Steve Early
Beckles’s fellow councilor Jim Rogers was no profile in courage during such confrontations. While serving previously as a county supervisor, Rogers had marketed himself throughout the Bay Area as “the People’s Lawyer,” a stand-up guy for clients with small but important legal claims.7 On Tuesday nights, amid the weekly crossfire at council meetings in Richmond, Rogers tended to keep his head down. In an interview, he explained why he rarely objected to Booze’s constant disruptions and audience incitement. “Corky was so clever and good at getting inside people’s heads and bringing them down to his level,” Rogers said. “One of the things I’m most proud of is that Corky has not gotten me down to his level.”
Rogers believed that city councilors, up for reelection in 2014, including himself, would not suffer from any voter backlash. He planned to run as a lonely “voice of reason” on the council, a thoughtful, results-oriented defender of the RPD, local public schools, consumers, and the environment. “I think that people who are incumbents are in good position,” he told me. “The public ultimately judges us on how things are going on the ground, not based on what goes on at council meetings.”
In contrast, Rogers’s senior colleague Tom Butt didn’t shy away from connecting the dots between the behavior of Bates and Booze and their main corporate benefactor. In a message to his constituents, Butt noted, “Virtually all the local organizations that routinely and repeatedly legitimize what Booze and Bates do are beneficiaries of Chevron, as are Bates and Booze themselves, both directly and indirectly. What all of these individuals who disrupt city council meetings and spew homophobic and xenophobic hate have in common is that they routinely criticize the RPA, the mayor, and Jovanka Beckles while extolling the virtues of Chevron.”8
Chevron’s public affairs manager for Richmond, Heather Kulp, found Butt’s accusation to be not only “troubling” but also so “entirely false” that she demanded a public retraction. According to Kulp, no one in Richmond supported “the return of respect, civility, and good government” more than her employer. Chevron was, she asserted, a well-known foe of “hate speech in any form” and even boasted an in-house “PRIDE employee network that represents the company’s core belief in diversity and inclusion.” In Richmond, that network had hosted Beckles as a keynote speaker at a workplace Pride celebration. In addition, Kulp noted, the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBT rights advocacy group, had rated the company one of the best places to work.
While Chevron distanced itself from the fray with its usual smooth dissembling, respected city figures, other local politicians, and Bay Area media outlets began to weigh in disapprovingly. In August 2014, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a front-page story detailing the “taunts, rants and ridicule about her sexual orientation and race” that Beckles had faced throughout her first council term. Two days later, the Chronicle ran a strong editorial condemning the use of “personal insults,” involving “racial and sexual orientation slurs,” at Richmond council meetings. “Re-establishing meaningful public debate is long overdue,” the newspaper said. On her personal blog, park ranger Betty Reid Soskin argued that “the 23% of the Richmond population that is African-American was not well served [by city council misbehavior].” Soskin worried that there was “a growing racial barrier being reconstructed by the studied animosity being generated by the antics [of Booze and his followers].”9
As Richmond filmmaker Brenda Williams vividly captured in her 2015 documentary Against Hate, two of Beckles’s most eloquent defenders were the Reverend Phil Lawson and the Reverend Kamal Hassan. These African American ministers spoke out at a packed city council meeting on September 15, 2014, attended by local gay activists and out-of-town supporters. Eighty-two-year-old Lawson, who participated in the 1965 civil rights march in Selma, reminded everyone present that “hate language hurts and kills and must never be accepted by the public.” Hassan, pastor of Richmond’s Sojourner Truth Presbyterian Church, argued that “African Americans, who have suffered oppression in all of its forms, must be against it in all of its forms.” He condemned any misguided “use of the Bible to justify condemnation, rejection, and abusive speech and behavior towards same gender loving people.” He joined other speakers in urging the council “to have zero tolerance for homophobic expression.”
That big meeting turnout for Beckles, seven weeks before the council election, threw her usual foes on the defensive. It also helped build public support for a new code of conduct and city harassment policy to curb disruptions and limit hate speech at Richmond council meetings. Both guidelines are now in effect, with the first trying to balance the requirements of “robust debate” and a “public forum [that] provides an open, safe atmosphere” with a minimum of “physical disturbance.” The updated policy against harassment is designed to discourage “public comment and critique” of city officials and employees that strays from their job performance or policymaking role to topics such as their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other personal condition irrelevant to city functioning.
BIG OIL STRIKES BACK
Over the past fifty years, few Richmond politicians have paid more consistent fealty to Big Oil than Nat Bates, now eighty-five years old. Bates is a veteran of the Korean War, a retired parole officer, and long-time pillar of the African American community. As a small boy he moved to Richmond from Texas and lived in wartime public housing with his mother, who cleaned railroad cars to support her family. Bates has always been a firm believer in the city’s largest taxpayer and employer. What’s good for Chevron is, in his view, good for the community. Local refinery management reciprocated with generous financial backing for Bates’s many successful campaigns for city council since 1967. Along the way he also got regular election year help from Darrell Reese, even after the Richmond firefighters’ union leader and lobbyist for local developers pled guilty to felony income tax evasion.10
Getting Bates elected mayor in 2014 would definitely require the deep pockets of Chevron, with campaign spending unhindered by our local $2,500 cap on individual donations to municipal candidates. In 2010 the company had bankrolled Bates’s failed attempt to prevent Gayle McLaughlin from winning a second term as mayor. Two years later, Bates bounced back strongly as the top city council vote getter, thanks to further industry spending on his behalf and stronger black turnout during a presidential election year. Although Richmond races are officially nonpartisan, Bates plastered the city with hundreds of campaign posters featuring twinned headshots of him and Barack Obama. These made it look like Obama had dropped Joe Biden in favor of Bates as his vice presidential candidate in 2012.
When I first met Bates, at a neighborhood party more than a year later, Richmond’s senior city council member was still basking in the refracted glow of the Obama administration. He had just returned from a White House party hosted by the president and first lady (an event that included two hundred other guests). This event, I noticed later, had furnished Bates with a valuable photo-op. His picture with Obama was reproduced in full color on one side of a “Nat Bates for Mayor” fan, meant for use by Richmond churchgoers lacking air conditioning. On the other side of the fan Bates stood shoulder-to-shoulder with future presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, California attorney general Kamala Harris, and former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, his past comrade in arms against the Richmond soda tax.
My first conversation with Bates was pretty much a one-way tutorial by him on the importance of knowing the right people in politics. At the Point Richmond holiday party where we met, he was surrounded by old friends and neighbors, past political patrons, and a few perennial adversaries. His genial hosts—ninety-year-old former California Assembly speaker John Knox and his wife, Jean—welcomed such guests as US congressman George Miller, fellow Richmond city council member Tom Butt, and even two leading figures in the Richmond Progressive Alliance—Mike Parker and Margaret Jordan, who are neighbors of the Knoxes. By November 2014, three of these party guests—Bates, Butt, and Parker—would launch competing b
ids to become Richmond’s next mayor.
At the time, only my new friend Nat was expressing much interest in the job or confidence in his ability to win it. In Bates’s view, Richmond had become a magnet for political “nuts” with a “radical agenda.” Under McLaughlin, city hall was “anti-business with tons of regulations, insensitive elected officials, and staff.” Local progressives were out of touch with the real needs and concerns of longtime residents, regardless of their race, income, or neighborhood. But, Bates believed, the RPA had overplayed its hand. In 2014 the group was ripe for defeat because McLaughlin, its best-known standard-bearer, would be termed out, barred by state law from seeking a third term as mayor.
Bates regularly accused the RPA of practicing what he called “plantation-style politics.” One example of this, in his mind, was McLaughlin’s suggestion that Richmond consider renaming Macdonald Avenue, its main thoroughfare, for Nelson Mandela. Bates favored naming a street in Richmond after President Obama instead. McLaughlin was just trying to “generate African American votes for RPA candidates in November,” he claimed. But that effort would fail because “they do not know the African American community as I know them.”11
Meanwhile, the RPA’s leading critic had no problem with the plantation-like feel of Big Oil’s advertisements for itself in Richmond. In fact, he expressed full support for any and all Chevron media buys that made the company—and then him, as its favored candidate—look good to the electorate. “Chevron has been under attack by the RPA,” he told me. “And they’re going to protect their turf. . . . You better bet Chevron is going to favor someone with more sensitivity and compassion for what they’re trying to do.”
By the time Bates and I first talked, Chevron was already spending tens of millions of dollars on a multifaceted public relations campaign called Richmond Proud, which showcased the community-mindedness of his major benefactor. “For much of 2012 and even into 2013, all the billboards of Richmond’s main streets were dominated by Chevron ads for its preferred city council candidates,” Tom Butt observed. “Then they were replaced with the visages of smiling Chevron employees touting the company’s dubious safety record. . . . Chevron appears constantly on TV and radio. There is nowhere you can go to escape the Chevron logo.”
As the Nation reported, Chevron maintains a permanent “infrastructure of influence” in Richmond based on targeted philanthropy, as well as its outsize spending on local politics. After the 2012 fire, the company created a new vehicle for its charitable giving, called 4Richmond. Either through this 501(c)(4) organization or directly, Chevron began doling out $15.5 million in grants. In 2012, for example, “$37,000 went to the Richmond Chamber of Commerce, $10,000 to the Richmond Police Officers Association, nearly $450,000 to the local school district, and $15,000 to a local Latino merchants association.”12 Other lucky beneficiaries included Richmond neighborhood councils, local churches, ethnic festivals, the NAACP, YMCA, and Teach for America. Of course, worthy recipients of Chevron largesse, like the Police Activities League or the Familias Unidas, were happy to have their executive directors appear in Richmond Proud ads and billboards as a small token of their appreciation.
“They just infiltrate everything that is going on in the community,” Butt said. “They spread around a lot of money to non-profits and most non-profits have community leaders on their boards, so they influence the community through co-opting community leaders.”13 While acknowledging, in his E-Forum, that Richmond’s cash-strapped nonprofits need more resources, Butt objected to corporate philanthropy that has such “an ostentatious air about it” and just “reinforces the perception of Richmond as a company town.” For Nat Bates, Chevron’s post-fire charm offensive just added wind to his sails. If it succeeded, there would be no stopping his forthcoming run for mayor.
When I queried Melissa Ritchie, a local Chevron manager for external communications, about the connection between the company’s political and charitable giving, she insisted that the “Richmond Proud Campaign has nothing to do with elections.” She declined to provide any details about its budget, arguing that the more relevant figure was Chevron’s larger financial commitment to making “our great community even better.” Said Ritchie: “From 2009 to 2012, we spent over $500 million in this community, which includes our procurement spending with local businesses, the taxes the company pays, and its investments with nonprofits.”
“Our participation in elections is focused on our independent expenditures campaign,” she explained. “We generally don’t provide direct contributions to candidates, including Nat Bates. And there are clear limits on what money can be given to candidates directly. . . . Our goal is to educate people about the qualifications of the candidates and allow voters to make their decision through their vote. All the monies we spend on elections are fully reported in accordance with government regulations.”
Chevron’s impending drive to retake city hall made finding a strong mayoral candidate a top priority of the RPA. During the winter of 2013–14, McLaughlin met privately with Butt to persuade him to run. Butt could not expect an official RPA endorsement, she explained, because he accepted donations from business. But, in McLaughlin’s scenario, Butt and three RPA candidates, including herself running for her old council seat, would cross-endorse each other and run complementary 2014 campaigns. This left-liberal united front would increase everyone’s chances of winning.
Within the RPA leadership, Butt was respected for his past civic leadership and willingness to criticize Chevron and work productively with RPA-backed city councilors on many issues. Progressive activists admired his savvy as an online communicator. For years Butt had been posting insightful political commentaries on his E-Forum, a list-serv with several thousand Richmond subscribers (an e-mail list rivaling the RPA’s own). He was a deft and experienced handler of the mainstream press, always making himself available to Bay Area reporters and columnists covering Richmond issues.
Nevertheless, RPA’s overture to Butt was made with some trepidation. Tom Butt is not a “movement person,” as McLaughlin and others in the RPA think of themselves. He’s an old-fashioned, good-government liberal, proud of his political independence. He was a lonely beacon of integrity during past politically troubled periods in Richmond. After RPA members joined the Richmond council, he became their frequent ally. But even then the founder of Interactive Resources, a local architecture firm, remained a political entrepreneur. He was not part of any collective organizational structure, whether the RPA or the local Democratic Party. Among Butt’s RPA suitors in early 2014, there was some concern about how he would function as mayor, despite his forty years of experience managing a successful business. As one journalistic observer noted to me: “Tom, for all his pragmatism, is very intolerant of disagreement and other points of view. He’s a take-my-toys-and-go-home kind of guy if he doesn’t get his way.”
Because of his background, Butt was sympathetic to small business concerns and wary of labor union agendas. For example, in 2014 he parted company with RPA council members over their attempt to fast-track city approval of a minimum wage hike. Butt believed that more time was needed to solicit Richmond business owner opinion about the impact of the increase. By the time a final measure was adopted—providing incremental increases to thirteen dollars per hour by 2018—Butt and fellow councilor Jim Rogers had succeeded in carving out exceptions for several categories of local business. RPA councilors grudgingly went along with the changes.
When Butt met with McLaughlin about the mayor’s race, he expressed support for fellow Democrat Charles Ramsey, president of the West Contra Costa Unified School District Board. To Butt at the time, Ramsey seemed to have the best chance of beating Bates. He was a fifty-two-year-old African American attorney with close ties to contractors and building trades unions that valued his support for “project labor agreements” covering school construction and renovation. (These backers helped him quickly amass a $100,000 campaign treasury.) In the early stages of his mayoral campaign, Ramsey s
tressed that he, unlike McLaughlin, was a “consensus builder” who understood that “being adversarial and strident doesn’t necessarily move the agenda forward.”
Several months after the RPA’s failed effort to recruit him, I interviewed Butt. In the lounge of the Hotel Mac, a century-old Point Richmond landmark that he helped restore and reopen, Butt seemed weary of recent city hall feuding. He displayed little enthusiasm for serving as mayor, recalling a previous run for the job in 2001, when he placed second in a field of four. Now, he said, “it takes a lot of money to get elected, races are excruciating and punishing.” Those who win find themselves saddled with official duties that include “a lot of fluff stuff.”
Sounding a bit like Ramsey, Butt yearned for more sensible centrism on the Richmond council. “It’s really almost a shame that we don’t have any moderate, smart, capable people willing to run,” he told me. “Everybody out there is either on the progressive/socialist lunatic fringe or the Chevron, chamber of commerce, do-whatever-business-wants fringe.” He expressed admiration for the RPA’s field campaign and fund-raising capacity in the past. He was less bullish about how RPA standard-bearers, new and old, would fare in November 2014. “They’ve got a small bench,” he said.
COMING OFF THE BENCH
After approaching Butt and learning of his choice for mayor, the RPA interviewed Ramsey too. Not surprisingly, the school board president was rejected as an alternative to Bates because of his “closeness to developers, unwillingness to reject major corporate contributions, and his lack of support for progressive struggles in Richmond,” as Mike Parker later reported.14 Next, the RPA sounded out Richmond native Doria Robinson about running for mayor. Robinson’s work as director of Urban Tilth, Richmond’s network of thirteen school and community gardens, gave her high visibility and lots of favorable publicity.
