Refinery Town

by Steve Early

  ANYTHING LEFT ON THE TABLE?

  After listening to lots of testimony, pro and con, in hearings attended by hundreds of people, the Richmond Planning Commission erected a final speed bump before the city council’s vote on modernization. A predictably apoplectic Richmond Standard complained that its proposals would force Chevron to spend an additional $250 million over thirty-five years on community investments and replace all piping in the refinery installed prior to 1990.

  Other changes and improvements in the company’s plan were sought by California attorney general Kamala Harris and even the Contra Costa Times. Harris’s helpful intervention led to management acceptance of a tighter cap on Richmond refinery emissions. The Times recalled how poor pipe maintenance practices had led to the fire and explosion in 2012, calling into question management claims that safety-related amendments to the EIR were now unnecessary and burdensome. “When Chevron officials say, ‘trust us,’ they forget that we once did,” the newspaper editorialized.

  In response, Chevron tweaked its plan further and proposed to double its community investment to $60 million for the “good of the company and the community,” Chevron refinery manager Kory Judd explained. At a public hearing, Alex Smith, one of many Laborers Local 324 members pressing for a deal, praised these concessions for moving “labor, Chevron, and the community in the right direction.” Among those urging city acceptance now was Henry Clark, once Richmond’s leading community critic of Chevron. Clark was joined by the head of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District and the Richmond NAACP.22

  Yet by Tuesday night, July 29, Chevron management was still facing pressure to sweeten the pot. After negotiations with city councilors Tom Butt, Jim Rogers, and Jael Myrick, the company agreed to upgrade all carbon steel piping in the refinery’s crude unit and install more sensors and air monitors. It increased its proposed ten-year funding of the Environmental and Community Investment Agreement (ECIA) to $90 million. More than one-third of that sum would be allocated to a scholarship program benefiting college-bound Richmond high school seniors. As Butt reported, the rest “will fund greenhouse gas reduction and sustainability projects in Richmond, creating a lot of jobs and attracting perhaps additional millions in matching grants. Job training will move hundreds of Richmond residents into employment.”

  Before the city council’s vote, Congressman Miller personally lobbied its members on Chevron’s behalf. (“First time George Miller called me in 30 years,” Butt reported in a Facebook post.)23 Judd continued to complain about modernization plan alterations that imposed “significant constraints on our operations” but acknowledged in the Contra Costa Times that it had “[become] clear that we would need to do this.”

  Butt thanked all those “holding out for more stringent conditions and mitigations” because that “helped raised the ante for what we eventually achieved.” Noting that RPA, CBE, and other groups wanted more, Butt himself wondered whether his negotiating team had left anything on the table. He argued on his E-Forum, “We will never really know. There is a limit that you can push anyone, even an insanely rich multinational corporation. Chevron has threatened before to sue the City for overreaching, close or downsize the refinery or go to the legislature for a CEQA [California Environmental Quality Act] exemption. All are possible.”

  From the RPA standpoint, the biggest item left on the table, or never making it there, was the demand that Chevron bail out Doctors Medical Center, the financially troubled public hospital in neighboring San Pablo. DMC operated the biggest emergency room in the Richmond area, handling most of the people who sought treatment after the 2012 Chevron fire. Without additional tax dollars from Contra Costa County or private financing, it faced downsizing or closure.

  Jennifer Hernandez, the consultant hired by Richmond to assess the EIR, backed Chevron’s claim that there was insufficient “legal nexus” between refinery safety and the fate of the DMC to require hospital funding as part of the community benefits agreement. Before the council voted on that, McLaughlin and Beckles tried to earmark nearly a third of the $90 million settlement for the hospital and held out for the Planning Commission’s more stringent modernization conditions. They got no other votes in favor of either stand, so they ended up abstaining when a council majority approved the terms, as negotiated.

  Beckles described the outcome for DMC as “horrible.” By April 2015 hundreds of members of the California Nurses Association and the National Union of Healthcare Workers were all laid off at the facility. A public hospital that had served 250,000 area residents was closed, leaving the poor and elderly of West Contra Costa County “struggling to find new ways to get care.”24

  FIVE

  AN ELECTION NOT FOR SALE

  IN 2014, SEVENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD Tom Butt became a late-in-the-game candidate for mayor against Nat Bates, his old council adversary. A Vietnam veteran, architect, avid environmentalist, and folk music lover, Butt is a native of Fayetteville, Arkansas, with a lingering hill-country drawl to prove it. During his forty years as a Richmond resident Butt had dealt with myriad issues arising from the working port, major highway, sewage treatment plant, Burlington Northern Santa Fe rail yard, and sprawling Chevron refinery that are all part of the sweeping non-bay view from his property. He and his wife, Shirley, have at times kept a mixed flock of sheep and goats grazing behind their house, on the steep hillside that also overlooks downtown Point Richmond. His annual “Refinery Town” barbecue and bluegrass party—attended by hundreds—is one of the liveliest open houses in the city.

  As a city council member for two decades, Butt had led the fight to preserve historic buildings in the city, including the East Brother Island Lighthouse, Richmond’s old Ford Motor Company assembly plant, and other buildings on or near the old Kaiser shipyard site. He had lobbied Congress to create the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park, where Betty Reid Soskin holds forth today. Butt’s tireless work promoting community choice aggregation, through Marin Clean Energy, has greatly expanded local utility user access to renewable energy, saving Richmond ratepayers $2 million since 2014. In his early years on the council, he was a lonely foe of Darrell Reese, the Richmond Fire Department influence peddler and city hall string puller.

  Butt helped hire Bill Lindsay, who restored competence to the city manager’s office and backed Chris Magnus as police chief. During McLaughlin’s two terms as mayor, Butt was often a key ally of hers and the two RPA councilors, Jeff Ritterman and Jovanka Beckles, whose first terms overlapped in 2010–12. When Corky Booze began his disruptive hectoring of Mayor McLaughlin and gay-baiting of Beckles, Butt defended both. And for many years he was one of Richmond’s leading critics of Chevron’s self-serving, overweening role in local politics and philanthropy.

  As the filing deadline for the 2014 mayoral race neared in late August, Butt began to have second thoughts about not running. Charles Ramsey had dropped out of the race over the summer, announcing his candidacy for city council instead. This narrowed the field to Parker, Bates, and political newcomer Uche Uwahemu. A Nigerian immigrant, lawyer, and business consultant, Uwahemu was not expected to be a major factor in the race because he lacked Parker’s grassroots campaign structure and the corporate funding, incumbency, and name recognition of Bates. Butt feared that Parker, despite his energetic campaigning, couldn’t beat Bates, even in the kind of three-way race that McLaughlin had won twice with a plurality of the vote.

  For Butt, the prospect of his old council adversary becoming mayor, undoing many years of work and putting Chevron’s already ubiquitous logo back on city hall, was more than he could bear. His eleventh-hour decision to join the race put Parker in a difficult spot, personally, politically, and financially. During his six months of increasingly successful canvassing, Parker had loaned money to his own campaign to cover some expenses, but if he withdrew he would not receive any public matching funds, despite raising enough in small donations to qualify. At a hurriedly convened meeting at the RPA office, Parker consulted with sixty
of his closest supporters. They expressed varying degrees of shock and resentment over Butt’s last-minute move. After a difficult discussion, a straw poll showed that a third of those present believed that Parker should remain in the race, despite the risk of splitting the left-liberal vote to the benefit of Bates. Two-thirds agreed with Parker that he should withdraw in Butt’s favor to avoid the appearance of being a spoiler, which might jeopardize the rest of Team Richmond, as the RPA called its four-member slate.

  Before dropping out, Parker conferred with Butt to secure his commitment to campaign coordination, cross-endorsement of McLaughlin, Beckles, and Eduardo Martinez, and what he hoped would be future cooperation with them on the council. In his withdrawal statement, Parker pledged “to work very hard to continue the progress we have made in Richmond” by electing candidates “who represent a different kind of politics, based on organized people-power—not on corporate power.” He also reminded some in his own camp, who were wary and resentful of Butt, about the overriding “need to challenge Chevron-backed candidates and those unwilling to stand up against Chevron when representing the community.”

  Butt graciously praised Parker’s decision to bow out. Echoing a favorite RPA campaign theme in 2014, he declared that “Richmond is better off in every way—safer, cleaner, healthier, quieter, and greener. . . . We need to keep up this drive for excellence.” He also bemoaned the fact that Richmond’s “huge process” of civic improvement was now “in danger of being undermined by contention between the extremes, both on the council and in the community.” Butt’s attempt to plant himself in the moderate middle may have been helpful to his own campaign. But his political framing was neither accurate nor particularly supportive of the RPA. Its candidates had made their own substantial contributions to Richmond’s progress, in addition to supporting him. Yet they were about to be tarred by Chevron as extremists of the most dangerous and contentious sort.

  Within days of Butt joining the race, Chevron began a new wave of campaign spending. Most of it sluiced through Moving Forward—the Chevron-backed political action committee it labeled a “Coalition of Labor Unions, Small Businesses, Public Safety and Firefighters Associations.” A smaller amount was spent in the name of Richmond Working Families for Jobs, which received all of its funding from Moving Forward. Overall, Big Oil put $3.1 million to work in its campaign against RPA candidates and for their main opponents, according to Moving Forward’s post-election filings.

  The most noticeable change in our local scenery was the addition of the benign visage of Nat Bates gazing down from countless billboards, like the ever-present Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. Bates’s advertising popped up on the Internet, on local TV and radio stations, and in newspapers. Richmond voters got e-mails with links to YouTube videos featuring his homilies. Bates’s glossy campaign literature showcased his traditional base by listing more than fifty local ministers as supporters, along with Senator Dianne Feinstein, former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, Contra Costa County building trades leaders, Richmond police and firefighters’ unions, and the chamber of commerce. An impressive number of Richmond residents displayed “Bates for Mayor” signs on their lawn.

  The negative advertising and direct-mail blitz targeting Team Richmond, which included McLaughlin, Beckles, and Eduardo Martinez, never cited any actual policy disagreements with Chevron, such as the RPA attempt to impose more costly conditions on its refinery modernization plan. Instead Moving Forward fingered McLaughlin as the ringleader of an “extreme left-wing group.” According to Big Oil’s hit pieces, the Green mayor had for the previous eight years paid little attention to fixing potholes, creating jobs, or improving public housing. Why? Because she was always too busy promoting radical causes irrelevant to Richmond residents.

  In Washington, DC, McLaughlin had lobbied to free five Cubans convicted of espionage in 2001. (The Obama administration eventually released them as a part of its bid to improve Cuban-American relations.) She had conferred, at Ecuadoran government expense, with an elected South American president now described by Moving Forward as “anti-American” and an “accused dictator.” On this slim basis, Chevron-funded TV and radio spots, mailings, and billboards depicted the mayor as perpetually MIA. Each prominently displayed billboard included an unflattering picture of her and the accompanying message “IF YOU SEE GAYLE MCLAUGHLIN, TELL HER TO CALL RICHMOND.”

  This multimedia flaying of McLaughlin for alleged absenteeism left an impression on some residents. Leaving the RPA office one afternoon, I encountered a Richmond teenager who had just parked his bicycle on the sidewalk so he could more closely inspect Team Richmond posters in the window. He was staring at a familiar face beaming down at him from one of them when the light of recognition went on. “That’s the lady who’s always away!” he said, pointing at McLaughlin and then wheeling away on his bike before I could offer the briefest of rebuttals.

  Two enterprising young journalism students from the Richmond Confidential did help set the record straight. They documented that between 2010 and 2014, McLaughlin had in fact “traveled less, missed fewer meetings, and spent less money on trips” than city councilor Nat Bates. His expenditure of city funds for forty-three days’ worth of trips amounted to more than three times McLaughlin’s city-paid travel. Bates had the worst council meeting attendance of any incumbent, missing eleven meetings, more than twice as many as any other member. (McLaughlin had missed one.) When questioned about this disparity, Bates explained that “you can’t accomplish things staying at home and not engaging with the global community.” A spokeswoman for Moving Forward, Alex Doniach, denied that its rendition of McLaughlin’s record was flawed in any way. “We put out 100 percent accurate information about the candidates in order to provide voters with facts,” she said.1

  Multiple Moving Forward mailers claimed that Jovanka Beckles had the travel bug too. In her day job, Beckles may have been a dedicated child protection specialist for the county, earning a base salary of $65,000 a year. But according to Moving Forward, she was actually a big feeder at the public trough who mimicked “the lifestyle of the rich and shameless” on her out-of-town trips. Chevron’s “100 percent accurate information” on this topic—gleaned from Beckles’s own expense reports—dwelt heavily on several dinner menu selections, including a lamb chop ordered in a convention hotel restaurant. In Moving Forward literature, Beckles was thus simultaneously blasted as a threat to the city treasury whether she stayed home to advance the RPA agenda or left town and ate a meal. Either way, we were told, she was just too radical for Richmond.

  In mailer after mailer, Moving Forward also informed voters that it was Beckles, not her harassers, who started “arguments and fights at the city council.” The Chevron-funded Black American Political Action Committee made this same claim in a widely distributed door hanger accusing her of the same “abrasive, abusive, and combative behavior she blames on her colleagues and the public.” BAPAC, of course, called for the reelection of Beckles’s always well-behaved colleagues, Bates and Booze.

  In 2014, the most memorable hit pieces were reserved for Eduardo Martinez. They illustrated the creative synergy between multiple forms of negative advertising employed by Whitehurst/Mosher, at Chevron expense, to defeat the RPA. Attack ads work, explains psychologist Drew Weston, because “our brains are highly reactive to threat—especially when, as in an ad, the threat isn’t immediately countered or refuted. . . . [T]here’s nothing like a sinister portrayal of a greedy, self-centered villain, replete with grainy images and menacing music, to stir up our unconscious minds.”2

  In real life, Martinez is no such villainous character. He’s a sixty-five-year-old retired elementary school teacher who belongs to Richmond’s Mexican American Political Association. He’s silver-haired, soft-spoken, neatly dressed, and sports a distinguished-looking goatee. For years he has devoted himself to worthwhile local causes, like helping to organize “March 4 Education,” a ninety-mile protest procession from Richmond to Sacramento, held in
2004, to seek more public school funding. On the Richmond Planning Commission, Martinez voted to impose additional air-quality and safety requirements on Chevron in return for city approval of its long-delayed $1 billion refinery modernization plan.

  In 2012, backed by the RPA, he received eleven thousand votes for city council, which then lacked a single Latino community representative; Martinez was first runner-up after the three winners in that race. Two years later, to neutralize his growing name recognition, Moving Forward manufactured the candidacy of Al Martinez, a former Richmond police officer and postmaster. Since ballot confusion alone might not be sufficient to keep Eduardo off the council again, Chevron spent heavily on messaging that distinguished “the good Martinez” from his RPA namesake. The latter, we learned, was not really a community-minded liberal Democrat but actually a dangerous “anarchist.”

  This warning first took the form of a lurid four-color mailer with Black Bloc demonstrators pictured on the cover, wearing dark masks and brandishing shields on behalf of the 99 percent in Oakland in 2011. Inside, Eduardo was identified as an “Occupy Oakland member, who believes that anarchy is the highest form of government.” In a brochure arriving several days later, Moving Forward claimed that, after enlisting in Occupy, Martinez had urged others to join the group, “which has been blamed for violent protests that cost Oakland more than $5 million, hurt local business, and drove away new business.”

  Just as these glossy warnings arrived in the mail, our home phone started ringing. It was Research America, a Sacramento-based pollster, calling to discuss local politics. Who was paying for this opinion survey, I asked. Oh, we can’t disclose that, my would-be interviewer said, but you can talk to my supervisor. Her supervisor didn’t know or wouldn’t say who was behind the call either, disclosing only that Research America had been retained by EMC Research, a firm based in Oakland, which was acting on behalf of some third party whose identity could not be revealed in order to “maintain as much impartiality as possible in the polling.”