Refinery Town

by Steve Early

  I objected to this policy of client anonymity but asked the supervisor to put her subordinate back on the line. “Okay,” I said, “what do you want to know?” Actually she had some things that Research America or EMC wanted me to know first. Was I aware that Eduardo Martinez and Gayle McLaughlin were part of “an extreme left-wing group called the Richmond Progressive Alliance”? “It’s a group of radicals out of touch with Richmond voters,” I was told.

  My Research America interlocutor gamely plowed through the rest of her survey script, reading and then asking my reaction to a long series of questions or statements, almost all of which distorted the political views, personal behavior, or public record of Martinez, McLaughlin, and Beckles.

  Eager to confirm the identity of those polling with such “impartiality,” I called and e-mailed Research America in Sacramento, EMC Research in Oakland, Chevron in Richmond, Moving Forward in San Rafael, and Whitehurst/Mosher in San Francisco, the “campaign consultant” listed on Moving Forward’s initial financial disclosure forms. On its website, Whitehurst/Mosher cited Richmond city council races as a prime example of the firm’s “expertise and experience in managing specialized, highly complex . . . independent expenditure campaigns.”

  Neither Research America nor EMC were listed yet by Moving Forward as additional “payees” for campaign services rendered. Only EMC responded in any form to my requests for information about how much they were being paid or who they worked for. Reached by phone, EMC president and founder Alex Evans told me that he has been a pollster since 1984 but would neither confirm nor deny that Chevron (Moving Forward) was currently his client. A Richmond city councilor in the late 1990s, Evans also wouldn’t acknowledge any past work for the oil company, before, during, or after his council service. “We have no disclosure obligations, no professional obligation to disclose unless directed by our client,” he said.

  Just a few months before this informative conversation, Evans published an article in Richmond Today, the Chevron newsletter for refinery neighbors. In it he touted the results of polling that demonstrated widespread community support for refinery modernization. Evans was identified as a pollster who “works for Chevron and other businesses and political candidates in Richmond.”3

  As Evans correctly noted, however, there is no state-mandated disclosure of who is financing phone polling, no matter how misleading and propagandistic it may be. In California, corporations or unions bankrolling “independent expenditure” committees, like Chevron’s Moving Forward, have to put their names on the direct mail brochures they send out to sway the electorate, and they must report their funding to the Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC). But their hired public opinion surveyors are free to engage in push polling with complete funder anonymity—unless or until these vendors’ names happen to show up in the sponsoring committee’s later disclosures to the FPPC.

  As registered Democrats under attack by a corporate behemoth, both Martinez and Beckles tried to get endorsed by the West Contra Costa County Democrats. When this political club met, Martinez argued that Chevron’s massive display of post–Citizens United political spending represented a threat not just to Richmond progressives but candidates anywhere who might be critical of Big Oil. Martinez suggested that his personal refusal to accept business donations made him particularly worthy of a West County Democrats endorsement. When a vote was taken, neither RPA candidate received the two-thirds margin majority necessary for the party endorsement. Even Tom Butt, a lifelong Democrat himself and less controversial than the two RPA activists, couldn’t win the backing of the West County Democrats or the Contra Costa Democratic Party, according to his miffed campaign manager, Alex Knox.

  Meanwhile, the other Martinez—Al—had little need for money or more organizational endorsements. Almost all the costs of his first run for office were covered by Moving Forward, which never coordinated with his own barely visible campaign apparatus. Al’s anointment by Moving Forward gave him the ready-made backing of Richmond’s two public safety unions, the building trades, and the city’s largest employer. Thanks to Chevron’s “independent” packaging and promotion, a candidate otherwise starting out with a very low profile gained high visibility, virtually overnight.

  On my way home from an Eduardo Martinez fund-raiser, I encountered a canvasser for Moving Forward, part of the paid crews deployed in neighborhoods throughout the city. She was a young Latina trudging up and down our street with door hangers demonizing a candidate with an obviously Hispanic name and appearance. She could easily have been one of Eduardo’s former elementary school students. When I gently questioned her about how the campaign was going, she seemed embarrassed by her role. “I just need the work,” she said with a resigned shrug. Then off she went to warn other neighbors about Occupy Oakland’s Manchurian candidate for Richmond city council.

  FEELING THE BERN

  By mid-October 2014, the main issue had become Chevron’s increasingly blatant attempt to buy the election. Adding to the national press this was attracting, a not-yet-announced candidate for president came barnstorming into town. Bernie Sanders, the independent US senator and socialist from Vermont, was invited to Richmond by Mayor McLaughlin and Mike Parker. Sanders’s solid record of accomplishment as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, had paved the way for his later career as an eight-term US congressman, twice-elected senator, and, not long after his Richmond visit, contender for the White House.

  In Burlington’s city hall, Sanders was initially dismissed, like McLaughlin locally, as a fluke, but he proceeded to confound all critics. Under his administration, Vermont’s largest city backed worker co-ops, affordable housing, new cultural and youth programs, and development of the city’s Lake Champlain waterfront in a way that preserved public access and use. Like other left-leaning mayors in the 1980s (and Richmond two decades later), Sanders saw “no magic line separating local, state, national, and international issues.” As mayor, he protested Reagan administration tax cuts and military spending that left Burlington and other US cities without desperately needed funding for affordable housing and economic development.4 His success in municipal government and support for like-minded city council members helped foster the Vermont Progressive Party, the nation’s most successful and effective third party.5

  In Richmond, Sanders helped the RPA raise thousands of dollars for its council candidates and organizational expenses. After a storefront reception with local donors, he spoke to a cheering crowd of five hundred in our municipal auditorium a few blocks away. He was introduced there by McLaughlin, Beckles, and Martinez, plus Tom Butt, who praised Sanders’s record as a leading senatorial defender of veterans’ health care. Gripping the lectern with both hands, slightly hunched over it, his crown of white hair not yet carefully groomed for prime time, Sanders launched into an hour-long speech that is now familiar to hundreds of thousands of people around the country. He began by recounting business-backed efforts to thwart progressive reform in Burlington. To succeed in the 1980s, his administration had been forced to “take on the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the utilities, the restaurant industry, the entire chamber of commerce, and other big money interests,” he said.

  Expanded citizen participation was the key to winning. “We doubled voter turnout,” Sanders reported. “Low-income people and working-class people came out in huge numbers, demonstrating that if you’re willing to stand up to the powers that be and keep your word, people will stand with you.” He denounced corporate domination of US politics today and accused Chevron of trying to teach Richmond a lesson about “who owns this community, who controls this community.” Sanders proclaimed our city to be ground zero in the struggle against Citizens United, which he called “one of the worst decisions ever made by the Supreme Court in American history.” In its wake, he said, “you’re seeing right here, in this small city, unlimited sums of money from one of the biggest corporations in America, who says, ‘How dare you ordinary people—working-class people, people of color, young pe
ople—how dare you think you have the right to run your city government.’

  “If Chevron can roll over you, they and their buddies will roll over every community in America,” he predicted. “If you stand up and beat them with all their money, you’re going to give hope to people all over America that we can control our destinies.” Amid a standing ovation and thunderous chants of “Run, Bernie, Run,” Sanders expressed confidence that Richmond progressives would prevail “if we do our job and knock on doors and talk to our neighbors.”

  RPA candidates were already relying on just that kind of ground game, ten years in the making, to offset Big Oil’s air war. Door-to-door canvassing by RPA volunteers got underway six months before Richmond was deluged with robocalls, push-polling, paid canvassing, and near daily mass mailings. Most mainstream political campaigns use canvassers to identify already convinced and likely voters who can be contacted again later with reminders to vote. The RPA, according to Mike Parker, “urged canvassers to take the time to talk to voters, providing information and having discussions that would go well beyond any script.” As a result, he believes, “voters could easily tell the difference between our canvassers and those working for the Chevron candidates.”6

  The RPA’s voter registration, identification, and later get-out-the-vote drive used four hundred volunteers who contributed an estimated twenty thousand hours of their time. Some just did phone banking. Others hosted house parties, made videos, maintained databases, and held signs or banners at events. In its voter outreach, the RPA stressed more strongly than ever that electing individual candidates was not good enough. Richmond needed a city council majority committed to working together and implementing a common program that would keep the city on its current positive path.

  RPA campaign strategists debated the merits of going negative, too. The RPA’s overall media budget was minuscule compared to Moving Forward’s. So stressing the positive record of Team Richmond and stoking voter discontent over Chevron’s election role remained a higher priority than debunking their business-backed opponents. Both the Richmond Sun, an eight-page RPA campaign newspaper, and La Voz, a bilingual paper for Spanish speakers, edited by Juan Reardon, did inform voters about the council voting record of Bates, Booze, and Jim Rogers (who opposed Richmond Cares and stronger minimum wage reform). The volunteer staff of La Voz printed and distributed twelve thousand copies of each issue. One pre-election edition stressed the “heavy responsibility” of eligible voters with Hispanic roots. “They will need to vote on behalf of the entire community because only one in three adult Latinos is registered to vote,” noted Reardon. “Most cannot register because they are not citizens.”

  Before the 2014 campaign was over, Team Richmond and its allies were aided by some independent spending far smaller than Moving Forward’s. This financial and organizational help came from Richmond Working Families, a coalition created, its organizers said, to help “stand up against the corporate money flowing freely into our election.” Working Families was bankrolled by SEIU Local 1021 and the California Nurses Association. Each union had already maxed out with $2,500 contributions to individual Richmond candidates.7 Other Working Families sponsors included the political action arms of two community organizing groups often allied with the RPA—the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) and the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN).

  According to Local 1021 staffer Millie Cleveland, also a leader of the RPA, Working Families canvassers knocked on ten thousand doors and called five thousand voters. They reached 1,900 people, identifying 1,222 as supporters of the five-member team they also branded, in a single mass mailing, Team Richmond. Working Families affiliates were not bound by any RPA-like rules about not backing candidates who accept business donations. So Butt and twenty-nine-year-old Jael Myrick, an African American Democrat serving on the council as an appointee, became part of their preferred ticket to “keep Richmond moving forward.”

  On the campaign trail, as exhausted candidates dragged themselves from one neighborhood forum to another, the differences between those responsible in some way for Richmond’s renaissance and those denying its existence became more apparent. Nat Bates repeatedly stressed that his post-election priority as mayor would be to make things right with Chevron. As he told Rachel Maddow in one pre-election interview, “The first thing I will do is sit down with the CEO of Chevron and see what Chevron wants.”

  In contrast, Butt questioned the mind-set of politicians like Bates, whose first priority is always “to take care of Chevron and developers and the industrial community.” This approach, he told Chronicle columnist Chip Johnson, was “Richmond’s version of the trickle-down theory.” He criticized Bates for his past lack of interest in keeping Richmond’s shoreline accessible to the public, citing his opponent’s memorable, almost Reaganesque claim that “Richmond has too many parks.”

  Friends of Bates in BAPAC, the Richmond Business PAC, and Black Men and Women (BMW) added their own hit pieces to Moving Forward’s mounting pile. One of BAPAC’s mailers race-baited the RPA just as Bates had done in the past when he accused white progressives in Richmond of collectively acting like “a slave master.” BAPAC urged voter rejection of Team Richmond, plus Butt and Myrick, because all were part of a “Richmond Plantation Alliance” hostile to people of color. Oddly enough, BAPAC’s own head shots revealed that three of these candidates were people of color. BAPAC’s preferred ticket included only “independent thinkers”—candidates like Bates, Booze, and Al (not to be confused with Eduardo) Martinez.

  The bad blood between Butt and BMW (which Bates helped found) had a long history. As Butt informed his E-Forum readers, Bates hosts “an annual golf tournament to replenish the BMW war chest. The donors are a rogue’s gallery of city contractors, developers, industries, city fire and police unions, and, of course, Chevron.” In the 2014 election cycle, one of BMW’s biggest financial contributors was Veolia, the private contractor in charge of Richmond’s sewage system and wastewater plant. Veolia’s $7,500 donation was redistributed, along with others like it, to Bates, Booze, Al Martinez, and Donna Powers, a former city council member backed by Moving Forward.

  BMW’s pièce de résistance against Butt was a glossy brochure with a coiled snake on the cover. In big black letters it said: “Beware of this Arkansas Rattlesnake!” BMW urged all “good and decent Richmond voters, especially the African American, Latino, and Asian communities,” to reject the menacing reptile in question (aka the Arkansas-born Butt). Pre-election website postings by BAPAC similarly implied that Butt was a white racist, indifferent to poor people, and caring only about himself and “his elitist, wealthy friends.” That accusation seemed a bit incongruous coming from well-financed local allies of John Watson, the white, Richmond-born CEO of Chevron.

  In 2013 Watson’s total compensation of $23 million suggested that his own social circle, out in wealthy San Ramon, where Chevron is headquartered, might be more elitist than Butt’s friends in Point Richmond. By this point in his mayoral campaign, Butt had raised just $60,000 in relatively small individual donations. Even with an additional $25,000 in public matching money, his total campaign budget equaled one-thirtieth of what Chevron was spending on its favored candidates, including Bates.

  At candidate nights, voter forums, and debates, Corky Booze rambled, ranted, and showboated his way to the campaign finish line. Before some audiences, Booze could still draw a few laughs. Outside his hard-core fan base, Corky’s steady stream of Trump-like personal jibes proved less entertaining over time. He took every opportunity to bash Point Richmond, Butt’s neighborhood, which he claimed wielded undue influence in city politics while “my people in other neighborhoods barely have any voice.” Left unmentioned was the fact that Nat Bates, his council ally and preferred mayoral candidate, lived in Point Richmond too—in an upscale condo development facing San Francisco Bay.

  Although several pro-Booze mailers were funded by the National Association of Realtors Fund, an industry PAC bas
ed in Chicago, Corky tried to position himself as the city’s only true defender of public housing tenants (whose conditions in a project called the Hacienda were indeed not a credit to Richmond or the US Department of Housing and Urban Development). The realtors backed Booze because he opposed Richmond’s anti-foreclosure initiative.

  Booze’s opponent for a two-year council seat was twenty-eight-year-old Jael Myrick, who had joined the council, as an appointee, after losing his first election bid, in 2012. Myrick became part of the council negotiations that produced Richmond Promise, the Chevron-funded scholarship program for graduates of Kennedy High, his alma mater, and other area schools. He worked as a field rep for state assembly member Nancy Skinner, a leading liberal Democrat in the East Bay, and he credited the RPA with doing a “good job moving the political center to the left in Richmond.”8

  In his campaign, Myrick was equally willing to accept donations from the business community and RPA turnout help against Booze. While voting regularly with the council’s left-liberal majority, he found the RPA’s approach to be “too confrontational, too ideologically driven” for someone who was just a “kid from Richmond,” more focused on the day-to-day concerns of his friends and neighbors. As election day neared, one good sign for Myrick was a last-minute mailing from Booze assuring everyone that he wasn’t homophobic. As proof of this claim, he displayed a picture of himself arm-in-arm with his ex-wife, who now has a female partner.

  As media scrutiny of Moving Forward’s role in the election increased, not all of its anointed candidates fared well in the spotlight. Two of the three—Donna Power and Charles Ramsey—had to move to Richmond shortly before their campaigns began to be eligible to run. Power and Ramsey had at least both been elected to something before. Power had served on the city council in the 1990s before moving away from Richmond for fifteen years after marrying a Chevron consultant whom she later divorced. Ramsey had served on the Contra Costa County School Board for twenty years and practiced law in the East Bay, where his father was a prominent state court judge, law professor, and former Berkeley city council member.