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Mill Valley City Council Clashes With Equity Task Force

Nikki Silverstein

Feb 24, 2021

Mill Valley City Council Clashes With Equity Task Force

A brouhaha has erupted over the Mill Valley diversity, equity and inclusion staff report released last week at a city council meeting. Critics describe it as a public relations piece with no substance.

The staff report, presented by City Manager Alan Piombo, includes a work plan based on 30 recommendations made by the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Task Force. The purpose of the staff report’s work plan is to show how the city will implement some of the DEI Task Force recommendations.

During his presentation, Piombo said diversity, equity and inclusion are the city council’s No. 1 priority this year. Despite this assertion, the DEI Task Force maintains city government will not achieve racial equity with the staff report’s work plan, because it ignored the recommendations and road map laid out in a DEI Task Force report published on Dec. 7.

The now-disbanded, 22-person task force served as an advisory committee to the city council on racial equity issues. The task force’s 93-page DEI report offers specific recommendations for systemic change within the city government.

Since the DEI report came out, scores of residents and task force members have asked the city council to approve the two foundational recommendations: create a permanent DEI commission, and hire an experienced facilitator to lead the development of a comprehensive and strategic racial equity plan for city government.

Ultimately, the staff report declined to endorse either of the top recommendations made by the task force. The city council concurred.

According to task force member Tammy Edmonson, a retired attorney, the staff report and its work plan are flawed.

“The staff report tried to interpret the task force recommendations and then rejected all of them but one,” Edmonson said. “The one action item they committed to is another staff report in 60 days on the policing recommendations.”

“The rest of the staff report is not an action plan or a work plan,” Edmonson continues. “There are no objectives, no timelines, no commitment, no responsible parties. Essentially there is no plan.”

City Manager Alan Piombo acknowledges that the action item for police-related recommendations calls for an additional staff report; however, he disputes Edmonson’s assessment of the rest of the work plan.

“For the remaining items, the City will focus on efforts that are appropriately scaled and within City jurisdiction, such as affordable housing, human resources, recreation and library,” Piombo said in an email. “As many of these items needed additional direction, research and consideration, timelines are still being determined.”

This isn’t the only disagreement between the city and the task force. The relationship has been contentious since December. Perhaps it’s not surprising, considering the city’s newfound commitment to DEI only developed because the mayor made an insensitive comment last summer.

During the public comment portion of the city council meeting on June 1, a week after George Floyd’s death, a resident submitted an email asking what Mill Valley was doing to show that Black Lives Matter.

“It is our council policy that we do not take action on issues that are not of immediate local importance,” Mayor Sashi McEntee responded.

Protests and petitions followed, as did an apology from McEntee. The city council then made the decision in June to appoint a DEI Task Force and hire a facilitator to lead the group.

Although the facilitator helped the task force get organized, members were disappointed she was not specifically a DEI facilitator.

Nevertheless, the task force tackled the equity issue in Mill Valley, noting 87 percent of the city is white and Marin County is the most racially segregated county in the Bay Area. After months working in small groups, they compiled their determinations into the DEI report.

Based on the facilitator’s advice, the task force operated on its own; no city council members worked with the task force on its research or recommendations. This likely exacerbated the problems brewing between the task force and the city council.

When presenting the DEI report at the city council’s December meeting, the task force expected to have a dialogue with the council members about their recommendations. However, they claim their microphones were cut off after their presentation.

“We were never allowed an opportunity to have a conversation, publicly or privately, with the city council about the report,” chairperson Naima Dean said.

Though the task force worked for two months on their report and recommendations, McEntee says no discussion was ever promised.

“Staff prepared the Task Force to expect that the Council may ask questions but would not have a dialogue during the Council meeting, as is typical for all reports from all advisory committees,” McEntee said in an email.

Task force members then surmised the city council was not taking their recommendations seriously. They say the city council ignored their requests for direction after the report was submitted and delayed putting the DEI recommendations on the agenda for a future city council meeting.

To air their concerns, the task force communicated with the media and Mill Valley residents. On Jan. 12, the Marin Independent Journal printed a story about the city council’s “foot dragging.” Residents flooded the city council’s Zoom meetings, demanding they adopt the two primary recommendations in the DEI report.

After the conflict became public, task force members were invited to a meeting on Jan. 20 with the city’s DEI working group, which includes McEntee, city councilmember Tricia Ossa and Piombo. Believing they were finally going to discuss the DEI report, the task force prepared for the meeting.

Instead, the meeting was turned over to the city’s outside counsel, who lectured them on the Brown Act, state legislation which ensures local government transparency by requiring that most business be conducted in public meetings. Members of the task force say the attorney raised his voice, declared they were in violation of the Brown Act and threatened criminal penalties to intimidate them. The mayor’s recollection is different.

“There were several interruptions and crosstalk by DEI Task Force members, and one member asked Attorney Lim to ‘get to the point,’” McEntee said in an email. “Attorney Lim quickly read to them the remaining language from the Brown Act that he was in the process of reading before he was interrupted.”

Either way, the task force, which has three lawyers among its members, concluded that as an ad hoc advisory committee, they were exempt from the Brown Act.

Despite the clashes, the city will continue with its work plan, which disregards the two primary recommendations proposed by the task force.

The task force believes the city has treated them in a condescending and disrespectful manner. Still, they’ll continue their mission for diversity, equity and inclusion in Mill Valley.

“This is our pivot moment,” Dean said. “The city government failed, but we’re going to build good community anyway. Maybe they’ll join us.”

Park Service Pushes Back on ‘Apocalypse Cow’

Pacific Sun Staff

Feb 17, 2021

Park Service Pushes Back on ‘Apocalypse Cow’

The Point Reyes National Seashore (PRNS) responded last week to an investigative report published in the North Bay Bohemian and Pacific Sun in early December.

On Tuesday, Feb. 9, PRNS staff sent out an email newsletter titled “Corrections to Media Coverage on the General Management Plan Amendment” to an unknown number of recipients. The agency posted the same text to a Frequently Asked Questions page of its website under the subtitle “Corrections regarding misinformation published in the press.”

The newsletter presents itself as an effort to correct alleged “factual inaccuracies” in “Apocalypse Cow: The Future of Life at Point Reyes National Park,” an investigative article by Peter Byrne published in the Pacific Sun on Dec. 9, 2020. However, PRNS management’s statements about the facts presented in the article are demonstrably inaccurate.

Two month’s prior to the seashore park’s posting of these public facing messages, on Dec.15, PRNS’s Melanie Gunn emailed the Pacific Sun’s editors contesting the accuracy of several facts as reported in “Apocalypse Cow.”

The editors reviewed Gunn’s allegations and decided that the article was accurate. In a Dec. 21 email, news editor Will Carruthers informed Gunn that the article was factually correct and offered to participate in an electronic meeting with Gunn and Byrne to discuss the documentation of the facts.

Gunn did not respond to the Pacific Sun’s offer. Instead, almost two months later, NPS officials published a revised version of Gunn’s original allegations in the newsletter and on its website without first contacting the Pacific Sun for a response.

In an email to Gunn and the Seashore’s new superintendent, Craig Kenkel, last week, Byrne requested that the federal agency remove the inaccurate information from its website and send a retraction to the newsletter email list. Byrne sent the park officials and their bosses at the U.S. Department of Interior a factually detailed rebuttal of the allegations. So far, the agency has not issued a retraction, nor has it removed the offensive information from the website.

The PRNS’s campaign to push back on Byrne’s reporting comes weeks after Kenkel was appointed by the outgoing Trump administration as superintendent of the Point Reyes National Seashore. In his prior position, Kenkel served as superintendent of Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio, a national park which offers leases to farmers.

In a December interview with the Point Reyes Light, Kenkel was open to extending 20-year leases to cattle ranchers using the PRNS, stating that there is “a long history of ranching at Point Reyes” which is “worth preserving.”

Below we respond to a few of the Park Service’s allegations about our reporting. A full rebuttal to the allegations is available here.

Park or Seashore?

The PRNS’s first allegation is that the article’s headline is “wrong.”

“The park name is Point Reyes National Seashore not Point Reyes National Park,” the Feb. 9 newsletter complains.

Whether or not the use of “Seashore” or “Park” meaningfully changed any readers’ understanding of the issues covered in the article, Gunn’s first allegation is undercut by the Park Service’s own publications.

The PRNS website features a subhead reading “Learn About the Park” and other references flagging the National Seashore as a “park.”

The NPS also uses “park” to refer to the PRNS in a standard lease issued to ranchers by the PRNS which defines the “Park” as “all lands, waters and structures within the legislative boundaries of or within areas administered by Point Reyes National Seashore…”

Despite using “park” in the headline, Apocalypse Cow repeatedly referred to the park by its more formal appellation — Point Reyes National Seashore — throughout the story.

Protected Species

The PRNS’ Feb. 9 newsletter alleges that the article inaccurately identified Tule Elk as a threatened or endangered species, which are legal terms. The article did not use those terms. It correctly identified tule elk as a “federally protected species,” which is a true statement supported by the Park Service’s written policy.

The elk have long received federal protections inside the park, leading to the Pacific Sun’s choice to refer to them as “federally protected.” For example, the Park Service’s’ 1998 “Tule Elk Management Plan” repeatedly refers to the elk as “protected”:

The NPS has an agreement with California binding it to “Protect and preserve the tule elk population at Tomales Point consistent with NPS policies.”
“Tule elk are a distinct subspecies of elk endemic to California that was given special protective emphasis by State and Federal agencies (Phillips 1976), although it is not a state or federally listed threatened or endangered species.”

Unfortunately, in accusing the Pacific Sun of factual inaccuracy, the Park Service has resorted to issuing false statements about a critical story. For more details documenting the Park Service’s errors, please see the Pacific Sun’s full response.

Sausalito Threatens to Move Downtown Homeless Encampment

Nikki Silverstein

Feb 16, 2021

Sausalito Threatens to Move Downtown Homeless Encampment

The Sausalito City Council has been busy during the last two weeks. At a special meeting on Friday, Feb. 5, the council voted 4-1 to relocate the homeless encampment from its visible location near Dunphy Park to the less noticeable area of Marinship Park.

Showing no mercy, the resolution also banned daytime camping. The residents must break camp 30 minutes after sunrise and cannot set up their tents again until 30 minutes before sunset. The city placed storage lockers at Marinship Park for their belongings during the day—unfortunately, the lockers are exposed to the elements. In addition, the ground at Marinship Park is soggy after a rain, making it even more difficult.

An 82-year-old Army veteran resides in the encampment next to Dunphy Park. A woman needing hip and knee surgery also lives there. Another camper suffers from arthritis. Pitching and striking their tents daily won’t be easy.

Shall the campers sit out in the rain and cold during the next storm? The Sausalito Public Library is still closed. Most of them can’t afford to buy food or beverages all day while they wait out the inclement weather in a coffee shop.

And let’s not forget the pandemic. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), encampments should “remain where they are,” to prevent infectious disease spread.

Never mind those pesky concerns. Last week, the city served the encampment with an eviction notice instructing campers to move to Marinship Park on Tuesday, Feb. 16.

In response, the campers engaged attorney Anthony Prince of the California Homeless Union. Prince emailed the Sausalito City Council last week of his intention to file in federal district court for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to stop the displacement of the encampment. In an interview, Prince said he expected to file legal paperwork on Tuesday, Feb. 16, days after a disappointing conversation with a lawyer the city hired to defend itself.

“We tried to negotiate a suspension of the ordinance pending discussion. The city rejected that,” Prince said.

The outcome of Prince’s injunction request was unclear at the time of the Pacific Sun’s Tuesday print deadline; however, Sausalito Police Chief John Rohrbacher visited the camp on Tuesday morning and announced he would return in a few hours to remove the residents.

A federal judge recently granted an injunction for a similar situation in Santa Cruz, citing the Covid-19 pandemic. It prevented the city manager from following through with his order to close an encampment of almost 200 people.

Even with the threat of legal action and the success of the Santa Cruz case, the city of Sausalito persists with its uncompassionate plan to shut down the camp beside Dunphy Park and ban daytime camping citywide.

In serving the eviction notice, the council behaved in a shortsighted manner to appease the NIMBYs complaining about the downtown encampment.

The NIMBYs have a great presence on the social media site Nextdoor, with hundreds of comments denigrating the Sausalito encampment and its occupants. One mean-spirited poster discouraged providing support to the campers: “For every person that’s helped, two more will arrive.”

It appears the NIMBYs are organizing. I was recently invited to join a Nextdoor group called “Sausalito residents against tent encampment at Dunphy park (and elsewhere).” Their mission is to continue pressuring the city to dismantle the tent encampment and put measures in place to prevent other encampments.

The group may be unaware the city is restricted by a recent legal decision. In Martin v. Boise, the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit affirmed that people cannot be punished for sleeping outside on public property when a city is unable to offer them a suitable alternative shelter option.

Perhaps an introduction to a couple of people living in the encampment would help folks understand the plight of those experiencing homelessness.

Sherie Colo, 64, once had a husband, a daughter and a successful career. As the statewide coordinator for a Florida program serving women and children exposed to drugs, she was responsible for fundraising and advocacy.

Life began to change for Colo after her bipolar diagnosis in 1992. The following year, she divorced her husband and left their daughter in his care.

Feeling overwhelmed by her job, she quit. Her aunt took her in for a while, but Colo ended up homeless in 1996. For the most part, she’s remained without shelter for the last 25 years.

Colo moved into the Sausalito camp about three weeks ago, after a 40-day stay in the behavioral health department at MarinHealth Medical Center in Greenbrae. In addition to her bipolar disorder, Colo suffers from cataracts, migraines and arthritis.

“Big fun that is,” she said. “Especially when you’re homeless.”

Colo said she went through Marin County’s required assessment interview for those experiencing homelessness; however, she’s received few services. Since landing at the camp, the county has paid for her stay in Motel 6 for two nights. She knows there’s a long waiting list for housing.

Like other camp residents, Colo is adamant she doesn’t want to move. She especially doesn’t care for the daytime camping ban.

“I can’t take down my tent every day,” she said. “I need a cane just to get up. The city council doesn’t care about the homeless.”

Fellow camper Mike Arnold, 51, is also waiting for services; however, his will come from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). He served in the Gulf War during Desert Storm, he said.

A VA representative visited the camp and informed Arnold his status as a veteran gives him priority for housing. Unfortunately, veterans also get put on a waiting list.

Before Arnold moved to the Sausalito encampment three weeks ago, he resided on his boat anchored in Richardson Bay. Living on the water comes with its own set of problems.

The Richardson’s Bay Regional Authority (RBRA), a local government agency, enforces the applicable 72-hour anchorage law. Vessels in violation or deemed as marine debris may be seized by RBRA harbormaster Curtis Havel. The agency crushes the boats it considers derelict.

The RBRA policies established an adversarial relationship between the mariners and Havel. It’s the reason Arnold left the anchorage to live on land.

“I sold my boat to someone braver,” Arnold said. “I can’t afford to fight these people and I couldn’t constantly run from Havel. This is a war.”

Arnold wants housing and is prepared to work for it. He graduated from the Art Institute of Atlanta and worked as a graphic artist, but he’ll wash dishes and mop floors, he said.

These are just two of the 19 residents at the camp. Each has a unique story about how they ended up living in a tent next to Dunphy Park.

After visiting the encampment several times and meeting most of the campers, it’s clear to me these folks need a boost to get back on their feet. We live in one of the wealthiest counties in the country. What does it say about us if we don’t lend a hand? Not much. Not much at all.