by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Bill Fulton
Tom Lemmon
San Diego Unified
School District board members Kevin Beiser, Richard Barrera and John Lee Evans
ACLU’s contingent at
the CPI awards
Assemblymember Toni
Atkins and Mickey Kasparian
Charles Nelson
Marta Blancarte
(right) and her daughter
San Diego’s
planning and land use laws remain stuck in an “outdated suburban model” from
the 1950’s, recently hired city planner Bill Fulton told a packed crowd of over
300 people at the 13th annual Center on Policy Initiatives (CPI)
gala dinner at the Wyndham Bayfront hotel Thursday, September 19. Fulton, a
former mayor and city councilmember in Ventura, was hired by ex-Mayor Bob
Filner to head San Diego’s recently revived Planning and Neighborhood
Restoration Department after former mayor Jerry Sanders decided the city didn’t
need a planning department at all — just a “Development Services” department,
which implied it was the city’s job to service developers rather than the other
way around.
Fulton, a
veteran of 30 years in the urban planning field and author of Guide to
California Planning, the standard textbook
on the subject, as well as other books and hundreds of articles, began his talk
by describing the struggle of residents near the Euclid Avenue trolley station
to bring a pharmacy to their area. He explained that so far they’ve failed
because all those 1950’s planning laws are standing in their way. Fulton
explained that the city’s rules assume that San Diego will expand outward into
currently undeveloped areas and developers will pay assessments to allow the
city to provide services to these new communities. The city’s current
challenge, he said, is to do what’s called “infill development” — expanding
both housing and job opportunities in already developed areas.
“The built
environment and land use drive so many things, including what services people
have, how they get around, and where they lay their heads down at night,”
Fulton explained. “I arrived here for the first time on July 7 and I’m supposed to have a grand vision for San Diego? I’m
supposed to help you implement the ‘city of villages.’ San Diego will have
small neighborhoods around cores and urban places.”
“City of
villages” was a buzzword phrase popular among San Diego officials during the
Sanders administration, but it’s still not clear precisely what it means, Fulton
admitted. To Fulton, the “city of villages” is the opposite of the way San
Diego has generally grown, with residential development in certain parts of the
city, big retail shopping malls elsewhere, industrial and commercial districts
outlying them, and a freeway system linking them all — which means that people
have to own their own cars and do a lot of driving to get from their homes to
their jobs to the stores they need.
Under the “city
of villages,” at least as Fulton describes it, San Diegans’ lives will be quite
different. “Our job is to make sure everything people need on a daily basis” —
a home, a job, goods and services — “is right there in their neighborhoods,” he
explained. “It cuts down transportation costs, frees people’s time and has environmental
benefits.” Because the “city of villages” runs so much against the grain of San
Diego’s historic pattern, Fulton conceded, “it’s going to be even harder” for
private developers and nonprofit agencies to build projects, especially
affordable housing projects. But he’s convinced the struggle will be worth it.
“The point of
planning has to shift from how to build affluent suburban neighborhoods to how
do we make sure every neighborhood gets
what its people need,” Fulton said. “We have to step up to the plate on
neighborhood infrastructure. We also need to rethink how we do things, and
spend less time on abstract analysis and more time on how we help real people
solve real problems in real neighborhoods. We have a lot of state laws and
tribal customs that make that hard, but making sure people in neighborhoods
have what they need will be my promise to you.”
Fulton was the
keynote speaker of an event entitled, “Prosperity for Our Communities: We Are
All Pieces of the Future.” The program featured a front cover showing a
neighborhood being put together out of jigsaw-puzzle pieces labeled
“Education,” “Good Jobs,” “Affordable Housing,” “Access to Health Care,” “Equal
Rights,” “Environment,” and “Transportation and Infrastructure.” Befitting
CPI’s association with the labor movement, two of the big honorees were either
local unions or union leaders: Tom Lemmon, business manager of the San Diego
County Building and Construction Trades Council, AFL-CIO; and United Food and
Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 135, which represents workers at unionized
grocery chains Ralph’s, Vons and Albertson’s in the San Diego area.
Though CPI is a
nonprofit corporation under U.S. Internal Revenue Code section 501 ( c ) (3),
which means it can’t affiliate with a political party or endorse candidates in
elections, it was clear throughout the evening which of the major parties is in
line with CPI’s goals. A number of elected officials attended the event and
were introduced from the podium by co-MC’s Rabbi Laurie Coskey and Johanna Primo
Hester, but all of them were Democrats. Also, the honorees were presented with
official proclamations by Congressmembers, state legislators and city
councilmembers, but only from Democratic ones. Acting mayor Todd Gloria, a
Democrat, introduced Fulton and commended CPI for giving him and other elected
officials “good information based on great data” that helps them make
decisions.
Lemmon opened
his speech with a claim that, despite the setback from the bipartisan campaign
that drove progressive Democratic Mayor Bob Filner from office over his alleged
treatment of women, “we’re so close to being a progressive city, a city that
leads in good jobs and affordable housing.” Then he recalled his own childhood
in an affordable housing development in National City — one he didn’t find out
until years later was built and owned by the Building Trades department of the
local AFL-CIO, the organization he now runs.
According to the
citation in the event program, Lemmon was being honored for helping local
governments enact “policies guaranteeing that construction projects require
payments of good wages, access to health care coverage, and retirement savings,
hiring of local workers, and employment of apprentices.” The technical name for
such policies is Project Labor Agreements (PLA’s), and they’ve been
successfully demonized by the Right. Voters in San Diego County overwhelmingly
approved an initiative banning PLA’s on county projects, and measures to ban
PLA’s in other San Diego County jurisdictions have also generally been
successful.
But Lemmon says
PLA’s are working as intended in the San Diego Unified School District and
other agencies where voters haven’t shut them down. Through PLA’s, he
explained, San Diego’s current union leaders “have opened decades-old barriers,
reached into San Diego’s poorest neighborhoods and built opportunities to enter
construction jobs.”
Greg Akili,
recently returned to San Diego (having apparently shed his first name in the
process, since he was introduced just as “Akili”), acceped the special
recognition award on behalf of the absent Gracia Molina de Pick. “She is a
soldier, an activist on the front lines,” Akili said of Molina de Pick. “Gracia
has been a lifelong advocate for women’s equality, Chicano civil rights,
education reform, labor reform, and the rights of indigenous communities and
immigrants. In San Diego, she was a powerful advocate for education and helped
found the Chicano Studies departments at SDSU and Mesa College. She was a
charter founder of Third College, now Thurgood Marshall College, at UCSD, and
recently donated a community room to the Logan Heights Library and establishing
the Gracia Molina de Pick Chicano Studies Endowment Fund at Mesa College. For
15 years she’s been an invaluable CPI board member.”
The special award
to the San Diego-Imperial Counties chapter of the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU) was presented by its newly appointed executive director, Norma
Chavez-Peterson — apparently the first Latino or Latina ever appointed to head an ACLU chapter. “The ACLU of San
Diego is on the move, and we are unchanging,” she said. Chavez-Peterson
introduced a group of young volunteers, not-so-young volunteers and staff
members who participated in Nuestro Voto, Nuestro Futuro, last year’s voter registration campaign in Escondido
that upped participation in local elections to 4,905 voters, 80 percent of whom
were Latino, in November 2012.
“We also have
some of our partners around our criminal justice work, and some of our young
leaders that are part of a new program we have just launched called Inspire San
Diego,” Chavez-Peterson said. “We’re committed to inspiring young people across
seven high schools throughout the county not only to become high-school leaders
and register their peers and their families to vote, but to register their
neighbors and to partner with some of our allied organizations here that do
voter engagement.”
Chavez-Peterson
said one of her goals for the San Diego-Imperial Counties ACLU branch is to get
it to pass an “economic justice agenda” similar to the one passed by the
Southern California branch in 1983. (The ACLU has three regions in California:
Northern, based around the San Francisco Bay Area; Southern, based around Los
Angeles; and San Diego/Imperial Counties.) She said that the issues of wealth,
income, employment and redistribution are “inextricably linked to civil rights”
even though American law has traditionally treated them separately and attached
much less importance to economic justice than to legal and rights equality.
“I am committed to
work with my partners at CPI, the Labor Council, and all of you to make sure
that our own ACLU passes our own policy framework around an economic justice
agenda,” Chavez-Peterson said. Quoting the Southern California chapter’s
statement, she added, “The recognition that all persons are entitled to basic
economic rights is an essential prerequisite for the full and fair functioning
of democracy in the United States, and for the development of civil liberties.
A nation like ours, which has accumulated wealth, has an obligation to ensure
that basic human needs are provided for all economic levels of society. Unless
all persons have the opportunity to work at jobs that pay a fair, living wage,
and are assured of adequate food, housing and health care, regardless of their
ability to pay, a society cannot truthfully claim to provide liberty and
justice for all.”
Introduced by
Richard Barrera, San Diego Unified School District board member and newly
appointed head of the San Diego/Imperial Counties Central Labor Council, CPI
executive director Claire Crawford continued with the theme of economic
inequality. “Every year, our research team computes data to determine how many
people in San Diego County are living in poverty,” Crawford explained. “San
Diego’s score on the Gini index, which measures income inequality, keeps going
up. The gap between rich and poor is growing wider.” According to Crawford,
that’s bad news not only for the people who are falling behind but for the
economy as a whole. The reason: the less income people in the lower and middle
classes have, the fewer goods and services they buy. Therefore, employers hire
fewer people, the economy produces less, and growth slows or stops completely.
“In order for
our region’s economy to do well,” Crawford explained, “we must narrow this gap.
Increasing wages is important, but it’s not all. One woman worked as a janitor
in Torrey Pines on the night shift and she had to walk home three miles from
work because the buses stopped running by the time she got off of one of her
jobs. We have to address not only wages and working conditions but also
transit, parks and much more.” She praised San Diego City Councilmember and
Mayoral candidate David Alvarez and Local 127 of the American Federation of
State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) for pushing the Council to pass
the Local Property Values Protection Ordinance, which requires banks to
maintain houses and other residential properties they foreclose on, so the
properties don’t fall apart due to neglect the way they have in other cities.
The final award
of the evening was given to Local 135 of the United Food and Commercial
Workers, the local union representing grocery workers at Vons, Albertson’s and
Ralph’s chain stores. Mickey Kasparian, veteran head of Local 135, announced
that he and his wife were celebrating their 30th anniversary that
night and introduced her and their two children. Then he focused on his big
issue for the evening, the difference in wages and benefits between his union’s
members and people doing similar jobs at non-union stores. “Most retail jobs in
San Diego are poverty-level,” Kasparian said. “Our food clerks are making $20
per hour and have a comprehensive health care package and a pension — not a
401(k) but a defined-benefit pension. A non-union grocery worker’s wage is
$8.83 per hour, without health care.”
Kasparian took a
side swipe at San Diego city voters for passing Proposition B, which abolished
the city workers’ pension system for new hires, then set his sights on the
labor movement’s public enemy number one: Walmart. Though Walmart claims they
offer their workers a health plan, Kasparian said, “70 percent of their workers
don’t qualify for it and another 20 percent can’t afford it.” Kasparian echoed
Crawford’s point that without a well-paid middle class, the American economy
can’t grow because there aren’t enough high-paid workers to afford to buy the
goods and services it produces. “We don’t need ‘jobs,’ we need good jobs,” Kasparian said.
“Next month will
be the 10-year anniversary of the longest strike in retail in the U.S.,” he
recalled — referring to the seven-month dispute between his unions and
Albertson’s, Vons and Ralph’s management. At the end of this strike, widely
regarded at the time as a defeat for labor, Local 135 was forced to accept a
so-called “two-tier” contract that allows the stores to pay less to people
hired after 2004 than they did to workers who got their jobs before that.
Ironically, among the people on the wrong side of the “two-tier” system was
Charles Nelson (this reporter’s husband), who was presented at the gala as a
typical Local 135 member and made a short speech. Kasparian closed his speech
by urging people to shop at the stores where his members work and not at Walmart, Target, Whole Foods and other non-union
grocery outlets.
The final
speaker was Marta Blancarte, representing “Our Walmart,” an organization of
Walmart workers that has organized outside the labor movement to pressure
Walmart to improve the wages, working conditions and job assignments of its
workers. Speaking in Spanish, with her daughter as interpreter, Blancarte said,
“I’ve worked at Walmart for almost nine years. … I’ve had all kinds of
humiliations, threats and favoritism for anything and everything. For years I
was in the pharmacy department. Then one day management changed my schedule to
nights without consulting me. My medical excuse from my doctor, saying I was
taking medication at night, was not considered valid.
“They changed my
schedule anyway, and I had to move to another department where my salary was
lower,” Blancarte continued. “They told me I could either move and take the pay
cut, or walk out the door forever. Why did this happen? Because the person who
took my position was a friend of the assistant manager. My experience in that
department and my good work were not respected. … This is just one of the many
stories that are happening in this monstrous store known as Walmart. … Walmart
must change. Now is the time to respect us and treat us as people, not as
numbers; to recognize the great work we do, stop playing with our schedules,
and let us live normal lives.”
