Talk of the Point

That bookstore you may have been anticipating at 5 West Richmond, within a pint bottle’s throw from the wig-wags, isn’t going to happen. The story is coming soon and until then I know nothing.

No matter what I think of “Simple Architect” Tom Butt, and I do have thoughts, I have to admit that now and then he earns his feed. The latest is his cross-city comparison of revenue sources and expenditure categories.

Buried in his email blast is the real headline: “Of the fourteen cities compared, Richmond has the third highest general fund revenue…” At $1063 per capita, only Berkeley and Palo Alto exceed it.

Tom has made preliminary details available on a PDF sheet to his E-Forum email list. (I suppose it’ll appear on his site soon.)

He could earn his dessert by supplying the original Excel worksheet so anyone could chop, slice, and dice.

With the true fiscal picture now in view, how does he feel now about backing Measure Q, the sales-tax increase? Is he “shocked! shocked!” at these results?

So there it is, finally. The Trainmaster Building has been carried from the Burlington yard and plopped onto Cutting in to particular relation to the tracks, in the unhappy company of the Plunge and the wretched Todd Hotel (aka, “Gerlach Building”). It seems to promise the Plunge’s respectability while still a Todd-like ruin.

“Simple Architect” Tom Butt uses the kindest name I’ve heard for it. He calls it the “Santa Fe Reading Room.” Can’t you imagine off-duty trainmen seated not too far from the wood stove absorbed in Dostoyevsky and Joyce? “Excuse me, Horace,” says one to the other, “Might I read you a passage….?”

One of Tom’s antagonists, the “Not-A-Simple-Architect” Walter Connolly, owner of the Todd, has the most unkind name: “the shack.” But he might want to reconsider. What names might fly for the Todd should people get a look inside that little slum?

Andrew Butt, architect and occasional Talk correspondent, emails that the Point will finally a “gateway it deserves.” Another architect of respectable complexity, Jay Betts, calls it “bad design.” He says, “There used to be a sense of arrival into town, a gateway. That’s been removed.”

Bad design or gem, the Butt Gang seems to have won this time (after losing in August over NICE). The latest chapter seems to have been this month’s City Council meeting, where Connolly, Richard Lompa, Jay Betts, and perhaps others threw what they had at the Point Richmond Gateway LLC development and lost. The City Council declined to stop it.

With this, I hope this boring little fight ends and the developers live up to their promises. I hope too that Lompa and the others start going to neighborhood council meetings and other public forums. That’s where I heard–two years ago–about the arrangement reached between the city and the railroad about the crossing and nearby land. That’s where anyone could have heard it.

Jay Betts said the most honorable thing of all about this. I’ve heard him say with what I judge to be sincerity, “I keep apologizing for not being around” when this was in development. And for that little bit of humility we can honor him.

I voted for Measure Q, but no one else I know did. Measure Q–which would raise
Richmond sales tax by a half percent–will get clobbered.

Not one person in my sample group of 10 or so could could stop with just a simple “no.” I heard answers like
“Hell no!,” “Are you kidding?,” “No! No! No!..”

Just watch. [link fixed]

Ernest T. Grump will vote no on Measure Q next Tuesday. It’s a Richmond measure to raise sales tax by a half percent. But today he’s counting the bits of candy he’ll hand out tonight.

There’s no need to be generous to these little moochers, he says. Why, the same kids come to his doorstep year after year.

They all look well fed. Not only that, they walk on sidewalks that Ernest paid for in taxes. They attend his schools too, ride on his AC Transit buses, and breathe the air kept clean by Ernest’s occasional protests to Chevron.

Once last year, Ernest had to pay a fee at City Hall. To his horror, he saw vast numbers of clerks and others of unknown function doing nothing! They sat in front of monitors, now and then looking up. Ernest resents waiting a moment for one to notice him.

He portions out the candy and can’t help think about Measure Q. “More taxes!,” he curses, pronouncing the X with particular relish. Today the candy cost him $2.06 in sales tax. With the extra half percent under Measure Q, the same bag would cost him an extra 13¢. Last night’s dinner out with his wife would have cost 30¢ more. The new car he bought last summer would have cost him $167.98 more.

At about 9 o’clock, the stream of kids subsides, but inevitably there’s a late bunch. “Doesn’t it ever end?” he’ll say as he answers yet another ring on the doorbell.

Someday it’ll end for Ernest. In the meantime, he’ll just have to pay his bills as they come up.

Yes on Measure Q.

Ever since the last “Subway’s moving in!” scare, I’ve meant to get an opinion from the man who represents big landlords around here. You can’t miss all the Cushman & Wakefield signs around town, and on just about every one is John Troughten’s name.

No one I know wants another fast-food joint here. Starbucks is just about enough. But though Subway may not sell the kind of food you eat, those who run the company seem to have a brain. “You don’t see Subways closing up,” says John.

Subway’s interest in the Point, he says, is in fact a good sign. “They’re long-term players.” They were the first, for example, to believe in the El Sobrante location at the end of El Portel Drive. “It did very well, and there’s more going up around it.”

Leave the sandwiches. Take the optimism.

Andrew Butt, who campaigned tirelessly for the first NICE, has a darker view than mine on the prospects for a business improvement district. Don’t miss the comment he posted in response to “A New NICE Rises From The Mud.”

You may notice that all comments but the most recent ones are missing. That’s only temporary.

An unfortunate accident occurred the other day as I cleaned out the 15,000 or so spam comments that had accumulated since fall of 2003. A command that should have only deleted those posted before June 1 2005 somehow got rid of everything.

One of these days I’ll restore the handful of valid ones.

Let’s not miss the point about last night’s Son of NICE meeting in the parish hall of Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church.

Forget attendance. It could have been better–26 signed in–but so what. What matters is who showed up: nearly everyone necessary for a new drive.

Forget that they often disagreed, sometimes vehemently. After all, what did anyone expect with Village Barbarian Richard Lompa and His Honor Josh Genser in the same room?

Forget also the arguments over the Gateway project, railroad “quiet zones,” and other projects. They served to bring everyone face to face with the Point’s unmet needs. (In other words, I disagree completely with my friend and fellow blogger Fred Arm.)

Ultimately, this meeting was about scouting a new coalition. And on that we have this headline: Jay Betts, who during the original NICE was Chief Opponent Richard Lompa’s sidekick and principal ally, said last night that he could see the need for an assessment district to deal with parking. He says his first choice is to push voluntary work as far as possible. But his acceptance, conditional as it is, of any assessment district seems like a breakthrough.

Sure, NICE proponents still have a lot of bargaining to do. But if they proceed carefully–leaving out the known barbarians and bullies–they might piece together a credible, transparent plan. It might even persuade those who voted no the first time around.

Marsha Tomassi, who led the discussion, should be proud that she steered through the predictable disagreements and potential filibuster.

If it hadn’t been so scary, it would have been heartwarming. There they were, gathered around the fire at the Plunge on Wednesday night: the former mayor, a firefighter-union leader, and firefighters who remembered the Plunge from childhood.

It all went like this, according to the Contra Costa Times: At about 10 p.m, former mayor Rosemary Corbin drove by and saw smoke rising from the Plunge. Someone ran up two blocks to the firehouse banged on the door.

Firefighter-union leader Jim Russey, of previous fame or infamy depending on your views, responded and quickly called in a second alarm.

Rosemary, who’s now VP of Save the Richmond Plunge Trust, stuck around to watch the firefighters from Richmond and El Cerrrito and their six fire engines put out the blaze. The firefighters told her how they loved the building, how they learned to swim there.

But there’s good news here. Even though the fire caused up to $200,000 in damange, the new plan for renovation is to take out the burned part of the building anyway. In fact, the Trust had just approved money for architectural drawings, and if all goes well the whole thing should reopen in 2007.

Little firefighters-to-be may soon swim again.

Read the full Contra Costa Times story.