Richmond, California
A civic pamphlet. Not a newspaper. No ads. Nothing for sale.
Publius
20 October 2026.
Two governments meet today. I've read both agendas the way you read a menu at a restaurant where the kitchen closed some time ago. The Board of Supervisors sits at nine in Martinez. The City Council opens at 3:30 in the Community Services Building, goes behind a door to talk labor and litigation, and comes back out at six. By then a stack of pink speaker cards will be sitting at the clerk's elbow, and the room will smell of wet coats and patience.
I have one observation, and I offer it gently. In both rooms, the talking is what gets postponed. The money moves on consent.
Start with the Council's new business. There are eight items, and seven of them carry the same polite footnote: "This item was continued from" an earlier meeting. Accessible parking and the veterans housing at 338 Carlson Boulevard have each been continued twice, from September 22 and from October 6. The Keller Beach sewer study, the license-plate study, the 23rd Street safety measures, a Disaster Preparedness Commission, and grant applications for armored police vehicles have all been waiting since October 6. The eighth item is new. It asks the City Manager for a citywide traffic-safety plan, and it will sit nicely beside the 23rd Street traffic-safety item, which isn't new at all.
Now turn to the consent calendar. Its items, the agenda says, "will be enacted upon together with a motion and second, without discussion." A fifth amendment for Liebert Cassidy Whitmore, the City's outside labor counsel, adds $475,000 and brings that contract to $2,440,000 through June 2027. That same afternoon, in closed session, the Council confers with its negotiators about six employee organizations. Four on-call equipment-rental contracts carry a combined ceiling of $2,000,000 over five years. And the City will pay PG&E up to $80,000 in costs to end two fleet-electrification projects. None of this is improper, since routine business is what consent is for. I'll note only that two million dollars in rental authority will pass in about the time it takes a speaker to find the microphone.
Then there is the Polluters Pay money from Chevron. In January the Council voted 5–1 to hire a consultant to ask residents how it should be spent, with a report due May 26. In April it voted 4–2 to authorize a contract with Dalberg Advisors to do the asking. On September 15 the update wasn't reached, and on September 22 it was sent to tonight. Tonight's agenda describes the funds as "maintained in the General Fund pending future allocation," and it calls the Dalberg contract "proposed." That's nearly six months after the Council authorized it, and five months after the report was due. The money, meanwhile, waits with exemplary discipline. It may be the most patient thing in the building.
The license-plate readers follow a similar pattern. On October 6, according to the meeting video, the Council approved the Axon package except for the readers, which are to come back for separate approval. The return date was spoken as both October 20 and October 27. The readers aren't on tonight's agenda, but a $20,000 study of whether readers work is. I admire the order of operations: first decline the thing, then pay to learn whether it would have helped, then decide again. The data-center moratorium went in on September 15 as a 45-day urgency measure. Tonight it asks for "an additional 22 months and 15 days," which would carry it to September 15, 2028. I once wrote about urgency, and it seems I underestimated its stamina.
The County's agenda is quieter and more courteous. Item C.10 would make Supervisor Gioia the Board's alternate on the board of the California State Association of Counties for another year. The staff report notes that the post pays no stipend, and that the annual conference begins "Monday, December 2, 2026." December 2 falls on a Wednesday. Alternates, like conferences, arrive when they arrive. Item C.3 accepts the supervisors' monthly meeting reports. Districts III, IV and V attached theirs. District I's report is not among them, and it wasn't attached on October 6 either. The $12,934,417 in Air District money awarded to the County, which I discussed here last week, still has no sub-agreement on the calendar. One assumes it is pending.
Consent calendars are where the small town I described in No. 24 does its quietest work. Take the North Richmond waste mitigation fee, collected at the Golden Bear Transfer Station. This year's spending plan budgets $891,753.31. On May 22 the fee committee approved it. According to the draft minutes, Councilmember Zepeda moved it and Vice Mayor Robinson seconded it, and it passed with Councilmember Jimenez voting aye. Tania Pulido, a committee alternate whom the County lists as Supervisor Gioia's staff contact for urban agriculture, also voted aye. On June 23 the Board of Supervisors adopted the plan on consent, 5–0, with Supervisor Gioia voting aye. On July 7 the City Council adopted it on consent, 7–0, on a motion by Vice Mayor Robinson seconded by Councilmember Jimenez. No conflicts were stated. The plan gives CHDC $187,177.84 to run four strategies and gives The Watershed Project $28,062.13 for a habitat garden. Urban Tilth, for once, isn't on the list.
Nothing here breaks a rule. The plan's own text requires both bodies to approve it, and the committee was built with councilmembers on it. It does mean that the same hands get to admire the same plan in three rooms, and in the last two nobody has to say a word.
Or take the Supervisor's own District 1 Community Impact Fund: $1,000,000 for 33 West County nonprofits, approved on consent that same June day. The list the Board approved gives Richmond Renaissance $40,000 and the Richmond Black Historical Legacy Project $25,000. The "Final List" posted on the District 1 web page gives each of them $30,000, and its total comes to $995,000. None of the organizations I usually watch appear on either list, and the sums are small. Still, a million-dollar fund with two official totals is a minor miracle of arithmetic. Which figures made it into the contracts has not been made public.
I'm not asking either body to give up consent. Without it these meetings would run until Thanksgiving. I'm only asking that the order be reversed now and then: discuss the money, and let the referrals wait. Pull the Liebert amendment and say out loud what the first four amendments bought. Read the status of the Dalberg contract into the record, with a date attached. And when a supervisor's staff member votes on a plan the supervisor then votes on, say so in the staff report, in a single sentence. Saying a thing out loud costs nothing. Only the agenda is expensive.
The Board of Supervisors meets this morning at nine in Martinez. The Council meets at 3:30 and again at six, at 440 Civic Center Plaza. Will anything tonight, I wonder, be continued to a date certain?
— Publius
Sources: Council agenda, Oct. 20 · Council minutes, Jan. 27 · Council minutes, Apr. 28 · Council minutes, July 7 · KCRT video, Council Sept. 15 · Council agenda, Sept. 22 · KCRT video, Council Oct. 6 · Board of Supervisors agenda, Oct. 20 · County staff report on the CSAC appointments · Board of Supervisors agenda, Oct. 6 · Mitigation Fee Committee draft minutes, May 22 · North Richmond Mitigation Fee plan, 2026/27 · Board of Supervisors minutes, June 23 · District 1 Community Impact Fund, approved list · District 1 Community Impact Fund, web list · County urban agriculture page · Air District Board packet, Oct. 7