Zennie's Note: Grand Lake Theater Owner Allan Michaan asked me to repost this letter he sent to the Oakland Tribune. The Tribune did not run it, probably due to its length, not its content.
It's an attack on Oakland District Two (Glenview - Chinatown) Councilmember Pat Kernighan, who's running for reelection against challenger Jennifer Pae, in a tight contest, and over the Oakland Parking Issue. Michaan supports Pae in the race.
Allan says his business is down 50 percent because of Oakland's Parking laws. The Grand Lake Theater is on the corner of Grand Avenue and Lake Park in Oakland.
Here's the letter. Councilmember Pat Kernighan was contacted for a response, which she will most certainly provide soon.
Dear (Oakland Tribune) Editor:
In your front page story today (Sunday Oct 10) regarding the race for City Council in District 2 a statement was made which I cannot allow to go unchallenged. The writer stated regarding Kernighan "She went against her eight City Council colleagues last year when she voted against extending parking meter hours."
This is a distortion of the facts.
On the evening of June 30, 2009 in a late night session Pat Kernighan joined her fellow Council members in voting for a sweeping transformation of parking policy in Oakland that transformed what was already an overly aggressive and punitive approach into something that approaches an extortion scheme.
That night Pat Kernighan and her colleagues voted to increase meter rates to two dollars per hour, increase the fines for all parking infractions, increase enforcement to draconian levels AND extend enforcement hours to 8 PM. She, and the rest of the Council, had no qualms about what effect these changes would have on the quality of life of Oakland residents any
more than they gave any concern to the effects on Oakland's businesses.
Within the next few days a blizzard of parking citations was unleashed on vehicles parked in metered zones throughout the city after 6 PM whose meters had expired even though all signage still stated that the enforcement hours ended at 6 PM.
This act was a despicable betrayal of the public trust and an indication of the utter contempt that our City Council has for it's constituents! During the following few weeks I saw attendance at my business, the Grand Lake Theater, plummet by almost 50%. Other businesses all over Oakland, especially those that depend on evening patronage, were similarly affected.
Since the very survival of the Grand Lake Theater was at stake I took it upon myself to utilize my theater marquee to launch a grass roots effort to overturn this new policy, enacted by Pat Kernighan and her Council colleagues, before it was too late for my business and thousands of others throughout Oakland. In the next few weeks a volunteer group was formed and we began to gather signatures on petitions to demand that these changes be rescinded. I was able to focus a great deal of media attention on the issue as well.
Faced with an enormous public outcry, hundreds of emails in their inboxes, and a personal plea from myself via telephone calls to hold an emergency hearing to listen to constituents and understand the damage that was being caused, what did the Council do? They went on vacation for their August recess.
Pat Kernighan and her colleagues couldn't be bothered to look at the havoc that they had
unleashed on the community that they had been entrusted to represent. By the time public hearings were finally held it was late September.
My petitions had been signed by over 10,000 people. A similar, and completely separate effort by business people in Oakland's Chinatown district had gathered 5,000 signatures. At a series of Council meetings attended by hundreds of very angry Oaklanders Pat Kernighan, recognizing the political damage that she was suffering, then put forward a resolution that rolled back the hours to 6 PM which barely passed.
It should be noted that both of the Council members who now think that they are qualified to be Mayor of Oakland, Kaplan and Quan, were extremely hostile, arrogant and disrespectful to the dozens of concerned citizens who spoke before the council. I urge any citizen who is considering voting for either of these two mayoral candidates to go to the city hall website and watch their performance that night, September 22, 2009, to see what low esteem they hold for the concerned and injured citizens of Oakland that were beggingfor relief from the problems caused by the Council's mistake.
While the hours were indeed rolled back that night none of the other policies have been changed. The result is that Oakland public policy is to punish and prey on anyone who lives, visits, works, or shops in Oakland and dares to bring an automobile into the city. The parking enforcement is enacted in very dishonest fashion. We all remember news stories last fall
about how low income neighborhoods were being targeted for increased enforcement.
Probably everyone knows of a friend or co worker who pulled into a parking space, walked the distance to buy a parking receipt at a parking kiosque only to return moments later to find that their vehicle had been ticketed by a lurking parking enforcement employee when they walked away from their car to pay for the space.
Even worse, tickets are given to people whose time had not expired, fines that have been paid are not promptly processed and the fines are then doubled, and the appeals process is designed to make any recourse more difficult to obtain than winning the lottery. During the months I personally spent so much of my time fighting the new parking policy I heard hundreds of horror stories.
While no one would disagree that Oakland has a severe budget problem it should be clear to anybody with intelligence that punishing everyone that tries to support the city's economy is not the answer. The resulting decrease for my business and countless others has been clear and now shoppers avoid Oakland. There are too many alternatives for goods and services in adjacent communities that actually welcome visitors.
I firmly believe that more people avoid Oakland because they are afraid of being victimized by our municipal parking enforcement employees than by criminals.
So please remember that when it came to extending parking meter hours Pat Kernighan was for it before she was against it. No current member of Oakland's City Council ever deserves to hold elective office again.
Allen Michaan
Grand Lake Theater
3200 Grand Avenue
Oakland, Ca. 94610
452 1998
No comments:
Post a Comment