Wednesday’s city council meeting was almost of beaver vintage. It was SRO packed full of teachers and parents and city workers. A sea of orange caution t-shirts lined the first three rows of chairs and sat there ungraciously while old ladies stood at the back. In silent pauses you could hear the sound of children playing on the porch while they waited for their parents. Patient-looking women with classroom poise passed around tupperwear containers of chocolate chip cookies.
At that first body count everyone should have known how the meeting would end. A room beyond full of people willing to share cookies is a dangerous thing. The city should have just unfolded its hands and wrote out the check right then. Superindentent Rami Muth (who inherited woes she could not have possibly imagined) stood up and gave an impassioned, level, persuasive speech for the city to unclench its purse strings and help MUSD maintain the important 20-1 teacher ratio for K-3. She spoke so well the room was silent when she left the podium. A few of us clapped like it mattered and the room burst into applause.
The first speaker was an 11 year-old boy whose mom had gotten a pink slip. He bravely took the podium and started to say how important that school had been to him. He promptly burst into tears as only an 11 year old boy can. His mom came to stand with him. He finished his comments through sobs and then took his seat.
Game. Set. Match. At that moment the city should have just handed its atm card to the crowd and said, is this enough? The meeting was over, the brittle back of “withold” had been fractured by the gentle persuasion of “give”. I knew how it was going to end. (To be honest, I may have cynically wondered how that boy felt about beavers because he would be a powerful weapon if carefully used….) Still the city insisted on protocol and the meeting wore on.
I will say our City Manager, from the very get-go, seemed to know which way the wind was blowing. Before the meeting there was a deal in the works for the school to pay back a loan through turning part of one of their playgrounds into the Corp Yard for the city, (ostensibly so the then-vacated area next to the beavers could be used to make another 4 story senior center). The City Manager began by saying that the idea wasn’t possible, because of hazardous materials, etc, and looked at the council as if he had told them this before. It reminded me of the story I heard about his hiring. When asked about handling the beaver issue in Martinez he had apparently shaken his head and said knowingly, “You are never getting rid of those beavers. Better just face it”.
So how many nails is that in the city’s coffin (coffers?) SRO, cookies, crying and City Manager. There were more. The biggest came from the city workers union representative. The orange shirts were there because they objected to the city refusing to open its reserves to pay them, but agreeing to do so for the school district. They felt that the city giving up this money meant further cutting down the road. It reminded me again of the beaver subcommittee when one night their actions of allegedly ripping out the dam was up for discussion. News of the damage had hit the papers and the director was very upset about it. That night a similar sea of orange lined the back row to show solidarity.
On Wednesday they were a wave that couldn’t read which way the tide was turning. Instead of earning brownie points by gallantly standing up to offer their chairs to little old ladies in the back, (which would have allowed them to stand on strapping young lad display at the wall), they hunched their shoulders and ignored the entire room. Their representative got up and described how he had graduated from larger classrooms and turned out fine. With ear-splitting tone deafness he suggested that parents needed to volunteer in the classroom. (You could literally see the hair stand up on the backs of all the parents and teachers necks.) He pointed out helpfully that grades k-3 were not that important and its not like they were teaching the kids Calculus. I wanted to say sit down! Stop helping these men! Someone hand that man a cookie so his mouth is full. You are doing your union no favors.
One of our more colorful regulars called it like it was when he got up to accuse the city of playing both ends against the middle. “These guys work hard, they deserve to be compensated.” He argued. “And these teachers have important jobs and they deserve to be protected.” His accusation was hard to question, “You guys do this all the time. You make different sides fight each other. The truth is you can do this all, and you should.”
Even the obligatory public comment that questioned why a city could spent 300,000 on BEAVERS (goodness our beavers are greedy) and not on its children, wasn’t too upsetting. It, like everything, was fairly well articulated and impassioned. The Virginia Hills dismissive man who suggested that the city money should not go to the district where only half of Martinez residents are enrolled was countered by the mayor’s own admission that for years the city has paid for crossing guards in that district and never for MUSD.
It reminded me most of the beaver meeting because the community tipping point had been reached. What I mean by that is that there are regulars at city meetings, like the colorful speaker, and the city is used to lying in front of them. Then there are semi-regulars at some city meetings, of which I have unwillingly become one, and the city would prefer not to lie very much in front of them, (although they will if sheetpile is involved). And then there are those rare meetings full of people who have never been to a meeting before, who believe in their trusting hearts that the council represents their interests. The city HATES to be caught lying in front of them. And when they show up, the outcome is always predictable.
I’m reminded of Abraham Lincoln…
You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
The vote was 4-1 to award the school the loan. Chocolate chip cookies all around!
