It Wasn't Their Money

     There was no Fourth of July parade in Hercules this year.  The annual Hercules fireworks display was dark.  A month ago the annual Hercules Multicultural Fair was canceled for the first time in what; twenty years?  The swim center has cut back on hours of operation.  I’m wondering if there will be annual haunted house and Christmas Tree lighting.  These are just the cuts to fun and games.

     There have been some much more serious cuts in our little community.  The number of police officers has been cut from 30 to 26.  The Chief of Police, Fred Deltorchio, a quality fellow who has done a marvelous job and who I’ve chatted with on bike rides and at the local gym has moved up his retirement date.  He’s fed up. Said Deltorchio about the current state of affairs, "I put together a really good team. They are a great group of professionals... who are in it to serve the city.  It's hard for me to go back and undo it."  In April, the city pink slipped 25 employees in what was described as the first round of layoffs that could involve as much as 40 percent of the city’s workforce.

     How did we get here? Sounds just like the typical symptoms of our recent/current global economic meltdown.  But it isn’t quite that way at all. No, this was the handy work of folks who were either knaves or bunglers or bungling knaves.  It’s the story of folks who milked the city coffers dry through a combination of bad planning, their own greed and the greed of others and a total disregard of their fiduciary responsibilities.

     Hercules started out as a company town for an explosives company and by the 1970s had evolved into a bedroom community.  When my family moved to Hercules in 1990 it was still that; a bedroom community with no real downtown, serviced by a couple of malls. The town has grown since we moved in, adding businesses, restaurants and a number of housing developments, some fairly tony. 

     But there had always been bigger plans; maybe plans that were bigger than we needed. The city council spent money wooing Wal-Mart and then when public opposition to the predatory giant was successful it spent more money making it go away.  There were plans for a transit center with a rail station, a ferry terminal and a transit village.  Construction began on a project called Sycamore North, a downtown that would house restaurants and retail.  At this writing, the project consists of unfinished buildings cloaked only in their bare wooden shells, a main street that goes through the project is closed, with traffic detouring through a residential area and the well that waters the whole thing has all but run dry.  It is possible that for the foreseeable future we will have a skeletal downtown.  Another project, a complex of six sports fields went too far beyond the mere contemplation phase.  For two years beginning in 2008 the city shelled out 30,000 dollars a month to a company called Big League Dreams for what was described as“project evaluation” and “conceptualization,” which sounds like a flowery way to say, consulting fees.  In 2010, the city scrapped the whole project. Big League Dreams has refused to refund a 450,000 dollar licensing fee and the city has sunk 2 million dollars into what turned out to be a big league hallucination.  And then there is Market Hall. Market Hall was built on the site of an abandoned Park and Ride on one of the area’s main streets.  It was conceived of as a temporary retail site before yet another project called New Town Center was to be built there; a "placeholder" as the developer called it.  From the start an amateur like me looked at it and said, “Huh?”  Market Hall housed a handful of uninspiring retail shops each about the size of my living room that included a plant store, a clothing outlet and a toy store which sold toys for plenty more than you would pay at the local Target.  There was a stage where local entertainers put on shows before audiences of phantoms, and a bocce ball court.  A bocce ball court?  That’s right, bocce. They might just as well have put in a polo field. Food was provided by food trucks most of which bailed out after a couple of months of desultory trade.  One truck which served Mexican food stuck it out to the bitter end albeit with a spotty schedule.  The only business that gutted out a regular schedule was the coffee house which served excellent coffee, superior to the swill dispensed by the nearby Starbucks and with much better, friendlier service.  From the start, Market Hall looked like a junky little trading post with no hall and very little market.  Now after being open for 11 months it is a closed and deserted, junky little trading post and all that’s missing are the tumbling tumbleweeds, the creaking signs and the jingling of a bridle swinging in the wind that characterize your typical ghost town.  The developer, Red Barn, billed the city for everything from property management at 30,000 dollars per month to trips to Vegas for corporate executives.  The Planning Commission consistently sounded alarms against less than promising projects like these but the klaxons went unheeded.  If projects were food the council's eyes were bigger than their stomachs and much, much bigger than the city's wallet. 

     Amidst all of the big plans for the future everything else seemed to be an unfinished symphony. We have poop bag dispensers along the recreation path that are now nothing more than modern art as the city has ceased to refill them.  A pleasant path through one of the new developments is bereft of poop bag dispensers.  But that doesn’t matter because there are no trash cans to throw the non-existent poop bags into.  The city put up it’s one and only dog park, an attractive yard that I took my dog to once and vowed never to go back to.  Why? Because it has no turf.  In the summer your dog comes home dusty and ready for a bath and after a winter rain the place is a muddy quagmire.  Locals go to the parks in neighboring Pinole.

     Who would do this?  There were the greedy and dishonest.  One of the chief gang members, a city manager named Nelson Oliva was the owner of a company doing a healthy business with the city. To avoid any apparent conflict of interest he “suspended” his activities with his company, NEO and put his then just out of her teens daughter in charge.  Her work experience prior to being a CEO was waiting tables at a local pub (talk about your skyrocketing career path).  This arrangement apparently made it alright for NEO to continue doing business with the city, even benefiting from no bid contracts.  In the meantime, Oliva, while still under contract with Hercules and in apparent violation of that contract, traveled to Lompoc to market a 350,000 dollar deal between NEO and that city.  This is just a taste of Oliva’s slippery dealings.  There was former mayor Ed Balico who’s own company profited from housing developments that the mayor pushed for and voted in favor of.

     There were the gullible like the city council members who approved no bid contracts and expensive projects with little or no discussion or public input. There were the enablers such as the city attorney who turned a blind eye to the entire nefarious goings on.  There were the ass coverers in the city council that gave a new city manager his walking papers ostensibly for insubordination but more likely because he had uncovered and was ready to make public the shady shenanigans of the past. There were those who fed themselves from the public trough like the property manager who allegedly helped himself to 73,000 dollars from a city trust fund but was circumspect enough not to drain it completely dry.  He did after all leave 39 cents.

     Where are the knaves and fools today?  Two council members were recalled in last June’s election.  Balico, with an impending recall petition dangling over his head resigned for “family reasons”.  Oliva no longer works for the city but collected a generous severance package.  The city attorney resigned as well and those remaining council members who never saw a project or met a consultant they didn’t like, failed in their reelection bids.  While there are rumblings of criminal and civil proceeding against these folks they will probably just live with their shame.  They probably shop in neighboring communities these days and no longer frequent the local watering holes.  Instead of a legacy of community service they are loathed by the citizens of that community.  I suppose the various consultants, attorneys, managers and other suits spent their recent Fourth of July weekend sipping umbrella drinks on a cruise ship or gambling in Vegas; all paid for by the generous citizens of Hercules.

     What does all of this have to do with anyone who doesn’t live in Hercules?  Nothing more than the story of Bell, California which was bilked on what can only be described as an artistic level by its “caretakers.”  These are object lessons to everyone whether they live in Bonanza Town, Colorado, population 14, or New York City.  There are people who go into politics for all of the right reasons, do their level best and even make mistakes but in the final analysis take their responsibilities seriously and care about the citizens that elected them.  And then there are those who go into public office with every intention of lining their own pockets or are completely clueless, with no idea of, or concern for, their fiduciary responsibilities.

     I know many people, too many, who characterize themselves as politically inactive; actually taking pride in their apathy.  They look down their noses at politics for its dirtiness and corruption, feeling that they are above it all, not deigning to soil themselves.  I know others who take part only to the point of going to the polls with as much knowledge of the candidates and issues as they have of, oh, astrophysics. In a free country that’s all fine and dandy but it does rather run counter to that whole silly notion of an enlightened electorate. 

     There are those who say, “Oh my vote doesn’t really count.”  To that argument I need only point to the failed reelection bids of incompetent Hercules council members and the subsequent recall of two other scoundrels.  In these elections the votes counted loudly and without those vociferous votes we might still be stuck with the crooked and the clueless.

     Every year I pay property taxes and about 1100 dollars of that goes to Hercules.  This doesn’t include any other fees and taxes that I pay throughout the year.  I’m giving a fair chunk of hard earned coin of the realm to a bunch of strangers and trusting that they are going to take good care of it.  Taxes and fees are something we are all compelled to pay.  It doesn’t have anything to do with parties or ideologies. If you gave 10 Benjamins to someone to spend on your behalf I’m pretty sure you would make certain it was spent with your best interests in mind or at the very least not spent on a cockeyed scheme that was approved with nothing more than a casual wave of the hand.  As my wife put it, “It wasn’t their money.” I understand that when it comes to national and state budgets it is difficult to figure out just what is going on in such a massive money pot. But at the local level with smaller budgets and more visible projects it is easier to spot the accounting sleight of hand.

     One of the casualties of our internet, gotta have the information now society, is journalism.  There is a dearth of true investigative journalism, the kind of work that exposed a sitting President, Richard Nixon, as a blackguard and common criminal.  Investigative journalism isn’t cost effective these days.  It takes time to follow the trails and develop the story, and newspapers with dwindling circulations and ad revenues find themselves with little patience for a long story to pan out.  And so with a fourth estate that has to compete with sensationalism, dumbing down, raging ideologies and stories that are hustled to the public because speed counts over vetting, who is left to protect our interests?  The answer is in your mirror.