[Kern County] Grand jury finds unacceptable conditions at Bakersfield senior housing facility

A Kern County grand jury report released Thursday highlighted alarming conditions at a low-income senior housing facility on Wilson Road, ranging from homeless people coming and going at will to inoperable smoke alarms and security cameras to prostitution and drug deals on the premises.

The 13-page account recommended a list of urgent changes to be made next year, such as restoring the facility's food pantry, locking down access and scheduling more on-site activities, while also giving the facility's owner and operator, the Housing Authority of the County of Kern, 90 days to respond to the report.

The housing authority's assistant executive director, Heather Kimmel, took issue Thursday with some of the report's conclusions, saying improvements have been made that were not reflected in the report. But she acknowledged the semi-independent public agency has been frustrated by the impact crime has had on the 199-unit Plaza Towers/Plaza Towers Annex at 3015 Wilson Road.

Several senior county officials declined to address the report ahead of the authority's 90-day deadline to respond to the grand jury. But a commissioner of the agency, Keith Wolaridge, who said he had been unaware of the concerns detailed in the report, spoke up to say they will be addressed.

"My initial thought, you know, (is that) I do have a concern," he said. "It's our responsibility to look after all of our tenants and their safety, and we will take right actions going forward."

Several people living at the facility vouched for many of the report's allegations in interviews Thursday, saying that although some conditions have improved in recent months, security remains a big concern, along with problems like bed bugs, rooms reeking of drugs and cigarettes and a front gate that never closes.

"We don't feel safe," partly because the facility's doors don't lock at night, said five-year resident Irma Cetto. "We have problems with parking. We have problems with everything. They say they don't have money."

Another five-year resident, Lucy Portillo, said the water at the towers "tastes and smells bad." When it rains, the lobby floods, and non-residents have unimpeded access, she said, adding, "It's bad."

Ross Walters, who has lived there for about a year, noted someone recently defecated in the laundry room and that, while people do enter at will, "they have locked it down a lot … in the last month."

The report compares three of the housing authority's facilities, the other two being the Pinewood Glen Retirement property at 2221 Real Road, which serves "low-income" residents, and the Park Place Senior Apartments, serving "very low-income" residents. The towers serve "extremely low-income" residents making 30 percent or less of the area's adjusted median income, which was $59,700 in April of last year.

After interviewing housing authority officials, reviewing budgets, reading crime summaries and speaking with residents, the grand jury concluded security and access are big problems at the towers — but not its only challenges.

The housing authority only has two full-time investigators, which the report characterized as insufficient and in need of addressing on a schedule laid out in the document.

It found a senior food pantry launched there in May 2010 no longer exists and should be restored by March 1. It said a single hour per week of organized activity, a bingo game, is inadequate to keep residents busy.

The report pointed to non-working smoke alarms and disabled security cameras, prostitution and drug sales on the property.

The grand jury witnessed people they said they assumed were homeless entering and leaving the facility during their visit.

Kimmel noted the housing authority recently spent more than $725,000 on security measures, not all of it at the towers property. She added that other deficiencies are being addressed, such as the property's access gates.

She denied the property has been neglected simply because residents there pay less money in rent than do others at facilities that charge more. One problem, she said, is that the towers property has a higher concentration of residents and is surrounded by a neighborhood with greater crime problems.

In one example, it noted someone has been living unauthorized on one of the towers' roofs, and that the person has caused more than $35,000 in damage so far this year.

"Trespassers are occupying the laundry rooms, stairwells, bathrooms and sleeping within the facility often locking stairwells, preventing residents' access," the report noted.

Another concern raised in the document was that the property's crime log does not match that of the Bakersfield Police Department, whose records showed incidents not noted by the property's management.

Bakersfield.com
John Cox
December 15, 2022

The Elusive Quest for Environmental Justice at Hunters Point [San Francisco]

The failed cleanup of a Navy site in San Francisco is a worrisome test of federal policies.

In the long-running battle for environmental justice, the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco is a crucial beachhead. The Navy and EPA have been trying to clean up the radioactive site for decades, so that it can be handed over to the city for lucrative real estate development by the shipyard’s master developer, Lennar Corp. But a series of remediation scandals and controversies have plagued the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, which has been called “a textbook case of environmental injustice.” If the Navy and EPA can get away with a subpar cleanup at one of the Navy’s most hazardous sites, in one of the nation’s most historically progressive cities, environmental justice advocates fear a cascade of similar losses around the country.

The Navy bought the shipyard on the edge of the San Francisco Bay just 11 days after Pearl Harbor and employed 18,000 people there toward the end of World War II, one-third of whom were African American. Components of “Little Boy,” the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, were transported across the Pacific from Hunters Point by the USS Indianapolis. The post-war shipyard became home to the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory for the study and decontamination of ships used in the nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands. Top-secret radiological defense and fallout research, waste disposal, and repair of heavily radiated ships coming back from Bikini Atoll left the shipyard with extensive toxic contamination, but low on documentation of what was disposed of where. The shipyard was declared an EPA Superfund site in 1989, due to contamination from asbestos, as well as PCBs and radioactive materials.

Racist housing policies led many African Americans to settle in the Bayview-Hunters Point area in the years following the war, and the area still has the city’s largest African American population. Twenty-seven percent of the neighborhood’s 35,000-plus residents currently live within a quarter mile of contamination risk, according to a new San Francisco Civil Grand Jury report, “Buried Problems and a Buried Process.”

The cleanup at the EPA Superfund site devolved into scandal in 2014, when investigators discovered that workers from Navy contractor Tetra Tech EC had faked remediation of radioactive soils. The massive eco-fraud scandal deepened further when investigators found that at least 90 percent of Tetra Tech’s work was suspect. More than $250 million in taxpayer dollars was wasted. Two Tetra Tech EC supervisors were convicted and sentenced to eight months in federal prison in 2018. Parent company Tetra Tech Inc. tried to scapegoat the duo as “rogue employees” purportedly acting on their own.

The Department of Justice joined ongoing false claims lawsuits against Tetra Tech EC later that year, suggesting the DOJ doesn’t buy that narrative. Tetra Tech’s attempt to distance itself from the alleged lone miscreants took another hit in 2020, when the San Francisco Bay View reported on how another Tetra Tech subsidiary was caught up in similar radiological sampling/testing controversies at another EPA Superfund site in Ohio in the 1990s.

The ongoing controversy surrounding Hunters Point recently flared up again this fall, when the EPA made it known that it doesn’t intend to hold the Navy responsible for a full cleanup at the site. Failure to do so would disregard Proposition P, a measure passed overwhelmingly by San Francisco voters in 2000 (and adopted by the city’s board of supervisors in 2001), which urged that the site be cleaned up to the agency’s most protective standards for safe residential use without restrictions.

“On one hand, EPA talks about the importance of community input, but on the other hand says it is free to ignore Prop P, one of the strongest expressions of community input imaginable,” Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER)’s Pacific Director Jeff Ruch said in a statement. His concern was echoed by other watchdogs and activists in the Bay Area.

“Rather than assure that the site is cleaned up to its most protective standards, the EPA intends to allow the use of far weaker limits and let the Navy walk away from much of the pollution at the site, relying on unenforceable land-use restrictions and covering up rather than cleaning up the radioactivity and toxic chemicals,” Daniel Hirsch, an environmental policy analyst, wrote for the San Francisco Examiner. This amounts to “regulatory capture,” which happens when an agency is influenced to act in favor of the entities it’s supposed to be regulating. Hirsch has previously outlined this and much more in four comprehensive reports on Hunters Point Naval Shipyard (HPNS) for the Committee to Bridge the Gap, an advocacy group for which he is president.

Hirsch and Ruch were part of a local stakeholder group that met with EPA upper management in 2021 to discuss community recommendations for moving forward with the cleanup at Hunters Point. In an email memo to the group that PEER published in October, the EPA said they had convened an interagency working group with the Navy “to identify and resolve issues affecting remediation activities.” The working group was said to include “senior leadership from EPA headquarters and Region 9, the Navy, and California state regulators.”

When queried as to the identities of the working group personnel, an EPA spokesperson would only say that it includes “senior managers from EPA Region 9, EPA Headquarters, the Navy, the California Department of Toxic Substance Control, the California Department of Public Health, and the San Francisco Department of Public Health.”

These are the same agencies that Hirsch says have proven untrustworthy at Hunters Point, based on their prior actions and failures to protect public health at the site. The EPA seems to be taking a page from Uncle Sam’s playbook portrayed in a scene at the end of Steven Spielberg’s classic film Raiders of the Lost Ark, when archeologist Indiana Jones meets with Army Intelligence officials to discuss what’s going to happen with the Ark of the Covenant. “We have top men working on it right now,” one of them says assuredly. “Who?” Indy asks skeptically. “Top men!” comes the response.

The EPA’s vague assurances only lead to more questions. In the same EPA email to stakeholders, the agency noted that “the Navy has also hired an independent contractor to provide third-party quality assurance review.” According to Derek Robinson, the Navy’s Base Realignment and Closure Coordinator & Environmental Program Manager, the independent contractor is Battelle, an Ohio-based firm that happens to be a longtime partner to the Navy and US Department of Energy.

A prior review at Hunters Point from Battelle turned out to be not so independent after all. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, the Navy hired Battelle in 2010 to conduct a cost-cutting study to optimize the radiological remediation work being done by Tetra Tech. Battelle in turn hired the Argonne National Laboratory – which then relied on data that was in part provided by Tetra Tech and vetted by the Navy – to produce a report that offered contrived changes to cleanup rules to save money for the Navy. Now the Navy and EPA are again asking the citizens of San Francisco to trust Battelle as an “independent” provider for “third-party quality assurance review” of radiological rework by the Navy at Hunters Point.

Asked how the Navy can still consider Battelle to be an independent entity, Robinson could only reiterate the Navy’s previous position: “Battelle was hired to provide additional oversight for radiological remediation activities at Hunters Point. The Navy, federal agencies, and state agencies also provide oversight for work being performed to ensure the public is protected and contamination is properly addressed.”

Earth Island Journal
Greg M. Schwartz
December 5, 2022

Palo Alto rejects recommendations to have [Santa Clara] county vet its ballot questions

City's response letter claims Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury proposals would impinge on city's constitutional rights

Defying recommendations from the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury, Palo Alto will not submit its ballot measure questions to the county for review before future elections, according to a response letter that the City Council plans to approve next week.

Palo Alto was among the cities that the grand jury singled out for falling short earlier this year after it conducted a survey of misleading language on ballot measures. The report, titled "If you only read the ballot, you're being duped," analyzed what the grand jury called the "tricks of the trade" that municipalities use to make their ballot measures seem more favorable to voters.

The grand jury specifically took issue with the wording of Measure L, which affirmed the city's historic policy of transferring revenues from the gas utility to the general fund and which overwhelmingly passed last month. The grand jury felt that the phrase in the ballot that states that the tax would be in place "until ended by voters" is misleading because the measure itself does not include a mechanism for ending the practice.

The language, which was also found in other jurisdictions, is cited as an example of poorly worded ballot questions that "may not be illegal, but if they withhold information to shield what is really at issue, they are unethical," the report stated.

"There are insufficient workable checks and balances to prevent this ongoing issue from being curtailed," the grand jury report states. "Not doing anything about this only adds to the distrust of government."

But its proposed remedies — submitting ballot language to a Santa Clara County counsel or to a third-party panel for review — are unlikely to be adopted any time soon. In a defiant response to the report, Palo Alto officials strongly disputed the grand jury's finding that Measure L language was in any way misleading and argued that the proposed remedies would trample on the local control over elections.

The response letter, which the council is scheduled to approve on Dec. 12, maintains that the Measure L language is accurate despite the fact that the measure does not specify a process for voter repeal. That's because the state's Election Code already gives voters that power through the process of circulating a petition.

"It is therefore a true statement that if a tax ordinance is approved by the voters and does not have a fixed end date, then it will be in effect until it is ended or repealed by the voters," the letter states.

City officials are also pushing back against the grand jury's recommendations and argue that ballot language is already well scrutinized by professional staff, approved by the council and subject to legal challenges if it falls short. The formal response, which the city is required to submit, reflects that arguments that City Attorney Molly Stump and Mayor Pat Burt made in the days after the grand jury report issued the report. Burt told this news organization at the time that he believes the grand jury misunderstood local election law and called Measure L language "common and appropriate."

While Palo Alto's response letter concurs with the grand jury's finding that "local governmental entities that sponsor ballot measures have a responsibility to ensure that ballot measure language is clear, accurate, and useful to voters," it disagreed with all three of the recommendations that it was asked to respond to: voluntarily submitting ballot questions to the county counsel; approving a local ordinance or resolution requiring counsel review of ballot questions; and submitting them to a specially created Good Governance in Ballots Commission. The city argues that these recommendations are not warranted and makes clear that they will not be implemented.

The county counsel, the letter notes, is "appointed by and serves at the pleasure of the County Board of Supervisors." The grand jury's proposal to empower the county counsel to potentially modify ballot questions is "not appropriate for cities like Palo Alto, which are separate government entities with independent constitutional authority to control our own elections," according to the letter.

"Giving authority to the County Counsel to review and edit ballot questions for the City of Palo Alto would impinge on Palo Alto's constitutional authority over its elections," the letter states. The effect would be to reduce local control by shifting authority to a government entity that is not accountable to Palo Alto residents."

Palo Alto Weekly
by Gennady Sheyner
December 5, 2022