Saturday, May 7, 2011, was a great day for freedom!!! Over 26 brave East Bay Tea Party members and others we did not even know stood up against an army of well trained environmental activists and beat them at their own game. The fake visioning meeting for “One Bay Area 2035” was systematically dismantled by neighbors who just asked simple questions. Let me tell you it was a bit nerve racking at first, but once we got started it was cathartic and fun!!
Let me give you a bit of background information first. For those of you that do not know “One Bay Area” or “You Choose Bay Area” from Adam…. It is a taxpayer and privately funded venture designed to form a “Consensus” about what our housing and transit should look like in the year 2035. This visioning workshop was billed as a public workshop and boy did they hear from the public!!! This all a result of the passage of SB375 and AB32. Just to give you a quick idea of what they are about you can read through this link, or a summary of Agenda 21 in the U.S.
Without reading I’ll give it to you in a nutshell; the visioning process seeks to gain consensus from the public that we need a predetermined plan for future development that primarily takes into consideration CO2 emissions. The meeting was funded, sponsored or supported by the MTC (Metropolitan Transportation Commission) http://www.mtc.ca.gov/, ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments) http://www.abag.ca.gov/, the “Green Belt Alliance” http://www.greenbelt.org/, “Transform” http://transformca.org/, among others. The outcomes of this visioning process are designed to draw a consensus to fund…….……wait for it…………. wait for it…… Public TRANSPORTATION and OPEN Space Conservation!!!!
First I want to say that we did not go in there without preparing. We met ahead of time and strategized on how we would handle ourselves down to the minute detail. We developed a plan and implemented it. We registered for the event, showed up and questioned them mercilously about the details of their plan. Here’s where their plan breaks down. Their plan for the future is to “stack and pack” housing near mass transit so we the people are not a burden on our environment by breathing and emitting CO2 from our cars. They want to limit building to existing urban growth boundaries, which are arbitrarily set by City Councils. They base their utopian model on high density housing with shops underneath, no parking, but lots of bicycles and walking????? What these people don’t seem to understand is that people move to the Suburbs to get away from this type of Urban lifestyle.
As a realtor I see this every day. Young earth minded eco friendly brain washed urbanites that have recently had kids and suddenly realize San Francisco is NO place to raise kids. There is no place to send your kids to play within eyeshot from your home. There is no easy way to grocery shop with a screaming 2 year old. The carry the groceries 10 blocks from the store to your high rise or three story walk up where you have no elevator. Sounds great doesn’t it???? NO!!! The 20 or 30 something crow without kids rightly fully think living in the city with other singles packed and stacked is fun and so is partying the night away until the sun comes up. Then reality or kids hit you and you suddenly realize that this lifestyle has no room for kids and family. Don’t get me wrong…. I’ve been there. When I was 20/30 I felt the same way, but once you have kids you are forced to stop being selfish and think about your child’s welfare and not just your own.
That is why most of the transplant urbanites come to the suburbs of Contra Costa County. They know that we have great schools and freedoms not found in the city. The freedom to get in your car and take your kid to Karate, Soccer, Little League, Ballet or Spanish class and park right in front while you wait for an hour or two bored out of your skull, but loving it because that is what’s best for your child. The last thing these warrior moms are thinking about is Co2 emissions and carbon footprints.
The first speaker was there to go through a broad visioning process and get the crowd to buy in to a predetermined outcome. We were all handed clickers and asked questions. The group was being guided through the questions by the facilitator who was following a power point presentation. The questions started off benign… are you male/female. Then got worse…. What is your ethnicity? That’s when one of our members asked “Why does that matter?” Then we were asked to rank a list of items from 1 to 5 (one being high priority and 5 being low priority). The list included things like; I want a big yard and big house, I want clean air, I want clean water, I want more roads, I want to drive less, I want to conserve open space, I want to improve public transit, etc. We kept asking questions of the facilitator because many of these questions are too general and most are loaded questions. We had people peppering him with questions from all sides of the room. At that point the meeting leaders could tell this crowd was not going to go along with their predetermined plan. They tried switching speakers a few times, but we weren’t having any of it so finally they stopped the voting process and the guy packed up his stuff and left. Score one for our side!! Another facilitator asked us all to take a break.
After the break they brought a geeky guy from “Greenbelt Alliance” to pinch hit and he was a tougher nut to crack. He absolutely would not entertain any questions. He wouldn’t even tell us what the mission statement was of his organization. Anyway during his presentation some guy who I don’t know jumped to his feet and went up front and addressed the crowd. He said “I used to work for them! I left the Greenbelt Alliance because they oppose building on any property and repair of any roads!” He went on to say other stuff I can’t remember, but I got his info later when the meeting was over.
Then they broke us up into small groups based on where we lived in the county. They made us all get up and move to other tables. This is when we realized that there were at least 4 of them at each table. At my table I had one attorney who represented builders and transit, someone from “Transform”, a developer and the table facilitator. In addition there were 3 college students from SF, me and another one of our members who is from Russia.
They pulled out maps of the county and a list of place types (urban, suburban, city center, transit center, etc.) with pictures and asked us to plan our future cities. No information was given other than the picture of the place types. I told them this is a ridiculous exercise and their whole plan was to stack and pack and I would not participate in this exercise. Since we wouldn’t participate and none of the other people that were there were from Contra Costa I wouldn’t let them continue to plan a community they had no knowledge of personally. The idea that someone who knows nothing about your community can plan your future is disturbing to me.
Then they brought out these index size colored cards. They asked us to each pick 4 (out of 8 or 10) of the cards based on how important they were to us. We did this exercise two times with different cards. The cards had stuff like; I want to spend more money on mass transit, I want to fix pot holes, I want to widen freeways, I want to improve access to mass transit, etc. The bottom line was to get you to choose Mass Transit as those were the people that were hosting the meeting and there is $200 billion dollars of federal money at stake. I did not participate in this process either. After reading through the cards it was clear to me that this was just another way for them to say that we all want to spend money on mass transit. What really ticked me off was that the schills at my table were also voting!! These are the same people who sponsored the meeting! I should have spoken up and questioned why they would vote during this public input period, but I was so ticked off by then it didn’t cross my mind. If I go to a future meeting I would insist that these facilitators not vote.
What I learned is that these meetings are rigged. There is no real public input. All options given are designed to lead to a predetermined end solution. There is a lot of money at stake ($200 billion). All of this planning can be derailed by lobbying your local city council members not to implement these plans. We must get involved locally. We must get people elected to local planning commissions, city councils, water boards, etc. We can derail these meetings by speaking out, asking questions and holding them accountable. These meetings are going on all over the Bay Area and all over the Country!!! Agenda 21 is designed to abolish private property rights by rezoning and eminent domain. It is also designed to force us out of our cars by advocating legislation that would penalize car owners by raising parking fees, bridge tolls and other things associated with driving. To use our codes and statutes as a punitive measure against one group of citizens is un-American and illegal I think?
If you have gotten this far in my recon rant and this has not inspired you to take action then I don’t know what else to say, but go back to sleep and don’t worry things will be taken care of by the government!!! One day (in 2035) you will wake up in subsidized government housing, eating government subsidized food, your kids will be whisked off by government buses to indoctrination training centers while you are working at your government assigned job on the bottom floor of your urban transit center village because you have no car and who knows where your aging parents will be but by then it will be too late! WAKE UP!!!!
If you want to get involved join the East Bay Tea Party or some other group fighting against Agenda 21. Search for “Sustainable Community workshops in your area. Get a group of people to strategize and attend together and help us stop the spread of this cancer in our Country!!!
Other links and information:
- Read about ICLEI at work in Contra Costa and its cities
- agenda21fighters@yahoo.com (This a great national yahoo group)
- www.theEastBayTeaParty.com (We have an extremely active group)
Bill Gram-Reefer is Editor & Publisher of Halfway To Concord, founded in 2004. Halfway To Concord is the leading online source for community-driven political news, events, and opinion for Contra Costa County and the San Francisco East Bay.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Yeah, screw those holier-than-thou urbanites! The answer is clearly more cars and cul-de-sacs! I’m happy to pay $9,641 every year for the convenience of my car, despite all of the side effects. Let’s stop these elites from taking our property!
Bravo for long-term planning and sustainable growth, but don’t let the ink dry on those buy-sell agreements just yet.
A few key points to consider:
- The groups behind this development effort say we have a choice, but they present the most important choice as a simple assertion: Bay Area population will grow by 2.2 million people by 2035. Our roads, downtowns, parks, transit resources will all be more crowded.
- According to their website, in 2010 SVCF granted roughly $75,000 each to 16 organizations that advocate for building more housing, and for groups that go to public meetings to advocate for more residential construction. Its Board of Directors is a “who’s who” of real estate developers, bankers and architects.
- According to California law S.B. 375, Bay Area cities are forced to join this transit-based development effort in order to qualify for billions in Federal and regional transportation funding.
- Transit-based development, as defined by S.B. 375, provides a loophole used by real estate developers to avoid compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
- We have 10 percent unemployment and a glut of vacant housing in the Bay Area. Building 900,000 more units and increasing the population by 33 percent will only increase job competition, strain resources and add congestion, while the few profit.
- And the challenge of reducing our carbon emissions consistent with California law will be made more difficult as a result of this hypothetical population increase. It’s that simple.
You can choose Bay Area.
I agree with Edi on all counts except #3 which is where your point relates Bill.
I do think if people think there is a conspiracy, they should fight fire with fire, but bragging about it out loud on a site that I am sure the other side reads (I read left wing blogs all the time to see what they are up to) is probably not the most strategic.
Personally I differ with some of my allies on this issue in that I dont think it is a conspiracy as much of what they do is described online. Some told me they were using a devious tactic called “delphi technique.” However, if they were using such a tactic as described on Wikipedia, they clearly were not very good at it. Its like my criticism of NWO/911 conspiracy theorists, the people supposedly perpetrating the conspiracy are too incompetant for such a conspiracy to stay a secret for long.
These Onebayarea people have good intentions, unfortunately the road to hell is paved with them. Im not interested in a highway, (or high speed railline) to hell.
Right on, Randle!
Some points to consider from a tactical perspective…
1. never boast about having stacked an audience
(It diminishes the reflection of others on the results and detracts from impact)
2. never follow it up with boasting about it
(It makes people feel manipulated- which is what they were and then you stuff it – not in the face of the facilitators who now have an excuse to blame the failed meeting on something other than their own approach and topic, but instead of the audience members who were not part of your position group- people really eventually get ticked off by being manipulated- which oddly enough is one of the points you wanted to make)
3. never fight a conspiracy by calling it a conspiracy and displaying the behavior of a counter conspiracy.
(You will not convince people of the other’s conspiracy and only reinforce and confirm that you are a group of conspirators. A conspiracy theory is always a weak ploy and detracts from the focus on the counter ACTION that is wanted)
4. keep the focus on the goal and the cause, not on the goalie and causer.
There is a role for demonization but it should not be done casually.
5. always broaden the credit to enhance potential allies rather than hog the highlight.
For example there were those in the crowd that were very much environmentalist but also champions of local control, why tick them off on one side, rejoice in the common appeals. You sharpen the differences within coalition against your position not amongst your own side.
…things learned in stopping a war 40 years ago.
I disagree Edi, Labor does this all the time. It’s about time citizens organize and stand their ground at these shadow government passive aggressive process charades.
Bless you for doing this and writing this great piece. You nailed on the head the plans of these organizations and their desire to have us all in Soviet-style housing.
The assumptions of these organizations are ridiculous as well. A key issue to them is getting everyone out of cars, as if in 2035 we will all still be driving internal combustion engines! This is akin to planning for 1935 in 1911 by assuming horse-and-buggy would be the primary form of transportation 25 years into the future.
ABAG’s website stresses that the Bay Area suburbs should undergo “smart urbanization” and gives tips to local politicians on how to combat “NIMBYs” who might be against this. They stop just short of advocating re-education camps for opponents.
Although most projections show population growth in CA for the foreseeable future will be concentrated in the Central Valley, these organizations make the preposterous claim that three million more people will live in the Bay Area by 2035 — thus the need for the “stack and pack”. Apparently none of them ever learned about the pesky law of supply and demand. You don’t build transit villages in distant suburbs with the idea that someday there will be people to fill them.
You are absolutely correct that people move to the suburbs to get away from high-density living — and in the Bay Area, there are already ample high-density living areas with more than enough vacancies for those who desire that lifestyle. We don’t need to develop them in the suburbs.
These organizations are dangerous and wish to interfere with your freedom, and your community’s right to self-determination. When the state is facing billions in deficits, any taxpayer funding for these groups should be the first to go so that a few cops and teachers might be spared.
KUDOS TO YOU GRETCHEN.