HPD Still Covers Children's Mental Healthcare

In Which: I question how Mental Health gets funded in Schools. Trade Unions barter away their right to strike on City Projects. And an Urbanist White Whale appears again.

Important Things That Council Won’t Discuss

HPD’s Youth and Family Bureau Gets County Funding

HPD’s Youth and Family Services Bureau will get more funding to continue its work around both intervention/diversion and mental health counseling to children in Hayward. A sub-department of HPD with 16 full time staff (have we mentioned before that HPD has over 330 full-time staff, a full third of the entire City Staff?), the Youth and Family Services Bureau (YFSB) will be getting $600,000 from Alameda County and HUSD to continue providing these services to children.

The first program is the intervention/diversion program, officially called the Delinquency Prevention Network (Programs). This set of programs covers a wide range of things, including diversion programs to keep arrested youth out of the criminal legal system, life skills and support services, service coordination to address basic needs, and restorative justice programs for children in one of the two different juvenile detention centers in Alameda County, and those who have recently been released.

These are good things to be doing. We should be doing restorative justice work, especially for children. We should be providing their basic needs so they don’t miss school or are pushed into gangs or just steal to survive. We should be providing life skills training to support children and their families who don’t have the ability to pass these skills along themselves.

But we should also be asking ourselves: Why are we arresting children? Why are we giving $233,000 to the Police Department to provide these services for 10 months? Why, when our society has failed these children, are we putting them in more contact with the police department? Why have we failed them?

And these questions should continue when considering the mental health counselors that are being funded through the YFSB. Again, objectively a positive thing: students need mental health support. All students at every school deserve access to free mental health counseling, not just those at Stonebrae Elementary and Ochoa, Bret Harte, and MLK Middle Schools.

But why is the money going through HPD? Why are counselors, the people called to help those who are suffering, in the same department as those with license to kill people they believe may be guilty of a crime? Why, when our society fails these children, are we funneling their healing through the police department?

It doesn’t have to be this way. We have the power to make these changes. And we owe it to our children to find the strength to do so.

Renewed Union Agreement Stops Strikes Before They Happen

The Community Workforce Agreement is an agreement between the City and the Building Trades Council (BTC), which is the collective name of all the building trade unions—electricians, plumbers, carpenters, sprinkler fitters, etc. It was initially created in 2015 to cover the work on the new Downtown Library. The City then expressed interest in doing a city-wide agreement, and that was settled in 2017.

The news here is that it’s been re-negotiated and there’s some new provisions. Most of it is pretty commonsense stuff, like allowing employment interviews to be conducted via teleconference, and some technical stuff around grievance arbitration. The big boon for the City is that there are a lot of provisions around hiring Hayward residents and HUSD graduates.

Local jobs for local people.

But one of the other reasons it was created is to keep the projects moving on time. City projects are usually plagued with delays and cost overruns that have nothing to do with labor—just look at the new library and all their issues, or the current cost increases for materials—so the City presumably saw value in pre-empting strikes.

The Staff report says:

During the duration of the Projects, the Union(s) and its members, agents, representatives and employees shall not incite, encourage, condone, or participate in any strike, walkout, slowdown, sit-down, stay-in, boycott, wobble, sympathy strike, picketing or other work stoppage or hand billing of any nature whatsoever, for any cause whatsoever (including jurisdictional disputes), and it is expressly agreed that any such action is a violation of the agreement. (emphasis added)

In essence, the unions of the BTC agree to never strike—or even publicly condone other strikes—during a City project. Ever. There’s an arbitration process for any workplace issues, but there is zero tolerance for work stoppage.

It’s a bit of a devil’s bargain: trade away your right to strike in exchange for the very lucrative City projects—often tens of millions of dollars. The City wins because work goes smoothly, no matter what happens, and locals get hired into good Union jobs. We just won’t mention that those good Union jobs exist because of the ability to strike, including solidarity/sympathy strikes.

It feels especially interesting that it’s being re-approved in May, less than a week after May Day—the celebration of the Haymarket Massacre—also called International Worker’s Day. By asking the Unions to trade away their most powerful weapon, the City complicates its own self-described reputation of being Union-friendly.

Clearly, union leadership hasn’t had issue with it over the last 10 years and doesn’t have issue with it now. But I’m sure the former leadership of UAW thought the same thing a few years ago.

Company Drama Over Main Street Bid

The Main Street Complete Streets Project is going to move forward, but not without some drama. The winner of the bid is Radius Earthworks, but there was some contention from Sposeto Engineering about the process.

These bids are supposed to be closed-envelope affairs, to help ensure that people are putting in fair cost estimates and not just trying to chase each other to the bottom for the $4,500,000 project—with the safe knowledge that the City will approve any change orders and increases. But closed-envelope isn’t just a euphemism—the bids seem to be delivered in sealed envelopes to the City and everyone involved stands around hoping they get the lowest bid, which the City will always choose (there’s reasons and criticism there, but that’s another story).

Apparently, the bid from Radius Earthworks was in an envelope that wasn’t fully sealed and so Sposeto—the one with the second-lowest bid—spent $500 real world dollars to try to invalidate the bid on a technicality. The calculation was sound, who wouldn’t spend $500 on the chance to get $5,000,000?

Unfortunately for them, the City saw the protest for what it was and is rejecting the protest from Sposeto and award it to Radius. Either way, the project is getting done, but it can be both comforting and worrying that big companies engage in petty drama just like the rest of us.

Community To Be Consulted On Public Transit Equity

Hayward is putting in for a grant from the Alameda County Transportation Commission (ACTC) to develop a Community Based Transportation Plan. There’s a regional Bay Area Plan that Hayward contributed to, but the City is trying to get one of our own because of the 13 census tracts that the Metropolitan Transportation Commission has identified in Hayward as being Equity Priority Communities.

You can see which areas qualify on the map below:

If you aren’t sure what an Equity Priority Community is, the MTC lays it out like this “Equity Priority Communities are census tracts that have a significant concentration of underserved populations, such as households with low incomes and people of color.” There are other considerations, like limited English proficiency and no-car households, but most of the weight goes to being People of Color and Low Income.

If we get this, we can hopefully get some more love from AC Transit and BART—Hayward is cut into 3 pieces in the BART District map, effectively limiting its influence on the board. The plan will involve community engagement from the people in the EPC’s above to understand their concerns and hopefully improve access and circulation of transit there.

Sherman Lewis’s White Whale

For those of you who don’t know Sherman Lewis, he ran for City Council last cycle, he’s an emeritus professor of CSU East Bay, and he’s a big believer in walkable cities. He’s also earned the respect of City Staff—or maybe annoyed them—enough to get his own zone (SD7 - Sustainable Mixed-Use, up to 100 units/net acre). The only place that zone exists is on the parcel he’s earmarked for what he’s now calling College Heights.

This project is, in a word, ambitious. And it has been for a while. The Staff Report doesn’t say for how long, but it does say “Sherman Lewis, has long advocated for the concept and has prepared numerous studies, reports, and presentations regarding the proposed concept benefits.” The closest it’s gotten to moving forward was in 2019 when Integral Communities initially agreed to take it on, but they backed out in 2022—the Staff Report doesn’t say why.

If you want to dream big, this is the way. It’s got all the New Urbanist bells and whistles: 100% affordability, mixed-use, walkability, ornamentation over massing setbacks, its own shuttle bus, cafes and markets and tons of affordable units.

Adding 732 affordable units would be a massive win for the City. It could be a model for more dense and walkable construction throughout Hayward that would not only make life better for almost everyone, but also help meet our climate goals. It is, without doubt, a beautiful idea.

Unfortunately, that’s all it is. According to the Staff Report “Dr. Lewis does not currently have control of the subject property through a purchase and sale agreement or an option on the property; nor does he have completed project plans or a source of financing for the project: College Heights, formerly Bayview Village, is conceptual at this point in time.” (Emphasis added). This is an idea in search of an investor.

Then why is it in front of the City Council? Lewis is hoping that having the Council’s support will attract partners and investors. The City has given all of the help it can to this project—it wouldn’t even have to be rezoned—but if nobody steps up soon, the State is going to auction off the property to someone, whether they like this idea or not. Planned Development rezoning happens all the time.

So if you happen to have several million dollars laying around and are looking to invest in a beautiful dream, I bet Sherman Lewis would love to hear from you.