Districting Timeline and How-To
In Which: I push you to represent your neighborhood. Unions speak to Council on pay and vacancies. And Councilmembers ask about pet infrastructure projects.
Districting Updates
Districting is still coming and it’s coming in a big way. Not only is the City actively engaging in the process, Hayward Unified School District is also in the works, and their timeline is ahead of the City’s—their first public hearing has already happened. Here are important dates to know:
May 14th: First Public Hearing for City of Hayward
May 22nd: Second Public Hearing for HUSD
May 29th: Draft Maps for HUSD Posted
What Should I Do?
HUSD and the City need you to define what your neighborhood actually is. It’s dangerous to go alone, take this Mapping Tool. You don’t have to make an account. You can just use this mapping tool to zoom in on Hayward and describe and map the area that you think of as your neighborhood. It has a short answer section, but thankfully it’s in a dozen different languages.
After that, you just need to click on Draw Your Community and select Add By Clicking. Then you can just click the blocks that you think comprise your neighborhood. When you’re done, you can export it—be sure to choose ShapeFile—and email it off to both districting@husd.us and districting@hayward-ca.gov. You can save a PDF if you want to, but trust me… it is not as impressive as you think it should be.
That’s it! The other thing you can do is tell someone you know about it. Do you really want the City Council to be drawing up these maps on their own? Do you trust City Staff to really know what your neighborhood is like? I know I don’t. So get everyone you know involved—even if they live in the same home.
Unions Speak Up At Council Meeting
I didn’t mention it on Tuesday—there were too many interesting things on the Consent Calendar—but the City Council is in contract negotiations with the City Staff unions. There appears to be three distinct unions at play: Service Employees International Union (SEIU), International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), and Hayward Association of Management Employees (HAME). And it doesn’t look like any of them are happy.
They didn’t shout or demand, but they did comment on the declaration of “Public Servant Recognition Week” to show up and make themselves known. “Our work makes the City of Hayward work,” a representative of IFPE Local 21 said during public comment. They pointed out that there were many unfilled positions within City departments—especially Public Works which has over 30 vacancies.
The union reps said that they needed good wage packages, Cost of Living Adjustments (COLA), and pay equity with what other local agencies are offering. They recognized that Hayward is not alone in having recruitment issues, but put forward a solution. “Good wages,” a HAME rep said, “are the best way to deal with recruitment and retention challenges.”
Despite the looming budget shortfall, many of these positions have already had money allocated to them—filling them will just be spending the money that’s already been set aside. Although it wasn’t mentioned specifically, money could be re-allocated from other difficult to fill positions—like the Police Department—to increase wages for departments like Public Works. They stressed they wanted these positions to be filled, “in order to help this city.”
Assorted Items of Interest
East Bay Greenway Event
If you’re interested in how the East Bay Greenway is going to be going through Hayward, there’s an event on Monday May 20th at 2pm at the Eden Greenway hot meal distribution event, hosted by 5 Sikh Seva. It’ll be on the corner of Harder and Cypress. So if you’re interested, swing by, grab a bite to eat, and give your opinion about how these bicycle improvements will best benefit Hayward.
Building Trades Council Agreement Continued
The agreement between the City and the Building Trades Council was continued on Tuesday. Mayor Salinas pointed out that there were some edits that needed to be made to the agreement, though he did not give any details about what those edits were.
Capital Improvement Project Updates
We’ve covered this before when the Planning Commission took a look at it in mid-April. The majority of the staff report, much like last time, was devoted to showing off the CIP website that is housing all of the information. It continues to be a really accessible way of organizing a mountain of data about hundreds of projects that are being worked on throughout the City.
City Staff highlighted some of the more noteworthy projects that are in the report, including: $14,300,000 are earmarked for pavement rehabilitation, the new Water Resources Recovery Facility is going to cost over $500,000,000, the last section of Mission Boulevard improvements—between A Street and Rose Street—should be finished by the end of this year, and that the new locker room at HPD HQ is going to be over 6,000 square feet in size.
Much to the dismay of the caller from Hayward Concerned Citizens, the future Police HQ—which will be built next to the new fire station on unused sections of the Airport on Winton—wasn’t listed as a project in the CIP. Councilmember Syrop later asked about the cost of the upcoming Police HQ, which will be between $150,000,000 and $300,000,000. Staff also pointed out that the money to build that will likely come from the extension of Measure C, so it obviously isn’t budgeted for yet.
Money Talk
As this plan is dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars—and has identified over $1,000,000,000 in projects—so there was a lot of talk about money and saving money. Councilmember Zermeño asked how much of the money will be coming from the General Fund, and Staff said that less than 1/3 of the money will come from there. The rest is paid for by enterprise funds—money that comes from utility companies paying to use our public works and also the rates we pay for in our bills.
Councilmember Andrews asked if there was some way of coordinating sewer replacement and pavement rehabilitation to save costs. Staff said that they try to as often as possible, as it doesn’t make sense to tear up a street, put pipes in, pave over it, only to repave it again. But there are issues with getting the two priorities aligned in the same stretch of road. Luckily, if your street has been torn up to lay some pipes, it should get repaved again like new when they’re done.
Councilmember Bonilla asked if there were other sources of money that have been looked at to tackle the $690,000,000 in identified, but unfunded, projects. Staff said they’re always looking for grants—if you listen to Staff talk, it seems like that’s half of their job some days—and Councilmember Bonilla expressed interest in finding more money internally. “[I want to] put a plug in for how we determine how it is we work as a community to to bring in more revenue—or more funds—into the City to be able to fund these things.”
Pet Projects
Several folks on Council have pet projects that they asked for updates on. Councilmember Andrews asked, yet again, about any progress on the overcrossing of Tennyson and 880. She asked if there were any Safe Routes program money or any way to work with Caltrans to make the on/off ramps more safe. City Staff said they’re always looking for grants and extra money, but that Caltrans isn’t really prioritizing that area at this time.
Councilmember Syrop asked after the bus stop seats that he and Councilmember Zermeño pushed for earlier this year. Staff said that 10 of the 12 are installed and they are gathering feedback on how they’re received by users. He was assured that if the feedback is positive, Staff will come back and try to get more installed. Councilmember Syrop also asked why there was no spending on homelessness, and Staff responded that they aren’t expanding infrastructure at this time and that the Navigation Center has been handed off to Bay Area Community Services.
Councilmember Roche highlighted multiple areas in her comments, including the intersection of E Street and East Avenue—she indicated that the intersection could use more stop signs. She also asked after a patch of grass in South Hayward—it’s technically not even in Hayward—and Staff pointed out that there’s a jurisdictional conflict there and that the City can’t even expand the sidewalk (which the city owns) without getting the OK from Caltrans (which owns the road).
City Staff should also talk to the people who run the Goodwill on Mission Blvd, according to Councilmember Roche, because they were concerned about how long the work had been halted. City Staff pointed out that during excavation, they’d found unexpectedly old infrastructure that needed to be remediated, so things had slowed down. Finally, Councilmember Roche asked after the sign on Jackson and Silva, which is in the works, according to Staff.
Mayor Led to Revelation By Harvard Students
Mayor Salinas didn’t have much to say about the CIP document, other than to point out how much better the online format is compared to a 900 page binder. Instead he talked about one of the projects that Harvard students have been working on as a part of the Bloomberg/Harvard program that the Mayor has been a part of for the last several months. The project revolves around modeling a budget to include maintenance costs for infrastructure projects.
Now, this is not a particularly new idea—some have been talking about the issue of not including maintenance in road construction in 2010—but it is an idea I support. “We can get a much fuller picture,” Mayor Salinas said, “of a project when we include those maintenance costs.” He said that the Harvard students are developing an interactive budgeting tool and the models will be used on the development of the new Police HQ.
It’s a shame that it took some students flying in from Boston to make this change, but I’ll take late over never—especially when someone else is paying for it.