To the Vallejo City Council and Mayor:
Dr. Matyas gave an excellent presentation at the July 13 city council meeting. None of it is new information, but it is good to keep it in the foreground rather than letting denial take hold. I hope the irony of our recent missed opportunity to eliminate the South Vallejo food desert was not lost on you. We are not helpless. Yes, we should pressure Solano County for more resources, but there is a lot we should be doing to help move Vallejo in the right direction. The first thing is to stop letting staff put the interests of big developers ahead of the peoples’. The staff has a “tin cup” attitude that we have to take whatever is offered, and they treat our assets like someone trying to marry off an ugly stepdaughter.
The calls for studies on our inequities to help us plan better in the future were … interesting. Yes, more knowledge is useful, but don’t forget that we have this thing called the “General Plan.” The city hired professional planners and invited the public in for brainstorming sessions. We had already identified our food deserts, and we already knew that Vallejoans want walkable communities when staff sold us out to the Oakwood Apartment developer. Staff emphasized that it is not illegal to ignore the General Plan (Oakwood Apartments Hearing June 22). Do they view the wishes of the citizenry only as an obstacle and not as a guide? Who do they think they work for?
Then we heard from the “let them eat cake” guy who told us that food deserts are passé, because now you can have your groceries delivered. Let’s examine that. To have groceries delivered you need a bank account with a balance to cover the minimum order. You see all those Payday Loan businesses around town? A lot of people do not have bank accounts. A lot of people don’t have internet either. It does not appear that our local grocers, Safeway and Railey’s, accept EBT. And there are other benefits to walkable communities besides the luxury of being able to run out at 9 p.m. for a bottle of milk, like getting to know your neighbors. But we allowed an arrogant guy who has probably never gone hungry, or had to dig through his sofa cushions looking for enough change for bus fare, tell us to just have our groceries delivered.
Our own city staff set us up for that deal. I agree with Melissa Swift — everyone from the Nyhofff team who puts the interests of developers over our own people needs to go. I also hope we can put the legacy left us by Bob Sampayan — that of regarding commenters like Swift as a small group of malcontents who should be ignored — behind us. If you had listened to Jimmy Genn in time you could have told Dr. Matyas, “Yes, we are working on our food desert problem.”
Dr. Matyas also mentioned small business ownership as a path out of poverty. Nyhoff only seemed to care about big business. Do you know how much is involved in opening a business in Vallejo? Companies like Costco and In-N-Out can afford to spend two years on the planning and permitting process, but small businesses cannot. Our Planning Department is a goat rodeo. You are told something different every time you visit. You may leave the first time thinking you know what you need to do and how much it will cost, only to be told the following week by a different employee that you actually need to do something different. Then, only after weeks or months of dealing with Planning, do Building and Fire come out to the site (that you’ve been renting for weeks or months) to tell you that the exit door isn’t wide enough or that the bathroom sink is too big for 2020 ADA code. How many times have you seen a “Coming Soon” sign in a storefront, only to have it vanish after a few months, returned to a vacant state? Each one of those means that someone lost a lot of money trying and failing to open a business. Our downtown is a deserted embarrassment compared to the neighboring small towns of Crockett and Martinez. Why is that? I hear that Redwood City has a very streamlined and helpful application process, and that applicants can get everything done in a couple of weeks. Let’s look at other cities for best practices to help small business. Let’s make it as easy as possible for people instead of just throwing up hurdles.
So please, while you petition the county for more resources, also pay close attention to what we can do for ourselves.
— Gretchen Zimmermann/Vallejo