It Takes a Village

A Great Day by the Bay

Three years ago, my wife Betty and I moved to the small Bay Area city of Benicia, 45 minutes north of San Francisco. We were enticed by its waterside setting, balmy breezes, safe streets, affordable housing (by Bay Area standards), thriving art scene, civic pride, and small town celebrations such as wine walks and dog festivals. Its catchphrase, to attract visitors, is “A Great Day by the Bay.”

The town has an unusual political history. It served as the state capital from 1853 to 1854. According to local lore, during Prohibition its bars and hotels provided an off-the-beaten-track escape where politicians, judges, and the like could engage in, ahem, apolitical indulgences.

It’s also highly unusual, and fortunate, in that both its previous and current mayors have technocratic backgrounds pertinent to city planning. As part of politically moderate Solano county, Benicia is not as progressive as most Bay Area locales. But on balance it’s still pro-Biden and Democratic. It’s arguably the most liberal city in the most conservative county in the most liberal part of the country.

Trouble in Paradise

Be that as it may, there’s trouble in paradise, courtesy of the Texas-based Valero Energy Corporation. Its Benicia refinery spewed toxic pollutants, hundreds of times the legal limits, into the city’s air for 15 years without telling anyone. Benicians only learned of this earlier this year.

There’s more. Six years ago, Valero lost a bruising battle to bring potentially deadly “bomb trains” through the city. A similar train, carrying flammable crude, exploded and killed 47 people in a Quebec town in 2013. Others have derailed and often caught fire more than 20 times in North America since then.

The company has piled up a further record of pollution and violations, tainting our water and air alike. Its threats are not confined to Benicia. Even the ultra-conservative Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, has sued Valero for repeated violations in his state. The firm has also funded election deniers in Texas.

Poisoning Elections

In recent years, Valero has drawn on its vast wealth – with a current valuation of over $50 billion – to poison Benicia’s elections along with its air. After losing the “bomb train” battle in 2016, it poured massive amounts of money into political action committees that, with mixed success, have backed Valero-friendly candidates and unfairly slammed more independent ones. It successfully supported two such City Council candidates in 2018, but lost when one of them ran for mayor in 2020.

Since 2018, Valero PACs have spent at least $519,000 on just three Benicia elections; the total could climb when this year’s final spending reports come in. This is in a city of just 28,000, where voluntary, widely accepted policies cap candidate spending at about $35,000 (though they typically raise and expend much less) and individual donations at $640.

This is not to paint the company as an unalloyed evil. The refinery contributes a big chunk to the city’s revenues, pays for other services, and provides grants for community projects. In many parts of Benicia, you can’t see the refinery at all. In our three years here, I’ve never experienced even a sniff of its emissions at any spot around town (though I obviously can’t vouch for others).

Many good people, including some Benicia residents, are Valero employees or retirees. But these fine folks do not set corporate policies. Those decisions flow from the firm’s San Antonio headquarters.

There is a darker side to this civic picture. The company negotiates down its taxes, pays for only a small percentage of the city’s water costs despite consuming nearly 60 percent of the resource, and at least once has cut off grant recipients who oppose it.

Benicia and Solano County also have higher cancer and asthma rates than California as a whole. In fairness, whether Valero is to blame has not been nailed down. But it’s a cause for concern.

What Does Valero Want?

All this is a backdrop to our 2022 City Council election. It basically pitted two Valero-favored incumbents, first elected in 2018 with the PAC’s backing, against two liberal challengers. (Two City Council slots are up for election every two years here, on a five-member Council that includes the Mayor, in elections that don’t include party affiliation.)

One of those challengers, Kari Birdseye, had lost in 2018 after being attacked by the PAC in unfair and even cruel ways for her environmental and other credentials, including helping to defeat Valero’s oil bomb plan while on the city’s Planning Commission. The other, Terry Scott, with a background including corporate, small business, governmental, and nonprofit leadership, similarly stood for making Valero more accountable and transparent.

I should emphasize that it’s not as though Valero’s track record was necessarily at the top of Benicians’ concerns. Water bills and road improvement would probably rank higher in terms of everyday priorities. Terry’s and Kari’s campaigns – diverging in some respects, similar in others – were about many such bread-and-butter issues, as well as broader themes.

Still, in a city victimized by repeated environmental violations, a city that had mobilized to stop the oil bomb project, the Texas corporation was far from a non-issue for many. Why was Valero pouring so much money into influencing our elections? What would it do next? What did Valero want?

Surprise, Surprise…and Small Print

For much of this year’s City Council campaign, it seemed that Valero might not want anything, at least in terms of the election. Aside from some expensive polling that the PAC paid for, it seemed to hold back on spending the $232,000 in its coffers.

Then, just a few weeks before Election Day, Valero’s PAC swamped the city with mailers and online ads praising its favored candidates. One especially misleading piece placed photos of those two incumbents together with those of Benicia’s popular Mayor and Vice Mayor, implying their support – even though those officials had endorsed Kari and Terry. Another mailer praised the Valero-backed duo in terms of public safety – this coming from a corporation that had tried to force dangerous trains through town and secretly polluted our air.

Not least in terms of apparent deceit, the small print on the bottom of the ads attributed them to a previously unknown PAC, “Progress for Benicia,” perhaps to avoid the taint of the name previous Valero-funded PACs had used. The ads also noted Valero’s funding in a way even less noticeable to most recipients.  

Within and Beyond the Campaigns

A disclosure here: I aided efforts to inform Benicians about Valero’s practically hidden and certainly unfair PAC funding. But because I worked on an independent election-related initiative, I was barred from learning the strategies or details of Terry’s and Kari’s campaigns. So, in so many ways, this post does not do them or their campaigns justice

Nonetheless, it’s clear that Kari and Terry capped months of strenuous effort by coming on strong down the stretch, including via reminders to voters about truths that countered the Valero PAC’s deceit. They fought the PAC’s flood of misleading messages and excessive expenditures, which added up to far more than their combined campaign budgets.

A separate anti-Valero endeavor was a “Clean Elections” rally, organized by a handful of us independently of the two campaigns. The group pulled it together over the course of just two days and less than a week before Election Day. The rally blasted the corporation for its last-minute splurge of spending and shifty messaging. Here’s the video. (A short talk by me starts at 0:45; a substantially longer one starts at 3:45.)

I’ll sketch many other allied efforts in a minute.

What Politics Is About

The evening of Election Day, I attended a gathering at the home of a local couple. The event was organized to support Kari, hopefully celebrate her victory, and give her a chance to thank folks who’d helped her campaign or were otherwise supportive.

The house has been the scene of some wonderful parties. That night, though, while the atmosphere was still fun, it was also tense in anticipation of the election returns.

And then they came in. Terry was in first place, which was great. But Kari trailed one of the Valero-backed candidates, albeit by only 57 votes. Especially given that Terry had lost a similarly close race when he previously ran in 2020, this was worrisome.

A little later, Kari gave a talk to the assembled group of about 40 folks. It was emotional. It was strong. It was far from confident about the eventual outcome. Having lost to those Valero-sponsored attacks in 2018, here she was again, looking another potential defeat in the eye. But she was still hopeful and thankful for everyone’s help.

Kari’s talk was not the smoothest I’ve ever heard. But it was among the most inspiring. It reminded world-weary me that politics is not just about politicians in Washington, as impactful, important, arrogant, cynical, and craven as they can be.  

Politics is also about people sincerely trying to get meaningful things done on a local level across the country, often with little compensation or appreciation of their efforts. People who care deeply. Like Terry and Kari.

And Then…

All day Wednesday, Betty and I and many other supporters anxiously awaited what the next round of vote tallies would bring. Would Kari fall further behind? Would Terry retain his lead?

Then, early that evening, a text from a friend: “I don’t understand what’s going on! Is Kari back in second now???”

Other texts and emails started flying. Kari was now in second place, 42 votes ahead of third. Terry was still in first place, his own lead growing.

And then on Thursday, Kari went up by 112, Terry by even more. Their leading opponent conceded.

Finallly, with all the votes in on November 18, it became crystal clear that the two of them had won. That we’d won.

Kari and Terry, and all the folks supporting them, beat a couple of influential incumbents. They thwarted an oil giant.

What It Takes

I’m only scratching the surface of this story, in two significant ways. First, I’m painting a very incomplete picture Terry’s and Kari’s leadership and campaigns. As I’ve already indicated, they were about far more than Valero.

Second, I can’t begin to cover all of the individual and collective efforts that made the fight against Valero’s PAC more than the sum of its parts.

Still, a sample of those parts merits mention. A woman who spearheaded several initiatives. Another who made it possible to send out mass postcard mailings to Benicians, to counter Valero’s spurious messages. The folks who gathered in marathon sessions to stamp and address those postcards. The couple who pulled together a “Clean Elections” website while juggling myriad other responsibilities, with the wife in particular taking the lead. The Mayor, who helpfully weighed in while in town, and then at all hours from abroad after Valero launched its last-minute blitz. The woman who videotaped and edited the Clean Elections rally. The fellow who researches, writes and produces the unique, incredible Benicia blog/news outlet otherwise known as The Benicia Independent. The numerous people who wrote pro-challenger and anti-Valero letters to the Benicia Herald, our thrice-weekly print publication that still carries weight here in an online age.

After a career consulting, researching, and teaching courses about grassroots drives for democracy and against injustice, actually engaging in one made me appreciate all the more the challenges involved. In some crucial ways, of course, Benicians’ battles pale in comparison with others in many poorer countries, where people risk jail, violence, and even death.

But there’s one thing that links Benicia to other struggles across the country and globe, one lesson that shows what it takes to win such struggles.

It takes a village.