April 13, 2005

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Palo Alto Online

Editorial: City union tells 'a dirty secret'

The union representing full-time employees last year made organizing the several hundred part-time and temporary workers a major goal, and has repeatedly taken its case to the public one way or another. Last week, part-time staff members picketed City Hall to complain that they were getting rotten eggs.

There may be legitimate policy questions raised if temporary workers are kept around indefinitely to avoid paying for benefits. At the same time, the city is facing continuing budget cuts and is under a barrage of criticism from a few who say the city is bloated with staff.

Yet the new brochure, showing a woman holding a finger to her lips under a heading, "Palo Alto's dirty secret," goes beyond the rotten-eggs level of protest. While it notes that 90 percent of residents rate services good or excellent, it asks, "But did you know many of these services depend on temporary employees who have no health care and can't even take a day off when they get sick?"

They quote a maintenance person in a hard-to-believe statement: "When my wife was dying of cancer, I couldn't get a day off." They quote a part-time city librarian about having to work two jobs and pay $1,000 a month for health care for her family.

Jonathan Wright, the new union representative for SEIU Local 715, who replaced Ben Holgate in late March, said about 2,000 brochures were sent out, based on voter rolls and party registration.

Assistant City Manager Emily Harrison said city negotiators are willing to discuss benefits for temp workers but at the negotiating table, not in public. She said union demands need to be looked at in the larger picture of the overall city budget, now being put together at the staff level -- still facing a $5.2 million gap.

As in past efforts by the SEIU and other unions to bring external pressure to bear on negotiations, this effort should be viewed skeptically by residents. City leaders and residents alike need to balance the budget against community needs, and not base their conclusions on glossy mailers that, in the past, have backfired as often as been effective.

Editorial: Claire Dedrick: a forceful, early environmental voice

Long before environmentalists were known as "greens," Claire Dedrick raised her sometimes blunt voice against traffic, development and habitat degradation in the Palo Alto/Menlo Park area.

A lifelong conservationist from her childhood in Utah to her death, Dedrick and her then-husband Kent in the 1960s and early 1970s waged an early battle to slow down runaway filling of the San Francisco Bay -- untiring watchdogs of Midpeninsula marshes.

Professionally she was a microbiologist at Stanford, but in her personal and public life she fought for the macrobiology of the natural world. In the mid-1970s, then-Governor Jerry Brown tapped her to head the state Resources Agency, overseeing a half-dozen state bureaucracies relating to the environment. She later served on the Public Utilities Commission, Air Resources Board and State Lands Commission.

But it is her evolution as a person that strengthens her legacy: In her early years, she was an outspoken partisan fighter, often leaving behind a trail of offended, angry persons, even among environmentalists. In her later years, she focused on bringing people together to find common ground.

An example is the Stone Lakes wildlife refuge along Interstate 5 -- which she helped create by working with government entities, developers, environmentalists and farmers.

Her life lesson -- that there is often a middle ground if we but seek it -- should not be lost in our time of national polarization and assaults on the environment about which many of us care so deeply.

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