The Bay Citizen: San Mateo’s Asian and Hispanic Voters Speak Up

“The border is Eighth Avenue,” said Ms. Ortega, 67, who immigrated from Guatemala to Redwood City in 1970. “You come down Middlefield and the view is completely different all of a sudden. It’s like two societies.”

In many ways, the juxtaposition of the heavily Latino, working-class North Fair Oaks neighborhood and the largely white city of Atherton — home to the likes of the Apple C.E.O., Steven P. Jobs, and the executive chairman of Google, Eric E. Schmidt — captures the disparities in class and race found all over the Bay Area. ?

But some say that gulf also underscores a gap in political representation for ethnic and racial minorities in San Mateo County that is unique in California.

San Mateo is the only county in California that still elects its Board of Supervisors through at-large elections in which all candidates run countywide. In the past three decades, all 57 other counties in the state have moved to a district system, whereby the county is split into districts and each elects its own representative.

Last month, Ms. Ortega and eight other plaintiffs sued San Mateo County in an effort to change the way voters elect the powerful Board of Supervisors. Latinos and Asians make up half of the county’s population, yet they rarely hold high-ranking elected offices.

Ms. Ortega and her fellow plaintiffs in the lawsuit argue that the county is in violation of the California Voting Rights Act of 2001, which outlawed at-large voting in places with histories of racially polarized voting or where minority groups are “too geographically dispersed to elect their candidate of choice from a single member district.”

Since 1995, only one Latino — and not a single Asian — has won countywide office in San Mateo, said Robert Rubin, a lawyer at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which represents the plaintiffs. Although the 2010 census showed that for the first time in San Mateo County history, non-Hispanic whites — who are now 42.9 percent of the population — fell out of the majority, four out of five current supervisors are white. The fifth, who is African-American, was appointed to a vacant seat by the board in 1999.

A district voting system would yield at least one Asian and one Latino supervisor, Mr. Rubin predicted. “The white community votes as a bloc that defeats the electoral choices of the minority,” he said.

The lawsuit — and its implied suggestion of racism — has struck a nerve in a county that considers itself solidly liberal. County officials say going to a district system would promote provincialism, while others point to San Francisco’s polarized Board of Supervisors.

Residents say that despite the income disparity, signs of racial tension are almost nonexistent and that local governments spend heavily on social services for immigrants. As long ago as 1974, for instance, San Mateo County built a community center to provide health services and English and citizenship classes for North Fair Oaks.

“San Mateo County has always been reaching out to the underserved and welcoming its immigrants,” said Sister Christina Heltsley, the executive director of the St. Francis Center, a nonprofit in Redwood City.

County Counsel John C. Beiers said it had been the dearth of Asian and Latino candidates, rather than racially tinged voting patterns, that had led to a mostly white Board of Supervisors. “We looked at our races and haven’t found any conclusion of racially polarized voting,” said Mr. Beiers. “Our supervisors are very proud of the fact that they represent all of the constituents countywide.”

The Chicago Way: Figure in 2006 City Hall Patronage Case Has a New Career Lobbying City Hall

His new opportunity turns out to involve lobbying the mayor’s office, according to city records. Mr. Kozicki’s employer installs steel covers over the windows of abandoned city properties like police stations and firehouses.

“If, in fact, Kozicki is working for city funds and lobbying people in the mayor’s office, the current administration has no interest in punishing people for illegal hiring,” Noelle Brennan, the city’s court-appointed hiring monitor, said last week. “It suggests instead that such people are rewarded.”

The state’s last two governors have faced corruption charges in cases based largely on the testimony of former top aides. Yet, despite federal prosecutors’ threats to aim for bigger targets at City Hall, their investigation of illegal patronage hiring never reached into the highest echelons of the mayor’s office.

Whenever the smaller fish caught in the federal net would refuse to incriminate their superiors, members of the city’s political class shrugged and suggested that the “stand-up guys” would eventually be taken care of.

But Mr. Kozicki said Friday that his story was not a case of a political loyalist being rewarded for taking the fall for Team Daley.

“It’s a great product,” he said of his company’s method for securing vacant properties. “You can pick on me all you want, but the technology is second to none.”

Mr. Kozicki agreed to testify under a grant of immunity in the 2006 federal corruption trial of Mr. Daley’s patronage chief, Robert Sorich. But Mr. Kozicki surprised prosecutors when he testified that his old boss in the buildings department — rather than the mayor’s aide who was on trial — had pushed to rig the hiring of the young building inspector.

The prosecutors treated Mr. Kozicki as a hostile witness, saying his words on the witness stand deviated from an earlier sworn statement to the authorities. Those authorities suggested he had changed his story because of his deep ties to Mr. Daley’s 11th Ward Democratic power base, of which Mr. Sorich also was a member. Mr. Kozicki was an operative for the ward organization, and he drove the mayor’s brother, Cook County Commissioner John Daley, to and from their Bridgeport neighborhood.

Soon after the trial, the mayor’s office rejected the inspector general’s recommendation that Mr. Kozicki be fired for his role in the hiring of the 19-year-old son of a union official. Still, Mr. Kozicki stepped down in March 2008.

He then registered as the City Hall lobbyist for Vacant Property Security, city records show. The firm covers up abandoned buildings for the city’s property management contractors.

Mr. Kozicki said his work for the city since leaving the Daley administration has owed nothing to clout and everything to the value of the company’s product, as well as his experience as a “good public servant” before the scandal.

“I was not charged with any wrongdoing,” Mr. Kozicki said. “I worked hard. I was the mayor’s top deputy for vacant buildings for 10 years. I’m not some hack who didn’t know anything.”

Where Water Is an Old Friend, Until It Turns Into a Nemesis

The Army Corps of Engineers opened a portion of the Morganza Spillway on Saturday afternoon to relieve pressure on the levees from a bulging Mississippi River, and millions of cubic feet of water began rushing into the Atchafalaya Basin.

The corps expects to open more of the spillway in the coming days, allowing the water to rise steadily throughout the basin. In a day, maybe two, it will start to engulf this little river community in Cajun country.

Russell Melancon, 55, grew up pulling catfish, bass and crawfish from the Atchafalaya River and the swamp that surrounds it. He married here and is raising a son here.

And now, the place he loves is likely to drown. It could take a month or more for the water to seep back into the swamp behind the house he built with cypress boards and sweat.

Copperhead snakes might slither into the rafters. Alligators will take up residence on sheds. Gardens fat with tomatoes will be gone, and mosquitoes will swarm in such thick clouds that even he, a Cajun with skin as thick as one of those alligators, might not be able to stand it. So why live in a swamp that everyone knew was likely to flood one day?

As Mr. Melancon crated the belongings of three generations of family on Friday and got ready to pack his relatives into campers and cars, the answer was plain as the sticky Louisiana day.

“It’s where we was raised. Where my daddy was raised. Where we make our living,” he said. “Why you are here is something you never even think about. You are this place.”

In what is surely the nation’s slowest-moving natural disaster, the flooded Mississippi has been working its way south through cities and farmland, leaving people homeless and crops in ruins as it hits record levels.

It will end here in southern Louisiana, where the corps decided on Friday to open part of the levee system that holds back the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers. It was the only way, the engineers said, to take the pressure off the levees that protect New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

The move will divert that water into what is essentially the big bathtub that is the Atchafalaya Basin, a stretch of water and land 20 miles wide and 150 miles long and like nowhere else in the United States.

“You can’t have the Cajun culture without the basin,” said Oliver A. Houck, a professor at Tulane Law School who fought to preserve the basin when he was general counsel and vice president of the National Wildlife Federation.

To the north, the water is mostly saturating farmland, leaving it possibly richer in nutrients. But here in the southern half of the basin, home to descendants of the Acadians who settled in the 1700s and where countless Louisiana residents have passed their childhoods fishing and playing among its bayous and backwater lakes, several thousand people could lose everything.

“My husband still doesn’t believe it, but it’s really coming now,” said Deborah LeBlanc, 56, who lives next door to Mr. Melancon, her brother-in-law.

With the rest of the extended family, Ms. LeBlanc spent the weekend finishing up the details of moving their intertwined lives.

The outdoor dogs and Barbecue, the miniature horse, were sent to live with friends whose land is protected by the levee. The shed where Ms. LeBlanc’s father spends his days making catfish nets was dismantled. She even made her son take out her new air-conditioner.

“I asked God today if I’m coming back, and he said yes, so I guess I’ll believe that,” she said. “I can’t see living anywhere else.”

Unlike the Mississippi, which has been walled and manipulated by manufacturing and transportation and other byproducts of urban growth, the Atchafalaya has been allowed to run wild, lacing through the longest stretch of river swamp in the country.

Campbell Robertson contributed reporting from Morganza, La.

You Are Here: Recovering From Twisters in Rural North Carolina

Across the road at Askewville Baptist, the Rev. David Crumpler asked if I’d seen the field. When I said I had, he told me, “Well, that field used to be a trailer park.” A silver-haired, trim-mustached man from Alabama, he’d spent all day supervising the handing-out of relief supplies. He marveled that of a dozen or so single-wides, almost all of them were empty when the tornado struck the park. Only two were occupied. Those two were spared. The rest were gone.

“That’s lucky,” I said.

“That’s God,” he said.

He had other stories of people who’d narrowly escaped, who should’ve been home but weren’t. He saw meaning in it. The people who worried him most were the ones he couldn’t locate, those at the very bottom, the trailer renters, families with no insurance and no phone number. Those people tend not to sign up for aid, he said. They just disappear. “We’re trying to find them.”

The tornadoes of April 16, 2011, killed 24 people in North Carolina, fully half of them in a tiny strip of rural Bertie County. Two weeks later, it was the banality of recovery, that thing our species has that makes it possible for us to go on, the way we can undergo horrors then wake up and get on Facebook. All the obliterated houses had been backhoed up into neat piles that looked not unlike the brush piles in some of the fields, except that these stank of rotten refrigerators and had bent metal sticking out of them. They creaked in the wind.

Fifteen miles northeast, in Colerain, Carolyn Rankins stood staring at the forest across from her godmother’s house. To call it a forest anymore seemed obscene. It was acres of matchsticks. This was on Morris Ford Road, where four people died, three of them down the lane at a group home for mentally handicapped people. There it depended where your room was, if you lived or died.

Carolyn was short and young, with dark skin and multicolored braids that she wore tied up into a loose knot behind her head. She talked about Peggy Leary. “Miss Peggy’s trailer was right there,” she said, indicating the next-door lot, where only a small concrete slab, like a grill patio, suggested the presence of some vanished structure. “This was a whole neighborhood,” Carolyn said in disbelief, “50, 60 years old!”

Miss Peggy was sleeping when the tornado came roaring up across farmland from Rosemead. It picked up her trailer and dashed it into the woods at some unthinkable speed, with the same wind that snapped the trees in half and sheered off the bark. Even so, her neighbors believed that she had survived the initial event. They thought they heard her crying in the night, but no one could find her. I was taken aback, thinking surely they hadn’t tried hard enough. If they could hear her voice, they might have reached her. Not until we went farther along the edge of the damage and saw how much of the forest had been lain waste did I understand how impossible it must have been, a nightmarish game of pickup sticks, with thousands of spiky trunks and limbs, and you’re trying to clamber through there in the pitch-black, after the storm, with the wind carrying the sound around. And after a while they couldn’t hear her anymore, she stopped crying. In the morning the fire department cut their way through to her, with chain saws. It was too late. Indeed, her body was hurt so badly, it was unlikely she’d ever made a sound. They were hearing things.

“That’s where Squirrel stayed,” Carolyn said, pointing across a small pond. Squirrel wasn’t his real name, she assured me, but she didn’t know his real one. He had survived, but his trailer was gone, lost in the blast thicket. Worse, he’d been unable to find his dog.

It came trotting back a week after the storm, while they were out picking through the wreckage. They found some rope and tied it to something heavy. Somebody called Squirrel. He left his job and raced over in his truck. “My dog, my dog,” he said over and over, embracing the animal. Carolyn grinned widely, telling about it. “He was so happy,” she remembered. “He kept saying: ‘I don’t care about my house. I don’t need a house. I got my dog, man. I got my dog.’ ”

The Choice: Is College Worth It? Answers From Presidents and the Public

 

The Pew Research Center has just released a report incorporating two surveys — one of 2,142 adults 18 or older; the other of 1,055 college presidents — each centered on the question, “Is college worth it?”

Pew Research Center

Among the answers:

Fifty-seven percent of those questioned in the survey of members of the public said “the higher education system in the United States fails to provide students with good value for the money they and their families spend,” according to the report. Moreover, three-quarters say “college is too expensive for most Americans to afford.”

One factor behind such opinions is clearly student loan debt: among those questioned by Pew who said they had left college “with a substantial debt burden,” nearly half said such loans made it more difficult to pay other bills and a quarter said their college debts made it harder to buy a home.

And what of the presidents?

Pew Research Center

A majority of those surveyed — 58 percent — “say public high school students arrive at college less well prepared than their counterparts of a decade ago,” according to the report. Meanwhile, nearly four of every 10 presidents — who represent two- and four-year-colleges, and were questioned by Pew in partnership with The Chronicle of Higher Education — said they thought higher education was “headed in the wrong direction.”

The full report can be viewed here.

I’m curious what readers of The Choice make of these statistics, which seek to take the measure of a dynamic you’re experiencing first-hand. To register a comment, please use the box below.

The Texas Tribune: Cardiologists Accuse Hospital of Discrimination

 Caleb Bryant Miller for The Texas TribuneDrs. Harish Chandna, from left, Ajay Gaalla, Dakshesh Kumar Parikh, cardiologists, in the waiting room of their office in Victoria.

VICTORIA — The e-mails and memos written by administrators and doctors at Citizens Medical Center here about three of their colleagues of Indian descent are, at best, derogatory. An operating room chief wrote of trying to force “the Indians off the reservation.” Others wrote about their “Indian troubles,” or labeled the hospital’s two rival cardiology practices as “the Cowboys” and “the Indians.”

Expanded coverage of Texas is produced by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit news organization. To join the conversation about this article, go to texastribune.org.

At worst, they could be considered racist: “I feel a sense of disgust but am more concerned with what this means to the future of the hospital as more of our Middle-Eastern-born physicians demand leadership roles and demand influence,” David P. Brown, chief executive of Citizens Medical, wrote in a 2007 memo to himself. He continued, “It will change the entire complexion of the hospital and create a level of fear among our employees.”

But whether racial animus led Citizens Medical, a 344-bed county-owned hospital, to close its cardiology unit to non-staff doctors — effectively revoking the privileges of Drs. Harish Chandna, Ajay Gaalla and Dakshesh Kumar Parikh to practice there — is the subject of fierce debate and a discrimination lawsuit filed by the three doctors in Federal District Court in the Southern District of Texas. The dispute has divided Victoria’s close-knit medical community, where many doctors and hospital officials say it is not about race — the city has long been home to doctors of all ethnicities and nationalities — but a struggle over egos and influence gone awry.

The Citizens Medical battle appears to have begun over operational disagreements between Drs. Chandna, Gaalla and Parikh and hospital administrators, and a lack of trust between the three Indian-American doctors and other cardiologists at C.M.C. Drs. Chandna, Gaalla and Parikh have their own cardiology practice and have practiced at C.M.C. and the neighboring DeTar Hospital for many years.

In e-mails, memos and court testimony, Citizens Medical administrators and doctors, who declined to be interviewed for this article, describe fractious relationships between themselves and the three cardiologists as they debated on-call schedules, compensation and leadership roles. The arguments sometimes devolved into shouting matches and name-calling — often, C.M.C. officials suggest in the documents, incited by the three cardiologists.

“From my review of the evidence, the common denominator in the rough aspects of the operation of the hospital were the three plaintiffs,” said Rex L. Easley Jr., one of the defense lawyers in the suit.

In e-mails referenced in a complaint the plaintiffs filed in August, Citizens Medical doctors also accuse the three cardiologists of starting a smear campaign against the hospital’s staff heart surgeon, Dr. Yusuke Yahagi, who is of Japanese descent and who complained of harassment and threatened to leave the hospital.

“This seditious speech and subversive actions toward [Dr. Yahagi] and C.M.C. is deliberate and calculated,” Dr. William T. Campbell Jr., a staff cardiologist and one of the defendants in the suit, wrote in a March 2010 e-mail included in the court file connected with the case. He continued, “These rabble-rousing behaviors are very disruptive to general medical care and are a poor reflection on Victoria medical community as a whole.”

But Drs. Chandna, Gaalla and Parikh, board-certified cardiologists who have been licensed in Texas for 13 to 18 years, say they were raising concerns about inappropriate procedures and poor patient outcomes, not being “disruptive.” In court filings, the doctors — one who was born in the United States and two who were born in India and are naturalized citizens — say they were consistently treated like second-class citizens, removed from committees and pushed out of laboratory posts arbitrarily, or overlooked in favor of “less-qualified” cardiologists C.M.C. hired.

The Texas Tribune: Lawmakers and Others Discuss Changes to Education Programs for Prisoners

Lawmakers will most likely cut that number significantly in the 2012-13 budget, and that could be just the beginning of big changes to come.

“The structure itself screams out for change, screams out for renovation and innovation,” said State Senator Florence Shapiro, Republican of Plano and chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee.

The Windham School District is financed by the Texas Education Agency and overseen by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. In the 2009-10 school year, about 77,500 offenders participated in some type of Windham program. The school district operates much like a regular public school system, with a superintendent, principals and teachers at campuses across the state. It provides basic adult education, vocational training, life-skills programs and college-level courses.

Despite its sizable budget, a staff of more than 1,200 and a large number of students, Windham awarded just 5,287 G.E.D.’s in the last school year. “It’s really outrageous,” said Senator John Whitmire, Democrat of Houston and chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee.

Texas could save money, and prisoners could get better educations, some lawmakers say, if programs were provided online. Such programs allow students to learn at their own pace, Ms. Shapiro said, and would be better for prisoners. “Putting them in desks and chairs and making them feel like they’re in a school surrounding makes them feel stupid,” she said.

Lawmakers also complain that the school system seems top-heavy, with some 60 principals. “It’s the structure that needs to change,” Ms. Shapiro said. She and Mr. Whitmire are calling for a review of the program.

But correctional-education experts say lawmakers’ ideas, particularly about online programs, show a lack of understanding about prison life. “I don’t know of a program anywhere in the country where they’re able to use the Internet for instructional purposes,” said Chris Tracy, a former Windham superintendent. “Security personnel,” he said, are “absolutely paranoid about Internet systems.”

Mr. Tracy said that using more technology would not replace teaching staff for a population in which learning disabilities are endemic and educational achievement is low. “You don’t just say: ‘Here’s a computer. Help yourself learn how to read and write,’ ” he said.

Eddy Turner, a Windham teacher, said the school district could use more technology and could probably do with fewer administrators. But he said lawmakers should not judge the success of Windham solely on outcomes like G.E.D. attainment. Mr. Turner teaches courses that help inmates develop skills like maintaining relationships, balancing a checkbook and keeping a job.

“If you take education out of the prison,” Mr. Turner said, “they will no longer be confronted about changing.”