city council members who caused it to take two extra years to get rid of a proposed waterfront cement plant that would have poisoned the southern part of the city with particulates from open slag piles and 250 diesel trucks a day driving through the area spewing exhaust. It would have employed fewer people than a fast food restaurant and not paid enough in taxes to cover the cost of the roads it would destroy, or the public health costs from the adjacent, largely minority neighborhood with an already staggering amount of asthma. Their environmental impact reports were rubbish, and after much urging state agencies finally stepped in and were able to help kill it. One of the parties pushing the deep water port part of their package, ended up getting indicted for his corrupt activities in San Francisco.
These facts were widely known, the majority of people in Vallejo didn’t want the cement plant, yet Dew persisted in pushing it. She, the rest of the ORCEM 4 and the money people behind it persisted in spite of the overwhelming public opposition. If their plot had succeeded, it would have been the usual case of a few wealthy people, who don’t actually live in Vallejo, destroying the environment for their own power and profit.
Another bad deal she OKed was selling off the north end of Mare Island far too cheaply. “Then she rammed through the sale of 57 acres of public land for a crummy $450,000. According to Dew and City Staff that was the best possible price. A few months later the buyer listed it for sale at $18,450,000. Pippen is a Realtor! She knew better.”
The union that supports Dew is the Vallejo Police union. This group supports practices that have caused the city, already mired in financial distress, to have to pay out millions in lawsuits for police shootings, largely of men of color, to death. And they also have managed to keep the police department chronically understaffed, something good for collecting lots of overtime, but leaving police staffing at half of what it should be. A fact known to felons throughout the Bay Area.
Candidate Andrea Sorce, is vastly more qualified than Dew, is not raking money from poisoned sources, and is the choice of the Solano County Democratic Central Committee. Hopefully for Vallejo, she’ll win the office with her strong ground support from citizens hoping for a better Vallejo. She has a Masters from Harvard in public administration, is a tenured professor of economics at a local community college, co-founded the Solane County ACLU, and is involved in a number commissions seeking to improve policing practices in Vallejo.
By contrast, Pippin Dew is a realtor, involved with and taking money from often corrupt special interests.
My full disclosure is that I’ve been volunteering to help get Andrea Sorce elected, am on the board of Citizens Air Monitoring Network, and have an ACLU membership.
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