Diane Hendry, who filed a retaliation lawsuit against the city in August 2018, received a $2.6 million payment as part of the settlement, ending a five-year legal battle between the former fire captain and Fremont.

Fremont is still facing two other lawsuits that accuse city officials of retaliatory behavior. In November, the family of the late Fremont Police Capt. Fred Bobbitt filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city for allegedly contributing to his death last year, saying he was harassed by senior officials after refusing to violate state law during negotiations with the Fremont Police Association. The same month, senior Fremont police detective Michael Gebhardt filed a retaliation lawsuit against the city in which he claimed to be targeted for criticizing the Fremont Police Department.

Hendry, who joined the Fremont Fire Department in 1993 and agreed to retire later this year as part of the settlement, sued after experiencing two years of what she calls “a campaign of retaliation” by the leaders of the fire department.

According to the Fremont native, the retaliation began following her role in the investigation of the dismissal of a female recruit in 2016, when Hendry was a division chief of administration. The recruit had been released from the city’s training academy for failing performance tests, but disputed that she had failed the tests.

Hendry and then-Fire Chief Geoff LaTendresse reviewed tapes of the tests and determined that the recruit had indeed passed.

“It was my assignment at the time and I did my job. It was indisputable that this woman passed these tests,” Hendry said in an interview. The recruit was reinstated, and an investigation was launched. The recruit filed a lawsuit against the city and settled in 2017.

As a result, Division Chief Rick Cory was removed from his position as head of the training academy. The deputy chief of training at the time, Chris Shelley, retired before the investigation was complete, and a captain who was an instructor at the academy, Matt Loughran-Smith, retired two days after the results were released, according to court documents.

“I was widely blamed for what happened. I was left out of meetings, people stopped talking when I entered a room, nobody would sit next to me. It got to the point where people began making complaints about me, and I knew I was on the way out,” Hendry said. “I had been part of the city for 25 years; I was promoted up through the ranks and I built all of these relationships and suddenly I was completely shut out. It was horrible.”

Hendry said that she was isolated, removed from certain duties and excluded from critical meetings regarding the recruit’s reinstatement.

In depositions provided to Hendry’s lawyers, her accusations were backed up by two other division chiefs who worked at the department at the time. “It seemed she was blamed for everything,” one said during a deposition.

In 2018, Hendry decided to transfer to the city’s police department on a temporary basis, but said her requests to transfer back to the fire department were never approved, despite a number of positions opening up in the department. Hendry was also still paid by the fire department, rather than the police department, during this time.

A performance evaluation written by LaTendresse in June 2017 said that Hendry was “one of the most dedicated people” and was consistently positive, professional and trustworthy.

“One of the first things we look at with these cases is performance history, but her performance reviews are the most glowing I’ve ever seen,” Hendry’s attorney, Deborah Kochan, said in an interview.

In an email sent in 2020, Jacobson told Hendry that her duties had been reassigned and that her return to the department would be “disruptive” because of reasons that included the COVID-19 pandemic and wildfire season.

In another email sent in response to a further request by Hendry to be transferred in 2021, Jacobson told Hendry that he could not accommodate the request as she had not served in the department for two years.

In a later deposition, Jacobson said that he felt Hendry’s presence on the force would disrupt team cohesiveness if she were transferred back.

“Based on my personal experience of having people that have left organizations and/or brought lawsuits against organizations that they still are members of, it just doesn’t end well,” Jacobson said during the deposition.

Hendry said she believes her gender played a role in how she was treated. “There were five women in Fremont Fire for most of my career. I was hired in 1993, and we didn’t hire another woman until 2013. By that time, the others had retired, so there were only two of us in the department,” Hendry said. “I was actively trying to recruit more women, which was part of my duties, but I think people didn’t like that. There was a perception that we were lowering our standards. But, I also think I was targeted for simply speaking up; for going against the culture.”

Two investigations were launched after Hendry took her concerns to human resources, but she was told that sufficient evidence was not found to support her claims.

During a deposition, former Deputy Chief Amiel Thurston claimed that the issues came down to Hendry isolating herself from members of the department after he became interim chief following LeTendresse’s retirement in 2017.

However, Hendry maintained that she had fully supported Thurston’s appointment and that she had recommended him for the position, which LaTendresse and Assistant City Manager Brian Stott confirmed in court.

“Thurston came up through the ranks with Diane, and they always had a good working relationship,” Kochan said.

“His best friend was one of the people disciplined after the 2016 investigation. After that, he turned against her. I asked him why everything between him and Diane changed, and he realized he needed an answer and came up with this idea that she was jealous of him – and the city ran with it.”

Thurston confirmed in a deposition that Rick Cory was his best friend, and the godfather of one of his children.

A trial date was scheduled for November, but the city reached a settlement with Hendry in early December.

In response to a request for an interview, the city’s communications department said in an email that no one was available to comment as the case involved a “personnel matter.”

The two other lawsuits alleging retaliation by Fremont city officials are still pending. Bobbitt died by suicide on Feb. 21, 2022, at age 54, after serving on the Fremont police force for more than 32 years. He allegedly faced retaliation from former Fremont City Manager Mark Danaj, who was charged with embezzlement last March, and retired Fremont Police Chief Kimberly Petersen.

Bobbitt filed a complaint with the Department of Fair Employment and Housing in March 2021, and a claim with the city in May 2021. That December, an arbiter found that the city’s anti-retaliation policy had been violated. Bobbitt was also mentioned in the retaliation lawsuit filed by Gebhardt.

“I truly thought that when I spoke up, city leadership would step up,” Hendry said. “But these things will happen again. The needle hasn’t moved forward.”

Tensions were already high in December after efforts to recount the extremely close Oakland mayoral race went nowhere. The election was certified Dec. 8, and the deadline for a recount came and went a couple of weeks later.

But when the county registrar of voters revealed just before the new year that the District 4 Oakland Unified school board race should have been won by the candidate who finished in third place, it set off a chorus of outrage and questions about the accuracy of ranked choice voting.

Amid the push to figure out what went wrong — and how it can be fixed — there’s been spurious speculation. Here’s a look at where things really stand for the county’s elections.

Q: Is a recount actually going to take place, and if so, which local races would be affected?

A: It’s true that the Alameda County Board of Supervisors voted this week to request a manual recount of the election outcome in the contested school board race, as well as the Oakland mayoral election and a pair of close races in San Leandro.

The board’s request calls on Tim Dupuis, the registrar of voters, to bring in “a qualified individual with experience overseeing ranked choice voting” in another county to initiate a hand count of the results.

But that’s all it is—a request. And despite what other media outlets have reported, there is no clear pathway at the moment for a recount to be conducted, despite many calls from the public — including Oakland’s chapter of the NAACP — for one to take place.

In fact, with the deadline having passed in December, Dupuis suspects the only way for a recount to be allowable under the law would be if a court orders it.

At the moment, only one race in the county has resulted in actual lawsuits: the school board seat won by Nick Resnick that the county has since determined should be occupied by Mike Hutchinson.

It is unclear whether a judge’s eventual ruling in that case would have any bearing on the possible recounts of other close elections, such as the mayoral race. But it does not appear to be likely.

“This is a situation that’s not really addressed clearly in the law,” Dupuis said of the school board snafu. “We’re probably setting new precedent, and so we’ll have to get before a judge and see what the judge does.”

Q: What went wrong with ranked choice voting in the November election?

A: Oakland, Berkeley, Albany and San Leandro, as well as San Francisco, all use ranked choice voting, or an “instant runoff” system, to settle their elections.

Under the format, voters can rank their preferred candidates instead of choosing just one. The lowest vote-getters are eliminated, one by one, and their votes are transferred to their supporters’ next choice until one candidate secures majority support.

The District 4 Oakland Unified school board mess stemmed from 235 ballots where voters left the first-choice column blank — or added an ineligible write-in choice — but filled out their subsequent preferences.

Instead of simply registering those voters’ designated second choice as their top preferred candidate, the registrar’s office “suspended” those ballots until the next round of ranked choice voting. By that point, Hutchinson, who had the fewest first-place votes, was mistakenly eliminated.

As it turned out, he had enough support from those suspended votes to qualify for the second round, where vote transfers from losing candidate Pecolia Manigo would have helped him defeat Resnick, the certified winner.

Oakland’s city charter calls for ballots with a blank column to “immediately be advanced to the next ranking.” After voting advocacy groups alerted Dupuis to the mix-up, he confirmed on Dec. 28 that Hutchinson should have been elected to the board seat.

Q: So who’s actually going to serve in the Oakland school board seat when the dust settles?

Hutchinson has publicly declared himself the winner and filed an “election contest” lawsuit with the Alameda County court to reverse the election error.

Incidentally, Hutchinson is currently the District 5 school board director, and ran for the open board seat only because his home address was redistricted there.

If his election contest doesn’t work out, he still has two years left in his term. He will also serve as the board’s president this year.

Resnick, meanwhile, was sworn in to the District 4 seat on Monday, and has no plans on giving it up. His attorney filed a cross contest in the court alleging that Dupuis had no right to re-run the ranked choice algorithm on his own without notifying anyone.

Jim Sutton, Resnick’s attorney, argues that at least some of the voters who selected a second-choice candidate while leaving the first column blank likely did so with purpose.

He contends that it is unconstitutional to simply slide those votes into the first-choice category, noting a “vagueness” around why that line of the city charter exists at all.

“No one can explain to me why the (city charter) contains that provision,” he said. “What the constitution says is if there’s an election law, the government needs a reason for it.”

Q: How long will it take for the election to be corrected?

Hutchinson and Resnick’s court filings are proper lawsuits, meaning the whole nine yards are still ahead — a preliminary hearing, depositions of the relevant parties, and possibly a full-blown trial.

But it is likely the court will expedite the case, with Sutton saying he told his client to expect a two-month process.

In the meantime, the Oakland school board is full, with Hutchinson and Resnick both occupying seats.

Q: Is ranked choice voting to blame for this whole mess? Can Alameda County ditch the format going forward?

A: In every jurisdiction that uses ranked choice voting, it’s the voters who approved it. That is the case in Oakland, where the format has been utilized in the past three mayoral elections.

Dupuis, for his part, maintains that the Resnick-Hutchinson race is the only one in the entire county whose outcome was flipped by the error, with all the others resulting in some swapped votes but ultimately the same winner.

He and other officials intend to lobby the state for clearer guidelines on how ranked choice votes are processed, with fewer customizable options available to each individual city or county.

The tense standoff erupted in the pre-dawn hours of Aug. 3, when demolition crews quickly fenced in the park and downed dozens of trees on the university-owned site three blocks south of campus, which was once a center of 1960s political protest. Over two days, protesters foiled the university’s attempt to start construction on its controversial housing project for 1,100 students and 125 unhoused residents on the historic site.

By the early afternoon on Aug. 3, hundreds of police officers in full riot gear had retreated amid growing pushback from protesters, leaving dozens of people free to pry apart barricades, cut gas lines and puncture tires of heavy machinery left behind — the most recent chapter of a fiery history of activism on the land.

The havoc’s toll includes a whopping three-quarters of a million dollars to pay for the fencing that protesters ripped out of the sidewalks around the 2.8-acre park, but the biggest cost is $2.73 million to compensate law enforcement deployed at People’s Park, according to UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof.

The police response at the park — bounded by Telegraph Avenue, Bowditch Street, Dwight Way and Haste Street — was led by University of California Police Department officers, with help from the California Highway Patrol and California State University officers. Mogulof said that $2.73 million includes outside officers’ room and board, physical security supplies and overtime for UC Berkeley police personnel.

Fortunately for the $312 million project, there’s already wiggle room baked into the budget that the University of California Board of Regents approved in September 2021.

The plan allocated nearly $52.8 million for contingency costs, which included “anticipated delays due to litigation or special considerations relating to clearing the site for construction,” according to documents from the UC’s Capital Strategies Committee.

Mogulof, who said he was not previously aware of those funds, could not confirm if that was where the $4 million from August’s protests would be sourced.

So why should the greater Berkeley community care that a $312 million UC housing project — complete with a dedicated contingency fund — will swallow an additional $4 million in expenses and ballooning interest costs during years of delays?

While no taxpayer dollars are at stake, Mogulof said the public should be concerned that a small group of people were able to temporarily shut down a project that has otherwise gleaned support from the Berkeley City Council and 68% of surveyed university students.

“UC Berkeley is a public institution, and the public has a vested interest in the fact that the university is a good steward of the funds they receive, from the public and elsewhere,” Mogulof said by phone Tuesday, adding that unforeseen expenses may put pressure on the prices students pay to live in the proposed facility.

“These costs were incurred because of unlawful behavior, and it raises the question: Who gets to decide? At the end of the day, somebody has to pay. It’s a hard pill to swallow when costs are the result of illegal activity.”

But many activists working to preserve the park are left wondering whether UC Berkeley reflected on where they went wrong in August, given the fact that they’re left with a “hefty price tag for nothing,” according to Andrea Prichett, a member of the People’s Park Council who was one of the protesters arrested for blocking the construction in August.

“When you spend $4 million and you have nothing to show for it, that’s a public policy problem,” Prichett said. “I would like to think that they would revise their approach in future, but unfortunately they have it in their minds that they can simply roll over this portion of the community and force their will upon people. It didn’t take a public policy expert to recognize that there was going to be resistance.”

Construction was approved in July by Alameda County Judge Frank Roesch, who rejected several lawsuits — filed jointly in 2021 by the Local 3299 union for UC service workers and two community groups, Make UC A Good Neighbor and Berkeley Citizens for a Better Plan — that argued the housing project violated the California Environmental Quality Act.

Redevelopment of People’s Park has remained on hold since August — at first to avoid further confrontation, but also because the university was hit with an injunction by a state appellate court. That same court appears to be on the brink of forcing UC to abandon its current plans at People’s Park.

In December, the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco filed a tentative opinion that the University of California failed to offer a valid reason for why it did not analyze alternative locations, well-documented noise impacts and unintended population growth while developing a plan to build desperately needed homes on the historic 2.8-acre site.

Oral arguments for the case will be heard Thursday.

While the battle slogs through the courts, UC Berkeley is also on the hook to pay the project’s contractor delay fees, which are contractually required in order to compensate for costs that will be incurred while progress is stalled on the project.

Mogulof said that bill is currently $2.6 million and will continue to climb for as long as the delay continues.

The total price tag does not include the crews and equipment used to cut down several trees at the historic park, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in June. Rather, Mogulof said those costs will be rolled into the larger project’s final bill, since those actions were already planned, regardless of any protests and damage.

More detailed financial information about the bills — from the toll of the construction equipment that was destroyed to the locations where officers were housed during the protests — is not yet available.

Moving forward, Mogulof said the university wants to start construction as soon as possible in order to complete the project and welcome new residents within two years, attempting to address the university’s student housing crisis.

About 82% of the more than 45,000 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled last fall were left to find off-campus housing — the highest percentage among the entire University of California system.

“The university’s commitment to the project is unwavering,” Mogulof said. “And we intend to proceed with construction as soon as we’re able to.”

There’s only one problem: He probably didn’t win.

The troubled school board election exposed deficiencies with how Alameda County handled ranked choice voting and highlights the need for statewide standards.

To its credit, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday asked, and agreed to pay, for a recount of the school district election, the controversial Oakland mayor’s race and two close races in San Leandro, which also uses ranked choice voting.

But it’s unclear in the school board race whether the determinative result will be the official certified count, which showed Resnick the winner; the corrected tabulation conducted after an error was discovered, which placed Mike Hutchinson on top; or the recount.

The fate of the District 4 election ultimately will be decided in court. For now, Resnick will continue to serve.

It should not have come to this point of uncertainty. Given the growing use of ranked choice voting, it’s important to examine the Oakland school board race to avoid repeating mistakes.

Why use ranked choice voting? RCV provides a method of ensuring that winners have majority support without costly runoff elections. (It would have avoided, for example, the razor-thin, three-way Antioch City Council race in which the winner had just 34.3% of the vote.) And, in at-large elections with more than one seat at stake, ranked choice voting can increase the diversity of ideological and demographic representation.

In 2022, more than 100 elections in U.S. jurisdictions used ranked choice voting. In the Bay Area, San Francisco has used it since 2004; San Leandro, Berkeley and Oakland since 2010. In California, there’s growing interest and use among small municipalities, such as Albany and Palm Desert, that consider it a legal alternative to splitting their citywide elections into small geographic districts.

How it works: In a single-seat race, voters rank their candidate preferences. If no one wins a first-round majority, the candidate in last place is eliminated, and votes of those who preferred that candidate are reallocated to their second choice. The process is repeated until one candidate has a majority.

The Oakland school board race: In the first round of the official count for District 4, Resnick led with 38%, followed by Pecolia Manigo with 31.1% and Mike Hutchinson with 30.9%. So, Hutchinson was dropped, and his voters’ second choices were allocated, giving Resnick 51% and Manigo 49%. Resnick was the winner in the count certified Dec. 8.

What went wrong: On Dec. 23, members of FairVote, a ranked-choice advocacy group, after reviewing the data, advised Alameda County Registrar Tim Dupuis of a problem.

The issue pertains to counting of ballots in which a voter lists a write-in candidate as a first choice or makes no first-choice selection but lists subsequent choices. According to Dupuis, there were 235 such ballots. According to FairVote, about two-thirds of those had marked a first-choice write-in candidate and one-third had no first-choice selection.

The tabulation software the county uses allows either counting those ballots as having no first choice or counting those ballots for the next-highest-ranked candidate. The software was set using the former option. But the Oakland charter calls for the latter option, which, according to FairVote, is the way all U.S. jurisdictions using ranked choice voting handle ballots with no first choice.

The recalculation: After consulting with Dominion Voting Systems, the software vendor, over the Christmas holiday weekend, the county registrar on Dec. 27 retabulated the vote data to conform with the city charter.

The change reordered the candidate first-round finish, with Resnick still leading with 37.9%, but Hutchinson in second with 31.1% and Manigo last at 31.0%. Rather than Hutchinson being dropped, Manigo was eliminated. Then, Manigo’s voters’ second choices were allocated, resulting in Hutchinson winning with 50.5% and Resnick second with 49.5%.

Now what? The new tally came after the first count had been officially certified. It also came after the deadline for a recount request, which Resnick might have sought if earlier results had shown him losing.

Hutchinson’s lawyer argues that he should not be deprived of victory just because the software setting error was discovered late. Resnick’s lawyer argues that the certified count should be the final word.

Resnick’s lawyer also questions the recalculation process. He argues that the Oakland charter rule to ignore a write-in or blank first-round selection is an unconstitutional determination of a voter’s intent.

No state guidelines: The lack of state guidelines has made this more complicated for the county registrar. For most election issues, state law or the Secretary of State’s Office provides uniform rules. But for ranked choice voting, Dupuis relies on direction from the city clerks of the four cities in his county using ranked choice voting.

So, for example, the city clerks agreed to give voters the ability to rank up to five candidates in each contest. But Oakland’s charter requires voters be allowed “to rank as many choices as there are candidates,” which in the case of the mayoral race was 10 candidates. That didn’t happen.

The state could also require the county to release the anonymized vote data earlier, or in real time. That would have allowed observers such as Fair Vote to flag concerns before the vote tally was certified.

There’s been lots of griping about the complexity of ranked choice voting. But it’s much fairer, and more democratic, than the system used in most local elections in California in which someone can win with just a plurality.

Rather than end it, we need to fix it. For that, the state should provide uniformity so each county, indeed each city, doesn’t have to figure out ranked choice rules on its own.

It’s largely unknown where exactly the negotiations stand between the city and its last major professional sports franchise, but the U.S. Transportation Department’s decision not to include Oakland in its list of grant recipients makes a difficult project even harder. The city is anxious to craft a deal that does not rely on substantial subsidies from taxpayers.

“They’re looking under all the sofa cushions – federal money, state, county and city money, taxpayer money at all of those different levels,” said Nola Agha, a University of San Francisco professor and expert on sports economics who has followed the project closely.

City officials had sought the $182 million grant – a request to the federal MEGA program intended to help fund infrastructure projects around the country – to pay for street and transit improvements that would ultimately ease access to the team’s proposed waterfront ballpark and massive housing development.

But, according to a DOT document released Tuesday, the project details did not meet “statutory requirements” to be a cost-effective choice for investment.

“What’s unique about this is the MEGA grant, of course, was designed to be for infrastructure,” Agha said. “And the city very much perceives this to be an infrastructure project.”

Agha authored a financial study last year of the Howard Terminal project – a report funded by local shipping industry businesses opposed to the A’s development.

While the city already has secured about $321.5 million in funding for the improvements, its most recent cost estimate – provided in response to Agha’s findings – suggests the costs may total around $600 million.

The MEGA grant would have put a sizable dent in that cost burden, and former Mayor Libby Schaaf was quick to cite it as fuel for optimism that the city could get a deal done with the A’s, who have often taken a hardball approach to negotiations.

Schaaf, who officially left office last week, was among the Howard Terminal project’s most vocal and influential advocates. When MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said last fall he didn’t expect the A’s to stay in Oakland, she was quick to jump into damage control.

The A’s have promised to pay for the roughly $1 billion ballpark, which would seat 35,000 fans. But the stadium project is contingent on the city funding the off-site infrastructure projects and eventually creating a tax district to cover the costs of building 3,000 housing units, hundreds of hotel rooms and commercial and retail space on the available port land.

Major League Baseball, meanwhile, has encouraged the A’s to look into relocating, and the franchise has long flirted with a move to Las Vegas. Team president Dave Kaval and other executives are scouting potential ballpark sites in Nevada, where their Triple-A team currently plays in Henderson, a suburb of Las Vegas.

Normally, teams must pay a sizable fee to MLB when they relocate, but Manfred said last year that he did not expect to charge the A’s if they moved to Las Vegas, citing the cost of building a stadium there.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Tuesday that the A’s appear to be focused on land near the Tropicana as a likely ballpark site in the city. Negotiations about the Las Vegas Festival Grounds had stalled, according to a spokesperson for casino magnate Phil Ruffin, who owns the festival site.

The A’s did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Schaaf’s successor, Mayor Sheng Thao, promised at her inauguration Monday that she could reach a deal with the A’s without compromising benefits to local residents and businesses.

“I’m hopeful we can reach an agreement that safeguards the financial interest of taxpayers – creating good jobs, housing, retail and recreation opportunities,” Thao said. “And I know we can do this together, but only under our Oakland values.”

After a marathon meeting on Saturday, the Concord City Council hit the pause button on a crucial contract after raising concerns over the proposed amount and type of affordable housing, and the involvement of Albert Seeno III, who is currently in multiple legal battles with his father over control of the family’s building empire.

The City Council is now expected to vote on Jan. 28 on a term sheet — a draft of a contract — with Concord First Partners and a consortium of developers that includes Seeno III, to develop the 2,275-acre Naval Weapons site into thousands of homes, new schools, parks and commercial and retail centers on Concord’s north side over the next 40 years.

Councilmembers spent three hours of the daylong meeting, which ran from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., grilling Concord First Partners and city staff about the details of the contract, which differs from negotiations with the city’s previous master developer, Lennar, in that it now includes a longer construction timeline and more homes.

“I feel like I am being deposed,” Guy Bjerke, director of economic development and base reuse for Concord, said in the middle of Vice Mayor Edi Birsan’s line of questioning.

Councilmembers Laura Nakamura and Carlyn Obringer challenged the legitimacy of counting accessory dwelling units and junior accessory dwelling units —sometimes referred to as granny or in-law units —toward the project’s affordable housing goal.

The original 2012 area plan called for setting aside 25% of 12,272 units, or about 3,020 units, as affordable housing. The draft contract before the council on Saturday increased the number of residences to 15,595. The number of affordable units, however, remained the same. To make up the difference, the developers are counting 879 accessory units attached to single-family homes as affordable units.

Obringer and Nakamura said there would be no mechanism to ensure homeowners would rent out the units to those in need of affordable housing. Bjerke replied the city couldn’t force owners to rent the units, but could “create restrictions that should they rent the unit, they’d have to do so under certain parameters.”

Twenty years in the making, the project has recently led to unprecedented division amongst Concord residents, who packed the council chambers on Saturday.

Representatives of labor and union groups have supported passage of the draft contract and its goal of hiring 40% of the construction workforce from within Contra Costa County, giving Concord residents a priority.

More than 100 written comments were submitted to council prior to the meeting, many from residents who urged that Discovery Builders Inc., one of the three partners Concord First Partners, be dropped from the deal. The Seeno III-run company and Lewis Management each have a 45% stake in the project, with Oakland developer Phil Tagami’s California Capital & Investment Group holding a 10% stake.

The Seeno family for decades has held great influence over real estate development in Contra Costa but also has become notorious in the East Bay for regularly suing public agencies and fighting environmental groups.

Some letters referenced the recent revelation of an ongoing legal battle among the Seeno family, first made public in a column in the East Bay Times published Thursday. In the lawsuits, Albert Seeno Jr., 78, accused his son, Seeno III, of erratic behavior, improperly spending, and trying to shut his father and uncle out of their own companies, among other allegations.

Through present in the council chambers, Seeno III did not speak. He did submit a letter for public comment denying all allegations made against him by his father, Albert Seeno Jr., in a lawsuit filed in September.

In light of the allegations, Obringer asked city staff about whether its financial analyst had reviewed the ability of Seeno III’s company to keep its financial promises. Bjerke said his staff had not and was unsure whether it would be appropriate to do so.

Nakamura pressed Elmore, asking, “If, at any time when the partners were aware of this illegal situation with one of your partners, was there a thought to issue a statement in full disclosure to the public for full transparency?”

Elmore replied: “We did not see (the lawsuit) having any impact on our ability to proceed with the next steps in our partnership. He added, “Clearly, if we’re unable to perform…we know the answer is going to be that we’ll find someone else who can.”

According to a court affidavit submitted by Louis Parsons, president of Discovery Builders Inc., Seeno Jr.’s actions to “reassert control” of the family companies “have disrupted the business of those entities,” including “stop payments” orders to vendors, which placed the company’s projects at risk of liens and losing subcontractors.

After analyzing a long, spotty history of managing budget deficits, public housing responsibilities and ballooning employee compensation, the state auditor’s office compiled a list of 11 recommendations to help city officials try to dig themselves out of an ever-looming financial mess.

Last month, the Richmond City Council approved a corrective action plan laying out a timeline of next steps, which City Manager Shasa Curl will submit to the state by Monday — one day before a new lineup of elected officials kicks off the first City Council meeting of 2023.

The good news: Richmond successfully moved from the ninth to the 10th California city at greatest risk.

The bad news: The state auditor still questions whether the city, which faced a debt burden of $250 million in June 2021, can salvage a semblance of financial stability any time soon.

One of the most pressing issues acting California State Auditor Michael Tilden highlighted was that Richmond anticipates having an annual deficit of $6.7 million from now until 2028. He said those grim projections may still be too optimistic — warning that reserves could be depleted so low that city officials would not be able to cover more than two weeks of expenses by fiscal year 2027-28.

Additionally, Tilden reported that the city paid more than $35 million in retirement costs in fiscal year 2020-21, which accounted for almost a quarter of all general fund expenditures. To make matters worse, CalPERS anticipates Richmond’s annual pension costs will reach $53 million within five years.

If the city wants to best set itself up for success, the state audit recommended that Richmond expand its five-year financial projections to include plans for funding operations during a recession or economic downturn, eliminate unnecessary jobs, and dedicate resources to ensure that the city’s Housing Authority complies with federal requirements in order to receive proper funding.

During the Dec. 20 Richmond City Council meeting, Deputy City Manager Nickie Mastay said progress on these changes must happen fast, because the first update on how the city is succeeding — or struggling — with the state auditor’s suggestions is due May 10.

While Councilmember Gayle McLaughlin acknowledged that the city needs to be financially stable, she said during the meeting that she wants to see a balanced approach to any financial overhaul, in order to maintain the long list of services and support that many of Richmond’s 116,000 residents need — from extending library hours to providing rent assistance. The median household income in Richmond is $72,463.

“It’s really important to have solid financial accountability and sustainability, but we also need to meet the needs of our residents,” McLaughlin said. “Our community is clearly different than some cities that have more high-income residents. We have a large amount of low-income community members, and we need to lift them up.”

“I think the state has, for whatever reason, picked on Richmond for years,” Butt said by phone Thursday. “We have a lot of unique challenges, but rather than reaching out asking how they can help, the state seems to ask, ‘What can we do to make you feel bad?’ ”

However, he was also quick to push the onus back on McLaughlin and other members of the Richmond Progressive Alliance, which successfully held onto its political majority of elected leaders for another four years.

“I blame a lot of this on the RPA — they have a list of priorities that are not aligned with sound revenue management, and I don’t think they understand these issues,” Butt said, calling out RPA priorities such as creating a public bank and reducing the size of the police department. “We do the best we can, but we have a lot of burdens that are, in some respects, unfair, and we’re going to be continually challenged to do this.”

The court order means that for now, dozens of people living on a vacant, city-owned lot off Wood Street in West Oakland cannot be forced to relocate amid ongoing rain and flooding. The camp is home to roughly 55 people — the last holdouts in the area after Caltrans recently removed between 200 and 300 people from a neighboring lot — and the city intended to start the closure process Monday.

The judge’s decision comes as a wave of storms has drenched the Bay Area for the past 10 days — with the wet weather showing no sign of letting up this week — and experts are concerned about a “trifecta” of COVID-19, RSV and influenza viruses taking hold this winter.

“The plaintiffs have raised serious questions that the state will violate their constitutional rights by placing them in increased danger by being forced out of shelter during severe weather, in the midst of an ongoing ‘tripledemic,’ and without adequate plans to provide shelter,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Orrick, who last year issued a similar order temporarily barring Caltrans from clearing the neighboring camp.

Even so, Orrick indicated this latest court-ordered ban is likely to be brief. Both sides will appear in court Jan. 18, at which point the judge will decide whether to lift or extend the ban.

The problem, according to the court, is that the city has a little more than two-dozen shelter beds available — not enough to shelter everyone living at the Wood Street encampment. Furthermore, those beds are in a dorm-style shelter where many residents share one room. That setup isn’t feasible for everyone, according to the plaintiffs, as it’s untenable for people with certain mental health conditions, and it would force residents to leave behind their pets and belongings.

The city is building a new tiny home community down the road from the encampment, which will be able to shelter at least 31 unhoused residents in small, private dwellings. But it won’t be ready until Jan. 20. Another 29 new RV parking spaces will be available by Jan. 17.

“The closure should be postponed until those new spaces are available,” the judge wrote.

Oakland, which has said it expects to be able to shelter everyone from the encampment who wants shelter, argues it needs to be able to clear the camp to make way for a 170-unit affordable housing development slated to be built there. The project already has been delayed because of economic uncertainty and staffing shortages — and until the encampment is gone, the city says it can’t apply for the funding it needs for the project.

The city attorney’s office declined to comment on the judge’s ruling.

The court order marks the latest development in an ongoing saga surrounding the controversial camp, which has occupied the Wood Street area for years. Caltrans in October removed the majority of the camp’s occupants when it cleared a vacant lot the agency owns off Wood Street. Many residents displaced from that camp have since moved down the road to an encampment they call “the Commons” — the camp at the heart of the current lawsuit.

Both camps were much more than a cluster of tents — they had become functioning communities. The Caltrans camp had toilets, a hot shower, gardens, common areas and tiny homes built by residents and volunteer activists. The Commons has solar panels to help residents charge phones and other devices.

But frequent fires, some of which impacted Interstate 80, 880 and the transition lanes to 580 that run above the encampment, prompted everyone from Caltrans to city officials to Gov. Gavin Newsom to call for the camp to be shut down. Oakland spent nearly $80,000 responding to 63 fires at the Caltrans-owned Wood Street property between October 2021 and 2022.

Oakland initially planned to start clearing the Commons on Monday, and posted notices last month warning residents they would have to move out. But the city changed its tune Friday, citing the stormy weather. Instead, new notices posted at the camp advised, the city would start deep cleaning the site, and residents would need to vacate the property between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. every day this week. The city intended to start closing the camp after the cleaning was complete.

But that wasn’t good enough for the judge, who worried residents wouldn’t be protected from the rain while they had to leave the camp during the cleaning.

Did they hit their mark?

Not on every front. But even so, officials say they’ve made significant progress as we head into the new year.

San Mateo County set perhaps the most ambitious goal, setting its sights on essentially ending street homelessness in 2022 by making sure everyone who wanted to come inside had access to a shelter bed, temporary housing or a permanent home. It didn’t quite get there.

The county moved 154 homeless people out of new hotel programs and into long-term housing in 2022 and is on track to more than double its shelter capacity by the end of January. But the gold standard of having a bed for everyone remains elusive.

“We’re well within striking distance,” said Deputy County Executive Iliana Rodriguez, who is spearheading the county’s efforts and thinks they can guarantee a bed for everyone by the end of 2023. But it remains to be seen whether recent nationwide inflation and rampant job losses — which already have exacerbated the need for food and rental assistance in the Bay Area — will derail that effort.

San Jose, meanwhile, exceeded its goal of moving 1,300 homeless people into housing by the end of 2022 — overshooting by more than 50%. That target, set in September 2021, was part of the Biden administration’s larger “House America” goal of moving 100,000 homeless Americans into housing.

But the Bay Area’s biggest city fell far short of its goal to get 1,695 new units of homeless housing built, under construction or about to break ground by the end of 2022. The city hit less than 50% of that goal — 789 units. Part of the problem is that another 357 units were expected to be underway by now but hit delays in the permitting process, according to Director of Housing Jacky Morales-Ferrand.

Oakland, meanwhile, moved 1,468 unhoused residents into homes — falling just short of its “House America” goal of 1,500 people. The city also has 321 new units of permanent housing for homeless residents underway — exceeding its goal of 132 units.

By comparison, San Mateo County’s goal was a veritable moonshot.  But it was reasonable, officials argued, in part because the county’s homeless population — about 1,800 — is far smaller than nearby San Francisco, Santa Clara and Alameda counties.

The plan to meet that goal hinged in part on a new homeless shelter in Redwood City. The 240-bed shelter, which will give residents their own room and provide onsite medical, mental health and dental services while helping residents find long-term housing, was supposed to open in 2022. But construction delays have pushed the opening back to the end of January. The new Redwood City facility, plus three hotels the county has turned into homeless shelters, will more than double the county’s shelter capacity.

One of those hotels — the Coast House in Half Moon Bay — helped 57-year-old Joe move into housing after being homeless off and on for 10 years. Joe, who declined to give his last name, lived in the shelter for about a year while working on getting sober, finding a job and saving money. In November, he moved into a studio along the coast in Montara with a voucher that will help pay his rent for a year.

Now, he’s working full-time as an operations supervisor at a pharmacy. And he was able to spend the holidays with his 13-year-old daughter, whom he hadn’t seen in almost two years.

“I’m back on track,” he said. “It’s unbelievable.”

But the help Joe received won’t be available to everyone who needs it. Once the Redwood City shelter opens, there will be just 723 shelter beds available in a county that, as of January 2022, counted 1,092 people living outside.

San Mateo County also continues to struggle to keep up with the amount of affordable housing it needs to move people from shelters into long-term homes.

“We are making progress, but there are a lot of people who need affordable housing and more work needs to be done,” said Assistant County Executive Peggy Jensen.

The county is trying to close that gap with vouchers that subsidize rents for low-income and homeless tenants in market-rate buildings. The county received an extra 278 vouchers from the federal government in 2022. And starting in 2023, it will have another 100 vouchers backed by $4 million in county funds.

Even so, eliminating street homelessness in 2023 may prove challenging as the country heads into an economic downturn. Already Samaritan House, which provides shelters, food assistance and other programs in the county, is seeing a spike in need, said Chief Operating Officer Laura Bent. Six months ago, they were seeing an average of 50 new clients per month. Now, they see 50 per week.

“I tried doing it twice, but nothing really came of it,” he said. “I figured I slipped through the cracks.”

Despite his own experience, he’s optimistic the county can make progress toward its goal in 2023.

“I don’t think you can end it,” he said of homelessness. “But you can definitely make a dent in it, help people move forward with their lives.”

Resnick was the certified winner in the Nov. 8 race for the District 4 board seat, but Alameda County officials in charge of the election now have concluded that his opponent, current District 5 Director Mike Hutchinson, should have won.

The administrative error that led to the county’s mishandling of ranked choice votes is the central argument of a legal filing that Hutchinson submitted Thursday, hoping to overturn the certified election results.

“Hopefully, we can come together and get this done in a timely manner,” Hutchinson said. “We have real work that we’re planning on doing.”

For Resnick’s part, the legal filing will not interrupt proceedings. An employee in the Oakland city clerk’s office confirmed that Resnick will be sworn in as planned on Monday, along with all the winners in the city’s November elections.

Oakland City Clerk Asha Reed and Alameda County counsel could not be reached for comment on Hutchinson’s legal filing.

Resnick is listed as defendant in the filing, which is officially termed an “election contest.” It also Reed and Alameda County Registrar of Voters Tim Dupuis as real parties of interest.

Resnick and his attorney, Jim Sutton, have pushed back on Dupuis’ revelation late last month that Hutchinson should have won the school board race.

“We have very serious legal concerns about how the registrar has handled the situation,” Sutton said at Thursday’s county board of supervisors meeting.

The votes have not actually been re-counted — rather, when the error was caught, county officials re-ran a ranked choice algorithm that transfers votes between candidates based on how voters listed their preferences. The District 4 school board race was the only one where the winning candidate changed.

A full recount of the vote would take significantly more time and cost the county many hours of labor for the registrar staff, Dupuis has said.

When opponents of Oakland Mayor-Elect Sheng Thao last month requested a recount of votes in that race, they could not pay the $21,000-a-day price tag to carry it out.

But one county supervisor, Keith Carson, floated the idea Thursday of ordering a recount of all ranked choice elections in Oakland and San Leandro — two cities that, along with Berkeley and Albany, have adopted the format.

And it would pin the costs of such an endeavor on Dupuis’ office, since it is “being requested by elected members of the Alameda County Board of Supervisors,” according to the proposal.

Thao outlasted Councilmember Loren Taylor — her closest opponent in the mayoral race — by just under 680 votes after ranked choice vote transfers helped her erase Taylor’s lead in first-place ballots.

And after Dupuis’ revelation of an error in the school board results set off alarm bells for skeptics of ranked choice voting, Thao released a statement last week supporting a recount of the results in her race.

The election debacle has fueled skepticism of the ranked choice voting system. But Dupuis, in his few public statements, has insisted that the mistake had nothing to do with a glitch in election software or a flaw in the ranked choice voting format — saying instead that it was an error on the part of his office. He could not be reached for comment on this story.