Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra and welcome to the bay. Local news to keep you rooted. And it’s time for our November news roundup. That time of the month where I sit down with the rest of the Bay team to discuss some of the stories that we’ve been following this month. I’ll have you all introduce yourselves.
Alan Montecillo: Hi, this is Alan Montecillo and I’m the senior editor of the Bay.
Maria Esquinca: And I’m Maria Esquinca, and I’m the producer for the Bay.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And we are. I feel like in kind of the middle of holiday season, I feel like a lot of people are definitely feeling like, let’s just get to the holidays, y’all.
Alan Montecillo: Yeah. Another busy news month. We had APEC in town was APEC epic. I’ll let you all decide that the news cycle keeps going, but for a lot of people too, it’s it’s just trying to get through the last few weeks before the winter holidays.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And it’s cold.
Maria Esquinca: It’s so cold.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: It is so cold. I just want to, like, stay in my bed and cuddle with my big old cat.
Alan Montecillo: It’s Bay Area cold, but it is cold.
Maria Esquinca: It’s cozy season.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: It is. And this is also probably going to be our last news roundup of the year, actually. And so let’s kick it off. Alan, I want to start with you. You got some good news about Barton Muni, which I feel like we don’t get much of these days.
Alan Montecillo: Yeah, good news for people who like transit. Bart and the S.F. MTA and transit agencies across the region have avoided the devastating fiscal cliff for now. Basically, the state legislature approved $1.1 billion for transit agencies across the state, $352 million for Bart, $308 million for Muni for the next two fiscal years.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: This is, of course, been a huge problem, especially since the pandemic, which really impacted services like Bart. So what exactly is this money going to do?
Alan Montecillo: Essentially my understanding is this is just there to keep services afloat. Ever since pandemic relief funding ran out and frankly, ever since the pandemic caused such a huge drop off in ridership. You know, agencies that are so reliant on fares are just facing huge budget deficits. And so without money to close those gaps, our agencies would likely have to make major cuts in service. That would probably reduce ridership, which would probably reduce revenue, which would probably result in cuts to service and on and on and on.
Maria Esquinca: Okay. So this sounds like a lot of money that’s going to help the agencies for now. But are there any strings attached?
Alan Montecillo: Yes. And I think this is the interesting part of it. In order to access these funds, all transit agencies, not just Bart and SFO, to have to do a few things. One is that they have to continue to follow through with efforts across the region to basically increase coordination among all the transit agencies. So there’s already work around things like getting the schedules integrated, changing the payment system. We’re going to be soon moving to a system where you don’t have to have a clipper card to pay. You can actually use your debit card or credit card.
Alan Montecillo: They also must submit reports on what they’re going to continue to do to improve public safety. As we know, that’s been a major concern among many riders. And then there’s another provision which is specific to Bart, which is that they must complete their work on replacing their fare gates, more than 700 fare gates specifically. This is a measure to stop fare evasion. So Bart is and must continue to replace them with fare gates that are bigger, that are basically harder to jump over. They have to complete that work by 2025.
Maria Esquinca: So these millions of dollars, they’re going to last until 2026. But what is going to happen to these agencies after that?
Alan Montecillo: Well, the timing of this is interesting because this money is allocated for the next two fiscal years. It’s not a long term structural solution to keeping transit agencies afloat. It kicks the can down the road. Many people, including members of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which is the agency that oversees transit in the Bay Area, have already floated the idea of a ballot measure in 2026 that could raise up to $1 billion for transit agencies. So essentially, Bart and Muni especially are kind of on the clock for the next few years to make these improvements, to basically make the case to the public.
Alan Montecillo: We’ve talked about this before, that, hey, we should continue to fund transit. Who knows, right. In 2026, maybe people will say, hey, like, you know, Bart and Muni are back, it’s clean and feel safe and maybe people will want to reward that. Or maybe it won’t. This is sort of the beginning of what I think is 2 to 3 year window for transit to really, I think, make the case to voters and to legislators that transit should continue to be funded and that taxpayers should continue to help keep the agencies afloat.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, definitely something we’re going to be following here on the bay. And also, I wanted to just shout out Dan Brekke, our transportation editor here at KQED, who’s actually got a new live blog about transportation news. And everything that moves in the Bay Area is called In Transit. We’ll also leave a link in our show notes to that new blog. All right, Alan, thank you so much for that one. Coming up after the break, we’re going to talk about a proposal to pay working inmates more in California prisons. And Tupac Shakur, way in Oakland. Stay with us.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Maria, I want to move on to you. What story have you been following this month?
Maria Esquinca: So the story that I’ve been following is a proposal by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, commonly known as CDCr. And they’re proposing to increase wages for prisoners. What they have is a piece schedule. And this pay schedule is divided based on the way they categorize skills. And they’re starting at the lowest skill from $0.08 an hour to $0.16 an hour. The highest wage increase we would see is people that get paid $0.37 an hour would get paid $0.74 an hour.
Alan Montecillo: What are these wages for? I assume they’re for jobs. What kinds of jobs are we talking about?
Maria Esquinca: Yeah, so we’re talking about jobs that people do in state prisons, and that can vary from maintenance jobs to custodial jobs to food to critical service. And based on all these different types of of jobs, people are categorized into various skill levels or specialized kind of skills and that determines their wages. And so what this proposal will do is double it for every skill level that people are categorized in.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Why is this happening?
Maria Esquinca: So CDCr is saying that the reason they’re proposing these wage increases is to help workers retain their jobs. That will help support their rehabilitation, that it’ll give them greater buying power. And some prisoners have to do what is called restitution payments, which is money that they pay back to the state for their crime. And so they’re also arguing that this will help them meet those payments.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Okay. So, Maria, this is what CDCr is proposing, but what do advocacy groups think of this?
Maria Esquinca: Farida Jhabvala Romero who reported the story for KQED, spoke to Lawrence Cox, who worked as an inmate in California state prisons for seven years.
Lawrence Cox: The jobs I did were behind the wall in the kitchen, helping prepare food for the entire prison complex. I did janitorial services sanitizing the area, the showers.
Maria Esquinca: He talks about what people use this money for.
Lawrence Cox: Food, I need hygiene. Of course they feed us. But if anyone knows that’s been there, the food is deplorable.
Maria Esquinca: And he also says that this proposal is shameful. This sort of increase is still nothing about the money that they make in prison was already not enough to cover any of these things. He talks about how people in prison want to also support their family and that the wages that they make already are not enough. And this increase is really, in his words, shameful to continue.
Lawrence Cox: The practices of. Exploiting individuals is deplorable. Like it’s sorry. Give me an increase in 16 cent. I still I still can’t do anything with it.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, I guess, what do you think we should make of this story then, Maria? I mean, we we really are still talking about nickels and dimes here, people getting paid. I mean, like not even a dollar an hour for their work.
Maria Esquinca: Yeah. I think I also struggled with like, how to interpret this because I think at face value it seems like in like proposal to increase someone’s wages seems like a great idea. But I think like critics who are following this story, who work in prison reform or who advocate for prisoners, call this proposal grossly insufficient. They also argue that they’re not sure how people in prison will even make more money because part of this proposal is to cut most of these full time jobs into part time jobs. There has been a lot of criticism about prisons in general, and there has been a lot of conversations about abolition.
Maria Esquinca: I think this story scratches at the surface of conditions that might seem to better the lives of prisoners. But at the end of the day, we’re still talking about a pay schedule that has remained unchanged for the past 30 years. And so I think we’re it sort of returns us to the same place where we began, where there’s people that are like Lauren’s that rejected the idea that this is going to better the lives of people in prison in any way. And so I think it forces us to, again, think of what would actually better the lives of people in prison and what do people in prison actually want?
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And lastly, we have my story out of Oakland, where earlier this month, in a star studded ceremony, Tupac Shakur Way was unveiled near Lake Merritt along a portion of MacArthur Boulevard where Tupac Shakur lived in the early 90s. There were a bunch of folks there, E-40, M.C. Hammer and even members of Tupac Shakur’s family, including his siblings.
Alan Montecillo: So Tupac born in New York. But I think a lot of people also probably know about his Bay Area ties. I’m sure some of that came up at the ceremony as well.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Yeah. I mean, like you said, Tupac was born in New York City, but he lived in a bunch of different cities throughout his life, like Baltimore, famously Marin City, Santa Rosa, Richmond, Los Angeles. But Tupac kind of famously claimed Oakland in a 1993 interview as the place where he says that he learned the game.
Tupac Shakur: The game is now one person. The game is just end. Game is ending. It was just a rough year. Somebody just woke it up inside me, you know what I’m saying? Like the lack of religion. And I just saw it and I saw it in Oakland. I saw it living in Oakland. I saw it thriving in Oakland. And that’s that was never no other city I lived in. So I give all my love to Oakland. If I’m acclaimed somewhere, I’m a claim Oakland.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So this effort to name a street after Tupac was actually spearheaded by his sister, a council member, Carol Fife, hip hop historian Leroy McCarthy, and one of Tupac’s closest friends, Ray Love, who really talked about how Oakland had a huge influence on his artistic development and also his political mindset. His mom was part of the Black Panther Party.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: His friends and family say that Oakland is really where the birth of hip hop was based for them, especially around digital underground. And also, Tupac famously sued the Oakland Police Department in 1991 after they allegedly slammed and arrested him for jaywalking. He just has a lot of roots here. And as you heard in that clip, he gives all his love to Oakland.
Maria Esquinca: Tupac is also really known for his political outspokenness. I’m curious how you’re thinking of him in a moment like this as well.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Yeah, I mean, we’ve seen a lot of other hip hop legends being honored in this way all around the Bay Area. We had E-40 in Vallejo. He had to store in East Oakland. And at the ceremony, you heard a lot of people really wanting to honor Tupac’s importance to Oakland, but also hip hop culture at large, especially in this 50th anniversary of hip hop this year. And Councilmember Carroll Fife actually talked about how the naming of this street honoring Tupac is really about preserving some of what Tupac was trying to tell us back in the day.
Carroll Fife: He said Oakland gave him his game. Right. And it’s done that for a lot of us, Right. It’s done that for a lot of us. So let’s remember the game that it gave. Let’s remember we got to pour into our city. We got to pour into solutions. We got to pour into what we know he stood for, regardless of what the press and everybody else was trying. And we loved him.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: This idea of really kind of pouring into solutions at a time where there is just so much conflict going on in the world and really honoring some of the things that he really stood for.
[Music]
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: All right. And this is, again, probably our last news roundup of the year. Maria Elena and I, we really tried a new thing with this, so we’ll probably keep doing that next year. Hope you liked them as much as we did to John. Enjoy doing these little roundups.
Maria Esquinca: Oh yeah.
Alan Montecillo: It’s fine.
Alan Montecillo: No, it’s been fun. It’s nice to get to shake up the format a little bit and to make more space for four more stories.
Maria Esquinca: Yeah. And it’s always nice talking to the two of you in person and chatting, and I hope listeners enjoy it as much as we have.
Alan Montecillo: Right. Alan and Maria, thank you.
Maria Esquinca: Thank you.
Alan Montecillo: Thanks.
