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The Bay’s August News Roundup

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In this edition of The Bay’s monthly news roundup, California politics and government senior editor Molly Solomon joins us to talk about how Kamala Harris tells her life story to a national audience — and why she might be reluctant to mention Berkeley. Also, we discuss a lead water crisis at Oakland schools, and why some journalists are dismayed with a deal Google just reached with state lawmakers to pay millions of dollars to support local news.


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Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra and welcome to the Bay. Local news to keep you rooted and welcome to our August news roundup where me and the rest of the Bay team sit down to talk about some of the other stories that we have been following this month. I am joined by our senior editor, Alan Montecillo. What’s up, Alan?

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Alan Montecillo: Hey. Hey.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And we’re also joined by a very special guest today, senior editor of KQED’s California politics and government desk, Molly Solomon. What’s up, Molly?

Molly Solomon: Hey, thanks for having me.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: My thank you so much for taking the time. You guys have been super busy over there at the Politics desk, and I know your time is very precious. Can you talk about what you all have been up to this last month?

Molly Solomon: Yeah. Busy is like the understatement of the year. It has been a busy, busy week slash man slash. This election has probably aged me like a decade, but this I think more recently, the excitement on our team was being able to go to Chicago to cover in person the Democratic National Convention.

Molly Solomon: I think clearly the big story for us has also been this really quick, sudden ascension of Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket, replacing Biden. So obviously with her connections and her roots to San Francisco politics, to the Bay Area, that’s been a big story for us.

Alan Montecillo: There are times when I go throughout my day and I realize, again, that that happened, that Biden dropped out and that Harris is the nominee. And I still kind of can’t believe that happened.

Molly Solomon: And that was a month ago. Allen What is time? Yeah, it’s wild. The last two months have been have been a roller coaster ride.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And I mean, while we are on the topic, why don’t you kick us off with the first story of our news roundup, Molly, that you’ve been watching very closely this month.

Molly Solomon: The story that caught my eye. This last month is really this issue of how Kamala Harris is telling her story. And I think more specifically how she seems to be, as some people say, downplaying or even just saying the name of her hometown where she’s from, Berkeley. I just think it’s been fascinating because all of us, you know, reporters here, especially some of the local reporters on our team, have been covering her for decades.

Molly Solomon: So I just find it very fascinating the way she decides to tell her story, especially now that she’s on this national stage, including, you know, more recently, I was kind of watching for that when she was giving her speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Kamala Harris: Before she could finally afford to buy a home. She rented a small apartment in the east bay. In the bay, in the bay, you either live in the hills or the flatlands. We lived in the flats.

Molly Solomon: A beautiful I think I had actually sent out a tweet when we got the transcript of her speech and I was like, Hey, like, shout out to Berkeley Flatlands. And people immediately, even just in that tweet that I sent out were like, actually, she did not specifically say Berkeley in her speech. So they were already really, like keen to, like, highlight what she was and was not saying.

Molly Solomon: She was actually born in a hospital in Oakland. You know, when she was younger, they did spend some time actually, and then moved to the Midwest. She did end up moving back to Berkeley when her parents divorced and she lived with her mom in this now iconic yellow duplex house on Bancroft in kind of a southwest corner of Berkeley. After that, you know, she spent some of her adolescence actually in Canada.

Molly Solomon: Her mom had gotten a teaching research job at one of the universities there before. You know, the stage that she’s on now, like Harris has talked about growing up in Berkeley, like she wrote about it in her autobiography. She’s talked about, you know, going to protests with her parents in a stroller. Obviously, she moved back and was an adult and lived in Oakland as she was a prosecutor in Alameda County.

Molly Solomon: And she was also, I think, as a young child, she was part of this integrated bussing program in Berkeley. And she was actually bussed from, you know, her home in southwest Berkeley up to the wealthier North Berkeley Hills to go to school. So it has played a part in, you know, how she’s talked about her childhood in the past.

Molly Solomon: I just think it’s more interesting because it seems like there has been this deliberate omission of it. I mean, even in just how she referred to where she’s from in her speech, she said the bay and other times, you know, she’s called herself a daughter of Oakland. So for whatever reason and we can talk about it, it seems like she’s downplaying naming the city that she spent most of her time growing up.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Why is that? Like, why not? Claim Berkeley as much now, or even Oakland explicitly for that matter.

Molly Solomon: I think it’s pretty strategic. You know, there is a political strategy here of emphasizing, you know, Oakland over Berkeley or maybe neither and just saying East Bay, there’s this idea that it’s just a bunch of like hippies and radical leftist that are in Berkeley. It’s got the nickname, bizarrely.

Molly Solomon: So I think if she is trying to, you know, as a candidate, make herself palatable to people that don’t live in the Bay Area, especially like one of the more progressive parts of California, she might want to distance herself from that.

Molly Solomon: So I think from a political strategy standpoint, I could see her either wanting to paint herself with a broader brush or just maybe not even naming that city as a way to connect herself to to this bigger audience that she’s now speaking to.

Alan Montecillo: But, you know, it’s not like Harris is the first candidate to overplay or downplay certain parts of her background as someone from Berkeley. Molly, how does this make you feel?

Molly Solomon: I think there’s like an immense amount of pride for this place for people that have grown up in Berkeley. I mean, for people that have grown up in the Bay, I’m sure you feel this, too, from where you grew up. But, you know, to me, it’s like that is always been this thing that you claim, you know, and that you tell everybody about.

Molly Solomon: I’m from Berkeley, I’m from the bay, you know, almost to the point of like annoyance from my husband or anyone else that is not grown up here. So so I think about it with with this, you know, I think this is something that’s interesting to me and sort of stood out to me because, you know, it tells me a little bit also about how Kamala Harris is choosing to show different parts of her identity.

Molly Solomon: I mean, not just with the hometown thing and being from Berkeley. And I’m sure that, like they were quoted in this article that I read to a lot of people in Berkeley were like, we get it. It’s fine. Our feelings are not hurt. We understand you got an election to win, whatever. But I think it’s just interesting to see the way that like what she chooses to claim and reveal about herself. You know, she’s really leaned into this law and order prosecutor role.

Molly Solomon: I think that has a lot to do with the current climate around crime being a mixed race woman, South Asian, black woman. I think these are parts of her identity, what she is publicly claiming and telling us who she is as a national candidate says something. So that’s why it stood out to me.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: All right. Well, Molly, thank you so much.

Molly Solomon: Thanks for having me.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And after the break, we’ll talk about a lead crisis at Oakland schools and a deal that Google just cut with the state to help California’s struggling local news industry. Stay with us.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And welcome back to the Bay’s Monthly News roundup, where we sit down to talk about some of the other stories that we’ve been following this month. Alan Kids are back to school and it’s been a pretty chaotic return for students in Oakland. What’s going on?

Alan Montecillo: Well, there is lead in the drinking water at dozens of Oakland public schools. You know, it has obviously kids, parents, teachers, very frustrated with the district, afraid for their kids safety. I mean, not a great start to the school year in Oakland.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And how many schools are we talking about here? How bad and widespread is this problem?

Alan Montecillo: Well, as of now, we know of at least 30. There’s been a lot of reporting on this from the Oakland side. KQED has done some reporting as well. Now, the district has a policy that if the lead in drinking water is five parts per billion, just the concentration of lead or higher that the district needs to basically get rid of the fountains and replace them.

Alan Montecillo: We know of more than 30 schools in Oakland that are above that five parts per billion number. Some of the schools have much, much higher concentrations of lead. One school, a Lincoln Elementary, tested for 930 parts per billion. And there are at least a dozen that have about 50 parts per million, which is, you know, ten times the district’s sort of minimum level.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So how were parents and students finding out about these high levels of lead in the school’s drinking water?

Alan Montecillo: So in mid-August, when almost was starting the new school year, families were getting notified that that there was lead or unsafe levels of lead in the drinking water in some of their schools. In many cases, the testing had actually been done much, much earlier. One example of this is at the Frick United Academy of Language.

Alan Montecillo: So on August 12th, which is, you know, the first day of school, teachers say they found out that six water fixtures at their schools tested over the safe limit of lead. But the testing was done in April. So teachers find this out on day one and they’re furious because, A, we have to now tell all of the kids on the first day of school, hey, do not drink the water from the fountain.

Alan Montecillo: And B, kids were probably drinking it during the end of the school year during summer school. So the firestorm of anger in the district is not just about the fact that there is lead in the water. I mean, it should get fixed.

Alan Montecillo: You know, this happens when pipes are old, but that the notification didn’t happen in an efficient way. They found out months later. And that’s something that the district has even copped to, that they did not communicate the test results fast enough to families.

Molly Solomon: I think, like if I’m a parent and I have a kid in an Oakland school that has like, you know, maybe one of these schools that has a high amount, like you mentioned, should I be worried? I mean, is this dangerous? Is my child affected by this?

Alan Montecillo: Well, there are no safe levels of lead in drinking water. I mean, the county health department even recommended that parents who have kids at one of these schools have them tested for lead exposure and that they actually bring along the communication from the district to their primary care doctor’s office.

Alan Montecillo: The fountains that are known to have this lead in it have been shut down. But, you know, in in many cases, it’s possible that the kids have already drink the water that has led in it, because the way the district communicated this was so late.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I mean, what has the district said about why it took them so long to notify parents, students and sounds like even teachers?

Alan Montecillo: As of now, we don’t totally know what went wrong here with the notification process. I should say we’re taping this before. Superintendent Kyla Johnson Tremmel is set to give a presentation to the public. The district has promised now that they will notify families within three days of testing and they will publish all of the results on a public dashboard. They say they’ll get this set up by January, but right now we don’t really know why this happened.

Molly Solomon: Okay. So it sounds like there’s some plans in the works a little farther off. But what’s being done now about all of this?

Alan Montecillo: Well, I think for the district, just in the immediate term, there’s just the basic like explaining to families what happened here and trying to reassure them. In the meantime, there’s still more testing going on as of this taping. Not all of that. Schools have been fully tested yet.

Alan Montecillo: And in terms of just being at school, the district is also providing filtered water dispensers at schools that have been affected. I think for teachers and kids, it’s just trying to get through the first month of school with this, you know, huge inconvenience that in many cases a lot of your drinking fountains are unsafe.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: All right. Well, we’ll definitely continue to follow that story as it develops. Thank you so much, Alan.

Alan Montecillo: Thank you.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And last but not least, will cap off our news roundup with a story about an effort to try and force big tech to help the state’s struggling local news industry. This is a story that I have been following this month in a deal with state lawmakers. Google has agreed to pay $55 million over five years to a fund that would be distributed to local newsrooms and also fund AA technology.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: This deal comes after this effort by two Bay Area lawmakers to try and force the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley to really pay up essentially for the impact that some of these tech companies have had on our really I mean, faltering local news industry here in California.

Alan Montecillo: What role have they played specifically that led to some state lawmakers in California saying, hey, you guys got to pay up or at least help?

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Yeah. So some of the context here, I mean, the state of California has lost like about a third of its local newspapers since 2005. And as we know very well, I mean, news organizations are really trying to keep up with the changing media ecosystem. I mean, advertising has always been a huge source of revenue for newspapers.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: But now publishers argue that search engines and social media platforms have really harmed the journalism business by hogging up all that advertising revenue while also benefiting from news content that they don’t pay for. And so to local lawmakers in the Bay Area tried to put forward these two laws that were really set up to try and secure a cut of tech money, really to kind of help prop up California’s struggling local news industry.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So one of them would have forced Google and Medha to negotiate a so-called usage fee with news outlets directly. Basically, Google pays a local news outlet for how many clicks it gets on Google when a user searches for a story.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Another lawmaker from the Bay Area proposed a separate law that would have enforced a fee on major platforms like Google and Meta to basically provide a news outlet tax credit to help employ local journalists. And that ad actually would have raised $500 million a year, according to some estimates.

Molly Solomon: I mean, it sounds like the original idea is not exactly what they ended up agreeing on in the end. Could you kind of walk us through what those changes were? Was there pushback and how they ended up landing on this new deal? That has, you know, I as a part of it as well?

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Yeah. Basically, Google is going to be paying much less than this. The original two bills that these lawmakers proposed. What’s happening instead is that the tech giant has agreed to pay $55 million over five years to support local media outlets. This money is going to be administered by UC Berkeley and kind of distributed to local news outlets from there.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And it’s also going to help start an artificial intelligence program. The idea is to basically give some of these outlets some financial support to see how I can help them in their work. And there are kind of two big reasons I’d say why the original plan kind of failed. One being that Google has spent a lot of money lobbying against these bills. They spent about $2.1 million in response to Buffy Wicks bill.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And once Buffy Wicks is, Bill actually passed it in the state Assembly. Google actually retaliated and temporarily removed some links to California news websites from its search results. So there was just a lot of concern about how willing Google would be to kind of go along with this idea. And there was concern about whether Governor Newsom would have been willing to support this idea to.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Calmatters actually reported that proponents said that it was actually really unlikely that Newsom would support any one of these bills because he pledged no tax increases this year. So those are two kind of big reasons why their original idea didn’t kind of come to fruition.

Alan Montecillo: Where were journalists in these negotiations? I mean, you know, this is a little bit of a meta conversation. I didn’t get a call about going to talk about this bill. I assume neither of you did either. What groups, if any, were weighing in on behalf of journalists who would be affected by this? Well, this now new law.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Some groups representing journalists across California are really not happy about this deal. One really outspoken opponent is the Media Guild of the West, which represents reporters down in Southern California. The guild said that it was particularly concerned about this part of the deal involving artificial intelligence.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And they sort of have concerns about what promoting A.I. could further do to the local news industry. They saw it as sort of a concession to the tech industry in that way that could actually lead to even more devastation to the local news industry and maybe even a further loss of of jobs among, like, reporters.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So, yeah, I mean, basically, like there are a bunch of unions and and other groups sort of representing journalists across the the state who are accusing California lawmakers of kind of settling and others who say that, you know, local media is not really in a position to say no to more money either.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So there’s a lot more work to be done to kind of help local news organizations across the state to to be as healthy as we need them to be, especially in an election year. And that is it for our August news roundup. Thank you so much, Alan and Molly, for joining me, it was fun guys.

Alan Montecillo:  Thank you.

Molly Solomon: Thanks so much for having me. This was fun, you guys.

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Ericka Cruz Guevarra: The Bay is made by me and Alan Montecillo. We get support from Jen Chien, Katie Sprenger, Maha Sanad and Holly Kernan Music courtesy of Audio Network. The Bay is a production of listener supported KQED in San Francisco. I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra…peace.

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