https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y04gcyO4hcA
Oakland News Now Presents:
Dan Kalb, You’re Oakland District 1 Councilmember, You Can Work To Save Luka’s Taproom
. A vlog by the YouTube channel named in the video’s upper left corner and serves as the original blog post for this content.
Dan Kalb, You’re Oakland District 1 Councilmember, You Can Work To Save Luka’s Taproom Rather Than Cast Blame On A “Greedy Landlord”.
For those new to the story, I’ll make it brief: Rick Mitchell and Maria Alderete are faced with having to close their Luka’s Taproom and after 18 years, reportedly due to a dispute with the landlord. But from the perspective of this trained economic development officer, me, what I see is a City of Oakland who, in 2022, just does nothing to help.
My example of evidence to back my claim is Oakland District One Councilmember Dan Kalb. My friend did something on Facebook that was beyond the pale. I response to the posted news, Dan wrote: ” had fish and chips from Lukas today for lunch. So sorry to see that they are closing. Appears that a greedy commercial property owner is to blame.”
Luka’s Taproom And Oakland Restaurants And Businesses Can Benefit From Oakland Implementing AB464 ASAP
Now, few seeing his post know that Dan is in a position as an elected official to even take action to help Luka’s and establish a program around the new AB464 legislation that allows the creation of tax increment financing zones specifically for the objective of getting property tax revenue steered toward the retention of businesses harmed by the Pandemic. And that’s certainly the case for Luka’s as the Pandemic is not over and they have already suffered to the point where they can’t remain in the space.
But Oakland can take action. If Dan were proactive he would not have wrote that text on Facebook, or he would write that he would take action to save Luka’s. That’s what we used to do in Oakland when we had the Office of Economic Development and Employment and the Oakland Business Development Corporation. Now, Oakland’s economic development effort is designed for you to reach out to them and not for them to say they’re going to come to you. At the very time we need government to act, from the Federal level to the State and Local level, government is failing.
Moreover, my Democratic Party seems to have degenerated to a place where it sees only regulation of business and not assistance to business. We’re good at telling businesses to close due to the Pandemic, but awful at getting money to businesses to keep them as going concerns through the Pandemic. Locally, the same is true, as Oakland sitting on its hands and not establishing a city-wide, Pandemic-related, business retention program is but one example of this national economic development malaise. But it’s a big one.
Dan Kalb and the Oakland City Council have proven that Oakland’s lost its will and initiative to do anything to alter the outcome of happenings – even a little bit. No one will blame anyone who tries and fails, but to just plain give up before you start as an elected official is nothing short of horrible.
Oakland Councilmember Dan Kalb, get involved and fix this. If you don’t know what to do, call me at 510-517-7565, because I do and am not afraid to take action. I told everyone this would be Oakland’s result when the Mayor started her Economic Roundtable – it was analysis paralysis. And here, with Dan’s post, we have more of it. Well, OK, over fish and chips at Luka’s. “Sorry you’re closing” is all he can muster as the livestream shows.
Where’s Oakland District 3 Councilmember Carrol Fife? What about Oakland At-Large Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan? There’s so much the City of Oakland can do and even help by locating a new venue for Luka’s. We have clearly degenerated into not knowing how to do economic development as a city government. Time to work. Time to get off the sidelines and act. It has been long past that time for us in Oakland.
Stay tuned.
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Note from Zennie62Media and OaklandNewsNow.com : this video-blog post demonstrates the full and live operation of the latest updated version of an experimental Zennie62Media , Inc. mobile media video-blogging system network that was launched June 2018. This is a major part of Zennie62Media , Inc.’s new and innovative approach to the production of news media. What we call “The Third Wave of Media”. The uploaded video is from a YouTube channel. When the video is “liked” by Zennie62 YouTube, then it is automatically uploaded to and formatted automatically at the Oakland News Now site and Zennie62-created and owned social media pages. The overall objective here, on top of our is smartphone-enabled, real-time, on the scene reporting of news, interviews, observations, and happenings anywhere in the World and within seconds and not hours – is the use of the existing YouTube social graph on any subject in the World. Now, news is reported with a smartphone and also by promoting current content on YouTube: no heavy and expensive cameras or even a laptop are necessary, or having a camera crew to shoot what is already on YouTube. The secondary objective is faster, and very inexpensive media content news production and distribution. We have found there is a disconnect between post length and time to product and revenue generated. With this, the problem is far less, though by no means solved. Zennie62Media is constantly working to improve the system network coding and seeks interested content and media technology partners.