I had no idea, back in January, that doing a deep read of a niche political blog was going to launch a months-long obsession with El Cerrito political history.
One of the first things I observed, reading the El Cerrito Committee for Responsible Government (ECCRG) blog, was that it was telling a rather alarming story about events that started unfolding something like a decade ago. The early entries of the blog were organized kind of like a firsthand report on day-to-day city council affairs. The very first entry is from early 2020, and launches without preamble into a discussion of a city budget in crisis, point-by-point rehashing council discussion, public comments, and slides from the then-finance director’s presentation. As a newcomer to all of this, these early entries paint a somewhat muddled portrait of a city in the midst of grappling with a genuine financial crisis. It’s messy, real, and sympathetic: both the concerning discussions depicted, and the blog itself.
Some five pages deep from the beginning, the original author, Cathy (closed account: chattycathy5050), reveals that she has moved away from El Cerrito, but was asked to continue contributing. She does so until October 2022, with one final post in late 2023 recapping that the city’s financial status is still fragile, though showing some improvements.
As I read, I started to recognize some of the recurring characters the author(s) focused on: current and past council members, concerned voices on the Financial Advisory Board (FAB), and particularly the current city manager, Karen Pinkos. Underlying posts purportedly “just asking questions” was a current of powerful anger. One post made its point of view clear in its title, “City Manager Up to Her Tricks again aided by Mayor Quinto.” Another post, “City Council Congratulates themselves for doing nothing” highlights the sense that city leadership is not taking the financial crisis seriously. One of the posts is accompanied by a photo of a dumpster on fire, captioned “ANOTHER DUMPSTER FIRE OF A MEETING.” This is a blog with a point of view, and the point of view is angry.
I want to be clear, I started out completely sympathetic to the author(s). The portrait painted was bleak. I didn’t really know anything (yet) about pension liabilities and reserve policies and council proceedings, but I could smell a bunch of people in positions of power trying to cover their own asses. How typical a story: government bungling its one job. People appointed to leadership positions, who through incompetence, greed, or malice, manage to break the things they’re supposed to be building and protecting. It’s a tale as old as time. Just look at government on the state or national level: cronyism, corruption, and incompetence seem to win the day.
But something shifted in me as I read. Like I said in my introductory post, I’m a dreamer. I believe in humanity to a fault. I believe people screw up—a lot—but that there’s almost always room for redemption. I could completely understand the anger I was reading. Who could be happy with the situation with city finances, that was leading to things that hurt the community? The closure of the senior center, the cutting of library hours, the fears of a city in decline—all terrible consequences of decisions made a decade ago, no matter what the intentions were of the people making those decisions. The denial and sluggishness of the response, perceived or real, once the crisis came to light. No wonder people were angry and disillusioned.
But what I didn’t like, what started to really bother me, was the meanness that was coming through. There was a recurring thread of character abuse, an “us vs them” mentality that I just cannot condone. And I was well aware that I was reading a point of view, a perspective constructed by a community with an agenda, not a journalistic effort with trappings of impartiality. Once there was a change in authorship in 2022, things really went downhill. One or two commenters would show up on the entries every now and again with different points of view, and often get shouted down. The reasonableness of Cathy’s original posts, her willingness to highlight the positive (however rarely) and make practical suggestions, just vanished.
I want to point out a few things about the ECCRG blog in the posts that came after Cathy’s retirement.
- The new author (or authors), who writes under the “eccrg” moniker alone, is fully anonymous. The explanation given is that people involved in the “committee” have experienced online abuse writing under their own names. I sympathize! See my first post, my own anxieties about publishing my thoughts under my real name! But also, I believe it’s asking a lot to trust someone taking a stand against people who are inherently in the public without showing their own face. I have to think about what it’s like on the other side of the aisle; I talked to a public figure recently who told me about meeting with an agitated resident who told them she was carrying a knife. That’s awful. I’m so sad that things ever get to that point. If we expect our officials to show up when they’re putting up with that sort of thing, surely their detractors can do the brave thing, something we see every council meeting when members of the public give comment under their own name?
- Most posts make extensive use of “AI” tools, particularly in the illustrating images, but also likely in the text, as the new author has a different writing style (with typos) in the comments than in the main text. Okay, I know a lot of people use LLMs for everything these days, but to me, it’s a sign that someone isn’t prepared to speak in their own words, and may be more interested in producing propaganda than examining facts.
- When it comes to substance and facts, it seems like the blog simply loses touch with reality sometime after 2022. I later started digging into the state of current city finances, which is a topic for several posts (at least!), and I just… don’t see much factual reporting there anymore. Yes, there are a few facts sprinkled throughout, but they’re so cherry-picked and distorted that they practically lose all meaning. It’s not even worth getting into argument, it seems that far removed from reality (and I’m someone who loves to quibble over facts and framing… a deeply unfortunate tendency that makes me absolutely obnoxious at parties).
- I recently requested (under my own name) to join the ECCRG groups.io site that comprises the original “committee,” and was accepted into the group a few days later. Today there are about 60 members, and in 2020 and 2021 the group had a lot of activity—including some earnest discussion about ideas to revitalize the city and an intriguing digression into police reform—which backed up my impression that in the early days it was a real force for public engagement and serious reform. Then group activity dropped off sharply in early 2022, about the time Cathy retired.
Why am I so interested in this blog, anyway? Why is it worth spending some 1500 words at the start of my own infant writing project?
The first reason is that it was my own launch point. I’m still working out my own portrait of what actually happened in El Cerrito government over the past few years. I wish I had confidence in the picture painted in the ECCRG blog, because it would save me a lot of research time. But unfortunately, as it lost credibility with me, I have found I have to fact check literally everything it talked about. That’s a ton of work. I’m a little mad about it, honestly. I’m not even a government wonk by nature. I don’t find the research especially fun. It’s often extremely boring. I feel like the time I spent reading this blog was half wasted. I’ll never get those brain cells back*.
The second reason, though, is more important. I’ll talk about Nextdoor and public discourse soon, but suffice to say: The favorite talking points of the ongoing ECCRG blog are alive and flowing through the current community discourse. The hot anger, the perspectives of the later, anonymous author(s)—it’s stamped all over our current political moment. It collided with the library issue and, I believe, drove a lot of the factors that blew up that campaign into a huge culture war. It’s our history, yes, but told in a way that is inflaming today’s discourse. And I am so worried that it is damaging our ability to move forward as a city and a community. I am trying to listen to my neighbors, even the angriest and loudest ones, and all I can hear is echoes of the inflammatory rhetoric written in this blog.
I don’t think the city government is blameless in all of this. On the contrary, I am quite interested in who is genuinely accountable for what, and what each individual’s role has been and how roles evolved over time. But I don’t like to paint with an overly broad brush: things have changed since 2018/2020/2022. Things are still changing. We need to understand the past, but also continue to update our present understandings, and maybe, just maybe, figure out when it’s time to move on.
*I know this isn’t how brains work. Thank you.