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Oakland Unwrapped Dark Waters By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor Maybe you can figure this one out. Back last spring, the Tribune ran a story about the city-owned Jack London Aquatic Center over on the estuary, and the city's dispute with the JLAC, Inc., the non-profit group that built the Center under city direction. By February the City Manger's office and the Parks and Recreation Department were reneging on a verbal agreement to let the JLAC organization run the Center, and the Trib article explained the city's position: The concern was that the JLAC, which had started with a board that was largely white with many non-Oakland residents but has since diversified, would not make the programs inclusive enough for Oakland kids. City Manager Robert Bobb said he doesn't want the boathouse to turn into a private club. I suppose the folks who have been fighting Mr. Bobb about the city-owned Chabot Golf Course thing might accuse the City Manager of a double standard here. If the greens fees at Chabot are increased like Mr. Bobb wants, there won't be many little Tiger Woods' carrying their clubs up the hill from Fruitvale Avenue or 98th. But let's not get sidetracked. That's easy to do, in Oakland. What I really wanted to know is, who are these largely-white, mostly non-Oakland (but recently diversified) folks that are over-seeing the JLAC organization? Robert Kidd, JLAC president, sent me over a roster. Of the 15 JLAC board members, less than half are white (or Euro-American, as the JLAC roster puts it). Five are African-American. Two are Latino. One is Asian-American. 11 of the JLAC board members have ties to Oakland. Eight of them actually live in the city, while three others work here and live elsewhere. All in all, it sounds like a more representative group than a lot of Oakland city agencies, including the Oakland Police Department. You think more than half of the city's police officers live in Oakland? The city officials' charge that the JLAC board only "since diver-sified" gives the impression that the board took on dark-skinned folk only after the current controversy began. But only one non-white board member (an Asian-American) came on in 2001, when all the controversy started. The rest of the non-white board members came on between 1998 and 2000, during the time that the Center was being built by the JLAC, and everyone assumed that the JLAC was going to run it. In other words, there doesn't seem to have been any public pressure on the JLAC at that time to diversify its board. They did it ... what? ... maybe just because they thought it was a good thing to do, to be more representative of the city's population. Can't figure out why there's a problem with that. Whatever the case, JLAC was kicked out, the Parks and Rec Department took the Aquatic Center over, and after that there were charges that the only one getting the benefit of the center this summer was some homeless guy who was sleeping in the Center's parking lot. Assistant City Manager George Musgrove emails me to say that this is not true. "Center was operating," Mr. Musgrove writes (he's a man of few words, I guess). "We operated kids rowing programs with Oakland Strokes, rented two bays with Strokes and one pending bay and three racks to be approved by city council. Kids sailing programs also operated. This fall we will continue programs, build new outdoor bathrooms that were not included in the basic design." Not quite sure what this means. The whole purpose of the Aquatic Center, I thought, was to give more Oaklanders access to the estuary. The Oakland Strokes have been punting around those waters since 1975, so that's not bringing in anybody new. As for the kids sailing program, Robert Kidd counters that "early in the summer, a small sailing club appeared to disembark from the aquatic center docks .... That activity ended shortly thereafter, and, to the best of our knowledge, the aquatic center has remained locked up since." But at least the city is building new outdoor toilets out there, which should make that homeless guy happy. And you thought the folks at City Hall didn't have a heart. J. Douglas Allen-Taylor is an author, a journalist, and a graduate of Castlemont High School. He can be reached at www.safero.org and [email protected]. [ East Bay | Metroactive | Archives ]