UC Berkeley removes law school building name amid racist concerns -- John Boalt Law School now known as The Law Building. (San Jose Mercury-News)

Who knew that John Boalt had nothing to do with the University of California Law School at Berkeley, other than that his widow gave it money?

Who knew that John Boalt was a rebarbative racist who rabble-roused and lobbied for racist unconstitutional Chinese Exclusion laws?

I sure didn't.

Good call by UC Berkeley law school.

From the San Jose Mercury-News:

UC Berkeley removes law school building name amid racist concerns

John Boalt Law School now known as The Law Building

(UC Berkeley photo by Roxanne Makasdjian)

UC Berkeley carpenter Joe Poppi removes lettering of “Boalt Hall” from the side of the Berkeley Law building on Thursday morning, Jan. 30, 2020 at Berkeley, Calif.

By ANGELA RUGGIERO | aruggiero@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group

PUBLISHED: January 30, 2020 at 10:33 am | UPDATED: January 30, 2020 at 11:24 am

BERKELEY — Goodbye Boalt Hall and hello The Law Building.

UC Berkeley School of Law removed John Henry Boalt’s name from its campus building, saying the 19th century Oakland attorney was a racist, according to UC Berkeley News. It will now be known as “The Law Building.”

(Courtesy Berkeley Law photo by Alex Shapiro)

The name change was sparked after UC Berkeley lecturer Charles Reichman found Boalt’s racist writings at a campus library and published his findings in 2017. He discovered that Boalt helped fuel anti-Chinese racism in the country in a 1877 address to the Berkeley Club titled “The Chinese Question.” The address led to Congress enacting the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first immigration ban to target a group of people based on their race or nationality, according to the school.

Boalt Memorial Hall of Law was built in 1911 for what was then the UC School of Jurisprudence. When the school moved to a bigger building in 1951, it became what is known today as the UC Berkeley School of Law, and Boalt Hall became the main campus wing, according to the school.

Graduates of the law school have been dubbed “Boalties” over the years.

“His principal public legacy is … one of racism and bigotry … John Boalt’s positive contributions to the university do not appear to outweigh this legacy of harm,” states a 2018 report by a law school committee, which was ordered by Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, according to the school. The committee was tasked with reviewing if the name should be removed from the building.

It was Boalt’s wife, Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt, made a donation in her husband’s name after he passed in 1901. The Building Name Review Committee co-chair, assistant professor Paul Fine, told this news organization in an interview Thursday that the committee found Boalt had no real ties to the university.

“What it basically came down to…did the person do anything substantially important to the university?” he said.

But Boalt didn’t attend UC Berkeley, and didn’t teach at the school; it was only his widow’s contribution in his memory that became why the building was named after him. His so-called legacy, was the anti-racist address he gave.

“It’s incredibly important to confront racist symbols, like John Boalt’s name on a building, because these symbols act to reinforce the history of white supremacy in our institutions,” said Fine in a statement. “And, they can make students who learn about this history then feel excluded, like there is an endorsement of that racism by the institution itself.”

In November 2018, Chemerinsky said in a public statement that about 60 percent of the 600 people of the Berkeley law school community, including alumni and current students, who responded to a survey favored eliminating the Boalt name from the building. He said those attending the law school at the time who identified as people of color overwhelmingly favored the name change.

“I find this a very difficult question. I am reassured, though, that ultimately this is about a symbol, not the substance of the law school,” Chemerinsky said in the 2018 statement.

He recommended the campus Building Name Review Committee rename the wing. The committee unanimously agreed to the name change in October, and it was then approved by Chancellor Carol Christ and UC President Janet Napolitano.

UC Berkeley’s name change comes as a growing trend to rename or remove names of buildings at academic institutions. In 2018, Stanford University announced it would rename campus buildings and areas that included the name of Father Junipero Serra, the 18th-century founder of the California mission system. This rose after findings that Serra inflicted harm and violence on Native Americans. In 2019, the university renamed a student dorm and academic building after Sally Ride and Carolyn Attneave.

There have been a handful of public school districts that have also taken to consideration of renaming buildings, such as Alameda school in 2019 and two schools in Palo Alto in 2018.

Hunter Conrad County Administrator Contract -- Open Negotiation Meeting January 30, 2020 at 11 AM

St. Johns County Commission Chairman Jeb Smith will hold a meeting to negotiate proposed contract terms with Hunter Conrad at 11 am on Thursday, January 30, 2020 at the San Sebastian Conference Room, St. Johns County Administration Building, 500 Sebastian View. (Corrected)

If there is a meeting of the minds and a draft contract, the issue will be voted on as item 10 at the February 4, 2020 St. Johns County Commission meeting, which starts at 9 AM at the auditorium in the same building, a/k/a "Taj Mahal."

Without public notice, Commissioners violated EEO, Sunshine and Open Records laws by hiring Conrad, 33, as permanent County Administrator without posting, advertising or statewide or national searches.

This proposed contract is thus a contract violation of public policy, in violation of Restatement of Contracts, 2d, Section 178 (Contract Violation of Public Policy). This is the same contract law principle that activists used to overturn and cancel the no-bid $1.8 million Bell Helicopter contract with Anastasia Mosquito Control District of St. Johns County (AMCD) in 2007.

St. Johns County audit finds hundreds of improper tax exemptions. (SAR)

328 parcels with unjustified homestead exemptions. Good work by the professional staff of the St. Johns County Property Appraiser's office and its contractor, The Exemption Project. Thank you to Eddie Creamer, Property Appraiser. From The St. Augustine Record:






St. Johns County audit finds hundreds of improper tax exemptions
By Sheldon Gardner
Posted Jan 27, 2020 at 4:27 PM
St. Augustine Record

An effort to find improper homestead exemptions in St. Johns County has begun to yield results, with a few hundred improperly homesteaded properties found so far.

St. Johns County Property Appraiser Eddie Creamer launched the effort in 2019, hiring the business The Exemption Project to comb through county records and find properties that are getting a homestead exemption when they don’t qualify for it.

The property appraiser started sending data to the business at the end of November and early December for review, Creamer said. The property appraiser does not send confidential information, such as social security numbers.

Because of the audit, 328 parcels have been identified as needing their homestead exemption removed, according to Creamer.

And The Exemption Project plans to send questionnaires to get information about 1,986 more parcels that could be improperly receiving a homestead exemption.

When the property appraiser determines a homestead exemption is improperly claimed, the office sends a certified letter that gives the property owner 30 days to show Creamer that his office is wrong or pay what is owed before a lien is filed, he said.

What is owed, which is defined by Florida law, is the unpaid taxes, a penalty of 50% of the unpaid taxes and 15% interest.


The Exemption Project gets 18% of taxes, penalties and interest collected per property they audit, according to the contract. The county does not pay a fee for the work.

Information found by The Exemption Project led the property appraiser to file 16 liens against parcels, according to Creamer. The liens are worth $43,872.63 in tax dollars, and $21,603.69 of that has been paid.

In addition to that, the property appraiser plans to file 15 more liens on Feb. 3, said Nikki Pontello, the property appraiser’s chief administrative officer.

There’s more work to be done on the audit.

The Exemption Project’s contract with Creamer’s office says the agreement will become a month-to-month contract after September. Creamer said he expects to keep the homestead reviews going.

“Simply because our county is growing so fast,” he said.

In other parts of the state, people have said that they were given homestead exemption in another state but didn’t know it or apply for it, and because of that they were hit with a large bill for back taxes, according to an article from the USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida Capital Bureau.


Legislation is proposed to help people in that situation, according to the article.

An analysis of Senate Bill 514 says that, “Current law provides that a property owner who is receiving or claiming an ad valorem tax exemption in another state that is conditioned upon permanent residency in that state may not receive the ad valorem homestead exemption in Florida.”

That applies regardless of whether the person applied for the exemption, according to the analysis.

The bill would allow a property owner to retain homestead exemption in Florida if that owner “demonstrates to the satisfaction of the property appraiser that they did not apply for the exemption or credit in the other state and ... are no longer receiving or will no longer receive the tax exemption or tax credit in another state.”

Creamer said he has not had someone claim that they didn’t realize they were receiving homestead exemption in another state.

The Trump Administration Is Clearing the Way for Housing Discrimination -- The attack on the Fair Housing Act is reckless and wrong. (NY Times)

DONALD JOHN TRUMP and his father, FRED TRUMP, were guilty of massive race and religion discrimination in rental housing in New York City.  The Nixon Administration successfully sued them and won.  The TRUMP's response was to hire rebarbative reprobate ROY MARCUS COHN to file a bogus $100,000,000 lawsuit, which was  not based in reality. Yes, past is prologue.

Fair Housing laws must be enforced better.  Circa 1968-9, my father was told by NAACP, "congratulations, Mr. Slavin, you're the only Realtor in South Jersey who would show a black family a home in West Berlin, N.J."  HUD and NAACP use testers to detect discrimination, and my dad passed the test.  I was proud of my dad.  He believed in equality and stood up for principle.  In 1976, during our Bicentennial year, as a student at Georgetown University, I stood up against racism at rental housing on Capitol Hill and won, though the racist resident manager tried to have me evicted in retaliation.  She left town and our building was desegregated.

Here in St. Augustine, there are some Realtors of whom we are not proud, like the one that discriminated against a mixed-race couple, Ken & Lauren Bryan. Ken was a veteran and USDOJ retiree who could not find a local lawyer to take his case. They ended up buying a home in Pelican Reef, rather than buying an existing home because of racism. J. Kenneth Bryan was later elected by the good people of St. Johns County as our District 5 County Commissioner, 2008-2012.

From The New York Times:

Opinion

The Trump Administration Is Clearing the Way for Housing Discrimination

The attack on the Fair Housing Act is reckless and wrong.

By Shaun Donovan

Mr. Donovan was secretary of housing and urban development.

• Jan. 22, 2020

Government housing in New York City.Credit...Kholood Eid for The New York Times

On Monday, the nation honored the towering legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But the progress he demanded remains unfinished, and nowhere more than in the deeply segregated neighborhoods many of us call home. Dr. King understood that where a person lives determines so many of their opportunities, including access to good jobs, schools, health care, food and safety. Barely a week after Dr. King’s assassination, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act with overwhelming bipartisan support in recognition of this truth.

In the more than 50 years since its passage, the Fair Housing Act has helped fight discrimination in mortgage lending, zoning restrictions that prevent people from being able to choose where to live, and local landlord abuses. In 1973, the United States government used it to charge Fred Trump and his son, our current president, with housing discrimination. Rather than fight those charges, the Trumps signed a consent decree requiring changes to the way they managed their properties. The Fair Housing Act was the only backstop for the people the Trump family discriminated against, and now the Trump administration is seeking to gut its protections.

Key to those protections are two principles established by Congress and enforced by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), where I was secretary under President Barack Obama. The first is “disparate impact,” which makes clear that policies or practices that discriminate against people of color or other protected groups are illegal even without proof they are intentional. For example, if white couples are regularly approved for mortgages but black couples with the same qualifications are rejected, the bank must fix their loan process, even if its employees didn’t have racist intentions. Under disparate impact, it’s the results that matter.

The second is a mandate that communities “affirmatively further fair housing,” which requires government to promote greater opportunity and integration as well as fight discrimination. For example, if a city’s affordable housing is all located in black neighborhoods with failing schools, limited transportation, and poor health care, that city must make an effort to fix the problems in those neighborhoods and build new affordable housing in other neighborhoods, in addition to ensuring there’s no racial discrimination when any of the individual apartments are rented out.

At HUD, I codified and strengthened these principles. In 2013, the agency issued a formal disparate impact regulation based on decades of unanimous judicial consensus. And in the most important civil rights decision involving housing in a generation, the Supreme Court upheld the disparate impact principle in 2015, recognizing it as consistent with the “central purpose” of the Fair Housing Act. I also began improving HUD’s approach to affirmatively furthering fair housing and my successor, Julián Castro, completed it with a regulation in 2015.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration is now taking steps to dismantle this progress. Last year, the administration issued a proposed regulation that would gut the disparate impact standard. The proposal imposes nearly impossible requirements on those who would bring a disparate impact claim, and insulates the insurance industry and other businesses that rely on technological algorithms in their decision-making, even when they generate bias.

Image

President Donald Trump, with Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, at the White House in November.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

And this month, HUD issued a proposed rule that would fundamentally undermine the affirmatively furthering standard. The proposal would largely strip away the expectation that communities provide housing that fights segregation and increases opportunity, weaken penalties and reinstate a discredited enforcement process. In addition to the obvious conflict of interest for a president who was prosecuted under the Fair Housing Act and stands to benefit personally from these proposed rules, they are reckless and wrong for three key reasons:

First, housing plays a key role in advancing economic opportunity and closing the wealth gap between people of color and white Americans. African-Americans and Latinos have less than one-tenth and one-eighth, respectively, of the household wealth of white Americans, and homeownership remains the largest source of wealth-building for most families. Moreover, where a family lives determines access to jobs, schools, and a healthy environment. If we believe our children’s futures shouldn’t be determined by the ZIP code where they grow up, we need the disparate impact and affirmatively furthering standards to weed out and replace unjustifiable policies that limit opportunity.

The Fair Housing Act was enacted with bipartisan support and championed by Democrats and Republicans alike over five decades because it aligns with fundamental American values: fairness, freedom of choice and opportunity for all. Instead of undermining these values, the Trump administration should honor Martin Luther King by withdrawing its proposed rules.

EDITORIAL | Rush to hire not good for county. (SAR)

Good people of St. Johns County -- please come out to speak about this illegal hiring at the February 4, 2020 St. Johns County Commission meeting. Here's an excellent editorial from the Sunday, January 26, 2020 St. Augustine Record:




EDITORIAL | Rush to hire not good for county
Posted Jan 25, 2020 at 5:01 PM
Just like that, the St. Johns County Commission has itself a new administrator — 33-year-old Hunter Conrad.

No search. No interviews. No short list. No notice to county residents, who might have had a thing or two to say about Tuesday’s vote to offer Conrad the job

The “interim” won’t fall off Conrad’s title until he and county officials negotiate a contract. But it sure feels like a fait accompli. Conrad was recommended for the top job the same day the county fired its last administrator, Michael Wanchick, Nov. 17. (As The Record’s Stuart Korfhage points out, that decision was also made with no advance notice to the public.) Conrad quit his elected post as clerk of the circuit court to take the interim administrator’s post, which seems curious in and of itself — unless he was counting on being offered the top job.

Last week, Conrad apparently met with commissioners individually, telling them it was time to make a decision one way or another, since he would need to launch his bid to be re-elected to the clerk’s position soon if he wasn’t going to be county administrator. It was a bold move for someone who had only been in the interim job for about a month, and who had no experience running an operation as big and complex as a county government.

But apparently it paid off.

“I had to make sort of a considered judgment call when the commission meeting rolled around ... of whether we should proceed with a nationwide search,” Commissioner Henry Dean said. “Or if Hunter is the right one for the position just go ahead and offer him the position because I think he’s doing an excellent job. I’m a big fan of Hunter Conrad.

“I, as one commissioner, am very comfortable with him as our county administrator.”

Dean was also among those insisting that the agenda item to be considered Tuesday, titled “Presentation of options for County Administrator recruitment,” constituted notice that the commission might jump right over recruitment and into contract negotiations with Conrad.

We disagree. St. Johns County residents deserved the chance to evaluate the situation for themselves. More than that, they deserved the reassurance that commissioners had considered an array of options and settled on Conrad among a field of other contenders. If he is truly the right pick, he would stand out.

Most importantly, Conrad deserved to start his tenure without the appearance of a surreptitious move to install him in the job before members of the public had a chance to weigh in. If he was meeting with commissioners a week before Tuesday’s meeting, that was plenty of time to put the matter on the agenda in a more accurate way — to wit, considering making Conrad the permanent administrator.

With all that said, we do hope that the commissioners’ intuition was right — that Conrad quickly grows into the job and proves to be a capable, innovative manager of the myriad divisions and departments that demand attention on a daily basis. It’s a tough job — and a critical one. We wish him the best.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR | Dubious about hire. (Karen Neff,M.P.A., St. Augustine Record)

I agree with Karen Neff -- letter to the editor in today's St. Augustine Record exposes HUNTER S. CONRAD as unqualified, selected in a fatally flawed process, based on religion and politics. Darn good letter!



Opinion
LETTER TO THE EDITOR | Dubious about hire
By Karen Neff, St. Augustine
Posted Jan 26, 2020 at 5:00 PM

EDITOR: In reference to the selection of Hunter Conrad as the new administrator of St Johns County, I wish to add my voice to those already expressing concern for this turn of events.

EDITOR: In reference to the selection of Hunter Conrad as the new administrator of St Johns County, I wish to add my voice to those already expressing concern for this turn of events.

I hold an MPA (Masters of Public Administration) degree from the University of Dayton so am well-versed in the duties and complexities inherent in such a position. First, I question Mr. Conrad’s ability and experience as a professional in the public sector to adequately tackle the complexities, politics, and day-to-day tasks that he must address, especially in a county the size of St. Johns.

And second, I question the process that was used to select Mr. Conrad for this position. While I believe in the power of God as well as good luck and serendipity, it appears to me that his selection was based far more on religious affiliation and/or politics than any practical experience in the public sector. And the speed with which this entire process was carried out by Commissioners suggests nefarious motives on the part of all parties concerned.

As the editorial in Sunday’s paper mentioned, they, and I, wish him well in his new position. I also am keeping fingers crossed that, as so often happens, the citizens of our county don’t get caught (read that ‘screwed’) in the crossfire.