Manufacturing dissent in Sacramento

We’re getting to the final act in Sacramento’s redistricting drama. It started slow, but there have been some thrilling plot twists—and a few cheesy performances—along the way.

The climactic action, of course, is the attempt by council members Steve Cohn and Kevin McCarty to move the boundaries of McCarty’s District 6 seat to snatch up the UC Davis Medical Center neighborhood and Sacramento Charter High School.

Oak Park’s turn as the poor but proud neighborhood victimized by the greedy McCarty was compelling at first, but has grown a bit melodramatic.

Much of the supposed community outrage at the map move was ginned up by Mayor Kevin Johnson and his advisers. City council members received a flood of “stop the land grab” emails from an online petition organized by the one of the mayor’s employees, and signed by dozens of the mayor’s own staff, interns and associates.

The Astroturf campaign got even more blatant last week, when Johnson’s cronies used contact lists for K.J.’s Think Big Sacramento and For Arts’ Sake initiatives to send out mass emails attacking the Cohn/McCarty plan.

Much has been made, by City Councilman Jay Schenirer and Johnson and others, of Sac High’s long historical ties to Oak Park and to District 5, which Schenirer was elected to last fall.

But the truth is Sacramento High School—once the second-oldest public high school west of the Mississippi—actually left Oak Park eight years ago.

That’s when then-school board member Schenirer and Johnson worked together to close Sac High and give the building over to Johnson’s St. Hope charter school.

Whether you believe Sacramento Charter High School has been a success or not, you can’t really argue that the new school has any particular historic relationship to the neighborhood or to the district.

And it might not have much of a future there, either. Because attendance at the school is so far below expectations the Sacramento city school board is considering moving Sacramento Charter High School to a cozier home. One scenario has St. Hope swapping buildings with the popular West Campus program, which could use a little more room to grow.

Watching some of the testimony at City Hall, it appears St. Hope supporters think they can keep the Sac High building if it stays in Schenirer’s district.

That’s an interesting assumption, and one which several current Sac city school board members would probably be happy to prove wrong.

The local media have predictably lined up behind Johnson in this fight. Which is fine, but boring. Of course, there was this: “Did you see how my bitches did my bidding last night?”

That’s a post on Twitter from @BrotherCamp, critiquing the council’s redistricting plan. @BrotherCamp, who also goes by the handle “Suspenders Guy,” introduces himself in his bio: “Don’t worry if Union Labor is disappearing from Sacramento’s workforce. I’ve got 6 folks that work for me on the City Council!”

It’s an obvious send-up of local labor boss Bill Camp and his supposed pernicious influence on the council. For the few reporters and political junkies who saw the posts but didn’t get the joke, Camp’s employer, the Sacramento Central Labor Council, started frantically tweeting, too, “FYI @BrotherCamp is obviously a fake account created by someone making a mockery of the issues of working people in Sacramento.”

Perhaps some working people complained, because it looks like @BrotherCamp’s account has since been suspended by Twitter.

Oh well, thanks for at least not being boring, @BrotherCamp, wherever you are.