Richmond, California
A civic pamphlet. Not a newspaper. No ads. Nothing for sale.
Publius
5 February 2026.
The SS Red Oak Victory has been tied up at the Port longer than most of the people who vote on her have held office. She is a cargo ship built here in 1944, gray and patient, with rust blooming at the rivets the way lichen blooms on a headstone. On a windy day the mooring lines groan. She does not care about the agenda. She has outlasted several.
On February 3 she came before the Council as item O.1: a contract with Liftech Consultants, Inc., for $299,797, for “planning and preliminary design of the relocation” of the ship. The item had already been continued once, from December 16, and on January 6 it had been pulled from consent and continued again to this meeting. So this was its third appearance, if you are counting, and someone should be.
The Port Director presented. Residents who love the ship spoke. Then the Council asked for things. It wanted further analysis of whether the annual credit the Port receives for housing the ship, and the offset against a City loan, complies with the public trust doctrine. It wanted a cost-benefit analysis of “all the possibilities available,” including leaving the ship in place, moving it, or “returning it to its owners.”
Then the Mayor moved, and Councilmember Bana seconded, “to bring the item back in two months.” It passed 5–1, with Councilmember Jimenez voting no and Councilmember Brown abstaining.
Let us admire the shape of this. The contract on the table was itself a study: $299,797 to plan how to move the ship. The Council, presented with a study, asked for two more studies to help it decide whether to approve the first. One of them would examine whether to give the ship back. To whom, the minutes do not say. The ship is not a library book.
I am not against studies. Somebody has to figure out whether a 455-foot hull can be moved without breaking her back, and a Council should know what a lease credit costs the public before it renews one. Those are fair questions. But they are questions you ask before the third agenda, not on it. By February a Council has had since mid-December to ask them, and the staff report did not arrive by carrier pigeon.
What the vote really bought was two months. In a city with a lot of unfinished business, two months is the most common unit of currency. It is cheaper than $299,797. It costs nothing at all, except the time of the people who keep showing up to speak for the ship, and the patience of the ship herself, which is considerable but not infinite. Steel in salt water keeps its own calendar.
There is a version of this story where the Council takes the cost-benefit seriously, finds the ship is worth keeping, and funds her properly. There is another where the Council decides she should go. Either is a decision. The version I expect is the third: she returns in April, the same contract at the same price, and someone asks for a funding plan.
I hope I am wrong. I would like to be wrong more often. Out at the dock, meanwhile, the gulls have taken the stern rail, and the mooring lines go on groaning in the wind.
The next regular meeting of the City Council is Tuesday, February 17, 2026.
— Publius