the town dandy / By Hank Sims

Fall Follies

(Sept. 27, 2007)  We had a good time meeting last week with Steven Glazer, the public relations man retained by Eureka kazillionaire Rob Arkley to put forth his case in the now-infamous Avalon incident (see “Town Dandy,” Sept. 13). We’d heard from KSLG’s John Matthews — the first local to score an interview with Glazer, we believe — that the fellow actually serves as mayor of the East Bay town of Orinda when not flacking. That intrigued us. Then, when Glazer showed up and we embarked on the customary getting-to-know-you chat, we were even more astonished to learn that in the turbulent ’70s he had served as press secretary to then-Gov. Jerry Brown and embattled California Supreme Court Justice Rose Bird.

But Glazer was in town to talk Arkley, and we worked our way quickly to the point. Eureka City Councilmember Larry Glass, the alleged recipient of Arkley’s shoves and “I will destroy you” threats, had gotten all the good press so far, Glazer said — he realized that. Now the Arkley family wished to tell its side of the story, so they retained his services. He had already worked with them in some unspecified capacity on the Marina Center, the big box-anchored development proposal that will be making its way before the City Council sometime soon.

Basically, Glazer wished to make the case that Glass was an asshole from way back, especially to Arkley’s daughters. Though he could not discuss what happened that night at Avalon, he could say that this alleged rudeness to the Arkley daughters was what so exercised the father that night, when he met Glass face-to-face for the first time. He provided a statement from one of the daughters, to the effect that in their meeting with Glass, back when he was giving away “anti-Arkleyville” stickers in his shop, Glass had called the daughters “collateral damage” in his war with Arkley. (Glass told the Times-Standard that he didn’t remember the conversation that way at all.)

Fine and good, we said, but it doesn’t really cut to the heart of the matter, does it? The accusation on the table is that Glazer’s client physically assaulted and verbally threatened an elected official. What of that?

Glazer said that Arkley had apologized for the incident, contra Glass’ assertions. He then read a section of an e-mail that Arkley sent to Glass the morning after. Strangely, though, he would not give me a copy of that apology. He said that I should get it from Glass — that it was Glass’ place to give it to me. It was then I realized that I was in the spell of some kind of master PR mojo that I didn’t really understand. To me, it was like — Dude, you have information? Great. But I don’t really feel a burning desire to play Blue’s Clues with you.

But then the City of Eureka released the e-mail in question in response to a Public Records Act request from the Times-Standard. We were able to horn in on their work. You probably read the full e-mail in Wednesday’s T-S.Suffice it to say that it did, in fact, say “[M]y apologies for last night.” The e-mail also reiterated that from Arkley’s point of view, it was all about the hurt to his family: “It is hard for me to express the pain and outrage that I feel when my wife and daughters are needlessly brought in, as you did.”

For Glass, it wasn’t enough. “‘I’m sorry I pushed you, I’m sorry I dissed you, I’m sorry I called you a liar a million times,’” he said Tuesday. “None of those elements were there.”

Regular readers of this space will know that we have an ongoing fascination with the North Coast Railroad Authority (NCRA), the public agency that owns the defunct railroad line between Humboldt County and the Bay Area. (See “The Squeeze,” July 5. Or, hell, go all the way back to “Going Nowhere,” May 29, 2003.) The railroad has been dead for 10 solid years, yet according to its backers it is ever on the verge of making its glorious return, establishing steady freight service between a deindustrialized Humboldt County and the national grid. Not only will this put hundreds or thousands of local people to work in high-paying jobs, backers say, it is the only possible way to put people to work in high-paying jobs.

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