Duplicitousness of Modesto Politics
By Emerson Drake
Duplicitousness-Given to or marked by deliberate deceptiveness in behavior or speech.
Mayor Brandvold speaks out of both sides of his mouth and the uninformed Modesto electorate doesn’t know the difference. In today’s paper (Monday 5/28) Modesto’s Mayor Ted Brandvold endorses Janice Keating for the Board of Supervisors for District 5. He talks about Janice’s top priority being the homeless and specifically about her ‘mobilizing the community’ to establish a homeless shelter.
Now the funniest thing about this is Brandvold is the Chamber of Commerce’s/DoMo’s (downtown Modesto organization) mouthpiece in stopping the shelter from being placed on Stanislaus Foods property. He constantly suggests that Stan Foods is the wrong place for a shelter. He suggests that somewhere out on Hackett Road, presumably around the Sheriff’s office would be better. But why spend the money for a shelter no one will use? There isn’t ready transportation to and from Hackett Rd. There are no facilities, no anything, but that is exactly why the Mayor and Chamber want to ship these people out of town. Out of sight out of mind.
The sad part is the 60 bed low barrier shelter was to be for families, people with pets and people needing a place to temporarily store their belongings while they have the opportunity to shower. It wasn’t meant for the mentally ill or addicts but the elitist segments of our business community don’t care about anything except getting rid of what they see as disposable people.
It comes as no surprise that Brandvold would support Keating since both politicians have the same political strategist/money man – George Petrulakis. The spokesman for the Chamber/DoMo could just as easily been Councilmen Bill Zoslocki, Doug Ridenour, or Mani Grewal. But none of these except for Mani have the strong George Petrulakis connection. But Mani is busy masquerading as a Democrat so he stepped aside. Bill is maneuvering for his next position with the County and Doug wants to be Mayor like his brother was but George is intent on making sure Ted gets another election cycle.
But back to the beginning. Brandvold is allegedly supporting Keating, because of her accomplishments with the homeless community but she has has accomplished nothing because of his attacking the homeless shelter over and over. But hey, that’s the duplicitousness of Modesto politics.
Janice isn’t saving our city. She’s just an empty hollow promise from another Modesto politician designed to make you think something is being accomplished when in actuality it’s nothing more than a mirage designed to make us take another bite of sand. 
Eye On Modesto 
Duplicitousness. Emmo, my friend, this whole process/policy is just that.
First, and most important, this “shelter”, (read “transient ghetto) is designed for 60 people, dogs, etc. We have 1,500 identified homeless people, so the “shelter” would serve exactly 0.04% of our homeless. The cost would be about $5,000,000, or exactly $83,333.33 per room. Does this look like a politician’s dream?
Second, homeless people do not want to live in a shelter. They want free food, free toilets, free cots, free clothes, free drugs, free etc, which, by the way, they get.
Personal hygiene is not necessary.
Are they miserable wretches? Yes. But ask the guy parked next to mine which was being urinated on by a homeless person how much compassion he has for them.
Ask the downtown office owners how they like cleaning up their outside access toilets every Monday morning. Ours were broken into every weekend, and left filthy, with blood and stuff all over the place. We tried every kind of lock we could, they defeated them, even to the point of breaking the door knobs off.
Homeless people are a problem. They need to be institutionalized.
If you feed a stray cat on your back porch, it will soon tear your screens apart and spray your entire area. There is only one real solution, and temporary housing is not one of them.
It would be far easier to move them to some remote county venue, and truck in their food, water, tents, etc, and let them build what they want. Retaining them in our magnificent, revitalized, safe, clean and busy downtown is not exactly going to work.
I’m just saying, Dave
Interesting response. I waited so people could take in the homeless being called miserable wretches and the suggestion they could be isolated in a remote portion of the county, which would presumably be enforced, And having their food thrown over the fences at them. The cost the total being talked about is $4.9 million over three years that would include for their safety, shelter, 24 hour supervision and security which would come to $74.00 per day per bed. The real wrench in the gears is that $2.4 million of the money was coming from the state intended for Stanislaus County homeless and several other institutions (several being religious in nature) have their eyes on but on one wants to discuss that. Between the Modesto Chamber of Commerce, Salvation Army. and the Gospel Mission the homeless become little more that pawns being played rather than people very much in need of our compassion and help.