Dear Editor:
A few weeks ago I started working as a volunteer for Michael Dupray’s campaign for Oakley City Council because he is a Democrat, he lives a few blocks over from me, and at a candidates’ forum held in late September he was far and away the best informed and prepared of everyone running for their first term.
A few days after that forum I offered my services to Mike as a volunteer and he accepted, and my initial feeling was that, win or lose, I would gain valuable experience in this field by working on Mike’s campaign.
After spending a significant amount of time working with Mike however, I realize that there is a lot more to Mike than just being intelligent, knowledgeable, prepared, and willing to do hard work (though all of those things are true), but as impressive as those traits are, I have been blown away by just how fundamentally decent, generous, caring and patient a human being Mike Dupray is. I have witnessed people yell at him and seen him get treated horribly by other people in the political arena, but he has never once said an unkind word about anyone, regardless of whether or not they have actively attacked, mislead, or tried to undermine him and his campaign.
I have been furious a few times on Mike’s behalf, but he has universally acted to talk me down in every situation and has always kept me from going public with this or that grievance of mine; instead Mike just smiles and says that life is too short to hold grudges or fight with people, and while that can be considered cliché, it is exponentially easier to repeat a piece of clichéd advice than it is to actually follow through on the advice. In everything Mike does, he strives to live by his principles, and to my continuing astonishment, he pulls it off every single day.
Mike speaks often about what he calls Smart Growth. It is the top issue of his campaign, and a large component of Smart Growth is Green Growth. He wants to bring the Easy Mile Autonomous Bus business to the DuPont Property, believing that not only will such driver-less buses lessen issues of traffic congestion, but that the zero emission buses are a good way to limit Oakley’s carbon footprint and combat climate change, which is extremely important for a city that lays right on the water and is surrounded by the parched environment of a state that has been in a critical drought for years. To further achieve Green Growth and to keep pace with nearby cities like Brentwood, Mike wants the city to work with NRG to add more charging stations for electric cars around the city; he feels that encouraging the purchasing of electric cars will be better for the environment and create a city with cleaner air. Mike believes that adding new charging stations will be a signal to environmentally-minded young people who are looking to move east with the expansion of the BART that Oakley is a Green city with its eye on the future. Of course, to Mike electric cars and clean energy is not just the future, it is the present: he drives a Nissan Leaf and awaits the day when the rest of us catch up to him on this issue. Green Growth is Smart Growth.
To make Oakley more competitive with surrounding cities that have much larger populations, Mike wants to improve education options here by adding a satellite campus for nearby Los Medanos College. Los Medanos Community College’s main campus is less than 20 miles from Oakley’s City Center, but because many of the college’s students come from west of Los Medanos, they never venture any further east, and their attention, their time, and their money never makes it to our city. Not only would commuters to an Oakley LMC Campus come into town and spend money here to buy food and patronize local businesses, some of those commuters may decide that Oakley is a nice place in which to live and raise a family. And for those Oakley students who currently commute to LMC every day, this would give them the option to stay in their home city, and would make it so that children who are born and raised in Oakley and go to school here don’t have to instantly leave as soon as they get their high school diploma if they want to continue with their education. Educational Growth is Smart Growth.
Right now Oakley is in a perilous situation when it comes to our emergency services and fire prevention. We currently have only 9 full-time firefighters and one fully-funded firehouse a city of over 40,000 people. Mike supports passing ballot measures E and G in order to make sure that we can keep the Knightsen Station from closing and to enable the city to not only keep the firefighters that we have, but to add more and to be able to pay a living wage so that Oakley can compete with those larger nearby cities which, with a larger tax base, can afford to pay larger wages than Oakley can. Because our city is smaller than its neighbors, it will take more of a collective effort to have the emergency services our city so richly deserves. Our overworked and underpaid firefighters will continue to put their lives on the line to save our lives and our property regardless of whether we pass the absolutely necessary measures E and G, and they and their union have thrown their unqualified support behind Mike because they know that no matter what happens, Mike will be standing with and for them. Safe Growth is Smart Growth.
The expansion of BART means that Oakley is expanding whether we like it or not, and Mike is against struggling fruitlessly trying to stop it from happening: Mike is for guiding Oakley’s growth to make sure that it is Green, Educational, Safe, and Smart Growth. Mike wants our city to do more to protect the environment by moving toward zero-emission vehicles, so he drives a clean energy car; he believes that Oakley students need an option to go to college without having to leave their home city, so he is willing to dig the first shovelful of dirt needed to build a new campus to bring a community college to our city, the last shovelful, and every one in between. Mike knows that our city lacks adequate fire protection and that passing and funding ballot measures E and G is the way to get that done, and he is willing to pay more in order to guarantee better and safer emergency services.
Michael Dupray’s inherent decency and his flat refusal to mock or gossip about anyone behind their back may seem a bit old fashioned in a day when people can hop on social media to attack others – including their neighbors – from relative anonymity. He lives and acts the way he recommends and hopes that others do, and he never views those who disagree with him as implacable enemies whom he cannot work with, and he will come into office with no enemies.
If you were Mike’s neighbor and your house caught fire, Mike would not jealously guard his hose in order to protect his own home from catching as well: he would grab his hose and fight for your house as if it was his own, because it’s what he hopes you would do for him if the situation were reversed.
Heath D. Lenoble
City of Oakley
