Bijal M. Patel Tracy’s City Attorney Heads Black History Month Discrimination - ATLNews

Tracy’s City Attorney does not like Black History Month? The issue of discrimination, bias and racism is raising its ugly head in the City of Tracy. The story involves former Deputy Oakland City Attorney Bijal M. Patel, now Tracy’s City Attorney, who attempted to prevent the Tracy City Council from raising the Pan African flag and celebrating Black History Month earlier this year, new information from the NAACP reveals. Back in 2020, for the first time in Tracy history, the Tracy City Council adopted a resolution authorizing the display of the Pan-African flag at City Hall commemorating Black History Month. This historic resolution was adopted following another important first in Tracy’s history that occurred in November 2019 – the election of Nancy Young, Tracy’s first Black mayor. The raising of the Pan African flag and Black History Month celebration was held in 2021 and 2022 without incident. But this year, 2023, the flag raising and celebration almost didn’t happen at all because City Attorney Patel refused to approve of flag raising and planned celebration, citing an “administrative” issue. She didn’t apply the administrative issue to any other approved flag raisings for different causes and groups, just for the Black History Month celebration. The council had to re-approve the flag raising and ceremony to celebrate Black History Month to overcome Patel’s objections. During public testimony, Patel turned her back on the community and Black leaders and left the Tracy City Council chambers, causing Bobby Bivens, the head of the region’s NAACP, to call her out. “We're talking about respect, we're talking about acknowledgement of African American people, and I happen to be not too happy about the fact that your city attorney (Patel) is not in here to understand what we're talking about. That your city attorney, the one that makes policy or analyzes policy on behalf of the city on such an important matter is not in this room, and she appears to me, and I can be totally wrong, not to be a person of African American descent. And perhaps she needs to come in here, be in here, and get an education herself. But I just wanted to bring that to the table,” the NAACP’s Bivens told the council audience. In a another matter, the City Council itself also refused to fund the trip of Mayor Nancy Young to the African American Mayor’s Conference in Washington D.C. last month. Councilmember Dan Evans, a Trump MAGA supporter and member of the far rightwing Patriot Movement, along with councilmember Matt Bedolla and Eleassia Davis, refused to fund a trip by the Mayor to attend the conference because of last minute “budgetary concerns.” Local citizens were outraged at their failure to send Young and personally chipped in to pay for her attendance and travel to the DC conference. The action by anti-business, far right-wingers Evans, Bedolla , as well as Davis, is pure political nonsense and discriminatory. It’s time for Tracy to wake up and see that its City Attorney should be shown the door and these three councilmembers, two who of whom were mentored by notorious former councilmember and now County Supervisor Bob Rickman, should be tossed out in coming elections.
via YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd3dN_ZPeCw