Two years after Richmond won a $550 million deal from Chevron in a frantic five-day negotiation, the former city attorney, at the urging of mayoral candidate Claudia Jimenez, has written an account of what happened behind the scenes.
The memo, which was sent to Richmondside by the Jimenez campaign, reveals never disclosed play-by-play details about how Aleshire, alongside an ad-hoc committee of Jimenez, Mayor Eduardo Martinez and council member Doria Robinson, negotiated with Chevron executives in August 2024 as the deadline to place the Make Polluter’s Pay ballot measure on the ballot loomed.
Richmondside reached out to Aleshire for comment, but he’s reportedly in Egypt, according to Jimenez’s campaign, and did not respond by the time of publication.
The Chevron settlement — and who exactly gets credit for securing it — has been debated ever since the city agreed to remove a proposed $1-per-barrel oil refining tax from the November 2024 ballot.
Since then, the players involved and their respective roles have been a source of political tension between the progressives, who say they stood firm for a higher payout, and the moderates, who remember the timeline differently.
It has also been discussed during Richmond’s mayoral race campaigning, and the details depend on who you ask.
Ahmad Anderson, Jimenez’s mayoral opponent, said during the campaign that it was not the progressives on the council ad hoc committee who negotiated the deal but rather the public employee and police unions, SEIU 1021 and Richmond Police Officers Association (RPOA), who, in tandem with council member Cesar Zepeda, were approached by Chevron and then pushed the council to settle and withdraw the tax from the ballot.
The RPOA has raised hundreds of thousands in support of Anderson’s campaign, according to campaign finance filings.
“If they (the city council) didn’t have that (settlement) money, they wouldn’t be able to pay them what they need (for their labor contracts),” Anderson said during the League of Women Voters forum in September. “So if we keep talking about who was at the table, they (the council) didn’t answer the phone call. Cesar Zepeda answered the call and brought people together. That’s the real story. And some of you are afraid of walking across that fence line. Go ask Chevron if you’re scared of the big bad wolf.”
Richmondside reached out last week to Chevron but did not hear back by publication time.
Martinez declined to comment for this story, saying he “agreed” with Aleshire’s account.
Anderson declined to provide comment for this story, saying he “didn’t want to touch it.”
Richmond mayor wore cowboy hat for the ‘most amazing negotiation’ of Aleshire’s 45-year career
In the memo, Aleshire describes what happened as the “most amazing negotiation” of his 45-year career and one that moved much faster than the public knew.
Chevron opened with a $300 million offer on Aug. 5, 2024, nine days before the Aug. 14 deadline to pull the oil refining tax from the ballot, according to Aleshire.
Multiple sources close to the negotiation shared that Martinez’s approach included showing up to a meeting with Chevron officials in a cowboy hat, reading Chevron representatives a poem, asking them for their own poems and then later offering them two eggs, one raw and the other cooked, as a departing gift.
That left Chevron “confused,” sources said, saying the company didn’t know where negotiations stood afterward.
When Martinez asked Aleshire to draft a rejection to that $300 million offer, Chevron reportedly raised the ante to $400 million that same evening.
Aleshire wrote that the quick jump suggested it had been “thought through in advance as a fallback.”
By Mon., Aug. 12, Chevron said $500 million was its final offer. Martinez wanted to push for $600 million, but Aleshire proposed $550 million, and Chevron agreed to it within an hour.
Aleshire also credited local environmental organizations for bringing the Make Polluters Pay ballot measure to the council in the first place.
Those climate justice groups who pushed for the measure, including Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) and Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), have since touted their role in crafting the ballot measure that pushed Chevron to settle. They’ve urged the council at numerous meetings to make sure to include them in the community engagement process around how to spend the settlement.
On Nov. 7 the city is set to reveal a consultant’s plan for how that engagement process will happen.
Richmondside reached out to both APEN and CBE, with only APEN responding, saying that the organization is looking at the $550 million as a “major opportunity.”
“In 2024 when the settlement with Chevron was being negotiated, APEN was focused on winning the Polluters Pay ballot measure campaign — and we were disappointed we didn’t get the chance to win at the polls,” the statement reads. “Still, we’re proud that Richmond residents forced Chevron to the table, and we celebrate the settlement as a victory for the community… What matters most to us is that the community is deeply consulted and that the money is invested in meeting people’s day-to-day needs and preparing for a future beyond Chevron.”
Cesar Zepeda says Chevron reached out to him because others on council weren’t responding
Two others who say they were involved indirectly in the Chevron talks, Zepeda and RPOA president Sgt. Ben Therriault, described the negotiations differently.
Zepeda, who represents District 2, which includes the refinery, said Chevron representatives had been texting nd calling him in early August 2024 because “they could not reach anyone else on the council.”
“They said ‘Nobody is picking up the phone. Nobody is calling us back,’ ” Zepeda told Richmondside in a phone interview Wednesday. Zepeda said that a Chevron contact had alerted him by text on Aug. 5 that an offer letter was going to be sent to the mayor and council and then told him on Aug. 9 that an updated offer had been sent.
Zepeda, who said he was in Chicago the weekend before the settlement was reached, said that he gave his Chevron contacts Aleshire’s phone number and called Aleshire himself while he was out of town, urging him to call a special meeting of the entire council. Aleshire, he said, opted to use the existing ad hoc committee trio — something Zepeda told Richmondside was beyond its original scope, which was to work on the ballot measure wording.
“You can’t do an ad hoc to go do one thing and then decide to do something else,” Zepeda said. “Three people should not be making decisions for the whole city without the majority of the council knowing.”
Aleshire’s letter does not mention Zepeda though it says that the mayor appointed the committee that weekend to “facilitate the transaction quickly.”
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“The outcome was good, but the process was bad.”
— Richmond city council member Cesar Zepeda, on how the Chevron settlement was won in 2024
Richmondside reviewed KCRT footage from several public meetings where the ballot measure was proposed in May and June 2024 to confirm the creation of the ad hoc committee but could not locate in video footage or minutes posted on the city’s website the moment where the body voted to set up the committee, something Zepeda said would be the usual practice.
Richmondside reached out on Monday to current city attorney Shannon Moore on when the ad hoc was established and the city’s rules for such appointments but did not hear back by publication time.
Zepeda told Richmondside that he was critical of Aleshire for not calling a special meeting before the settlement and said if anything deserved an emergency convening of the body it would have been those negotiations.
“There was plenty of time,” Zepeda said, adding that he disagreed with the characterization that he was in favor of taking a smaller amount. He also said that he never told the company a dollar amount he would support and believes that $550 million was ultimately a “good deal for the city.”
“The outcome was good, but the process was bad,” Zepeda told Richmondside, marking the first time he has publicly revealed any displeasure with how the process unfolded.
Jimenez defends how the deal was made; unions say they helped determine settlement amount
On Saturday, outside of the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) headquarters before a canvassing event, Jimenez told Richmondside that the process needed to happen the way it did — with a small group that could take action quickly.
“In a public meeting, you wouldn’t have had the results that we had,” she said, adding that there was no time that weekend to call the full council together. Jimenez did not directly address Zepeda’s claim that the ad hoc committee had been authorized to only work on the ballot measure language.
Therriault called the timing of Aleshire’s memo a “political ploy” to make Jimenez look like a strong negotiator and that the timing indicates the RPA is worried about the outcome of Tuesday’s election.
“I think the RPA is 100% worried,” Therriault said. “It’s been performative event after performative event (during campaign season), where it’s stuff on the council and we need to talk about this because it’s super important like data centers, but we have no data centers. Like, really that’s the top of the agenda item? Get out of here. And then guess what? It pops up the next week on her flyers. I don’t think you have to be a police or cop to figure out and go ‘God, gee, that’s weird. What a weird coincidence.’ ”
He added that the “real” pressure on Chevron came from city labor unions, especially SEIU 1021 and IFPTE Local 21, both of which have previously supported the campaigns of Jimenez, Robinson and Martinez (the ad hoc committee).
Richmondside reached out to both SEIU 1021 and IFPTE Local 21 spokespersons for comment on the Aleshire letter but did not hear back by publication time.
“Well, the first part I would say is that, you know, looking at the letter is like, ‘that’s great.’ All it describes is a formal process … or what I would call the paper process,” Therriault said. “… But that’s not a real process of how things got done.”
Therriault said during the 2024 negotiations the unions were in direct contact with Chevron, telling them what settlement amount would be acceptable. He emphasized that the council members were not talking directly to Chevron.
“I know that because I participated in it (those conversations with the other unions),” he said. “I know this is what happened because these are the conversations that I had not just internally with my union, but with other members of other unions (SEIU 1021 and IFPTE 21). That’s how we got to the number we got, and that’s how the settlement was reached because people did not want to take these initial offers, and they held the keys to the car. The car being those council members.”
Therriault said whatever attempts Chevron made to get the city to the negotiating table were made through the unions.
“They’re painting this picture like they were somehow at a table, like a negotiations table, like, saying it’s going to be this, or it’s going to be that,” Therriault said. “Here’s the funny (thing) about it. Those people talk smack on Chevron all the time. They have no relationships (with Chevron). So what relationships were they utilizing? They don’t have them. The unions have them through various methods. Through the labor council or from over the years. None of those council members have them.”
Jimenez responded that she received calls from a Chevron representative while she was in Colombia in the week before the settlement was reached and that the unions were not directing the ad hoc committee. She said that “everybody” started calling the committee members once the talks became known, asking what would happen next and added that the ad hoc wanted to win an amount as close as possible to the projected tax revenue from the proposed barrel tax.
Jimenez described the former city attorney as the city’s sole negotiator and that the ad hoc was “providing him direction.”
“I believe we got as much as we would get,” Jimenez said.
When asked why she asked Aleshire to write the letter now, Jimenez said people were “criticizing and telling lies” about the ad hoc committee’s role.
“I wanted to make sure the right story comes out,” she said.
Well, as usual, Claudia Jimenez is lying boldfaced about this and Ben who knows exactly what happened is telling the truth. Most people with any inside information near this a long time ago.
Here’s hoping we see some new leadership voted in tomorrow!