Activist's Diary
What Happened is a free range of editorial comments on key Berkeley City meetings
to give a flavor of Berkeley and how local meetings tie into the larger world.
Note that not every meeting of the week is covered.
Editorial comments often include a book read by the editor in the preceding week.
What Happened is also published as the Activist's Diary in the Berkeley Daily Planet. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com
to give a flavor of Berkeley and how local meetings tie into the larger world.
Note that not every meeting of the week is covered.
Editorial comments often include a book read by the editor in the preceding week.
What Happened is also published as the Activist's Diary in the Berkeley Daily Planet. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com
January 5, 2024 Activist's Diary The Berkeley Hills Hazard Trifecta
Are we dancing with disaster?
The project at 1048 Keith is back on the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) agenda for January 9, 2025. This project initially caught my attention because it was listed as sitting in the Hillside Overly (high fire zone) in the ZAB September 26, 2024 agenda. Out of curiosity, I checked the Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation map and found the project hit the Berkeley Hazard trifecta, the landslide zone and earthquake fault zone and the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone (VHFHSZ).[i]
Little did I know when I shot off an email to ZAB on the project at 1048 Keith back in September that the landslide zone had already taken first place in the Berkeley Hazard Trifecta and that Keith Avenue was notorious for houses moving in this active landslide zone.
The 1048 Keith Avenue project was continued twice, first on September 26, 2024 and then again on October 10, 2024. At the September 26th ZAB meeting the neighbors testified the land was moving, houses were sliding down the hill and the land survey for 1048 Keith had a disclaimer that because the land is moving it may be off by 5 feet or more.
The reason there was a request for a continuance (postponing review) was that because the land is actively moving there was a dispute over the property lines, an active lawsuit and the location of the proposed 1048 Keith project may be on the neighbor’s land.
When Robert Matthews spoke, he said he was familiar with ground movement. In his full statement about the active landslide he related how his house made the front page of the Chronicle in 2004, that ground had been actively moving for decades.
The 2004 article Matthews references describes his house on Keith as sliding about 20 feet since it was built in 1916 and half of it was now on his neighbor’s lot.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/when-property-lines-run-through-the-front-door-2662450.php
Matthews brought his comments to a close with “[I] oppose the current plan, because I believe the applicant simply may not own the property...and I urge you not to approve any construction in the area until the disagreement is resolved between the parties.”
I thanked everyone who spoke. The evening testimony was better than TV.
Did I mention 1048 Keith Avenue is also right on top of the Hayward Fault?
The bottom line is should anyone be building anything in an area that is on land that is moving.
Apparently, the issues are settled now as Berkeley City Planning staff recommend approving the project. But should they?
We might question the sanity of people who keep rebuilding in Florida with hurricane after hurricane, but what about us?
We might ask how many landslides, hurricanes, floods, or fires does it take for someone to say enough, or for FEMA to relocate communities, or for insurance companies to leave or for governments to say no? Who ends up paying? Will it be just the home owner when disaster finally happens or will City of Berkeley be on the hook if the project at 1048 Keith Avenue and projects like it are approved by ZAB and then again by the various City of Berkeley Departments and staff?
There are people who argue the Berkeley Fire Zone map encircles an area that is too large, but we just passed the 101-year anniversary of the September 17, 1923 fire. That fire stopped just short of Shattuck when the hot dry Diablo winds from the northeast stilled and the late afternoon moist winds off the bay came in to give the fire fighters and volunteers the much needed edge to gain control and stop the fire from moving into the downtown and across Shattuck. By that time, the fast-moving fire had consumed 640 structures including 584 houses.
I drove right by the plaque at 1916 Oxford on the 1923 fire on my way up the hill to pick up a friend living in the Berkeley Hazard Trifecta area. On the way up, parked cars on both sides of Oxford squeezed the two-way street into a single lane. All I could think about was if a wildfire hits that area, there is no way people are going to get out.
I recommend picking up and reading Jake Bittle’s The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. Jake Bittle does a much better job than I can do here in this limited space describing what happens to individuals, families and communities when the calamities of nature strike. Bittle does it through the lens of the people experiencing it. After moving around the country on hurricanes, floods and drought, Bittle brings it home to us in the chapter on the 2017 Tubbs fire and Coffey Park.
You can borrow The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration from the Berkeley Public Library as an ebook, audiobook or in print.
_________________________
[i] The Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation is a State of California map https://maps.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/EQZApp/app/ and the Berkeley Fire Zone map is a City of Berkeley map https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/2022-04/Berkeley-Fire-Zone-Map.pdf.
Are we dancing with disaster?
The project at 1048 Keith is back on the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) agenda for January 9, 2025. This project initially caught my attention because it was listed as sitting in the Hillside Overly (high fire zone) in the ZAB September 26, 2024 agenda. Out of curiosity, I checked the Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation map and found the project hit the Berkeley Hazard trifecta, the landslide zone and earthquake fault zone and the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone (VHFHSZ).[i]
Little did I know when I shot off an email to ZAB on the project at 1048 Keith back in September that the landslide zone had already taken first place in the Berkeley Hazard Trifecta and that Keith Avenue was notorious for houses moving in this active landslide zone.
The 1048 Keith Avenue project was continued twice, first on September 26, 2024 and then again on October 10, 2024. At the September 26th ZAB meeting the neighbors testified the land was moving, houses were sliding down the hill and the land survey for 1048 Keith had a disclaimer that because the land is moving it may be off by 5 feet or more.
The reason there was a request for a continuance (postponing review) was that because the land is actively moving there was a dispute over the property lines, an active lawsuit and the location of the proposed 1048 Keith project may be on the neighbor’s land.
When Robert Matthews spoke, he said he was familiar with ground movement. In his full statement about the active landslide he related how his house made the front page of the Chronicle in 2004, that ground had been actively moving for decades.
The 2004 article Matthews references describes his house on Keith as sliding about 20 feet since it was built in 1916 and half of it was now on his neighbor’s lot.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/when-property-lines-run-through-the-front-door-2662450.php
Matthews brought his comments to a close with “[I] oppose the current plan, because I believe the applicant simply may not own the property...and I urge you not to approve any construction in the area until the disagreement is resolved between the parties.”
I thanked everyone who spoke. The evening testimony was better than TV.
Did I mention 1048 Keith Avenue is also right on top of the Hayward Fault?
The bottom line is should anyone be building anything in an area that is on land that is moving.
Apparently, the issues are settled now as Berkeley City Planning staff recommend approving the project. But should they?
We might question the sanity of people who keep rebuilding in Florida with hurricane after hurricane, but what about us?
We might ask how many landslides, hurricanes, floods, or fires does it take for someone to say enough, or for FEMA to relocate communities, or for insurance companies to leave or for governments to say no? Who ends up paying? Will it be just the home owner when disaster finally happens or will City of Berkeley be on the hook if the project at 1048 Keith Avenue and projects like it are approved by ZAB and then again by the various City of Berkeley Departments and staff?
There are people who argue the Berkeley Fire Zone map encircles an area that is too large, but we just passed the 101-year anniversary of the September 17, 1923 fire. That fire stopped just short of Shattuck when the hot dry Diablo winds from the northeast stilled and the late afternoon moist winds off the bay came in to give the fire fighters and volunteers the much needed edge to gain control and stop the fire from moving into the downtown and across Shattuck. By that time, the fast-moving fire had consumed 640 structures including 584 houses.
I drove right by the plaque at 1916 Oxford on the 1923 fire on my way up the hill to pick up a friend living in the Berkeley Hazard Trifecta area. On the way up, parked cars on both sides of Oxford squeezed the two-way street into a single lane. All I could think about was if a wildfire hits that area, there is no way people are going to get out.
I recommend picking up and reading Jake Bittle’s The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. Jake Bittle does a much better job than I can do here in this limited space describing what happens to individuals, families and communities when the calamities of nature strike. Bittle does it through the lens of the people experiencing it. After moving around the country on hurricanes, floods and drought, Bittle brings it home to us in the chapter on the 2017 Tubbs fire and Coffey Park.
You can borrow The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration from the Berkeley Public Library as an ebook, audiobook or in print.
_________________________
[i] The Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation is a State of California map https://maps.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/EQZApp/app/ and the Berkeley Fire Zone map is a City of Berkeley map https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/2022-04/Berkeley-Fire-Zone-Map.pdf.
October 15, 2024 Activist's Diary on Tax Exemption for Research
In case you are wondering who I am voting for in the local elections, it is Kate Harrison for Mayor, Margot Smith for State Assembly, Jovanka Beckles for State Senate, Nikki Fortunato Bas for Alameda County Supervisor. If I lived in District 6 I would vote for Andy Katz, District 5 Shoshana O’Keefe, in District 3 I would rank only Chip Moore and Ben Bartlett. I am voting for Fix the Streets – Measure EE, Parks – Measure Y, and Libraries – Measure X. I haven’t decided on BUSD or finalized my vote on the rest of the ballot initiatives.
As you keep reading you’ll see why I’ve made some of these choices.
Tuesday, October 15, 2024 was an interesting day starting in the afternoon with the Agenda Committee and ending in the evening with the Berkeley City Council.
At the Agenda Committee the alternate councilmember Taplin filled in for councilmember Wengraf.
In the public comment period on the draft city council agenda for October 29, 2024, I suggested that item 15 from Public Works on an “Agreement Regarding Allocation of Costs for Railroad Crossing Improvements for Berkeley Commons Between Berkeley Commons Owner, LLC (Developer) and City of Berkeley (City)” was potentially controversial and should be moved to action. The parking lots for this development have approximately 1,000 parking spaces.
Berkeley Commons is the big project on the edge of Aquatic Park built as a research and development project presumably for biotech.
Berkeley Commons is in council District 2, Taplin’s District.
Whether Taplin was picking up on my comment or he had also been looking at the item in another way, I don’t know, but when public comment closed and Taplin spoke, he asked for the Berkeley Commons item on the railroad crossings to be moved to action. Mayor Arreguin, basically cut off Taplin at the knees by saying he didn’t agree, the City was a pass through and Taplin could talk with the City Manager about the item.
The supporting documentation that wasn’t available on Tuesday is posted with the October 29 City Council Agenda, but it only designates where the improvements will be on Addison and Bancroft, not what the safety improvements will be which some might say is important with entrances for around 500 parking spaces for the Bancroft parking lot entrance and another 500 at the Addison parking lot entrance.
People in West Berkeley are concerned, some are upset about all of the parking that is being given to the multiple biotech projects now totaling about 3000 parking spaces in multilevel parking lots next to biotech projects already built or in the making. If even two thirds of these parking spaces are used that means 2000 more cars going through West Berkeley for biotech. That is while the city approves housing project after housing project with little to no parking leaving residents who need their cars struggling for parking when they come home and biotech scooping up three thousand spaces with ease in multi-level parking edging up on the residential neighborhoods.
While the city leaders in Berkeley have been chasing after biotech, the West Berkeley Plan with protective zoning for arts and crafts is taking hits with rezoning spaces piece by piece for biotech.
Estimates through public comment and the petition from Kate Harrison place the vacancy in developments for biotech at 39% to 47%. There are still more planned projects for biotech to come.
The West Berkeley neighborhood housing, where the largest percentage of persons of color live in Berkeley also looks to be the target and sacrifice zone for Middle Housing Zoning.
Add on to that sour taste that Arreguin had on the evening city council agenda item 21 on consent (to pass without discussion) Amend BMC 9.04.165 – Tax Exemption for Research & Development Grants to exempt the taxation of business gross receipts relating to government and philanthropic research and development grants in the public interest.
Arreguin stated to the public and council that as the author of item 21 the Tax Exemption for Research and Development, he was pulling the item from the evening agenda and rescheduling it for November 12, 2024. That is conveniently after the election while Arreguin is still in office as mayor in Berkeley.
Here is Arreguin’s statement:
“So, on item 21, this is the item tax exemption for research and development grants I submitted for Council consideration this evening. Since the item first appeared, there’s been considerable interest in the proposal. We received many letters of support from companies engaged in a wide range of research in Berkeley who asked council to approve the item [emphasis added] and received emails and letters from community members and public and requests to pull it from consent for more discussion of the proposal. While I’m still ultimately in support of moving forward, I agree more time would be beneficial to respond to the public comments and provide additional background on the reasons for the proposal, the financial implications and potential benefits. As the author of the item I’d like to ask for unanimous consent for the City Council to continue item 21 to November 12, 2024 is to allow time for council to discuss the merits of the proposal and act in time for the finance department to implement the new policy when the tax bills are sent in December.”
Of course, companies engaged in a wide range of research would enjoy tax breaks, while we as property owner taxpayers are asked to cough up more money through the multiple ballot measures for streets, the parks, the libraries.
As public comment on the consent calendar ended, Arreguin said giving the tax exemption would only cost the City $9,000. Here is Arreguin’s full statement regarding the tax exemption:
“I just have to say we received some information from the City Manager about what is the economic impact of the proposal on 21, $9,000 per year. So, to think that this is some big boondoggle or swindle for, you know, corporations at the expense of our tax base is just fake news. And, I just have to say I really resent the implication that because I’m bringing something forward to support a local economy that that’s somehow unethical [emphasis added], you know, we really need to move past toxicity and divisiveness and rhetoric that unfortunately has crept into this council chambers and let’s have a civil debate, let’s focus on the issues that’s what I intend to have on November 12 and let the council decide how to proceed and not to politicize or use -- [captioner missed a couple of words] or take an issue to create some false narrative for political purposes, because that’s what is really going on here.”
So, what is really going on? Chapter 9.04 of the Berkeley Municipal Code relates to Business Licenses, who/what needs a business license and how the fee (tax) for that license is calculated.
The current ordinance section to be modified limits the tax exemption to:
“Any person subject to a license under provisions of this section with less than $100,000 in annual gross receipts, as defined in Section 9.04.025, net of governmental research grants, may exclude from gross receipts up to $1,000,000 received from governmental research grants, providing that a list of those grants and the amounts of payments received are reported to the City as defined by the Director of Finance.”
What this means in plain language is any person with a Berkeley business license who receives money from a governmental research grant may subtract up to $1,000,000 in grants from gross receipts (income) for the purpose of calculating the fee/tax charged by the city. And when after subtracting the governmental grant from the total income results in a dollar number is less than $100,000 that income with the Berkeley business license is tax exempt.
As currently written this was supposed to help small struggling research and development entities.
Reading Arreguin’s agenda item 21 tax exemption proposal, it states:
“As of late 2023, the city had approximately 400 innovation sector companies, with 325 of them (81%) considered ‘startups’…”
and only
“…21 companies have received a R&D grant tax waiver, of which four (almost one-fifth) have reached the $1,000,000 maximum and several companies have been denied the waiver because they either had other gross receipts exceeding the $100,000 (e.g. from interest income on equity investments made in the company, [emphasis added] tax credits or philanthropic organization, rather than government entity.”
If each of the 21 companies mentioned received exactly the same exemption using the $9,000 impact (lost revenue), that would work out to $428.57 each. Of course, some exemptions were higher and some lower.
What Arreguin is proposing is to expand the sources of grants by adding philanthropic grants (which can come from anywhere, anyone not just the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or like foundations) and to remove all limitations on the amounts of grants and all limits on gross receipts (income).
So, we are to believe that the many letters of support from companies engaged in a wide range of research bothered to write for a share of $9,000 among them and all these tax emptions will total only a $9,000 loss to the City of Berkeley.
And, with more companies involved and the $9,000 divided among more companies, all this effort is for a tax exemption of less than $428.57 if divided equally. If the number of qualifying companies doubled then the cost of paying the accountants and staff to create the reports to send to the City of Berkeley Finance Department would very likely cost more than the expected $214.28 tax exemption if divided equally.
With the limits removed, no definition of who or what is going to fit into that philanthropic grant category, this looks like an invitation for creative accounting.
So, if the yearly loss of $9,000 to the City of Berkeley isn’t that the exemptions are going to total $9,000 split up among many more companies involved in research, what is it?
Maybe it is after Arreguin’s plan gives away what would have been revenue to the City of Berkeley, that all this new business, all this economic growth of biotech, all these new employees visiting Berkeley for their jobs will only set back the city for a loss of $9,000 each year after year going forward.
I’ll sure be interested in hearing how more companies qualifying for tax exemptions are going to do all this for a share of $9,000 or how they calculate this big giveaway is going to bring in so much income to the city that the overall yearly loss is only $9,000. Or maybe Arreguin will come up with some imagined profits with the help of the City Manager that will offset the lost revenue to seal the deal.
Or maybe this is to grease the wheels for the developers who manage and build the biotech buildings to incentivize the research/biotech with generous tax exemptions to come to Berkeley to fill the vacant space.
There are lots of studies that the promised gains from tax incentives, tax giveaways don’t produce as promised. And the tax exemptions and giveaways especially don’t work out as promised when it is a half-baked idea coming from someone who is pushing through giveaways on the way out the door for another office.
Something is very wrong with someone’s math or maybe all the bluster in Arreguin’s statement, “I really resent the implication that because I’m bringing something forward to support a local economy that that’s somehow unethical” is to divert our attention from taking a hard look and pulling out our mobile devices with the calculator and doing a little math ourselves.
This is looking more and more unsavory as I write.
None of all the building for biotech or the upzoning to demolish single family housing and fill the space with multi-unit projects takes into consideration the infrastructure that is needed to support it or the impact on the environment. That bill is coming.
Putting the evening together, from the beginning with non-agenda comments to the council meeting end at 8:18, besides Arreguin’s tax exemption plan, we heard from Marlene Watson one of the two Native artists (Watson uses “Native”) for the public art project at the Civic Center Park fountain that is supposed to recognize and honor Native People is now in contract to non-Native People for the work.
Marlene Watson: [I]t’s been problematic the last two and a half years of contributing on a capital budget with capital funds for a Native Project and Participation. We’re almost three years and now it’s going out to bid as a non-native project. So, that’s what we’d like the council to be aware of in the process of unfair contract practices…”
We heard complaints of a dual system when it comes to the Black Repertory Group Theater.
Note, there always seems to be money to go around for the Berkeley Rep on Center Street. The City Council approved putting the emergency rescue of $150,000 for the Aurora Theatre according to an article in Berkeleyside. I remember seeing it, but can’t find confirmation in City documents. The La Pena Cultural Center was approved on October 1, 2024 for consideration of $150,000 rescue in the mid-year budget adjustment.
And the Berkeley Black Repertory Group Theater can’t seem to get follow up from the City of Berkeley.
We heard Councilmember Bartlett learned the art of acting at the Black Repertory Theater.
We heard Deputy City Manager La Tanya Bellow profess her commitment to resolving the issues with the Berkeley Repertory Group Theater.
We were reminded of biased City of Berkeley contracting practices as identified in the Mason Tillman Report.
We heard about non-compliance with public records requests from a journalist still waiting for over a year for requested documents.
We heard how the City of Berkeley prioritizes bicyclists over the rest of the community, people who “roll” (people who use wheelchairs), people who are deaf, and pedestrians.
A group of volunteers did bicycle counts at the same intersections at the same time of day in 2023 to compare current use of bicycles in comparison to studies done in 2000, 2010, 2015, 2018 and 2022. While Berkeley’s population has increased, the volume of bicyclists in the 2023 bicycle counts decreased. The results were presented to the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission. The Commission wasn’t interested in following up on the findings and the commissioner leading the bicycle counts was replaced on the Commission.
We heard about the complaint about Sophie Hahn non-disclosure and conflict of interest.
There was some happy news at council. Taplin’s referral to maintain the six berths on J-Dock for the Cal Sailing Club passed without a peep of resistance. This was a lift that started months ago in response to a presentation under the previous city manager to the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission to take away those berths from the Cal Sailing Club and give them to big yachts.
Remember, Hahn who is the beneficiary of family income from the biotech industry did not recuse herself from the vote on the Wareham appeal to change zoning from protected space to filmmakers to research and development zoning.
If you want to see who is giving campaign donations to who in local elections, you can take a cruise through the City of Berkeley Electronic Filing System.
In case this link to the City of Berkeley Electronic Filing System of campaign donations doesn’t work. https://www.netfile.com/agency/brk/, you can do your own searches by going to the City of Berkeley website https://berkeleyca.gov and typing in campaign donations. Follow the instructions for the Public Access Portal.
Independent Expenditures are donations from PACs (political action committees aka dark money) The mailer on Nikki Fortunato Bas with the be afraid header “crime spree” is from the National Association of Realtors and California Association of Realtors.
There are a lot of what I would call dirty mailers from the Real Estate industry and because they have been successful in swinging voters even here in Berkeley with their dirty games they are still at it. Please don’t be fooled by these dirty negative hit pieces.
If you have trouble, I can walk you through it as I did the other evening for someone who wanted to follow-up on my Activist’s Diary: Full Disclosure? https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2024-10-01/article/50857?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-Full-Disclosure---Kelly-Hammargren
I finished Ta-Nehisi’s new book The Message earlier this week. If you can find it, snap it up and read it. I bought the last book from the first shipment to Pegasus. More on The Message later this Diary is long already.
In case you are wondering who I am voting for in the local elections, it is Kate Harrison for Mayor, Margot Smith for State Assembly, Jovanka Beckles for State Senate, Nikki Fortunato Bas for Alameda County Supervisor. If I lived in District 6 I would vote for Andy Katz, District 5 Shoshana O’Keefe, in District 3 I would rank only Chip Moore and Ben Bartlett. I am voting for Fix the Streets – Measure EE, Parks – Measure Y, and Libraries – Measure X. I haven’t decided on BUSD or finalized my vote on the rest of the ballot initiatives.
As you keep reading you’ll see why I’ve made some of these choices.
Tuesday, October 15, 2024 was an interesting day starting in the afternoon with the Agenda Committee and ending in the evening with the Berkeley City Council.
At the Agenda Committee the alternate councilmember Taplin filled in for councilmember Wengraf.
In the public comment period on the draft city council agenda for October 29, 2024, I suggested that item 15 from Public Works on an “Agreement Regarding Allocation of Costs for Railroad Crossing Improvements for Berkeley Commons Between Berkeley Commons Owner, LLC (Developer) and City of Berkeley (City)” was potentially controversial and should be moved to action. The parking lots for this development have approximately 1,000 parking spaces.
Berkeley Commons is the big project on the edge of Aquatic Park built as a research and development project presumably for biotech.
Berkeley Commons is in council District 2, Taplin’s District.
Whether Taplin was picking up on my comment or he had also been looking at the item in another way, I don’t know, but when public comment closed and Taplin spoke, he asked for the Berkeley Commons item on the railroad crossings to be moved to action. Mayor Arreguin, basically cut off Taplin at the knees by saying he didn’t agree, the City was a pass through and Taplin could talk with the City Manager about the item.
The supporting documentation that wasn’t available on Tuesday is posted with the October 29 City Council Agenda, but it only designates where the improvements will be on Addison and Bancroft, not what the safety improvements will be which some might say is important with entrances for around 500 parking spaces for the Bancroft parking lot entrance and another 500 at the Addison parking lot entrance.
People in West Berkeley are concerned, some are upset about all of the parking that is being given to the multiple biotech projects now totaling about 3000 parking spaces in multilevel parking lots next to biotech projects already built or in the making. If even two thirds of these parking spaces are used that means 2000 more cars going through West Berkeley for biotech. That is while the city approves housing project after housing project with little to no parking leaving residents who need their cars struggling for parking when they come home and biotech scooping up three thousand spaces with ease in multi-level parking edging up on the residential neighborhoods.
While the city leaders in Berkeley have been chasing after biotech, the West Berkeley Plan with protective zoning for arts and crafts is taking hits with rezoning spaces piece by piece for biotech.
Estimates through public comment and the petition from Kate Harrison place the vacancy in developments for biotech at 39% to 47%. There are still more planned projects for biotech to come.
The West Berkeley neighborhood housing, where the largest percentage of persons of color live in Berkeley also looks to be the target and sacrifice zone for Middle Housing Zoning.
Add on to that sour taste that Arreguin had on the evening city council agenda item 21 on consent (to pass without discussion) Amend BMC 9.04.165 – Tax Exemption for Research & Development Grants to exempt the taxation of business gross receipts relating to government and philanthropic research and development grants in the public interest.
Arreguin stated to the public and council that as the author of item 21 the Tax Exemption for Research and Development, he was pulling the item from the evening agenda and rescheduling it for November 12, 2024. That is conveniently after the election while Arreguin is still in office as mayor in Berkeley.
Here is Arreguin’s statement:
“So, on item 21, this is the item tax exemption for research and development grants I submitted for Council consideration this evening. Since the item first appeared, there’s been considerable interest in the proposal. We received many letters of support from companies engaged in a wide range of research in Berkeley who asked council to approve the item [emphasis added] and received emails and letters from community members and public and requests to pull it from consent for more discussion of the proposal. While I’m still ultimately in support of moving forward, I agree more time would be beneficial to respond to the public comments and provide additional background on the reasons for the proposal, the financial implications and potential benefits. As the author of the item I’d like to ask for unanimous consent for the City Council to continue item 21 to November 12, 2024 is to allow time for council to discuss the merits of the proposal and act in time for the finance department to implement the new policy when the tax bills are sent in December.”
Of course, companies engaged in a wide range of research would enjoy tax breaks, while we as property owner taxpayers are asked to cough up more money through the multiple ballot measures for streets, the parks, the libraries.
As public comment on the consent calendar ended, Arreguin said giving the tax exemption would only cost the City $9,000. Here is Arreguin’s full statement regarding the tax exemption:
“I just have to say we received some information from the City Manager about what is the economic impact of the proposal on 21, $9,000 per year. So, to think that this is some big boondoggle or swindle for, you know, corporations at the expense of our tax base is just fake news. And, I just have to say I really resent the implication that because I’m bringing something forward to support a local economy that that’s somehow unethical [emphasis added], you know, we really need to move past toxicity and divisiveness and rhetoric that unfortunately has crept into this council chambers and let’s have a civil debate, let’s focus on the issues that’s what I intend to have on November 12 and let the council decide how to proceed and not to politicize or use -- [captioner missed a couple of words] or take an issue to create some false narrative for political purposes, because that’s what is really going on here.”
So, what is really going on? Chapter 9.04 of the Berkeley Municipal Code relates to Business Licenses, who/what needs a business license and how the fee (tax) for that license is calculated.
The current ordinance section to be modified limits the tax exemption to:
“Any person subject to a license under provisions of this section with less than $100,000 in annual gross receipts, as defined in Section 9.04.025, net of governmental research grants, may exclude from gross receipts up to $1,000,000 received from governmental research grants, providing that a list of those grants and the amounts of payments received are reported to the City as defined by the Director of Finance.”
What this means in plain language is any person with a Berkeley business license who receives money from a governmental research grant may subtract up to $1,000,000 in grants from gross receipts (income) for the purpose of calculating the fee/tax charged by the city. And when after subtracting the governmental grant from the total income results in a dollar number is less than $100,000 that income with the Berkeley business license is tax exempt.
As currently written this was supposed to help small struggling research and development entities.
Reading Arreguin’s agenda item 21 tax exemption proposal, it states:
“As of late 2023, the city had approximately 400 innovation sector companies, with 325 of them (81%) considered ‘startups’…”
and only
“…21 companies have received a R&D grant tax waiver, of which four (almost one-fifth) have reached the $1,000,000 maximum and several companies have been denied the waiver because they either had other gross receipts exceeding the $100,000 (e.g. from interest income on equity investments made in the company, [emphasis added] tax credits or philanthropic organization, rather than government entity.”
If each of the 21 companies mentioned received exactly the same exemption using the $9,000 impact (lost revenue), that would work out to $428.57 each. Of course, some exemptions were higher and some lower.
What Arreguin is proposing is to expand the sources of grants by adding philanthropic grants (which can come from anywhere, anyone not just the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or like foundations) and to remove all limitations on the amounts of grants and all limits on gross receipts (income).
So, we are to believe that the many letters of support from companies engaged in a wide range of research bothered to write for a share of $9,000 among them and all these tax emptions will total only a $9,000 loss to the City of Berkeley.
And, with more companies involved and the $9,000 divided among more companies, all this effort is for a tax exemption of less than $428.57 if divided equally. If the number of qualifying companies doubled then the cost of paying the accountants and staff to create the reports to send to the City of Berkeley Finance Department would very likely cost more than the expected $214.28 tax exemption if divided equally.
With the limits removed, no definition of who or what is going to fit into that philanthropic grant category, this looks like an invitation for creative accounting.
So, if the yearly loss of $9,000 to the City of Berkeley isn’t that the exemptions are going to total $9,000 split up among many more companies involved in research, what is it?
Maybe it is after Arreguin’s plan gives away what would have been revenue to the City of Berkeley, that all this new business, all this economic growth of biotech, all these new employees visiting Berkeley for their jobs will only set back the city for a loss of $9,000 each year after year going forward.
I’ll sure be interested in hearing how more companies qualifying for tax exemptions are going to do all this for a share of $9,000 or how they calculate this big giveaway is going to bring in so much income to the city that the overall yearly loss is only $9,000. Or maybe Arreguin will come up with some imagined profits with the help of the City Manager that will offset the lost revenue to seal the deal.
Or maybe this is to grease the wheels for the developers who manage and build the biotech buildings to incentivize the research/biotech with generous tax exemptions to come to Berkeley to fill the vacant space.
There are lots of studies that the promised gains from tax incentives, tax giveaways don’t produce as promised. And the tax exemptions and giveaways especially don’t work out as promised when it is a half-baked idea coming from someone who is pushing through giveaways on the way out the door for another office.
Something is very wrong with someone’s math or maybe all the bluster in Arreguin’s statement, “I really resent the implication that because I’m bringing something forward to support a local economy that that’s somehow unethical” is to divert our attention from taking a hard look and pulling out our mobile devices with the calculator and doing a little math ourselves.
This is looking more and more unsavory as I write.
None of all the building for biotech or the upzoning to demolish single family housing and fill the space with multi-unit projects takes into consideration the infrastructure that is needed to support it or the impact on the environment. That bill is coming.
Putting the evening together, from the beginning with non-agenda comments to the council meeting end at 8:18, besides Arreguin’s tax exemption plan, we heard from Marlene Watson one of the two Native artists (Watson uses “Native”) for the public art project at the Civic Center Park fountain that is supposed to recognize and honor Native People is now in contract to non-Native People for the work.
Marlene Watson: [I]t’s been problematic the last two and a half years of contributing on a capital budget with capital funds for a Native Project and Participation. We’re almost three years and now it’s going out to bid as a non-native project. So, that’s what we’d like the council to be aware of in the process of unfair contract practices…”
We heard complaints of a dual system when it comes to the Black Repertory Group Theater.
Note, there always seems to be money to go around for the Berkeley Rep on Center Street. The City Council approved putting the emergency rescue of $150,000 for the Aurora Theatre according to an article in Berkeleyside. I remember seeing it, but can’t find confirmation in City documents. The La Pena Cultural Center was approved on October 1, 2024 for consideration of $150,000 rescue in the mid-year budget adjustment.
And the Berkeley Black Repertory Group Theater can’t seem to get follow up from the City of Berkeley.
We heard Councilmember Bartlett learned the art of acting at the Black Repertory Theater.
We heard Deputy City Manager La Tanya Bellow profess her commitment to resolving the issues with the Berkeley Repertory Group Theater.
We were reminded of biased City of Berkeley contracting practices as identified in the Mason Tillman Report.
We heard about non-compliance with public records requests from a journalist still waiting for over a year for requested documents.
We heard how the City of Berkeley prioritizes bicyclists over the rest of the community, people who “roll” (people who use wheelchairs), people who are deaf, and pedestrians.
A group of volunteers did bicycle counts at the same intersections at the same time of day in 2023 to compare current use of bicycles in comparison to studies done in 2000, 2010, 2015, 2018 and 2022. While Berkeley’s population has increased, the volume of bicyclists in the 2023 bicycle counts decreased. The results were presented to the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission. The Commission wasn’t interested in following up on the findings and the commissioner leading the bicycle counts was replaced on the Commission.
We heard about the complaint about Sophie Hahn non-disclosure and conflict of interest.
There was some happy news at council. Taplin’s referral to maintain the six berths on J-Dock for the Cal Sailing Club passed without a peep of resistance. This was a lift that started months ago in response to a presentation under the previous city manager to the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission to take away those berths from the Cal Sailing Club and give them to big yachts.
Remember, Hahn who is the beneficiary of family income from the biotech industry did not recuse herself from the vote on the Wareham appeal to change zoning from protected space to filmmakers to research and development zoning.
If you want to see who is giving campaign donations to who in local elections, you can take a cruise through the City of Berkeley Electronic Filing System.
In case this link to the City of Berkeley Electronic Filing System of campaign donations doesn’t work. https://www.netfile.com/agency/brk/, you can do your own searches by going to the City of Berkeley website https://berkeleyca.gov and typing in campaign donations. Follow the instructions for the Public Access Portal.
Independent Expenditures are donations from PACs (political action committees aka dark money) The mailer on Nikki Fortunato Bas with the be afraid header “crime spree” is from the National Association of Realtors and California Association of Realtors.
There are a lot of what I would call dirty mailers from the Real Estate industry and because they have been successful in swinging voters even here in Berkeley with their dirty games they are still at it. Please don’t be fooled by these dirty negative hit pieces.
If you have trouble, I can walk you through it as I did the other evening for someone who wanted to follow-up on my Activist’s Diary: Full Disclosure? https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2024-10-01/article/50857?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-Full-Disclosure---Kelly-Hammargren
I finished Ta-Nehisi’s new book The Message earlier this week. If you can find it, snap it up and read it. I bought the last book from the first shipment to Pegasus. More on The Message later this Diary is long already.
October 11, 2024 Activist's Diary on Sophie Hahn, FPPC Complaint and review of Form 700
It seems like the national news media is hanging in anxious anticipation for that “October Surprise” event, revelation, or catastrophe that will swing the Presidential election one way or the other.
And, then there is Berkeley.
Some of us received the forwarded letter from Paola Laverde that starts with, “Today I filed a complaint against Sophie Hahn, Mayoral candidate in Berkeley, with the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC).”
The complaint revolves around the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) Form 700 and failure to report.
I requested and received the full packet with the complaint from Paola Laverde and it is best summarized as thorough with substantial supporting documentation. Laverde used the California Form 700 filings, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings and business reports as documentation.
Here is an excerpt from that filing:
“Sophie Hahn (Ms. Hahn) is both a current City Councilmember for the City of Berkeley, first elected in November, 2016, and also a candidate for Mayor of Berkeley in the upcoming November 5, 2024 election. In her FPPC Form 700 filings, dating back to 2020, if not earlier, it appears Ms. Hahn failed to report, as required by the FPPC, her 50% share of yearly earnings from her spouse (Mr. Eric Bjerkholt), currently Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mirum Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company. These earnings likely averaged at least $500,000 per year during this period and were closer to $1 million/year for 2023 and 2024. A recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing listed Mr. Bjerkholt’s compensation at $4,337,928 for 2023 although this included stock options that may not yet have been awarded. (Ex. 1) Ms. Hahn also appeared not to report (other than 2020), as required by the FPPC, her family’s substantial stock holdings in various biotechnology companies. These holdings have been estimated as high as $4 million. (Ex. 2).”
In writing this Activist’s Diary, I went through the mandated Form 700 filings by Sophie Hahn going back to 2014, when I first started attending city meetings. I started with the State FPPC website, but the back and forth of when Hahn included her husband’ compensations in the biotech industry and when she didn’t was so hard to follow that I switched to the City of Berkeley website (which had the same Form 700 filings) where the documents were easier to view, save and print.
Here is the explanation of the Form 700 from the State of California FPPC website:
“Every elected official and public employee who makes or influences governmental decisions is required to submit a Statement of Economic Interests, also known as Form 700. The Form 700 provides transparency and ensures accountability in two ways:
For comparison and to be thorough I also reviewed the Form 700 filings completed by candidates Kate Harrison and Adena Ishii.
To look at the Form 700 filings go to the City of Berkeley and type in Conflict of Interest in the search bar. Then click on submitted forms. When the request page comes up you can change the dates and type in the last name of anyone you want to search. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/public-records/conflict-interest-reports
Not every Form 700 filing by an elected person in Berkeley is listed in the City of Berkeley filings. For example, Mayor Arreguin and Auditor Jenny Wong filed the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) sponsored trips to Israel with the State FPPC, but those same forms of the controversial trips to Israel are not in City of Berkeley filings. A person looking only at Berkeley Form 700 filings would not find the documentation of Arreguin’s and Wong’s sponsored trips to Israel.
For Form 700s filed with the state use https://fppc.ca.gov/transparency/form-700-filed-by-public-officials/form700-search.html
I was looking at councilmember Hahn’s 700 form filings a few weeks ago in relation to her trip with the Jewish Community Relations Council to Israel (JCRC) in March of 2023, so I was only looking at the recent 700 forms. What I found strange in Hahn’s filings was that her only investment was Jimmy’s described as “Environmentally smart dog food” with the box checked as stock with a value of $100,001 - $1,000,000 and the house she owns with her husband in the Berkeley Hills.
A dog food company by the name of Jimmy’s does not exist. Hahn did not bother to correct the name in her fillings of 3/10/2022, 4/3/2023, 3/15/2024. Most would probably excuse the misspelling of Jiminy’s as Jimmy’s as carelessness. It wasn’t until she completed her August 8, 2024 Form 700 filing as candidate for mayor that Jiminy’s was listed. In those same years Hahn listed only her house with a value of greater than $1,000,000 and did not list the income or any other investments. She did not list the substantial household income of her spouse that Laverde found in her searches
Jiminy’s is a privately held Berkeley initiated and based company with a Solano Avenue address. In the “profile preview” PitchBook Platform webpage it lists five of nine investors. Hahn is not listed in the five named venture capital investors. https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/459645-22#team
Hahn’s house is in fire zone 2 in the hillside overlay on a parcel that is designated as a landslide zone. Her house made only two of the three criteria for what I call the Berkeley Hazard Trifecta which are parcels/lots/properties that are in the very high fire hazard severity zone, in a landslide zone and also sit on top of the Hayward fault.
In the March 5, 2021 filing Hahn lists Chinook Theraputics stock with a value of $100,001 - $1,000,000. Hahn’s Form 700 filings of Chinook Theraputics lists an acquired date of 11/10/20 and then it just disappears from future filings.
The FPPC requires stocks that are worth $2,000 or more during the reporting period must be reported every year that they are held. The “acquired” and “disposed” are only required if the stocks were acquired or disposed during the period covered by the Form 700.
Here is the excerpt from the complaint referring to the March 5, 2021 for the year 2020.
“As noted above, Ms. Hahn did report her share of her husband’s salary and stockholdings in Chinook Pharmaceuticals but only for her 2020 FPPC filing. Chinook Pharmaceutical is the successor to Aduro Pharmaceuticals, through a reverse merger between the two firms. (Ex. 21) Aduro was started in Berkeley in 2015, and operated, and was headquartered in Berkeley, CA until, around the time of its reverse merger in 2020. (Ex. 22) As a result of the merger it relocated most of its operations outside of Berkeley.
However, this does not excuse the failure to report Chinook Pharmaceuticals for the 2021 through 2023 reporting years as Chinook continued to operate in Berkeley. It retained (and then sublet) the long-term lease with Wareham Development for Aduro’s headquarters at 740 Heinz St. (Ex. 23) as well as acquiring various Aduro patent rights held in conjunction with the University of California, Berkeley. (Ex. 24)
Chinook’s continued long-term lease in Berkeley should have been known by Ms. Hahn, as it was included in Chinook’s 2023 Annual Report, attested to by her husband in his role as CFO of Chinook (Ex. 23). Additionally, even if Chinook had completely eliminated its Berkeley presence (which it did not), the FPPC requires that candidates continue reporting for the following two years after departure (i.e. 2021 and 2022). Once again, this is something that Ms. Hahn failed to do.”
In Hahn’s Form 700 filings for March 12, 2017, March 18, 2018, March 7, 2019, April 16, 2020 July 30, 2020, she lists only her residence, no income, no investments.
The California Form 700 Fair Political Practice Commission is a public document with the cover page title of STATEMENT OF ECONOMIC INTERESTS. It is supposed to tell us in the Schedules (added forms) Schedule A-1 Investments, Schedule A-2 Investments, Schedule B-Real Property, Schedule C- Income, Loans & Business Positions, Schedule D-Income-Gifts and Schedule E-Income Gifts Travel Payments.
During the years I reviewed 2014 through 2024, Hahn completed the Form 700 Schedule A-1, Schedule A-2, Schedule B and Schedule C forms as required by the FPPC when she was appointed to the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB). Those filings ended when Hahn ran for city council and was elected in 2016. The filings for 2017 through 2020 as noted above listed only her residence.
The FPPC frequently asked questions and answers can be accessed with this link: https://www.fppc.ca.gov/content/dam/fppc/NS-Documents/TAD/Form%20700/2019-2020/Form_700_FAQs_2019.pdf
I did look at the Form 700 filings for candidates Kate Harrison and Adena Ishii.
Kate Harrison did not include her husband’s salary as he was a government employee. A spouse or registered domestic partner’s government salary is not reportable.
Harrison’s husband James Hendry is officially retired, though I understand he may still put in some part time hours. As a government employee Hendry was required to complete Form 700. According to his Form 700 filings I found with the last one dated 3/17/2024, Hendry was a civil servant working as a Public Utilities Commission, Boards and Administration Utility Specialist for the City and County of San Francisco. In his earlier filings Hendry did report Harrison’s non-governmental earnings.
The Harrison Hendry household holdings of mutual funds do not need to be reported according to the FPPC.
Stocks in a diversified mutual fund registered with the SEC or in a fund similar to a diversified mutual fund that meets criteria in Regulation 18237 do not need to be reported, nor do defined-benefit pension program plan such as CalPERS do not need to be reported.
Adena Ishii filed what looks to be a complete Form 700 including Schedule A-1, Schedule A-2, Schedule B, Schedule C, and included income and place of employment of her spouse or registered domestic partner.
One of the many things in Laverde’s complaint that caught my attention was the connection between Hahn’s husband’s business and Wareham Development. It is Wareham Development that purchased the building that housed filmmakers and Fantasy Studios and filed to change the zoning from arts which were protected into research and development for biotechnology. Wareham lost at the Zoning Adjustment Board which determined filmmaking was an art and protected.
Wareham appealed the ZAB decision by redefining film as just media and not an art. The Berkeley City Council heard the appeal on July 30, 2024 and voted in favor of Wareham. Hahn did not recuse herself and voted in favor of Wareham. I wrote about filmmaking, the Fantasy Studios and the hearing in my August Activist’s Diary. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2024-08-01/article/50779?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-August-1--Kelly-Hammargren
Will Hahn’s failure to disclose make any difference to Berkeley voters?
It would to me, but I had my reservations about Sophie Hahn before this new layer fell in my lap. I have been observing Hahn for nearly ten years first on ZAB, then on City Council and in Council Committees.
I’ve had my concerns for a very long time.
It seems like the national news media is hanging in anxious anticipation for that “October Surprise” event, revelation, or catastrophe that will swing the Presidential election one way or the other.
And, then there is Berkeley.
Some of us received the forwarded letter from Paola Laverde that starts with, “Today I filed a complaint against Sophie Hahn, Mayoral candidate in Berkeley, with the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC).”
The complaint revolves around the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) Form 700 and failure to report.
I requested and received the full packet with the complaint from Paola Laverde and it is best summarized as thorough with substantial supporting documentation. Laverde used the California Form 700 filings, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings and business reports as documentation.
Here is an excerpt from that filing:
“Sophie Hahn (Ms. Hahn) is both a current City Councilmember for the City of Berkeley, first elected in November, 2016, and also a candidate for Mayor of Berkeley in the upcoming November 5, 2024 election. In her FPPC Form 700 filings, dating back to 2020, if not earlier, it appears Ms. Hahn failed to report, as required by the FPPC, her 50% share of yearly earnings from her spouse (Mr. Eric Bjerkholt), currently Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mirum Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company. These earnings likely averaged at least $500,000 per year during this period and were closer to $1 million/year for 2023 and 2024. A recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing listed Mr. Bjerkholt’s compensation at $4,337,928 for 2023 although this included stock options that may not yet have been awarded. (Ex. 1) Ms. Hahn also appeared not to report (other than 2020), as required by the FPPC, her family’s substantial stock holdings in various biotechnology companies. These holdings have been estimated as high as $4 million. (Ex. 2).”
In writing this Activist’s Diary, I went through the mandated Form 700 filings by Sophie Hahn going back to 2014, when I first started attending city meetings. I started with the State FPPC website, but the back and forth of when Hahn included her husband’ compensations in the biotech industry and when she didn’t was so hard to follow that I switched to the City of Berkeley website (which had the same Form 700 filings) where the documents were easier to view, save and print.
Here is the explanation of the Form 700 from the State of California FPPC website:
“Every elected official and public employee who makes or influences governmental decisions is required to submit a Statement of Economic Interests, also known as Form 700. The Form 700 provides transparency and ensures accountability in two ways:
- It provides necessary information to the public about an official’s personal financial interests to ensure that officials are making decisions in the best interest of the public and not enhancing their personal finances.
- It serves as a reminder to the public official of potential conflicts of interest so the official can abstain from making or participating in governmental decisions that are deemed conflict of interest.”
For comparison and to be thorough I also reviewed the Form 700 filings completed by candidates Kate Harrison and Adena Ishii.
To look at the Form 700 filings go to the City of Berkeley and type in Conflict of Interest in the search bar. Then click on submitted forms. When the request page comes up you can change the dates and type in the last name of anyone you want to search. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/public-records/conflict-interest-reports
Not every Form 700 filing by an elected person in Berkeley is listed in the City of Berkeley filings. For example, Mayor Arreguin and Auditor Jenny Wong filed the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) sponsored trips to Israel with the State FPPC, but those same forms of the controversial trips to Israel are not in City of Berkeley filings. A person looking only at Berkeley Form 700 filings would not find the documentation of Arreguin’s and Wong’s sponsored trips to Israel.
For Form 700s filed with the state use https://fppc.ca.gov/transparency/form-700-filed-by-public-officials/form700-search.html
I was looking at councilmember Hahn’s 700 form filings a few weeks ago in relation to her trip with the Jewish Community Relations Council to Israel (JCRC) in March of 2023, so I was only looking at the recent 700 forms. What I found strange in Hahn’s filings was that her only investment was Jimmy’s described as “Environmentally smart dog food” with the box checked as stock with a value of $100,001 - $1,000,000 and the house she owns with her husband in the Berkeley Hills.
A dog food company by the name of Jimmy’s does not exist. Hahn did not bother to correct the name in her fillings of 3/10/2022, 4/3/2023, 3/15/2024. Most would probably excuse the misspelling of Jiminy’s as Jimmy’s as carelessness. It wasn’t until she completed her August 8, 2024 Form 700 filing as candidate for mayor that Jiminy’s was listed. In those same years Hahn listed only her house with a value of greater than $1,000,000 and did not list the income or any other investments. She did not list the substantial household income of her spouse that Laverde found in her searches
Jiminy’s is a privately held Berkeley initiated and based company with a Solano Avenue address. In the “profile preview” PitchBook Platform webpage it lists five of nine investors. Hahn is not listed in the five named venture capital investors. https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/459645-22#team
Hahn’s house is in fire zone 2 in the hillside overlay on a parcel that is designated as a landslide zone. Her house made only two of the three criteria for what I call the Berkeley Hazard Trifecta which are parcels/lots/properties that are in the very high fire hazard severity zone, in a landslide zone and also sit on top of the Hayward fault.
In the March 5, 2021 filing Hahn lists Chinook Theraputics stock with a value of $100,001 - $1,000,000. Hahn’s Form 700 filings of Chinook Theraputics lists an acquired date of 11/10/20 and then it just disappears from future filings.
The FPPC requires stocks that are worth $2,000 or more during the reporting period must be reported every year that they are held. The “acquired” and “disposed” are only required if the stocks were acquired or disposed during the period covered by the Form 700.
Here is the excerpt from the complaint referring to the March 5, 2021 for the year 2020.
“As noted above, Ms. Hahn did report her share of her husband’s salary and stockholdings in Chinook Pharmaceuticals but only for her 2020 FPPC filing. Chinook Pharmaceutical is the successor to Aduro Pharmaceuticals, through a reverse merger between the two firms. (Ex. 21) Aduro was started in Berkeley in 2015, and operated, and was headquartered in Berkeley, CA until, around the time of its reverse merger in 2020. (Ex. 22) As a result of the merger it relocated most of its operations outside of Berkeley.
However, this does not excuse the failure to report Chinook Pharmaceuticals for the 2021 through 2023 reporting years as Chinook continued to operate in Berkeley. It retained (and then sublet) the long-term lease with Wareham Development for Aduro’s headquarters at 740 Heinz St. (Ex. 23) as well as acquiring various Aduro patent rights held in conjunction with the University of California, Berkeley. (Ex. 24)
Chinook’s continued long-term lease in Berkeley should have been known by Ms. Hahn, as it was included in Chinook’s 2023 Annual Report, attested to by her husband in his role as CFO of Chinook (Ex. 23). Additionally, even if Chinook had completely eliminated its Berkeley presence (which it did not), the FPPC requires that candidates continue reporting for the following two years after departure (i.e. 2021 and 2022). Once again, this is something that Ms. Hahn failed to do.”
In Hahn’s Form 700 filings for March 12, 2017, March 18, 2018, March 7, 2019, April 16, 2020 July 30, 2020, she lists only her residence, no income, no investments.
The California Form 700 Fair Political Practice Commission is a public document with the cover page title of STATEMENT OF ECONOMIC INTERESTS. It is supposed to tell us in the Schedules (added forms) Schedule A-1 Investments, Schedule A-2 Investments, Schedule B-Real Property, Schedule C- Income, Loans & Business Positions, Schedule D-Income-Gifts and Schedule E-Income Gifts Travel Payments.
During the years I reviewed 2014 through 2024, Hahn completed the Form 700 Schedule A-1, Schedule A-2, Schedule B and Schedule C forms as required by the FPPC when she was appointed to the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB). Those filings ended when Hahn ran for city council and was elected in 2016. The filings for 2017 through 2020 as noted above listed only her residence.
The FPPC frequently asked questions and answers can be accessed with this link: https://www.fppc.ca.gov/content/dam/fppc/NS-Documents/TAD/Form%20700/2019-2020/Form_700_FAQs_2019.pdf
I did look at the Form 700 filings for candidates Kate Harrison and Adena Ishii.
Kate Harrison did not include her husband’s salary as he was a government employee. A spouse or registered domestic partner’s government salary is not reportable.
Harrison’s husband James Hendry is officially retired, though I understand he may still put in some part time hours. As a government employee Hendry was required to complete Form 700. According to his Form 700 filings I found with the last one dated 3/17/2024, Hendry was a civil servant working as a Public Utilities Commission, Boards and Administration Utility Specialist for the City and County of San Francisco. In his earlier filings Hendry did report Harrison’s non-governmental earnings.
The Harrison Hendry household holdings of mutual funds do not need to be reported according to the FPPC.
Stocks in a diversified mutual fund registered with the SEC or in a fund similar to a diversified mutual fund that meets criteria in Regulation 18237 do not need to be reported, nor do defined-benefit pension program plan such as CalPERS do not need to be reported.
Adena Ishii filed what looks to be a complete Form 700 including Schedule A-1, Schedule A-2, Schedule B, Schedule C, and included income and place of employment of her spouse or registered domestic partner.
One of the many things in Laverde’s complaint that caught my attention was the connection between Hahn’s husband’s business and Wareham Development. It is Wareham Development that purchased the building that housed filmmakers and Fantasy Studios and filed to change the zoning from arts which were protected into research and development for biotechnology. Wareham lost at the Zoning Adjustment Board which determined filmmaking was an art and protected.
Wareham appealed the ZAB decision by redefining film as just media and not an art. The Berkeley City Council heard the appeal on July 30, 2024 and voted in favor of Wareham. Hahn did not recuse herself and voted in favor of Wareham. I wrote about filmmaking, the Fantasy Studios and the hearing in my August Activist’s Diary. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2024-08-01/article/50779?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-August-1--Kelly-Hammargren
Will Hahn’s failure to disclose make any difference to Berkeley voters?
It would to me, but I had my reservations about Sophie Hahn before this new layer fell in my lap. I have been observing Hahn for nearly ten years first on ZAB, then on City Council and in Council Committees.
I’ve had my concerns for a very long time.
October 7, 2024 Peace and Justice Commission Passed the Ceasefire Resolution and Rules that can be used to delay it from coming before the City Council for a vote
Monday, September 30, 2024 was the long overdue meeting of the Peace and Justice Commission on a “Resolution for an Immediate and Permanent Ceasefire in Gaza, and an End to U.S. Military Aid to Israel, and Support for Palestinian Self-Determination”.
You probably know by now that the resolution passed with an 8 to 7 vote. But there is a lot more to what happened.
By the time you read this, we will have already passed one-year of war since the attack by Hamas on Israel killing 1195 including 815 civilians and took 251 hostages. It was a shock that reverberated across Israel and around the world. The year marks the escalation and expansion of the war into Lebanon with Israeli bombings including the insertion of bombs into pagers and walkie talkies killing over 2000. The number of dead Palestinians that were whole enough to be counted is more than 41,000.
Whole enough to be counted goes to the descriptions from physicians volunteering in Gaza of the impact on people of the bunker busting 2000 lb. bombs furnished by the United States to Israel. Dr. Mark Perlmutter, orthopedic surgeon who volunteered in Gaza, described bodies being brought to the hospital in bags that looked as if they had been in a shredder. Perlmutter also described seeing children being shot twice both in the head and chest with horrific exit wounds as no accident.
The July 10, 2024 article in the Lancet “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential” estimated direct and indirect deaths of Palestinians from the war may be more than 186,000. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext
It is impossible to identify the thousands buried in rubble.
The number of journalists and media workers killed in Gaza in this war of one year is now at 175.
As I finish this diary 19-year-old Hassan Hamad is the latest casualty in the targeting of journalists in Israel’s effort to silence and end reporting on the conditions in Gaza. Hamad, who was receiving messages from an Israeli officer ordering him to stop filming, died on October 6, 2024.
It is in this setting that on September 30, 2024 the main room at the North Berkeley Senior Center was packed. There were not enough chairs for everyone with many of us lining the walls and the back of the room. I tried counting. There were well over two hundred present.
If Maoz Inon Israeli peace activist whose parents were killed in the October 7, 2023 attack and is traveling the world with Palestinian peace activist Aziz Abu Sarah had been in the room he would have called for the ceasefire as he has done for the last year. Inon would have said as he did today in the interview broadcast, “[O]nly few years after the Second World War, where they were fighting among each other and killing 10 millions of each other, they realized that the only way to prevent the next war is making the enemies of the past into the partners of the future…” https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/7/maoz_inon_october_7_israel_palestine
What I had hoped when I sent my letter to the Peace and Justice Commission in support of the Ceasefire Resolution was that the commissioners would work together through wordsmithing, additional statements and possible subtractions for a ceasefire resolution they could all support. but it was obvious from the beginning there were seven commissioners who were appointed to block and obstruct.
The obstruction started when the Commission Chair Grace Morizawa opened the meeting acknowledging that the large public presence was for the Ceasefire Resolution and asked for a reordering of the agenda. Mayor Arreguin’s appointee commissioner Andrea Cassidy was the most vocal with others chiming in, the order of the agenda couldn’t be changed.
A vote was taken. The obstructers lost.
Commissioners Luke Taylor and George Lippman (both Jewish) wrote the Ceasefire Resolution and introduced the Resolution to the public before public comment began. Taylor explained their intent was to call for a permanent ceasefire and not to take sides. The resolution was written with the best intentions to bring it into the mission and function of the Peace and Justice Commission on the issues of peace and justice.
Taylor said he has students in the West Bank and when he opens his messages he will see martyred (killed) with the name of someone he knows.
I counted sixty-four speakers for the resolution (that includes speakers who assigned their time to another) and twenty speakers in opposition though there may have been a few more who assigned their time without the announcement that accompanied everyone for the ceasefire resolution that they were giving their time to another speaker. The limit was one minute for individual speakers and three minutes for speakers who received time from others.
There was no shouting or screaming during the evening though early on the commission chair Morizawa asked for clapping to stop and people to raise their hands and wiggle their fingers in a show of support instead. There were frequent reminders the meeting was scheduled to end at 10 pm encouraging speakers to leave time for the commission to discuss the resolution and vote.
There were speakers who were very moving, like the nurse practitioner who described what she experienced providing care during her month in Gaza.
Having done so much reading on Israel and Palestine, I wondered what the man holding the vehicle license plate in the back of the room was all about.
The Palestinian man was from the West Bank and showed his “green card” and passport and even his vehicle license plate to dispel the myth that Palestinians in the West Bank are treated equally.
Green cards are issued to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza strip. It is illegal for a Palestinian living in the West Bank to travel to Gaza or Jerusalem without a special travel permit from Israel. Palestinians living in East Jerusalem have blue IDs. Movement is tightly controlled with checkpoints and Palestinians must have their cards with them at all times. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/11/18/the-colour-coded-israeli-id-system-for-palestinians
Waving his green card, passport and license plate might not have had the same impact on others as it had for me. On the recommendation of a friend who is very much pro-Israel, I read Noa Tishby’s Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth. If that was your only source of information on Israel then you would have been led to believe that Palestinians living in Israel have all the same rights as the Jewish citizens of Israel which is simply not true. You would also believe the Nakba in 1948 was not much of anything when to the Palestinians it was the great catastrophe.
Reading the accounts by historians, the Nakba was the horrific. 750,000 Palestinians were violently displaced and dispossessed of land, property and belongings by the Israelis before and after the creation of the State of Israel.
The Nakba is akin to the Trail of Tears though the number of Native Americans in the forced removal was 60,000 with more than 3,000 deaths not 750,000 Palestinians and an unknown number of deaths.
What stuck with my friend, who is Jewish and supported the ceasefire resolution, was the public speaker who said the Jews were the indigenous people to the land implying the Palestinians were not indigenous and therefore had no rights.
I was surprised and not surprised by such a statement. It goes to the myth Israel was, A land without a people for people without a land, and that Jews are the rightful inhabitants of the land ignoring and denying the Palestinians as an indigenous people to the land.
I’ve been working my way through Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha a Palestinian historian at the University of London. Masalha writes with extensive sourcing and bibliography Palestine is not a modern invention, but instead firmly existed in the ancient past.
Accepting that Palestinians are indigenous to the land and existed in the ancient past is all very uncomfortable to historical and modern self-identity, but not as unsettling as the 2001 publication on Jewish and Palestinian genetics that created such a furor that the NIH retracted “The origin of Palestinians and their genetic relatedness with other Mediterranean populations“ and the Guardian wrote about the retraction in “Journal axes gene research on Jews and Palestinians” That is the story of science colliding with biblical dogma and science lost.
NIH: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11543891/
Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/25/medicalscience.genetics
Rabbi Lynn Gottleib described herself as the first woman rabbi and who has led over fifteen delegations to Palestine. She said, “non-violence is an act of hope” and described the leadership of Israel as a racist right-wing regime that has run amok.
When the public speakers ended and the discussion by the commissioners proceeded what stuck with me was the statement from councilmember Sophie Hahn’s appointee commissioner Nimrod Pitsker Elias. Elias stated he was the “mainstream” Jew implying that everyone else who identified as Jewish and who spoke for the ceasefire resolution was not mainstream. His comment sounded as those who didn’t align with his view were some kind of outlier.
There is a certain comfort in fortifying your position as being mainstream. Maybe Elias is right. And maybe he’s not. And, Is who has the largest number standing with them or who is or isn’t mainstream really the issue before the Peace and Justice Commission?
The Functions of the Peace and Justice Commission in the enabling legislation starts with:
“A. Advise the Berkeley City Council and the Berkeley Unified School Board on all matters relating to the City of Berkeley’s role in issues of peace and social justice, including, but not limited to the issues of ending the arms race, abolishing nuclear weapons, support for human rights and self-determination throughout the world, and the reallocation of our national resources so that money now spent on war and preparation of war is spent on fulfilling human needs and the promotion of peace.” https://berkeley.municipal.codes/BMC/3.68.070
You can find the full enabling legislation and purpose of the Peace and Justice Commission by going to the commission webpage and clicking on BMC Chapter 3.68 on the right side of the page under Enabling Legislation or go to Berkeley Municipal Code (BMC) starting at 3.68.010. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/boards-commissions/peace-and-justice-commission
In the commissioner discussion, Andrea Cassidy appointed by Arreguin on August 30, 2024 insisted that she had no time to read the resolution when she had over a month to read the first version for the cancelled September 3 meeting and at least four days to read the resolution before the commission.
There were complaints that there had been no listening session. With that, one has to wonder then, what the hours of comments from public speakers should be called?
In response to what I would call blatant behavior to obstruct, Lippman said he wished the discussion was of the content of the Resolution.
Lippman suggested to Cassidy that if she had issues with the motion on the floor, she should make a substitute motion.
Cassidy didn’t seem to know what a substitute motion was. To that I would suggest that commissioners put in more time to attending city council meetings. Attending city meetings is a continuous lesson in procedures.
I believe it was Elias that first asked for the amendment to the motion to insert a statement condemning Hamas. Lippman the maker of the motion would not agree to adding rape to the statement since there is dispute whether rapes occurred in the October 7 attack. The rest of the requested amendment was passed by the commission and is inserted as 4) on page 6 of the resolution, “Condemns the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on civilians in Israel, the murders, and the kidnappings.”
Elias complained that anti-Semitism was a misspelling and demonstrated a failure of the authors to properly seek consultation. In the final version it was changed to antisemitism to satisfy Elias, however, both spellings are correct and anyone doing any research will see both spellings. Which spelling is used varies by author, institution, journal, news media, etc.
The 8 to 7 vote finally came after three meeting extensions and “calling the question” which is a call to end debate and vote on the motion or motions on the floor. Calling the question requires a vote too. It was a long evening. According to my watch the vote to pass the Ceasefire Resolution as amended passed at 10:58 pm.
After the vote, commissioner Lippman said it would take about two months for the Ceasefire Resolution to reach the city council agenda for consideration.
Now that the commissioners appointed by Mayor Arreguin and councilmembers Kesarwani, Tregub, Hahn, Wengraf, and Humbert failed to block the Ceasefire Resolution whether the City Council actually votes on the Ceasefire Resolution anytime soon will depend on the actions of the City Manager and the Council Agenda and Rules Committee members, Mayor Arreguin and councilmembers Sophie Hahn and Susan Wengraf who have all openly stated their opposition to a Ceasefire Resolution.
No ceasefire resolution has made it to the draft Berkeley city council agenda. This resolution coming from the Peace and Justice commission will eventually make it to the draft agenda, but the Agenda Committee threesome (Arreguin, Wengraf, Hahn) have several paths to follow to delay the Ceasefire Resolution from seeing the light of day before Arreguin and Hahn make it through the November 5, 2024 election after the Resolution passes through the hands of the City Manager. Wengraf is retiring at the end of her term this year.
Anything submitted by boards and commissions for consideration by the City Council are subject to review by the City Manager. Currently that is the newly installed Paul Buddenhagen.
The city manager can let a board or commission submission progress to the agenda as submitted or step in and decide the commission submission needs a companion report. A companion report is either a report of opposition or modification of the action taken by a board or commission. If a companion report is to be submitted then an item from a commission will reappear on the city council agenda not sooner than 60 days or later than 120 days.
When the City Manager moves the commission item (Ceasefire Resolution) off his desk to be placed on the city council draft agenda, the Agenda Committee members currently Mayor Arreguin and councilmembers Sophie Hahn and Susan Wengraf as noted all in opposition have four paths for action:
https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/City%20Council%20Rules%20of%20Procedure%20-%20July%2011%202023%20-%20FINAL.pdf
Arreguin is running for State Senate against Jovanka Beckles who supports Ceasefire Resolutions. Beckles’ home base Richmond, California was the first city in the United States to pass a Ceasefire Resolution on October 25, 2023 followed by Oakland on November 27, 2023 and San Francisco on January 9, 2024.
Hahn who has explicitly stated she opposes a ceasefire resolution is running for mayor against Kate Harrison and Adena Ishii both of whom have expressed their support for a Ceasefire Resolution.
Next Monday, the second Monday in October the United States will observe the day as Columbus Day a federal holiday celebrating the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492.
Berkeley will celebrate October 14, 2024 (the 2nd Monday) as Indigenous Peoples Day. Berkeley was the first city in the U.S. to recognize the holiday as Indigenous Peoples Day in 1992. There are now over 200 cities, 17 states and Washington D.C. following Berkeley’s lead. President Biden is the first President to commemorate indigenous people on the federal holiday.
Berkeley has led on so many movements for justice that cities, states and countries have followed, one would expect this city would be standing for an end to this ugly horrific escalating expanding war that threatens the entire Middle East and threatens to pull the United States fully into it.
But we have a mayor and councilmembers who are firmly opposed to any ceasefire resolution.
Whether they actually believe in continuing this war that Israel has now expanded into Lebanon or if they see it as expedient for their November election to not offend the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) that sponsors the elected officials trips to Israel is unknown.
Our ballots are arriving any day. Whatever is going on in their heads, they have lost my vote. I will be voting for Jovanka Beckles and Kate Harrison.
Monday, September 30, 2024 was the long overdue meeting of the Peace and Justice Commission on a “Resolution for an Immediate and Permanent Ceasefire in Gaza, and an End to U.S. Military Aid to Israel, and Support for Palestinian Self-Determination”.
You probably know by now that the resolution passed with an 8 to 7 vote. But there is a lot more to what happened.
By the time you read this, we will have already passed one-year of war since the attack by Hamas on Israel killing 1195 including 815 civilians and took 251 hostages. It was a shock that reverberated across Israel and around the world. The year marks the escalation and expansion of the war into Lebanon with Israeli bombings including the insertion of bombs into pagers and walkie talkies killing over 2000. The number of dead Palestinians that were whole enough to be counted is more than 41,000.
Whole enough to be counted goes to the descriptions from physicians volunteering in Gaza of the impact on people of the bunker busting 2000 lb. bombs furnished by the United States to Israel. Dr. Mark Perlmutter, orthopedic surgeon who volunteered in Gaza, described bodies being brought to the hospital in bags that looked as if they had been in a shredder. Perlmutter also described seeing children being shot twice both in the head and chest with horrific exit wounds as no accident.
The July 10, 2024 article in the Lancet “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential” estimated direct and indirect deaths of Palestinians from the war may be more than 186,000. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext
It is impossible to identify the thousands buried in rubble.
The number of journalists and media workers killed in Gaza in this war of one year is now at 175.
As I finish this diary 19-year-old Hassan Hamad is the latest casualty in the targeting of journalists in Israel’s effort to silence and end reporting on the conditions in Gaza. Hamad, who was receiving messages from an Israeli officer ordering him to stop filming, died on October 6, 2024.
It is in this setting that on September 30, 2024 the main room at the North Berkeley Senior Center was packed. There were not enough chairs for everyone with many of us lining the walls and the back of the room. I tried counting. There were well over two hundred present.
If Maoz Inon Israeli peace activist whose parents were killed in the October 7, 2023 attack and is traveling the world with Palestinian peace activist Aziz Abu Sarah had been in the room he would have called for the ceasefire as he has done for the last year. Inon would have said as he did today in the interview broadcast, “[O]nly few years after the Second World War, where they were fighting among each other and killing 10 millions of each other, they realized that the only way to prevent the next war is making the enemies of the past into the partners of the future…” https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/7/maoz_inon_october_7_israel_palestine
What I had hoped when I sent my letter to the Peace and Justice Commission in support of the Ceasefire Resolution was that the commissioners would work together through wordsmithing, additional statements and possible subtractions for a ceasefire resolution they could all support. but it was obvious from the beginning there were seven commissioners who were appointed to block and obstruct.
The obstruction started when the Commission Chair Grace Morizawa opened the meeting acknowledging that the large public presence was for the Ceasefire Resolution and asked for a reordering of the agenda. Mayor Arreguin’s appointee commissioner Andrea Cassidy was the most vocal with others chiming in, the order of the agenda couldn’t be changed.
A vote was taken. The obstructers lost.
Commissioners Luke Taylor and George Lippman (both Jewish) wrote the Ceasefire Resolution and introduced the Resolution to the public before public comment began. Taylor explained their intent was to call for a permanent ceasefire and not to take sides. The resolution was written with the best intentions to bring it into the mission and function of the Peace and Justice Commission on the issues of peace and justice.
Taylor said he has students in the West Bank and when he opens his messages he will see martyred (killed) with the name of someone he knows.
I counted sixty-four speakers for the resolution (that includes speakers who assigned their time to another) and twenty speakers in opposition though there may have been a few more who assigned their time without the announcement that accompanied everyone for the ceasefire resolution that they were giving their time to another speaker. The limit was one minute for individual speakers and three minutes for speakers who received time from others.
There was no shouting or screaming during the evening though early on the commission chair Morizawa asked for clapping to stop and people to raise their hands and wiggle their fingers in a show of support instead. There were frequent reminders the meeting was scheduled to end at 10 pm encouraging speakers to leave time for the commission to discuss the resolution and vote.
There were speakers who were very moving, like the nurse practitioner who described what she experienced providing care during her month in Gaza.
Having done so much reading on Israel and Palestine, I wondered what the man holding the vehicle license plate in the back of the room was all about.
The Palestinian man was from the West Bank and showed his “green card” and passport and even his vehicle license plate to dispel the myth that Palestinians in the West Bank are treated equally.
Green cards are issued to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza strip. It is illegal for a Palestinian living in the West Bank to travel to Gaza or Jerusalem without a special travel permit from Israel. Palestinians living in East Jerusalem have blue IDs. Movement is tightly controlled with checkpoints and Palestinians must have their cards with them at all times. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/11/18/the-colour-coded-israeli-id-system-for-palestinians
Waving his green card, passport and license plate might not have had the same impact on others as it had for me. On the recommendation of a friend who is very much pro-Israel, I read Noa Tishby’s Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth. If that was your only source of information on Israel then you would have been led to believe that Palestinians living in Israel have all the same rights as the Jewish citizens of Israel which is simply not true. You would also believe the Nakba in 1948 was not much of anything when to the Palestinians it was the great catastrophe.
Reading the accounts by historians, the Nakba was the horrific. 750,000 Palestinians were violently displaced and dispossessed of land, property and belongings by the Israelis before and after the creation of the State of Israel.
The Nakba is akin to the Trail of Tears though the number of Native Americans in the forced removal was 60,000 with more than 3,000 deaths not 750,000 Palestinians and an unknown number of deaths.
What stuck with my friend, who is Jewish and supported the ceasefire resolution, was the public speaker who said the Jews were the indigenous people to the land implying the Palestinians were not indigenous and therefore had no rights.
I was surprised and not surprised by such a statement. It goes to the myth Israel was, A land without a people for people without a land, and that Jews are the rightful inhabitants of the land ignoring and denying the Palestinians as an indigenous people to the land.
I’ve been working my way through Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha a Palestinian historian at the University of London. Masalha writes with extensive sourcing and bibliography Palestine is not a modern invention, but instead firmly existed in the ancient past.
Accepting that Palestinians are indigenous to the land and existed in the ancient past is all very uncomfortable to historical and modern self-identity, but not as unsettling as the 2001 publication on Jewish and Palestinian genetics that created such a furor that the NIH retracted “The origin of Palestinians and their genetic relatedness with other Mediterranean populations“ and the Guardian wrote about the retraction in “Journal axes gene research on Jews and Palestinians” That is the story of science colliding with biblical dogma and science lost.
NIH: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11543891/
Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/25/medicalscience.genetics
Rabbi Lynn Gottleib described herself as the first woman rabbi and who has led over fifteen delegations to Palestine. She said, “non-violence is an act of hope” and described the leadership of Israel as a racist right-wing regime that has run amok.
When the public speakers ended and the discussion by the commissioners proceeded what stuck with me was the statement from councilmember Sophie Hahn’s appointee commissioner Nimrod Pitsker Elias. Elias stated he was the “mainstream” Jew implying that everyone else who identified as Jewish and who spoke for the ceasefire resolution was not mainstream. His comment sounded as those who didn’t align with his view were some kind of outlier.
There is a certain comfort in fortifying your position as being mainstream. Maybe Elias is right. And maybe he’s not. And, Is who has the largest number standing with them or who is or isn’t mainstream really the issue before the Peace and Justice Commission?
The Functions of the Peace and Justice Commission in the enabling legislation starts with:
“A. Advise the Berkeley City Council and the Berkeley Unified School Board on all matters relating to the City of Berkeley’s role in issues of peace and social justice, including, but not limited to the issues of ending the arms race, abolishing nuclear weapons, support for human rights and self-determination throughout the world, and the reallocation of our national resources so that money now spent on war and preparation of war is spent on fulfilling human needs and the promotion of peace.” https://berkeley.municipal.codes/BMC/3.68.070
You can find the full enabling legislation and purpose of the Peace and Justice Commission by going to the commission webpage and clicking on BMC Chapter 3.68 on the right side of the page under Enabling Legislation or go to Berkeley Municipal Code (BMC) starting at 3.68.010. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/boards-commissions/peace-and-justice-commission
In the commissioner discussion, Andrea Cassidy appointed by Arreguin on August 30, 2024 insisted that she had no time to read the resolution when she had over a month to read the first version for the cancelled September 3 meeting and at least four days to read the resolution before the commission.
There were complaints that there had been no listening session. With that, one has to wonder then, what the hours of comments from public speakers should be called?
In response to what I would call blatant behavior to obstruct, Lippman said he wished the discussion was of the content of the Resolution.
Lippman suggested to Cassidy that if she had issues with the motion on the floor, she should make a substitute motion.
Cassidy didn’t seem to know what a substitute motion was. To that I would suggest that commissioners put in more time to attending city council meetings. Attending city meetings is a continuous lesson in procedures.
I believe it was Elias that first asked for the amendment to the motion to insert a statement condemning Hamas. Lippman the maker of the motion would not agree to adding rape to the statement since there is dispute whether rapes occurred in the October 7 attack. The rest of the requested amendment was passed by the commission and is inserted as 4) on page 6 of the resolution, “Condemns the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on civilians in Israel, the murders, and the kidnappings.”
Elias complained that anti-Semitism was a misspelling and demonstrated a failure of the authors to properly seek consultation. In the final version it was changed to antisemitism to satisfy Elias, however, both spellings are correct and anyone doing any research will see both spellings. Which spelling is used varies by author, institution, journal, news media, etc.
The 8 to 7 vote finally came after three meeting extensions and “calling the question” which is a call to end debate and vote on the motion or motions on the floor. Calling the question requires a vote too. It was a long evening. According to my watch the vote to pass the Ceasefire Resolution as amended passed at 10:58 pm.
After the vote, commissioner Lippman said it would take about two months for the Ceasefire Resolution to reach the city council agenda for consideration.
Now that the commissioners appointed by Mayor Arreguin and councilmembers Kesarwani, Tregub, Hahn, Wengraf, and Humbert failed to block the Ceasefire Resolution whether the City Council actually votes on the Ceasefire Resolution anytime soon will depend on the actions of the City Manager and the Council Agenda and Rules Committee members, Mayor Arreguin and councilmembers Sophie Hahn and Susan Wengraf who have all openly stated their opposition to a Ceasefire Resolution.
No ceasefire resolution has made it to the draft Berkeley city council agenda. This resolution coming from the Peace and Justice commission will eventually make it to the draft agenda, but the Agenda Committee threesome (Arreguin, Wengraf, Hahn) have several paths to follow to delay the Ceasefire Resolution from seeing the light of day before Arreguin and Hahn make it through the November 5, 2024 election after the Resolution passes through the hands of the City Manager. Wengraf is retiring at the end of her term this year.
Anything submitted by boards and commissions for consideration by the City Council are subject to review by the City Manager. Currently that is the newly installed Paul Buddenhagen.
The city manager can let a board or commission submission progress to the agenda as submitted or step in and decide the commission submission needs a companion report. A companion report is either a report of opposition or modification of the action taken by a board or commission. If a companion report is to be submitted then an item from a commission will reappear on the city council agenda not sooner than 60 days or later than 120 days.
When the City Manager moves the commission item (Ceasefire Resolution) off his desk to be placed on the city council draft agenda, the Agenda Committee members currently Mayor Arreguin and councilmembers Sophie Hahn and Susan Wengraf as noted all in opposition have four paths for action:
- Will decide whether as with any agenda item in the draft agenda should it be on “consent” or “action” by leaving it as submitted or by moving it (some items always stay on action according to procedural rules),
- they can re-schedule board and commission items (Ceasefire Resolution) to appear on one of the next three regular meeting agendas after the council agenda where it first appears,
- they can send a board and commission item to a Council Policy Committee for review where the limit for taking action is supposed to be 120 days though items from councilmembers or staff can be renewed, extended and sometimes languish for months, (when city council is on recess those days are not counted in the 120) or
- the Agenda Committee can allow the item to proceed as submitted.
https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/City%20Council%20Rules%20of%20Procedure%20-%20July%2011%202023%20-%20FINAL.pdf
Arreguin is running for State Senate against Jovanka Beckles who supports Ceasefire Resolutions. Beckles’ home base Richmond, California was the first city in the United States to pass a Ceasefire Resolution on October 25, 2023 followed by Oakland on November 27, 2023 and San Francisco on January 9, 2024.
Hahn who has explicitly stated she opposes a ceasefire resolution is running for mayor against Kate Harrison and Adena Ishii both of whom have expressed their support for a Ceasefire Resolution.
Next Monday, the second Monday in October the United States will observe the day as Columbus Day a federal holiday celebrating the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492.
Berkeley will celebrate October 14, 2024 (the 2nd Monday) as Indigenous Peoples Day. Berkeley was the first city in the U.S. to recognize the holiday as Indigenous Peoples Day in 1992. There are now over 200 cities, 17 states and Washington D.C. following Berkeley’s lead. President Biden is the first President to commemorate indigenous people on the federal holiday.
Berkeley has led on so many movements for justice that cities, states and countries have followed, one would expect this city would be standing for an end to this ugly horrific escalating expanding war that threatens the entire Middle East and threatens to pull the United States fully into it.
But we have a mayor and councilmembers who are firmly opposed to any ceasefire resolution.
Whether they actually believe in continuing this war that Israel has now expanded into Lebanon or if they see it as expedient for their November election to not offend the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) that sponsors the elected officials trips to Israel is unknown.
Our ballots are arriving any day. Whatever is going on in their heads, they have lost my vote. I will be voting for Jovanka Beckles and Kate Harrison.
September 27, 2024 and Peace and Justice Commission Ceasefire Resolution
The Peace and Justice Commission will meet and vote on a Ceasefire Resolution Monday, September 30, 2024 at 7 pm at the NORTH Berkeley Senior Center at 1901 Hearst. This is not the normal meeting place for the Peace and Justice Commission, but they are expecting large attendance.
Please show up for peace and a ceasefire.
We can expect the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco (JCRC) will be putting out their call for their community to show up in opposition. The JCRC of San Francisco celebrated on their Facebook page the cancellation of the Peace and Justice Commission meeting that was supposed to take place the day after Labor Day, Tuesday, September 3rd. https://www.facebook.com/sfjcrc
There were over 100 of us who gathered the evening of the Peace and Justice meeting cancellation to hear speakers and stand in solidarity for a permanent ceasefire.
Dr. Feroze Sidwa MD, came from Stockton to describe his experience as a trauma surgeon in Gaza.
Dr. Sidwa is one of the many physicians that volunteer to go into war zones. There is a consistency in how the returning physicians describe the injuries and conditions in Gaza, it is, never have they seen such deliberately horrific scenes, children shot in the head, children with terrible painful injuries, a shortage of medicines to relieve their suffering, not even soap to wash their hands, children with loss of muscle and body fat from starvation, body burns, missing arms and legs, destroyed infrastructure and the imprisonment and torture of colleagues.
Biden the talking heads would like us to start history on October 7, 2023 ignoring the occupation, imprisonments, detentions, deliberate disabling injuries, torture and murder of Palestinians that preceded that day and continue. We are to see Israel as the victim and the expanding Israeli aggression into Lebanon and the West Bank as Israel defending itself.
The war continues with expanding aggression that could not happen without the complicity of the United States furnishing the bombs and munitions. The new military aid package to Israel approved by Biden totals $8.7 billion. A no from Biden to furnish more aid to Israel would bring this escalating war to a close, but Biden has not used the power he possess and has publicly called himself a Zionist.
The statements from Biden and his administration that they are working tirelessly day and night to bring a ceasefire and the lack of success is because of the intractable resistance of Hamas rings hollow when Netanyahu, the Knesset block ceasefire agreements and with their base of extremists call for the erasure of Palestine and the Palestinians and the flow of arms continues.
How can anyone think the hostages are going to survive while buildings are being blown up everywhere around them, there is no safe water and famine is setting in?
Harris has expressed recognizing the suffering of the Palestinians, but framing what much of the world including myself call a genocide as Israeli’s right to defend itself will not bring back the voters who are horrified by the bombing, killing, maiming of Palestinians in Gaza. It may well cost Harris and us the election.
Harris is the product of a JCRC sponsored trip to Israel. JCRC let out the secret on their website a little over a week ago, the same time they posted about Mayor Arreguin’s trip and declared in their myth and fact that the JCRC trips are balanced with multiple voices and that saying the trips are anything other than balanced with multiple narratives is “textbook antisemitism”.
If sponsoring trips for elected officials didn’t carry with them influence on future actions then how likely is it that organizations and individuals would spend thousands and thousands of dollars on them?
I am still voting for the Harris Walz ticket, because of Walz and a third party vote is a wasted vote. Protest votes are for the primary. When it comes to state and local elections, I / we have other choices in November.
At any other time, there would not even be a question of whether the posting error by the Peace and Justice Commission Secretary Okeya Vance-Dozier causing the meeting cancellation was deliberate or just a mistake.
Usually, this kind of mistake where the day of the week and the date don’t match is handled with reposting the agenda with the correct day, date and time and the meeting goes on not cancelled, but according to the article in the DailyCal the error was not caught until the morning of the meeting. The meeting was posted as Wednesday, September 3, 2024. September 3, 2024 was Tuesday.
Many of us have made posting mistakes. I’ve made them myself in what is now nearly a decade of emailing the summary of city meetings to make it easier to engage in local politics. In my case, there are always alert readers who see the error and email me within hours I need to send a correction.
At the rally in support of the Ceasefire Resolution, we learned Peace and Justice commissioner Diana Bohn was removed by Igor Tregub who was recently elected as Councilmember District 4. I had a chance to speak to Bohn, who said that Igor’s statements that she refused his request to insert language about Hamas into the resolution was a lie. She said she agreed to bring his requests forward.
It is up to the commissioners to accept or reject resolution change requests.
I expect there will be changes to the posted ceasefire resolution if there is a commitment among the commissioners to work together, but we shall see if that is the intention of the new and replacement appointees or whether they were appointed to block and obstruct any action.
After observing Igor at city meetings for nearly ten years and hearing from others their experiences, I know who I believe in the supposed disagreement – Diana Bohn. I told a friend who was all in on working on Tregub’s campaign and told me that she received his promise he supported a ceasefire resolution, that no matter what he said or promised she would learn like others.
Tregub has been great on environmental issues and it could easily be argued that the assault on Gaza is an environmental catastrophe too, but replacing commissioner Bohn on the Peace and Justice Commission on August 29, 2024, days before the important meeting on a ceasefire resolution is another extension of the pattern I’ve seen over the last ten years.
There are lives in the balance. The count of dead and maimed Palestinians grows daily. In just five days, the Israeli escalation into Lebanon has killed over 740, the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza is over 41,000 and in the West Bank it is over 600.
What Berkeley does actually matters. Berkeley’s history in movements for free speech, against apartheid to name two of many has put this city on the world stage. But this is 2024 and here we are with Mayor Arreguin and councilmembers Hahn and Wengraf steadfastly opposed to a ceasefire resolution.
Councilmembers Bartlett and Taplin who posted draft ceasefire resolutions on Twitter months ago quickly fell in line and withdrew them, never bringing them before full council for a vote. Taplin and Bartlett are both running for reelection to council.
Councilmember Lunaparra who ran for her seat on supporting a ceasefire resolution has fallen in line too.
When I went through the JCRC of San Francisco Facebook photo posts there was a smiling Tregub. I guess now that he is an elected official he will be eligible for one of the JCRC trips to Israel to rub shoulders with other Bay Area elected officials to solidify relationships, friendships and support.
I suspect the cozy JCRC sponsored trip to Israel in March 2023 is how Hank Levy, Alameda County Treasurer landed on the Sophie Hahn for Mayor mailer paid for by Sophie Hahn for Mayor 2024. Anyone who is a property owner in Alameda County addresses their property tax payment to Henry C. Levy aka Hank Levy. Hahn and Levy were on the same JCRC trip to Israel together along with Jenny Wong, City Auditor and Dan Kalb, Oakland Councilmember.
You won’t find a paper trail for Hahn’s participation in the JCRC trip as it is said she paid for the JCRC trip to Israel herself while still taking advantage of all the connections with elected officials. In the JCRC trip picture, Hahn stands behind a much taller man exposing a little less than half of her face. Wong also stands behind a taller person.
Wong’s trip was paid for by the JCRC. Wong completed the California Form 700 listing $4,743 for the trip to Israel and $175 for the extension, but you have to go to the state of California FPPC website to find the 700s, not the City of Berkeley conflict of interest filings where they should also be. The FPPC website is where you will also find Arreguin’s 700 forms for his sponsored trip.
Just because Arreguin and Wong filled out the proper 700 forms with the State of California, doesn’t mean the trip didn’t achieve influence. If a pro-Israel organization didn’t find that sponsored trips to support their pro-Israel cause weren’t beneficial then would they be paying for them?
The declaration of the JCRC trips being balanced made me think of the description of Harriet Martineau’s trip to the United Sates in 1834 in our September book club choice Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom by Lyon Woo. Martineau traveled to the United States determined to come with an open mind to view slavery first hand. Friends in Kentucky insisted she see the Saturday evening market run by cheerful slaves selling handicrafts and fruit, but Martineau found the other market where people were sold by auction and seeing that agony is what shaped her. (Put this book on your reading list)
We’ve had multiple scandals of late on sponsored trips from Clarence Thomas Supreme Court Justice to the indictment of Mayor Eric Adams New York City Mayor just this week.
There are posts on the JCRC of SF Facebook to activate JCRC members to oppose the ceasefire resolutions.
We can’t blame Dan Kalb’s third place finish in the State Senate primary in March behind Jovanka Beckles to his signing the Oakland City Council resolution for a ceasefire. Kalb didn’t have a strong campaign, but in reading the Marin’s Newsletter on elected officials and Jenny Wong to the end there should be concerns about elected officials’ participation in these sponsored trips. https://marincountyconfidential.substack.com/p/what-a-berkeley-elected-officials?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
With the rise of Trump, the racism and constant attacks on minorities this is an ugly time.
Anti-Semitism exists, it is real like Islamophobia, the call for mass deportations, the attacks on the Haitians.
The labeling of anyone who criticizes Israel as anti-Semitic brings up another book and another time in our history.
My plans to finish off all the partially read ebooks on my iPad while sitting in airports and on airplanes went down the drain when I picked up Betty Medsger's The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI published in 2014 about the break-in to the Media, Pennsylvania FBI office by eight Vietnam War resisters on March 8, 1971 the night of the Muhammad Ali versus Joe Frazier II fight.
The Burglary is the story of eight ordinary people who risked everything to confront the spying on of Americans and the use of violence, harassment, fabrication, demonization and defamation by the FBI, to suppress and silence dissent to the Vietnam War.
In many ways the tactics used by the FBI against the Vietnam war resisters are not so different from the name calling, accusations and attacks on Pro-Palestinian students. The students have been accused of being under the influence and monetized by the Russians and other foreign and subversive entities, ill-informed, misguided and anti-Semitic. They have been kicked out of colleges, denied their graduation degrees, had job offers withdrawn, doxed, threatened and beaten.
The attacks don’t end with students.
Today I sent my email to [email protected] for the Monday, September 30, 2024 Peace and Justice Commission meeting.
Dear Peace and Justice Commissioners, Thank you for bringing forward the Ceasefire Resolution. Please note my strong support. I expect there may be some wordsmithing, additional statements and possible subtraction of statements made to the resolution as it is currently posted in the agenda. It is my deepest hope and request that through working together you can reach an agreement on a resolution that you all can support. The escalation that is occurring as I write threatens tragedy for the entire Middle East region. Berkeley’s previous resolutions has put us on the world stage. What Berkeley does matters. We must not be silent. Kelly Hammargren
The Peace and Justice Commission will meet and vote on a Ceasefire Resolution Monday, September 30, 2024 at 7 pm at the NORTH Berkeley Senior Center at 1901 Hearst. This is not the normal meeting place for the Peace and Justice Commission, but they are expecting large attendance.
Please show up for peace and a ceasefire.
We can expect the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco (JCRC) will be putting out their call for their community to show up in opposition. The JCRC of San Francisco celebrated on their Facebook page the cancellation of the Peace and Justice Commission meeting that was supposed to take place the day after Labor Day, Tuesday, September 3rd. https://www.facebook.com/sfjcrc
There were over 100 of us who gathered the evening of the Peace and Justice meeting cancellation to hear speakers and stand in solidarity for a permanent ceasefire.
Dr. Feroze Sidwa MD, came from Stockton to describe his experience as a trauma surgeon in Gaza.
Dr. Sidwa is one of the many physicians that volunteer to go into war zones. There is a consistency in how the returning physicians describe the injuries and conditions in Gaza, it is, never have they seen such deliberately horrific scenes, children shot in the head, children with terrible painful injuries, a shortage of medicines to relieve their suffering, not even soap to wash their hands, children with loss of muscle and body fat from starvation, body burns, missing arms and legs, destroyed infrastructure and the imprisonment and torture of colleagues.
Biden the talking heads would like us to start history on October 7, 2023 ignoring the occupation, imprisonments, detentions, deliberate disabling injuries, torture and murder of Palestinians that preceded that day and continue. We are to see Israel as the victim and the expanding Israeli aggression into Lebanon and the West Bank as Israel defending itself.
The war continues with expanding aggression that could not happen without the complicity of the United States furnishing the bombs and munitions. The new military aid package to Israel approved by Biden totals $8.7 billion. A no from Biden to furnish more aid to Israel would bring this escalating war to a close, but Biden has not used the power he possess and has publicly called himself a Zionist.
The statements from Biden and his administration that they are working tirelessly day and night to bring a ceasefire and the lack of success is because of the intractable resistance of Hamas rings hollow when Netanyahu, the Knesset block ceasefire agreements and with their base of extremists call for the erasure of Palestine and the Palestinians and the flow of arms continues.
How can anyone think the hostages are going to survive while buildings are being blown up everywhere around them, there is no safe water and famine is setting in?
Harris has expressed recognizing the suffering of the Palestinians, but framing what much of the world including myself call a genocide as Israeli’s right to defend itself will not bring back the voters who are horrified by the bombing, killing, maiming of Palestinians in Gaza. It may well cost Harris and us the election.
Harris is the product of a JCRC sponsored trip to Israel. JCRC let out the secret on their website a little over a week ago, the same time they posted about Mayor Arreguin’s trip and declared in their myth and fact that the JCRC trips are balanced with multiple voices and that saying the trips are anything other than balanced with multiple narratives is “textbook antisemitism”.
If sponsoring trips for elected officials didn’t carry with them influence on future actions then how likely is it that organizations and individuals would spend thousands and thousands of dollars on them?
I am still voting for the Harris Walz ticket, because of Walz and a third party vote is a wasted vote. Protest votes are for the primary. When it comes to state and local elections, I / we have other choices in November.
At any other time, there would not even be a question of whether the posting error by the Peace and Justice Commission Secretary Okeya Vance-Dozier causing the meeting cancellation was deliberate or just a mistake.
Usually, this kind of mistake where the day of the week and the date don’t match is handled with reposting the agenda with the correct day, date and time and the meeting goes on not cancelled, but according to the article in the DailyCal the error was not caught until the morning of the meeting. The meeting was posted as Wednesday, September 3, 2024. September 3, 2024 was Tuesday.
Many of us have made posting mistakes. I’ve made them myself in what is now nearly a decade of emailing the summary of city meetings to make it easier to engage in local politics. In my case, there are always alert readers who see the error and email me within hours I need to send a correction.
At the rally in support of the Ceasefire Resolution, we learned Peace and Justice commissioner Diana Bohn was removed by Igor Tregub who was recently elected as Councilmember District 4. I had a chance to speak to Bohn, who said that Igor’s statements that she refused his request to insert language about Hamas into the resolution was a lie. She said she agreed to bring his requests forward.
It is up to the commissioners to accept or reject resolution change requests.
I expect there will be changes to the posted ceasefire resolution if there is a commitment among the commissioners to work together, but we shall see if that is the intention of the new and replacement appointees or whether they were appointed to block and obstruct any action.
After observing Igor at city meetings for nearly ten years and hearing from others their experiences, I know who I believe in the supposed disagreement – Diana Bohn. I told a friend who was all in on working on Tregub’s campaign and told me that she received his promise he supported a ceasefire resolution, that no matter what he said or promised she would learn like others.
Tregub has been great on environmental issues and it could easily be argued that the assault on Gaza is an environmental catastrophe too, but replacing commissioner Bohn on the Peace and Justice Commission on August 29, 2024, days before the important meeting on a ceasefire resolution is another extension of the pattern I’ve seen over the last ten years.
There are lives in the balance. The count of dead and maimed Palestinians grows daily. In just five days, the Israeli escalation into Lebanon has killed over 740, the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza is over 41,000 and in the West Bank it is over 600.
What Berkeley does actually matters. Berkeley’s history in movements for free speech, against apartheid to name two of many has put this city on the world stage. But this is 2024 and here we are with Mayor Arreguin and councilmembers Hahn and Wengraf steadfastly opposed to a ceasefire resolution.
Councilmembers Bartlett and Taplin who posted draft ceasefire resolutions on Twitter months ago quickly fell in line and withdrew them, never bringing them before full council for a vote. Taplin and Bartlett are both running for reelection to council.
Councilmember Lunaparra who ran for her seat on supporting a ceasefire resolution has fallen in line too.
When I went through the JCRC of San Francisco Facebook photo posts there was a smiling Tregub. I guess now that he is an elected official he will be eligible for one of the JCRC trips to Israel to rub shoulders with other Bay Area elected officials to solidify relationships, friendships and support.
I suspect the cozy JCRC sponsored trip to Israel in March 2023 is how Hank Levy, Alameda County Treasurer landed on the Sophie Hahn for Mayor mailer paid for by Sophie Hahn for Mayor 2024. Anyone who is a property owner in Alameda County addresses their property tax payment to Henry C. Levy aka Hank Levy. Hahn and Levy were on the same JCRC trip to Israel together along with Jenny Wong, City Auditor and Dan Kalb, Oakland Councilmember.
You won’t find a paper trail for Hahn’s participation in the JCRC trip as it is said she paid for the JCRC trip to Israel herself while still taking advantage of all the connections with elected officials. In the JCRC trip picture, Hahn stands behind a much taller man exposing a little less than half of her face. Wong also stands behind a taller person.
Wong’s trip was paid for by the JCRC. Wong completed the California Form 700 listing $4,743 for the trip to Israel and $175 for the extension, but you have to go to the state of California FPPC website to find the 700s, not the City of Berkeley conflict of interest filings where they should also be. The FPPC website is where you will also find Arreguin’s 700 forms for his sponsored trip.
Just because Arreguin and Wong filled out the proper 700 forms with the State of California, doesn’t mean the trip didn’t achieve influence. If a pro-Israel organization didn’t find that sponsored trips to support their pro-Israel cause weren’t beneficial then would they be paying for them?
The declaration of the JCRC trips being balanced made me think of the description of Harriet Martineau’s trip to the United Sates in 1834 in our September book club choice Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom by Lyon Woo. Martineau traveled to the United States determined to come with an open mind to view slavery first hand. Friends in Kentucky insisted she see the Saturday evening market run by cheerful slaves selling handicrafts and fruit, but Martineau found the other market where people were sold by auction and seeing that agony is what shaped her. (Put this book on your reading list)
We’ve had multiple scandals of late on sponsored trips from Clarence Thomas Supreme Court Justice to the indictment of Mayor Eric Adams New York City Mayor just this week.
There are posts on the JCRC of SF Facebook to activate JCRC members to oppose the ceasefire resolutions.
We can’t blame Dan Kalb’s third place finish in the State Senate primary in March behind Jovanka Beckles to his signing the Oakland City Council resolution for a ceasefire. Kalb didn’t have a strong campaign, but in reading the Marin’s Newsletter on elected officials and Jenny Wong to the end there should be concerns about elected officials’ participation in these sponsored trips. https://marincountyconfidential.substack.com/p/what-a-berkeley-elected-officials?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
With the rise of Trump, the racism and constant attacks on minorities this is an ugly time.
Anti-Semitism exists, it is real like Islamophobia, the call for mass deportations, the attacks on the Haitians.
The labeling of anyone who criticizes Israel as anti-Semitic brings up another book and another time in our history.
My plans to finish off all the partially read ebooks on my iPad while sitting in airports and on airplanes went down the drain when I picked up Betty Medsger's The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI published in 2014 about the break-in to the Media, Pennsylvania FBI office by eight Vietnam War resisters on March 8, 1971 the night of the Muhammad Ali versus Joe Frazier II fight.
The Burglary is the story of eight ordinary people who risked everything to confront the spying on of Americans and the use of violence, harassment, fabrication, demonization and defamation by the FBI, to suppress and silence dissent to the Vietnam War.
In many ways the tactics used by the FBI against the Vietnam war resisters are not so different from the name calling, accusations and attacks on Pro-Palestinian students. The students have been accused of being under the influence and monetized by the Russians and other foreign and subversive entities, ill-informed, misguided and anti-Semitic. They have been kicked out of colleges, denied their graduation degrees, had job offers withdrawn, doxed, threatened and beaten.
The attacks don’t end with students.
Today I sent my email to [email protected] for the Monday, September 30, 2024 Peace and Justice Commission meeting.
Dear Peace and Justice Commissioners, Thank you for bringing forward the Ceasefire Resolution. Please note my strong support. I expect there may be some wordsmithing, additional statements and possible subtraction of statements made to the resolution as it is currently posted in the agenda. It is my deepest hope and request that through working together you can reach an agreement on a resolution that you all can support. The escalation that is occurring as I write threatens tragedy for the entire Middle East region. Berkeley’s previous resolutions has put us on the world stage. What Berkeley does matters. We must not be silent. Kelly Hammargren
July 23, 2024 and Middle Housing
I was in Tim Walz country (Minnesota) when I saw the book Gunflint Burning: Fire in the Boundary Waters by Cary J. Griffith sitting on top of the stack of books at my sister’s house. Gunflint Burning is the story of the Ham Lake Fire, the largest fire in Minnesota history in almost a century.
If you have ever canoed and portaged through the Boundary Waters then you know how uniquely beautiful, serene the experience is. I did the trip decades ago with my then boyfriend. Out on the lake completely by ourselves we stopped to take in the spectacular beauty. It felt and looked as though the earth curved off from this miraculously special place.
Stephen Posniak who loved the Boundary Waters on May 5, 2007 two days into his twenty-seventh solo annual trip into the boundary waters in a moment of carelessness accidently ignited the fire that burned an estimated 75,551 acres of forest with a cost over $11,000,000 in resources, and destroyed so much that some told the author Griffith it was just too painful to relive through even talking about it.
More than one thousand firefighters, volunteers and others responded to the call to fight the Ham Lake Fire.
Griffith is masterful in describing wildfire as the beast that it is eating up whatever is in its path.
Any casual trip into the Berkeley Hills reveals yards, gullies, hillsides filled with highly flammable vegetation leading to the densely packed housing all of which make a tasty meal to feed the fire beast.
I doubt that any of the younger crowd that spoke in favor of adding housing, increasing density, in the high fire zones in the Berkeley Hills at the July 23 special meeting on the Middle Housing Ordinance have any appreciation of the beast that wildfire is and how a moment of carelessness, a wayward spark can ignite a fire that eats everything in its path until it runs out of fuel.
A young woman who has never previously attended the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission that I recall in the years I’ve attended the commission meetings stood up for non-agenda comments on August 7, 2024 to speak to how she attended the city council meeting on middle housing and that older people from the hills were talking about fire and opposing adding middle housing in the hills when her friends needed housing.
She insinuated through her comments that opposition to adding housing in the fire zones was a ruse by existing property owners to bolster their own selfish interests. She didn’t believe the hills were actually that hazardous and housing should be built in the hills so her friends would have places to live.
The comments from the young woman pushing for approval of increasing density in the hills, the fire zones, didn’t move any commission action at the meeting.
Through the evening we learned from the young woman’s comments she had lived in Berkeley three years and that is exactly the problem.
She wasn’t here in 1991 nearly thirty-three years ago when the Berkeley Oakland Firestorm exploded on Sunday morning October 20th destroying 2,843 single-family homes, 437 apartments and condominium units, took the lives of 25 and 150 people suffered non-fatal injuries.
Anyone who experienced that day is unlikely to forget it especially the people who were trapped in traffic trying to evacuate, abandoned their cars and ran for their lives with the fire billowing around them. Others of us watched the fire move down the hills not knowing if it could be stopped and heard the frightening fire survivor stories from co-workers, friends and neighbors over the days that followed.
I wonder if she read Fire Chief Sprague’s letter to City Council on the Middle Housing Zoning and fire risk, watched the films and followed the references from Sprague’s letter or for that matter if any of the people commenting at the July 23 City Council meeting for treating all of the City the same and increasing density in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones (VHFHSZ) read his letter. https://tinyurl.com/ye27ra3e
I doubt any of those commenters at City Council dismissing fire risk actually grasped that fire in the Berkeley Hills is cyclical in nature and at thirty-three years since the Oakland Berkeley Hills Fire in 1991 we are pushing our luck.
Of course, I’ve learned as a RN, people even when confronted with irrefutable science and facts, have an immense capacity for denial.
After the meeting, in the brief exchange I had with a member of the Berkeley Fire Department, asking what he thought, he gave this answer, “she isn’t interested in the science.”
When Kathy Kramer (organizer of the annual native plant garden tour) and I took a drive through the VHFHSZ to look at vegetation especially along the expected evacuation routes, nearly the entire area along our drive was filled with what looked more like kindling than what would fall into recommended steps for home hardening to reduce fire risk.
You can find the list of recommended native plants for VHFHSZ on the Bringing Back the Natives Fire-Hazardous plants and fire-resistant native plants webpage. https://www.bringingbackthenatives.net/fire-hazardous-plants-fire-resistant-native-plants
To make what Kathy and I saw that day even more alarming, my walk partner who lives in the WUI (Wildland Urban Interface) on the very edge where housing ends and wildland starts shared with me that in a recent evacuation exercise/drill she couldn’t get out and down the hill. That was in optimal conditions without raging fire and panicked drivers trying to evacuate.
Changing the VHFHSZ from a mix of highly flammable vegetation to fire-resistant native plants is a momentous task. The Berkeley Fire Department is trying to get on top of this through inspections and the Berkeley Fire Safe Council has done a miraculous job of clearing flammable eucalyptus debris, but there is still so much to be done.
A frequent phrase heard on adding and increasing housing density is that it is necessary because “my children can’t live here” or “my friends can’t live here” as if the 10.5 square miles of land in Berkeley is the only place in the world to live. What was interesting in my recent trip to Minnesota and all the other trips over the years, I never heard anyone whining about where their children or friends couldn’t live.
Fire was just part of the backdrop to what played out at the July 23, 2024 city council special meeting on the Middle Housing Ordinance that started at 3:30 pm, was supposed to end at 5:30 pm and ran over to 8:42 pm.
I read the late posted “Revised Agenda Material for Supplemental Packet 2” from Jordon Klein, that stated, “Staff recommend delaying action to adopt the Middle Housing Zoning Ordinance…” but I didn’t quite believe there would be no action so I attended in person to what I believed would be a historic city council meeting.
By the time the meeting started, there were over 100 in attendance and most everyone spoke. It broke out in young versus old meaning under 40 and people with gray hair, there was resentment over the long history of restrictive covenants, wealth in the hills and redlining in the flats. There was the continuing divide of race and class between hills and the flats with There was the demand that if density is going to increase then it should be across the entire city. There were calls of racism as the real issue for exempting the hills from increased density not fire.
The very real unaffordability of housing hovered over all of it.
It was former councilmember Lori Droste who brought the Missing Middle Housing to the table as an answer to housing affordability. Middle Housing defined as duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes were supposed to be more affordable by their very nature of adding more units to a single parcel and neatly fitting into single family home neighborhoods.
Missing Middle Housing was presented as addressing racism and the remnants of redlining and bringing equity by eliminating single family housing zoning even though it has been that same single family housing zoning that protected the historic San Pablo Park Black neighborhood and to this day single family housing provides the more modestly priced homes in West Berkeley which has the highest percentage of persons of color in the 2020 census.
At the August 10, 2024 Berkeley Neighborhoods Council meeting, Chip Moore Chair of the Planning Commission was invited to speak on the Middle Housing Zoning Ordinance. Moore (who is Black), expressed his reservations on the Middle Housing Zoning going on to state, “They [proponents of middle housing] are using racism as a way to defend bad public policy…this is not real…they want you to shy away from this argument and I think it is despicable that they are using redlining to justify this…”.
Councilmembers Bartlett, Robinson and Kesarwani attached their names as sponsors to Droste when Missing Middle Housing appeared on the city council agenda on February 26, 2019 (vote to continue), on March 26, 2019 (vote to hold over to April 23) and on April 23, 2019 when it was finally passed as a referral to the City Manager after which it landed at the Planning Commission.
Missing Middle Housing fell to the back shelf with the pandemic and other priorities. In the intervening years on February 23, 2021 City Council voted to end single family zoning and to allow multi-family housing throughout all residential neighborhoods with small scale developments in formerly single-family zoning neighborhood and low-density neighborhoods.
In 2023 Berkeley submitted its Housing Element for the years 2023 – 2031 which is the state required document and exercise to define Berkeley’s plan for adding the assigned Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) of 8,934 dwelling units which Berkeley expanded to plan for 15,000 units.
Each regional governmental group receives a bulk number of new housing units which are divided up and assigned to cities within a region. Berkeley is part of the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) of which Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin is President.
Interestingly, Richmond which is just up the road and has nearly three times the amount of land (33.7 square miles) was assigned by ABAG just 3,614 dwelling units. ABAG has their formulas. https://www.ci.richmond.ca.us/DocumentCenter/View/66913/6th-Cycle-Housing-Element_Certified?bidId=
In 2023, Middle Housing was revived and brought to the Planning Commission for discussion by city staff on November 1, 2023 to refine the recommendations to send to City Council.
The name Missing Middle Housing is to give the impression that besides middle size housing being missing that when middle housing is built it will be affordable to middle income and low-income households.
The entire theory ignores the price of land. The more units that can be put on a piece of land, the more valuable that piece of land becomes which in turn hikes the rent and sale price of units. It is why when a modest single-family home is demolished and replaced with two or more houses they each sell at market rate which is over $1,000,000.
At the start of the Planning Commission public hearing on Middle Housing on April 3, 2024 Laurie Capitelli (alternate for the evening for Blaine Merker) was still on the middle housing as “affordable” page until he was informed by other commissioners that middle housing was about increasing the number of units not affordability.
April 3 was the evening that John E. “Chip” Moore, the Planning Commission Chair, was absent and Barnali Ghosh, vice-chair, chaired the meeting. It was quite a scene. In the nearly ten years I’ve attended Berkeley City meetings, I’ve never seen anything like it. Ghosh was intent on not allowing Commissioner Elisa Mikitin to speak. Ghosh interrupted her, spoke over her and even called on city staff to stop Mikitin from speaking. Staff stayed out of it.
Despite Mikitin’s concern not being on the table, she remained calm making her point that if there wasn’t some kind of staging/priority setting to encourage density in single family home districts that normally escape the impacts of upzoning (increasing housing density with bigger taller buildings covering more of the land on a lot/parcel), i.e. North Berkeley, the modest more affordable homes in West Berkeley would be the target for demolition and replacement.
The Planning Commission voted 7 to 2 (Ayes: Andrew, Capitelli, Marthinsen, Twu, Hauser, Ghosh, Noes: Mikitin, Oates, Absent: Moore) for one to 50 dwelling units per acre in Lower Density Residential including the Hillside Overly the VHFSHZ and 20 to 80 dwelling units per acre in the Middle Density Residential and to change the language to say “building intensity can range” instead of “building intensity will range” under land use classifications.
The upzoning vote by the Planning Commission would increase the number of units in current low density neighborhoods with a range of 1 to 10 units to up to 50 units per acre and multi-unit neighborhoods from 20 to 40 units to up to 80 units per acre.
Middle Housing Zoning does not include the downtown which is zoned separately and seeing a surge of high-rises like the 26-story 456 unit building on Oxford and Center before the Zoning Adjustment Board on September 12, 2024. The Southside next to UC Berkeley Campus has already been upzoned.
In anticipation of the city council vote on Middle Housing Zoning, Commission on Aging commissioner Phyllis Orrick, who self-proclaimed as a YIMBY in her Sierra Club Northern Alameda County Executive Committee bid (she won), invited Karen Parolek to present examples of middle housing to the Commission on Aging on March 20, 2024. While Parolek was introduced as a Planner and representing Berkeley and she is the chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission and a member of Walk Bike Berkeley, Parolek is the co-founder and President of Opticos Design, Inc., a nationally engaged architecture and urban design firm which specializes in missing middle housing. Parolek is not a city employee.
Parolek’s presentation included photos of fourplexes with spacious lawns and other designs that blended into local architecture. Spacious green lawns can be seen driving north on Claremont Boulevard off Ashby and Claremont Avenue, but most of us are living in already very dense neighborhoods. I measured the narrowest distance between the wall of my house and the wall of my neighbor, the duplex next door. It is 5 feet 7 inches.
In fact, the map included in Fire Chief Sprague’s letter shows nearly the entire Fire Zones 2 and 3 as dangerously dense which places Berkeley’s Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones in the highest risk category in addition to the topography and highly flammable vegetation.
Mayor Arreguin partnered with councilmember Kesarwani before the July 23 council meeting on Middle Housing Zoning to draft a proposal. It was a smart move as without gaining Kesarwani as a partner the ordinance likely would have passed with Kesarwani and Humbert joining Taplin Bartlett and Lunapara who all voted to move forward instead of abstaining.
The Lunapara/Humbert motion exempted the Hillside Overlay R1-H (Fire Zone 2) until after the evacuation study is completed by the Fire Department and accepted the maximum densities recommended by Arreguin and Kesarwani.
R-1 – 40 units/acre – Resulting in 5 units on a 5000 square foot lot
R-1A and R2 – 50 units/acre – Resulting in 6 units on a 5000 square foot lot
R-2A and MU-R – 60 units/acre – Resulting in 7 units on a 5000 square foot lot
If your eyes glaze over and your brain goes into shutdown with these numbers, just know Jordon Klein, Director of Planning and Development stated in his introduction to City Council on July 23, “Council is being asked to consider new objective standards to facilitate the production of multi-unit projects in low density districts where those projects are currently not allowed.”
The bottom line is this is about opening every neighborhood to multi-unit development that has not already been upzoned.
There has been considerable information provided by the Fire Department in documents and presentations on the impact increasing the population and building density in Berkeley has on the capacity of the Fire Department to provide services.
The evacuation study being completed for the Fire Department is not just evacuation. It is also emergency access and will include when completed late this fall according to the information provided at the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission the capacity to assess the impact of how changing the configuration of a street will impact evacuation and emergency access.
The Berkeley Hills are not the only areas of the city with narrow streets creating trouble in the event of an emergency whether it is access for emergency medical services, response to fire or evacuation.
If public safety has a place in planning and decisions, any further upzoning or changes to the configuration of city streets should be on hold until the evacuation study is completed.
Middle Housing Zoning is coming back for a City Council vote, we need to keep our eyes open and our email pens ready.
I was in Tim Walz country (Minnesota) when I saw the book Gunflint Burning: Fire in the Boundary Waters by Cary J. Griffith sitting on top of the stack of books at my sister’s house. Gunflint Burning is the story of the Ham Lake Fire, the largest fire in Minnesota history in almost a century.
If you have ever canoed and portaged through the Boundary Waters then you know how uniquely beautiful, serene the experience is. I did the trip decades ago with my then boyfriend. Out on the lake completely by ourselves we stopped to take in the spectacular beauty. It felt and looked as though the earth curved off from this miraculously special place.
Stephen Posniak who loved the Boundary Waters on May 5, 2007 two days into his twenty-seventh solo annual trip into the boundary waters in a moment of carelessness accidently ignited the fire that burned an estimated 75,551 acres of forest with a cost over $11,000,000 in resources, and destroyed so much that some told the author Griffith it was just too painful to relive through even talking about it.
More than one thousand firefighters, volunteers and others responded to the call to fight the Ham Lake Fire.
Griffith is masterful in describing wildfire as the beast that it is eating up whatever is in its path.
Any casual trip into the Berkeley Hills reveals yards, gullies, hillsides filled with highly flammable vegetation leading to the densely packed housing all of which make a tasty meal to feed the fire beast.
I doubt that any of the younger crowd that spoke in favor of adding housing, increasing density, in the high fire zones in the Berkeley Hills at the July 23 special meeting on the Middle Housing Ordinance have any appreciation of the beast that wildfire is and how a moment of carelessness, a wayward spark can ignite a fire that eats everything in its path until it runs out of fuel.
A young woman who has never previously attended the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission that I recall in the years I’ve attended the commission meetings stood up for non-agenda comments on August 7, 2024 to speak to how she attended the city council meeting on middle housing and that older people from the hills were talking about fire and opposing adding middle housing in the hills when her friends needed housing.
She insinuated through her comments that opposition to adding housing in the fire zones was a ruse by existing property owners to bolster their own selfish interests. She didn’t believe the hills were actually that hazardous and housing should be built in the hills so her friends would have places to live.
The comments from the young woman pushing for approval of increasing density in the hills, the fire zones, didn’t move any commission action at the meeting.
Through the evening we learned from the young woman’s comments she had lived in Berkeley three years and that is exactly the problem.
She wasn’t here in 1991 nearly thirty-three years ago when the Berkeley Oakland Firestorm exploded on Sunday morning October 20th destroying 2,843 single-family homes, 437 apartments and condominium units, took the lives of 25 and 150 people suffered non-fatal injuries.
Anyone who experienced that day is unlikely to forget it especially the people who were trapped in traffic trying to evacuate, abandoned their cars and ran for their lives with the fire billowing around them. Others of us watched the fire move down the hills not knowing if it could be stopped and heard the frightening fire survivor stories from co-workers, friends and neighbors over the days that followed.
I wonder if she read Fire Chief Sprague’s letter to City Council on the Middle Housing Zoning and fire risk, watched the films and followed the references from Sprague’s letter or for that matter if any of the people commenting at the July 23 City Council meeting for treating all of the City the same and increasing density in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones (VHFHSZ) read his letter. https://tinyurl.com/ye27ra3e
I doubt any of those commenters at City Council dismissing fire risk actually grasped that fire in the Berkeley Hills is cyclical in nature and at thirty-three years since the Oakland Berkeley Hills Fire in 1991 we are pushing our luck.
Of course, I’ve learned as a RN, people even when confronted with irrefutable science and facts, have an immense capacity for denial.
After the meeting, in the brief exchange I had with a member of the Berkeley Fire Department, asking what he thought, he gave this answer, “she isn’t interested in the science.”
When Kathy Kramer (organizer of the annual native plant garden tour) and I took a drive through the VHFHSZ to look at vegetation especially along the expected evacuation routes, nearly the entire area along our drive was filled with what looked more like kindling than what would fall into recommended steps for home hardening to reduce fire risk.
You can find the list of recommended native plants for VHFHSZ on the Bringing Back the Natives Fire-Hazardous plants and fire-resistant native plants webpage. https://www.bringingbackthenatives.net/fire-hazardous-plants-fire-resistant-native-plants
To make what Kathy and I saw that day even more alarming, my walk partner who lives in the WUI (Wildland Urban Interface) on the very edge where housing ends and wildland starts shared with me that in a recent evacuation exercise/drill she couldn’t get out and down the hill. That was in optimal conditions without raging fire and panicked drivers trying to evacuate.
Changing the VHFHSZ from a mix of highly flammable vegetation to fire-resistant native plants is a momentous task. The Berkeley Fire Department is trying to get on top of this through inspections and the Berkeley Fire Safe Council has done a miraculous job of clearing flammable eucalyptus debris, but there is still so much to be done.
A frequent phrase heard on adding and increasing housing density is that it is necessary because “my children can’t live here” or “my friends can’t live here” as if the 10.5 square miles of land in Berkeley is the only place in the world to live. What was interesting in my recent trip to Minnesota and all the other trips over the years, I never heard anyone whining about where their children or friends couldn’t live.
Fire was just part of the backdrop to what played out at the July 23, 2024 city council special meeting on the Middle Housing Ordinance that started at 3:30 pm, was supposed to end at 5:30 pm and ran over to 8:42 pm.
I read the late posted “Revised Agenda Material for Supplemental Packet 2” from Jordon Klein, that stated, “Staff recommend delaying action to adopt the Middle Housing Zoning Ordinance…” but I didn’t quite believe there would be no action so I attended in person to what I believed would be a historic city council meeting.
By the time the meeting started, there were over 100 in attendance and most everyone spoke. It broke out in young versus old meaning under 40 and people with gray hair, there was resentment over the long history of restrictive covenants, wealth in the hills and redlining in the flats. There was the continuing divide of race and class between hills and the flats with There was the demand that if density is going to increase then it should be across the entire city. There were calls of racism as the real issue for exempting the hills from increased density not fire.
The very real unaffordability of housing hovered over all of it.
It was former councilmember Lori Droste who brought the Missing Middle Housing to the table as an answer to housing affordability. Middle Housing defined as duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes were supposed to be more affordable by their very nature of adding more units to a single parcel and neatly fitting into single family home neighborhoods.
Missing Middle Housing was presented as addressing racism and the remnants of redlining and bringing equity by eliminating single family housing zoning even though it has been that same single family housing zoning that protected the historic San Pablo Park Black neighborhood and to this day single family housing provides the more modestly priced homes in West Berkeley which has the highest percentage of persons of color in the 2020 census.
At the August 10, 2024 Berkeley Neighborhoods Council meeting, Chip Moore Chair of the Planning Commission was invited to speak on the Middle Housing Zoning Ordinance. Moore (who is Black), expressed his reservations on the Middle Housing Zoning going on to state, “They [proponents of middle housing] are using racism as a way to defend bad public policy…this is not real…they want you to shy away from this argument and I think it is despicable that they are using redlining to justify this…”.
Councilmembers Bartlett, Robinson and Kesarwani attached their names as sponsors to Droste when Missing Middle Housing appeared on the city council agenda on February 26, 2019 (vote to continue), on March 26, 2019 (vote to hold over to April 23) and on April 23, 2019 when it was finally passed as a referral to the City Manager after which it landed at the Planning Commission.
Missing Middle Housing fell to the back shelf with the pandemic and other priorities. In the intervening years on February 23, 2021 City Council voted to end single family zoning and to allow multi-family housing throughout all residential neighborhoods with small scale developments in formerly single-family zoning neighborhood and low-density neighborhoods.
In 2023 Berkeley submitted its Housing Element for the years 2023 – 2031 which is the state required document and exercise to define Berkeley’s plan for adding the assigned Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) of 8,934 dwelling units which Berkeley expanded to plan for 15,000 units.
Each regional governmental group receives a bulk number of new housing units which are divided up and assigned to cities within a region. Berkeley is part of the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) of which Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin is President.
Interestingly, Richmond which is just up the road and has nearly three times the amount of land (33.7 square miles) was assigned by ABAG just 3,614 dwelling units. ABAG has their formulas. https://www.ci.richmond.ca.us/DocumentCenter/View/66913/6th-Cycle-Housing-Element_Certified?bidId=
In 2023, Middle Housing was revived and brought to the Planning Commission for discussion by city staff on November 1, 2023 to refine the recommendations to send to City Council.
The name Missing Middle Housing is to give the impression that besides middle size housing being missing that when middle housing is built it will be affordable to middle income and low-income households.
The entire theory ignores the price of land. The more units that can be put on a piece of land, the more valuable that piece of land becomes which in turn hikes the rent and sale price of units. It is why when a modest single-family home is demolished and replaced with two or more houses they each sell at market rate which is over $1,000,000.
At the start of the Planning Commission public hearing on Middle Housing on April 3, 2024 Laurie Capitelli (alternate for the evening for Blaine Merker) was still on the middle housing as “affordable” page until he was informed by other commissioners that middle housing was about increasing the number of units not affordability.
April 3 was the evening that John E. “Chip” Moore, the Planning Commission Chair, was absent and Barnali Ghosh, vice-chair, chaired the meeting. It was quite a scene. In the nearly ten years I’ve attended Berkeley City meetings, I’ve never seen anything like it. Ghosh was intent on not allowing Commissioner Elisa Mikitin to speak. Ghosh interrupted her, spoke over her and even called on city staff to stop Mikitin from speaking. Staff stayed out of it.
Despite Mikitin’s concern not being on the table, she remained calm making her point that if there wasn’t some kind of staging/priority setting to encourage density in single family home districts that normally escape the impacts of upzoning (increasing housing density with bigger taller buildings covering more of the land on a lot/parcel), i.e. North Berkeley, the modest more affordable homes in West Berkeley would be the target for demolition and replacement.
The Planning Commission voted 7 to 2 (Ayes: Andrew, Capitelli, Marthinsen, Twu, Hauser, Ghosh, Noes: Mikitin, Oates, Absent: Moore) for one to 50 dwelling units per acre in Lower Density Residential including the Hillside Overly the VHFSHZ and 20 to 80 dwelling units per acre in the Middle Density Residential and to change the language to say “building intensity can range” instead of “building intensity will range” under land use classifications.
The upzoning vote by the Planning Commission would increase the number of units in current low density neighborhoods with a range of 1 to 10 units to up to 50 units per acre and multi-unit neighborhoods from 20 to 40 units to up to 80 units per acre.
Middle Housing Zoning does not include the downtown which is zoned separately and seeing a surge of high-rises like the 26-story 456 unit building on Oxford and Center before the Zoning Adjustment Board on September 12, 2024. The Southside next to UC Berkeley Campus has already been upzoned.
In anticipation of the city council vote on Middle Housing Zoning, Commission on Aging commissioner Phyllis Orrick, who self-proclaimed as a YIMBY in her Sierra Club Northern Alameda County Executive Committee bid (she won), invited Karen Parolek to present examples of middle housing to the Commission on Aging on March 20, 2024. While Parolek was introduced as a Planner and representing Berkeley and she is the chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission and a member of Walk Bike Berkeley, Parolek is the co-founder and President of Opticos Design, Inc., a nationally engaged architecture and urban design firm which specializes in missing middle housing. Parolek is not a city employee.
Parolek’s presentation included photos of fourplexes with spacious lawns and other designs that blended into local architecture. Spacious green lawns can be seen driving north on Claremont Boulevard off Ashby and Claremont Avenue, but most of us are living in already very dense neighborhoods. I measured the narrowest distance between the wall of my house and the wall of my neighbor, the duplex next door. It is 5 feet 7 inches.
In fact, the map included in Fire Chief Sprague’s letter shows nearly the entire Fire Zones 2 and 3 as dangerously dense which places Berkeley’s Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones in the highest risk category in addition to the topography and highly flammable vegetation.
Mayor Arreguin partnered with councilmember Kesarwani before the July 23 council meeting on Middle Housing Zoning to draft a proposal. It was a smart move as without gaining Kesarwani as a partner the ordinance likely would have passed with Kesarwani and Humbert joining Taplin Bartlett and Lunapara who all voted to move forward instead of abstaining.
The Lunapara/Humbert motion exempted the Hillside Overlay R1-H (Fire Zone 2) until after the evacuation study is completed by the Fire Department and accepted the maximum densities recommended by Arreguin and Kesarwani.
R-1 – 40 units/acre – Resulting in 5 units on a 5000 square foot lot
R-1A and R2 – 50 units/acre – Resulting in 6 units on a 5000 square foot lot
R-2A and MU-R – 60 units/acre – Resulting in 7 units on a 5000 square foot lot
If your eyes glaze over and your brain goes into shutdown with these numbers, just know Jordon Klein, Director of Planning and Development stated in his introduction to City Council on July 23, “Council is being asked to consider new objective standards to facilitate the production of multi-unit projects in low density districts where those projects are currently not allowed.”
The bottom line is this is about opening every neighborhood to multi-unit development that has not already been upzoned.
There has been considerable information provided by the Fire Department in documents and presentations on the impact increasing the population and building density in Berkeley has on the capacity of the Fire Department to provide services.
The evacuation study being completed for the Fire Department is not just evacuation. It is also emergency access and will include when completed late this fall according to the information provided at the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission the capacity to assess the impact of how changing the configuration of a street will impact evacuation and emergency access.
The Berkeley Hills are not the only areas of the city with narrow streets creating trouble in the event of an emergency whether it is access for emergency medical services, response to fire or evacuation.
If public safety has a place in planning and decisions, any further upzoning or changes to the configuration of city streets should be on hold until the evacuation study is completed.
Middle Housing Zoning is coming back for a City Council vote, we need to keep our eyes open and our email pens ready.
August 4, 2024 on Filmmakers in in Berkeley
The current Historical Society exhibit running until September 21, 2024 is “Berkeley and the Movies”. It is fitting that this exhibit at this time is sponsored by the Historical Society as the once vibrant center of filmmaking and film viewing in Berkeley is fading into the past falling victim to the steady erosion of theaters demolished for housing and creative space for collaboration turned over to more profitable tenants.
At its peak there were thirty-two movie theaters in Berkeley. Now there is only the Elmwood and the Pacific Film Archive. The Pacific Film Archive doesn’t help if your desire is to see current films, especially the independent and documentary films that used to be offered at the Shattuck Cinemas in downtown Berkeley with ten screens.
When I stopped by the exhibit on Thursday at 1931 Center in the Veterans Building, the volunteer (I didn’t catch her name) said I missed the talk by Saul Zaentz’s nephew Paul Zaentz. It evidently wasn’t recorded as it is not available on the Historical Society website. The volunteer told me how Saul Zaentz (the early owner of 2600 Tenth Street) planned for filmmakers to fill the building, but he soon found he needed tenants who could pay higher rent. She worked for McGraw Hill which shared the building with the filmmakers and paid the higher rent in the Fantasy Studio Building.
The Historical Society exhibit is open on Thursdays and Fridays from 1 pm to 4 pm. https://berkhistory.org/2024/03/20/berkeley-and-the-movies/
Wareham purchased the Fantasy Studio Building in 2007. As noted by Frances Dinkelspiel in her July 31, 2018 article, “Berkeley’s Fantasy Studios closure came because of financial struggles”. From her interview with Rich Robbins she wrote, “[W]areham Development’s main focus is on building and operating life science, medical, research and biotechnology complexes…” https://www.berkeleyside.org/2018/07/31/berkeleys-fantasy-studios-closure-came-because-of-financial-struggles
After Arreguin and Taplin recused themselves stating they had received contributions from a party to the matter before council, Wengraf took over the appeal by Wareham Development to City Council to overturn the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) decision upholding that filmmaking is an art and thereby the space occupied by filmmakers at 2600 Tenth Street (known as the Fantasy Studio Building even though fantasy studios closed in 2018) is protected under the West Berkeley Plan.
Overturning the ZAB decision by council would enable Wareham Development the building owner to turn what had been determined to be three protected spaces for the creation of art or crafts (filmmakers) into nine units for research and development (R & D). It all boiled down to was filmmaking an art (protected) or media production (not protected).
In the city staff presentation photographers/filmmakers are included as examples of an establishment engaged in the creation of art or crafts and in a separate box film recording, editing, special effects production, motion picture processing are listed as media production.
Presentations from both sides were heard with Wareham Development challenging the ZAB decision and defining what the filmmakers were doing was media production and not protected. The filmmakers and Rick Auerbach representing the arts and the West Berkeley Plan spoke to filmmaking as an art and always included in the West Berkeley Plan protections.
In 2011 years after the West Berkeley Plan was adopted, a definition of media production was added. Auerbach informed Council that the Civic Arts Commission reviewed and included filmmaking as an art twice which Council approved. Auerbach reminded Council that the Oscars are given from the Academy of the Arts.
Maureen Gosling documentary filmmaker spoke to her experience, ”I’ve been working at the fantasy building since 1984, that’s thirty years. The Berkeley Community with the hub at Saul Zaentz Fantasy Studios has created a legacy and made an outsized contribution to the art of film in the United States and around the world. Our independent community includes directors, editors, writers, cinematologists, sound mixers and more…In the time I have been there, I have felt the art space chipped away, chipped away, chipped away and now it seems it is happening again…”
We heard how working in one building allowed collaboration and fostered mentoring of film students and new filmmakers.
After all the public speakers made their points, Wengraf opened the Council discussion relating how she was a documentary filmmaker, worked in the building and met her husband there.
I wondered why she hadn’t recused herself and then realized she was relating this personal story, because she had already made up her mind that the filmmakers were not protected and Wareham would have their appeal upheld.
Wengraf preceded her question to Chris Barlow from Wareham with, “[T]he fim making community is feeling threatened and that’s not a good thing…but, I’m trying to understand the threat…” and posed the question, “Is there any intention to displace the community of filmmakers...?” and asked about longer leases.
Chris Barlow gave a long round about answer how they met with each tenant, how longer leases weren’t suitable, because of the cyclical nature of the filmmaker funding and two to three-year leases were more practical.
Wengraf responded with “okay” giving the impression she was reassured and then turned the discussion over the remaining councilmembers.
The exchange between Wengraf and Barlow reminded me of another Susan, Susan Collins and what she said about meeting with Judge Kavanaugh when she announced she would vote to confirm Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. In light of what the Supreme Court has done since securing a six to three majority those remarks from Collins make for very interesting reading. https://www.collins.senate.gov/newsroom/senator-collins-announces-she-will-vote-confirm-judge-kavanaugh
Throughout the evening in public testimony, question and answer between councilmembers and the filmmakers we heard that Wareham did not meet individually with all the filmmaker tenants as stated, how longer leases were not offered, how rents were doubled and tripled, how Wareham would not meet with them as a group, how Wareham pitted one against the other and how some had already left.
It wasn’t a surprise when the remaining councilmembers, Kesarwani, Bartlett, Tregub, Hahn, Wengraf, Lunaparra, and Humbert voted unanimously to support the appeal by Wareham Developments. Bartlett rather than making a hollow how much he cared, stated his concern that denying the appeal would entangle the city in a lawsuit.
The city elected, Planning Department and developers have been chasing after biotech, research and development as the next big thing. Land is cheaper in West Berkeley making it the target area for development. The West Berkeley Plan was supposed to protect the arts and crafts from being pushed out, but when City Council approved the first change of use (zoning) for the Wareham Development new building now occupied by Kaiser it was really the beginning of the end for protections of the arts.
There is something very special about watching a movie on the big screen with surround sound. It was something I took for granted until we fought to save our movie theaters and lost. And as we heard on Tuesday evening July 30, 2024 there is something very special about having filmmakers sharing the same spaces where they can form community, create, collaborate, and mentor film students and newcomers to filmmaking.
Last week I watched the sold out documentary “Al Shifa Hospital: The Crimes They Tried to Bury” in the packed fellowship hall at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists church. It was a rough film in content. A panel discussion followed with Dr. Feroze Sidwa and Dr. Mohammad Subeh who both had recently returned from their second rotation in Gaza and were present in person. What is happening in Gaza and the West Bank is heart breaking and horrific.
Documentary films change minds in ways that an article can’t.
The proceeds from attending the film will be donated to the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
Berkeley has lost its theaters and now it looks as though Berkeley will lose its filmmakers too.
This is a sad ending to another marathon day with Berkeley City Council that started and ended with the arts.
We have an election for a new mayor in November. We should ask what is the vision for Berkeley.
This might be a good time to listen to Governor Tim Walz and Ezra Klein and hear how Walz’s vision set the direction for Minnesota. Walz is uplifting and positive. This link should work https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-tim-walz.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AU4.fJ6r.TNezOafnL4Cl&smid=em-share
Listening to podcasts doesn’t require a subscription, they are just better with a finger on fast forward to skip the ads.
The current Historical Society exhibit running until September 21, 2024 is “Berkeley and the Movies”. It is fitting that this exhibit at this time is sponsored by the Historical Society as the once vibrant center of filmmaking and film viewing in Berkeley is fading into the past falling victim to the steady erosion of theaters demolished for housing and creative space for collaboration turned over to more profitable tenants.
At its peak there were thirty-two movie theaters in Berkeley. Now there is only the Elmwood and the Pacific Film Archive. The Pacific Film Archive doesn’t help if your desire is to see current films, especially the independent and documentary films that used to be offered at the Shattuck Cinemas in downtown Berkeley with ten screens.
When I stopped by the exhibit on Thursday at 1931 Center in the Veterans Building, the volunteer (I didn’t catch her name) said I missed the talk by Saul Zaentz’s nephew Paul Zaentz. It evidently wasn’t recorded as it is not available on the Historical Society website. The volunteer told me how Saul Zaentz (the early owner of 2600 Tenth Street) planned for filmmakers to fill the building, but he soon found he needed tenants who could pay higher rent. She worked for McGraw Hill which shared the building with the filmmakers and paid the higher rent in the Fantasy Studio Building.
The Historical Society exhibit is open on Thursdays and Fridays from 1 pm to 4 pm. https://berkhistory.org/2024/03/20/berkeley-and-the-movies/
Wareham purchased the Fantasy Studio Building in 2007. As noted by Frances Dinkelspiel in her July 31, 2018 article, “Berkeley’s Fantasy Studios closure came because of financial struggles”. From her interview with Rich Robbins she wrote, “[W]areham Development’s main focus is on building and operating life science, medical, research and biotechnology complexes…” https://www.berkeleyside.org/2018/07/31/berkeleys-fantasy-studios-closure-came-because-of-financial-struggles
After Arreguin and Taplin recused themselves stating they had received contributions from a party to the matter before council, Wengraf took over the appeal by Wareham Development to City Council to overturn the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) decision upholding that filmmaking is an art and thereby the space occupied by filmmakers at 2600 Tenth Street (known as the Fantasy Studio Building even though fantasy studios closed in 2018) is protected under the West Berkeley Plan.
Overturning the ZAB decision by council would enable Wareham Development the building owner to turn what had been determined to be three protected spaces for the creation of art or crafts (filmmakers) into nine units for research and development (R & D). It all boiled down to was filmmaking an art (protected) or media production (not protected).
In the city staff presentation photographers/filmmakers are included as examples of an establishment engaged in the creation of art or crafts and in a separate box film recording, editing, special effects production, motion picture processing are listed as media production.
Presentations from both sides were heard with Wareham Development challenging the ZAB decision and defining what the filmmakers were doing was media production and not protected. The filmmakers and Rick Auerbach representing the arts and the West Berkeley Plan spoke to filmmaking as an art and always included in the West Berkeley Plan protections.
In 2011 years after the West Berkeley Plan was adopted, a definition of media production was added. Auerbach informed Council that the Civic Arts Commission reviewed and included filmmaking as an art twice which Council approved. Auerbach reminded Council that the Oscars are given from the Academy of the Arts.
Maureen Gosling documentary filmmaker spoke to her experience, ”I’ve been working at the fantasy building since 1984, that’s thirty years. The Berkeley Community with the hub at Saul Zaentz Fantasy Studios has created a legacy and made an outsized contribution to the art of film in the United States and around the world. Our independent community includes directors, editors, writers, cinematologists, sound mixers and more…In the time I have been there, I have felt the art space chipped away, chipped away, chipped away and now it seems it is happening again…”
We heard how working in one building allowed collaboration and fostered mentoring of film students and new filmmakers.
After all the public speakers made their points, Wengraf opened the Council discussion relating how she was a documentary filmmaker, worked in the building and met her husband there.
I wondered why she hadn’t recused herself and then realized she was relating this personal story, because she had already made up her mind that the filmmakers were not protected and Wareham would have their appeal upheld.
Wengraf preceded her question to Chris Barlow from Wareham with, “[T]he fim making community is feeling threatened and that’s not a good thing…but, I’m trying to understand the threat…” and posed the question, “Is there any intention to displace the community of filmmakers...?” and asked about longer leases.
Chris Barlow gave a long round about answer how they met with each tenant, how longer leases weren’t suitable, because of the cyclical nature of the filmmaker funding and two to three-year leases were more practical.
Wengraf responded with “okay” giving the impression she was reassured and then turned the discussion over the remaining councilmembers.
The exchange between Wengraf and Barlow reminded me of another Susan, Susan Collins and what she said about meeting with Judge Kavanaugh when she announced she would vote to confirm Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. In light of what the Supreme Court has done since securing a six to three majority those remarks from Collins make for very interesting reading. https://www.collins.senate.gov/newsroom/senator-collins-announces-she-will-vote-confirm-judge-kavanaugh
Throughout the evening in public testimony, question and answer between councilmembers and the filmmakers we heard that Wareham did not meet individually with all the filmmaker tenants as stated, how longer leases were not offered, how rents were doubled and tripled, how Wareham would not meet with them as a group, how Wareham pitted one against the other and how some had already left.
It wasn’t a surprise when the remaining councilmembers, Kesarwani, Bartlett, Tregub, Hahn, Wengraf, Lunaparra, and Humbert voted unanimously to support the appeal by Wareham Developments. Bartlett rather than making a hollow how much he cared, stated his concern that denying the appeal would entangle the city in a lawsuit.
The city elected, Planning Department and developers have been chasing after biotech, research and development as the next big thing. Land is cheaper in West Berkeley making it the target area for development. The West Berkeley Plan was supposed to protect the arts and crafts from being pushed out, but when City Council approved the first change of use (zoning) for the Wareham Development new building now occupied by Kaiser it was really the beginning of the end for protections of the arts.
There is something very special about watching a movie on the big screen with surround sound. It was something I took for granted until we fought to save our movie theaters and lost. And as we heard on Tuesday evening July 30, 2024 there is something very special about having filmmakers sharing the same spaces where they can form community, create, collaborate, and mentor film students and newcomers to filmmaking.
Last week I watched the sold out documentary “Al Shifa Hospital: The Crimes They Tried to Bury” in the packed fellowship hall at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists church. It was a rough film in content. A panel discussion followed with Dr. Feroze Sidwa and Dr. Mohammad Subeh who both had recently returned from their second rotation in Gaza and were present in person. What is happening in Gaza and the West Bank is heart breaking and horrific.
Documentary films change minds in ways that an article can’t.
The proceeds from attending the film will be donated to the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
Berkeley has lost its theaters and now it looks as though Berkeley will lose its filmmakers too.
This is a sad ending to another marathon day with Berkeley City Council that started and ended with the arts.
We have an election for a new mayor in November. We should ask what is the vision for Berkeley.
This might be a good time to listen to Governor Tim Walz and Ezra Klein and hear how Walz’s vision set the direction for Minnesota. Walz is uplifting and positive. This link should work https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-tim-walz.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AU4.fJ6r.TNezOafnL4Cl&smid=em-share
Listening to podcasts doesn’t require a subscription, they are just better with a finger on fast forward to skip the ads.
August 4, 2024 on Berkeley Ballot Measures
City Council began and ended with the arts on Tuesday, July 30, 2024 in an eight hour and twenty-minute session of two back to back meetings one at 3 pm and a second scheduled for 6 pm that didn’t start until 7:27 pm, the entire evening of city council didn’t end until 11:20 pm.
Council didn’t finish the 3 pm meeting agenda so when they should be off on summer recess, they are meeting again at 6 pm on Monday, August 5, 2024.
If we’re paying attention, not reviewing Councilmember Lunaparra’s ballot measure on Tuesday, July 30 looks like Arreguin’s strategy to give himself and Hahn more time to write an alternative ballot measure. The email notice that the August 5 meeting agenda posted on Thursday had been revised arrived in my email inbox at 6 pm Friday.
The revised agenda with the added alternate ballot measure now reads as one agenda item with 1.a. from Lunaparra – Placing the Berkeley Tenant Protection and Right to Organize Act on the November 5, 2024 Ballot and 1.b. from Arreguin and Hahn - Placing the Berkeley Tenant Protection and Right to Organize Act and Funding Housing Retention on the November 5, 2024 ballot.
I was expecting a long and interesting discussion Monday evening on the Berkeley Tenant Protection and Right to Organize Act for the November election, but with the Arreguin - Hahn alternative removing Golden Duplexes (a Golden Duplex is when the owner occupies one of the two units), we might get by without having to bring rations to make it through the night, but there is a twist, keep reading.
Lunaparra’s ballot measure if passed by the voters as written would phase out the Golden Duplex modify grounds for eviction, allow tenant associations, limit automatic rent adjustment (rent increases) based on CPI to 3%, eliminate the ability of boards and city council to remove price controls during period of high vacancy, require landlords to notify tenants of their rights. Arreguin and Hahn removed the Golden Duplex, eliminated the prohibition of boards and city council to remove price controls during period of high vacancy and added using U1 Ballot Initiative funds for housing retention.
Deleting the section on prohibiting boards and commissions from removing price controls during high vacancies, takes on a whole different perspective when you read (the article is short) “Real Estate Software Aided Price-Fixing ‘Cartel’ Among US Property Companies” by Tyler Walicek published on July 28, 2024. https://truthout.org/articles/real-estate-software-aided-price-fixing-cartel-among-us-property-companies/
Walicek covers how property companies use the program RealPage which “suggests” how high rents can and should be pushed as it is more profitable to maximize rent than to fill units. Lunaparra is on the right track with prohibiting removing price controls during periods of high vacancies as the software could very well assist the large property owners to maximize rent (price gouge the captive student audience) and manage vacancy rates to avoid rent price controls.
After investigative reporter Heather Vogell exposed the rent fixing game in ProPublica in 2022, lawsuits have cropped up around the country from coast to coast and even include Fresno, California. Maximizing rent/price gouging rather than filling units as a business plan certainly pieces together the complaint of exorbitant rents and vacant units.
To read both ballot measures on tenant protections go to https://berkeleyca.gov/city-council-special-meeting-eagenda-august-5-2024
There were ten proposed local ballot measures besides Lunaparra’s.
The community survey on the ballot initiatives kicked off the 3 pm meeting discussion.
The results of the issues identified by the city of Berkeley to survey ranked in the following order of priority of where tax dollars should be spent by the residents who responded, 1) Major investment in affordable housing, 2) Continue rehousing and providing services for homelessness, 3) Repairing deteriorating streets, 4) Planting and maintaining trees and improving park maintenance and infrastructure, including the waterfront, 5) Electrification of gas-powered buildings to reduce climate impact, 6) Expanding Sunday hours and Children’s programming at libraries, and 7) Saving and sustaining arts and culture.
The Council was considering a ballot measure for the arts (theaters, music, dance and theater organizations), but dropped any consideration of crafting a ballot measure for the performing arts when the survey respondents placed financing the arts through additional taxes at the bottom of their priorities. None of the machinations of possible tax plans, i.e. parcel tax, sales tax or transient occupancy tax (TOT – tax added onto hotel, etc. bills) garnered enough support to predict even the slimmest chance of passing a ballot measure for the arts.
Looking at the broader implications, this could spell the end of the proposed 24,273 square feet of live theater space in the plans for the 18-story mixed-use project at the California Theater site 2113-2115 Kittredge. The mixed-use development comes with 211 dwelling units (including 22 very low-income density bonus qualifying units).
I always doubted the final project would include the live performing theater and viewed it as a proposal to gain support while another three movie theater screens turn to dust in the downtown.
Now with performance theater groups struggling, no ballot initiative to bail them out and per Mark Rhodes in his statement to council at the appeal on June 4, 2024, actually building that performing theater under the 18-story development would require raising $25,000,000 from the community. We shouldn’t be surprised if the approved project at the California Theater site comes back for modification without a live performance theater in the basement.
In the 2025/2026 budget, City Council allocated $300,000 for Civic Center Phase III Pre-Design & Construction Activities In the 2025/2026 biennial budget. The lack of support for the performing arts may also spell trouble for the Civic Center Maudelle Shirek and Veterans Buildings which comes with a total projected cost of $109,450,000 for seismic work, rehabilitation, remodeling and new chambers for city council. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/our-work/capital-projects/civic-center-vision-plan
In the next few years, deferred maintenance is going to catch up with Berkeley just as it already has for the visibly poor condition of the streets. While Berkeley City Council is busy disassembling zoning codes to increase city density, there has not been a whiff of attention from City Council to upgrade and replace the Fire Department facilities to match the increased density Council keeps approving. That bill comes to around $310,000,000. Those of us who attend the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission have already seen the presentation and report.
And those of us who remember the Oakland Berkeley Hills fire in 1991 probably have a different feeling about the threat of fire and the Fire Department I know I do than the younger crowd that showed up at the July 23 special city council meeting on middle housing pushing upzoning, increasing density, adding housing for the entire city including the fire zones in the hills.
Back to the ballots. The two ballot measures on the deteriorating streets, “Fix the Streets” and “Safe Streets” will appear on the ballot without council statements for or against either measure. Toni Mester had the best comment on the street ballot measures.
“I’m not sure as a taxpayer why we have to have citizens initiatives to do what city government should be doing on a regular basis, which is to maintain the roadways. It should come out of the general fund. It should be organized by the Public Works Department. Hopefully directed by the Public Works Commission…The whole idea of having a citizens’ initiative to do something that is the basic chore of the city is perplexing.”
City Council dissolved the Public Works Commission on June 14, 2022 creating the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission. Kesarwani, Taplin, Bartlett, Wengraf, Robinson, Droste and Arreguin all voted to dissolve what I found to be the most productive commission in the city. Harrison voted no and Hahn abstained which was interesting as Hahn lead the reorganizing and dissolution of commissions for the Agenda Committee.
The new Transportation Commission seems to forget that infrastructure (a substitute for public works) is part of their assignment. At least that is what I find from reading the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission agendas.
Gretchen Whitmer had much to say about Fix the Damn Roads in a terrific interview with Ezra Klein recorded on July 29, 2024. https://youtu.be/wz0MB1JbcCc?si=ndlWxDRegi8HQ6W1&t=77
Councilmember Tregub worked on an alternative to the community ballot initiative organized by Fossil Free Berkeley for a special tax on natural gas consumption in buildings of 15,000 square feet or larger. Even with Lunaparra and Hahn joining Tregub on the motion to continue the discussion until August 5, Tregub lost. Arreguin abstained and Kesarwani, Taplin, Bartlett, Wengraf and Humbert voted no, killing an alternative ballot measure.
The Fossil Free Berkeley organizers for the special tax on natural gas use gathered approximately 1500 more signatures than needed for November election and filled a webpage with an impressive list of supporting organizations. https://fossilfreeberkeley.org/endorsements/
There was opposition to the special tax on natural gas. Emily from Boichik Bagels showed up in frustration having just made a huge investment in natural gas presumably to bake bagels.
As money pours in to oppose the special tax, I am sure we will hear more and our mailboxes will be filled with scary postcards when our November ballots arrive for early voting.
This community based ballot measure really reflects our failure to act on global warming. We have been unwilling to change how we live. Despite the 2018 warning from the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) that we are running out of time to hold temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrials levels, the action in the last six years has been wholly inadequate.
We just had the hottest days on the planet ever reliably measured. Copernicus the European Union’s Earth observation programme recorded an entire year from June 2023 through May 2024 as 1.6°C above pre-industrial levels.
The longer we postpone making the changes we need to get a grip on global warming, the harder it gets. “We” is being used deliberately, because everyone of us is part of the consumption driving climate change.
August 1, 2024 was Earth Overshoot Day. This is the day when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services exceeds what the earth can regenerate in a year. If everyone lived like the population in the United States, earth overshoot day for 2024 would have been March 14. We have a lot of work to do.
In all the gloom on climate change/global warming, I like to follow David Roberts’ VOLTS podcast. Roberts’ mission in his own words, “Volts is a podcast about leaving fossil fuels behind. I’ve been reporting on and explaining clean-energy topics for almost 20 years, and I love talking to politicians, analysts, innovators, and activists about the latest progress in the world’s most important fight.” Go to www.volts.wtf or look for the VOLTS podcast on your phone, tablet or computer.
Council voted unanimously to write an opposition to the community based ballot initiative requiring adoption of minimum air quality standards in city-owned and city-leased buildings. This came out of the city employee experience during the pandemic and not being able to move council on installing HVAC filtration systems to improve indoor air quality and safety for city employees. The Council discussion flowed from individual councilmember declarations of how much they cared about city employees while justifying opposition to the ballot measure as too expensive to enact.
The last of the ballot initiatives include extending the Sugar Sweetened Beverage Tax and a small increase in the parcel tax to maintain library services. There is a ballot measure of adding a tax for the parks. The property transfer tax (time of sale) to extend Measure P for homeless services finishes off the list with Arreguin, Hahn, Tregub and Bartlett all volunteering to write the argument in favor of the ballot measure.
We will have a lot to think about when the November ballots arrive. For those of us that own property we’re going to need our property tax statements and calculators to work our way through the impact of everything.
No matter what shows up in that long list of ballot measures for the November election, maintaining the library services are on top of my list. I love the ebooks and audiobooks from the library and will be voting for the library ballot measure.
Our book club choice for July was the The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor by Hamilton Nolan which I read as an ebook from the library. One of the book club members complained to me that she wanted to read about books related to the election not a book on labor. That was, of course, before she picked up the book and Sean O’Brien President of the Teamsters spoke at the Republican Convention.
Whatever you have heard about O'Brien's speech and before you surrender to the pundits telling you what to think of Teamster Sean O’Brien as a keynote speaker at the Republican Convention, there is nothing like watching it. https://youtu.be/a5WlI1LK1NY?si=rjuQdig_DsmTZy_k
And yes, The Hammer fit right in to a robust discussion of the book, labor and the November election.
City Council began and ended with the arts on Tuesday, July 30, 2024 in an eight hour and twenty-minute session of two back to back meetings one at 3 pm and a second scheduled for 6 pm that didn’t start until 7:27 pm, the entire evening of city council didn’t end until 11:20 pm.
Council didn’t finish the 3 pm meeting agenda so when they should be off on summer recess, they are meeting again at 6 pm on Monday, August 5, 2024.
If we’re paying attention, not reviewing Councilmember Lunaparra’s ballot measure on Tuesday, July 30 looks like Arreguin’s strategy to give himself and Hahn more time to write an alternative ballot measure. The email notice that the August 5 meeting agenda posted on Thursday had been revised arrived in my email inbox at 6 pm Friday.
The revised agenda with the added alternate ballot measure now reads as one agenda item with 1.a. from Lunaparra – Placing the Berkeley Tenant Protection and Right to Organize Act on the November 5, 2024 Ballot and 1.b. from Arreguin and Hahn - Placing the Berkeley Tenant Protection and Right to Organize Act and Funding Housing Retention on the November 5, 2024 ballot.
I was expecting a long and interesting discussion Monday evening on the Berkeley Tenant Protection and Right to Organize Act for the November election, but with the Arreguin - Hahn alternative removing Golden Duplexes (a Golden Duplex is when the owner occupies one of the two units), we might get by without having to bring rations to make it through the night, but there is a twist, keep reading.
Lunaparra’s ballot measure if passed by the voters as written would phase out the Golden Duplex modify grounds for eviction, allow tenant associations, limit automatic rent adjustment (rent increases) based on CPI to 3%, eliminate the ability of boards and city council to remove price controls during period of high vacancy, require landlords to notify tenants of their rights. Arreguin and Hahn removed the Golden Duplex, eliminated the prohibition of boards and city council to remove price controls during period of high vacancy and added using U1 Ballot Initiative funds for housing retention.
Deleting the section on prohibiting boards and commissions from removing price controls during high vacancies, takes on a whole different perspective when you read (the article is short) “Real Estate Software Aided Price-Fixing ‘Cartel’ Among US Property Companies” by Tyler Walicek published on July 28, 2024. https://truthout.org/articles/real-estate-software-aided-price-fixing-cartel-among-us-property-companies/
Walicek covers how property companies use the program RealPage which “suggests” how high rents can and should be pushed as it is more profitable to maximize rent than to fill units. Lunaparra is on the right track with prohibiting removing price controls during periods of high vacancies as the software could very well assist the large property owners to maximize rent (price gouge the captive student audience) and manage vacancy rates to avoid rent price controls.
After investigative reporter Heather Vogell exposed the rent fixing game in ProPublica in 2022, lawsuits have cropped up around the country from coast to coast and even include Fresno, California. Maximizing rent/price gouging rather than filling units as a business plan certainly pieces together the complaint of exorbitant rents and vacant units.
To read both ballot measures on tenant protections go to https://berkeleyca.gov/city-council-special-meeting-eagenda-august-5-2024
There were ten proposed local ballot measures besides Lunaparra’s.
The community survey on the ballot initiatives kicked off the 3 pm meeting discussion.
The results of the issues identified by the city of Berkeley to survey ranked in the following order of priority of where tax dollars should be spent by the residents who responded, 1) Major investment in affordable housing, 2) Continue rehousing and providing services for homelessness, 3) Repairing deteriorating streets, 4) Planting and maintaining trees and improving park maintenance and infrastructure, including the waterfront, 5) Electrification of gas-powered buildings to reduce climate impact, 6) Expanding Sunday hours and Children’s programming at libraries, and 7) Saving and sustaining arts and culture.
The Council was considering a ballot measure for the arts (theaters, music, dance and theater organizations), but dropped any consideration of crafting a ballot measure for the performing arts when the survey respondents placed financing the arts through additional taxes at the bottom of their priorities. None of the machinations of possible tax plans, i.e. parcel tax, sales tax or transient occupancy tax (TOT – tax added onto hotel, etc. bills) garnered enough support to predict even the slimmest chance of passing a ballot measure for the arts.
Looking at the broader implications, this could spell the end of the proposed 24,273 square feet of live theater space in the plans for the 18-story mixed-use project at the California Theater site 2113-2115 Kittredge. The mixed-use development comes with 211 dwelling units (including 22 very low-income density bonus qualifying units).
I always doubted the final project would include the live performing theater and viewed it as a proposal to gain support while another three movie theater screens turn to dust in the downtown.
Now with performance theater groups struggling, no ballot initiative to bail them out and per Mark Rhodes in his statement to council at the appeal on June 4, 2024, actually building that performing theater under the 18-story development would require raising $25,000,000 from the community. We shouldn’t be surprised if the approved project at the California Theater site comes back for modification without a live performance theater in the basement.
In the 2025/2026 budget, City Council allocated $300,000 for Civic Center Phase III Pre-Design & Construction Activities In the 2025/2026 biennial budget. The lack of support for the performing arts may also spell trouble for the Civic Center Maudelle Shirek and Veterans Buildings which comes with a total projected cost of $109,450,000 for seismic work, rehabilitation, remodeling and new chambers for city council. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/our-work/capital-projects/civic-center-vision-plan
In the next few years, deferred maintenance is going to catch up with Berkeley just as it already has for the visibly poor condition of the streets. While Berkeley City Council is busy disassembling zoning codes to increase city density, there has not been a whiff of attention from City Council to upgrade and replace the Fire Department facilities to match the increased density Council keeps approving. That bill comes to around $310,000,000. Those of us who attend the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission have already seen the presentation and report.
And those of us who remember the Oakland Berkeley Hills fire in 1991 probably have a different feeling about the threat of fire and the Fire Department I know I do than the younger crowd that showed up at the July 23 special city council meeting on middle housing pushing upzoning, increasing density, adding housing for the entire city including the fire zones in the hills.
Back to the ballots. The two ballot measures on the deteriorating streets, “Fix the Streets” and “Safe Streets” will appear on the ballot without council statements for or against either measure. Toni Mester had the best comment on the street ballot measures.
“I’m not sure as a taxpayer why we have to have citizens initiatives to do what city government should be doing on a regular basis, which is to maintain the roadways. It should come out of the general fund. It should be organized by the Public Works Department. Hopefully directed by the Public Works Commission…The whole idea of having a citizens’ initiative to do something that is the basic chore of the city is perplexing.”
City Council dissolved the Public Works Commission on June 14, 2022 creating the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission. Kesarwani, Taplin, Bartlett, Wengraf, Robinson, Droste and Arreguin all voted to dissolve what I found to be the most productive commission in the city. Harrison voted no and Hahn abstained which was interesting as Hahn lead the reorganizing and dissolution of commissions for the Agenda Committee.
The new Transportation Commission seems to forget that infrastructure (a substitute for public works) is part of their assignment. At least that is what I find from reading the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission agendas.
Gretchen Whitmer had much to say about Fix the Damn Roads in a terrific interview with Ezra Klein recorded on July 29, 2024. https://youtu.be/wz0MB1JbcCc?si=ndlWxDRegi8HQ6W1&t=77
Councilmember Tregub worked on an alternative to the community ballot initiative organized by Fossil Free Berkeley for a special tax on natural gas consumption in buildings of 15,000 square feet or larger. Even with Lunaparra and Hahn joining Tregub on the motion to continue the discussion until August 5, Tregub lost. Arreguin abstained and Kesarwani, Taplin, Bartlett, Wengraf and Humbert voted no, killing an alternative ballot measure.
The Fossil Free Berkeley organizers for the special tax on natural gas use gathered approximately 1500 more signatures than needed for November election and filled a webpage with an impressive list of supporting organizations. https://fossilfreeberkeley.org/endorsements/
There was opposition to the special tax on natural gas. Emily from Boichik Bagels showed up in frustration having just made a huge investment in natural gas presumably to bake bagels.
As money pours in to oppose the special tax, I am sure we will hear more and our mailboxes will be filled with scary postcards when our November ballots arrive for early voting.
This community based ballot measure really reflects our failure to act on global warming. We have been unwilling to change how we live. Despite the 2018 warning from the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) that we are running out of time to hold temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrials levels, the action in the last six years has been wholly inadequate.
We just had the hottest days on the planet ever reliably measured. Copernicus the European Union’s Earth observation programme recorded an entire year from June 2023 through May 2024 as 1.6°C above pre-industrial levels.
The longer we postpone making the changes we need to get a grip on global warming, the harder it gets. “We” is being used deliberately, because everyone of us is part of the consumption driving climate change.
August 1, 2024 was Earth Overshoot Day. This is the day when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services exceeds what the earth can regenerate in a year. If everyone lived like the population in the United States, earth overshoot day for 2024 would have been March 14. We have a lot of work to do.
In all the gloom on climate change/global warming, I like to follow David Roberts’ VOLTS podcast. Roberts’ mission in his own words, “Volts is a podcast about leaving fossil fuels behind. I’ve been reporting on and explaining clean-energy topics for almost 20 years, and I love talking to politicians, analysts, innovators, and activists about the latest progress in the world’s most important fight.” Go to www.volts.wtf or look for the VOLTS podcast on your phone, tablet or computer.
Council voted unanimously to write an opposition to the community based ballot initiative requiring adoption of minimum air quality standards in city-owned and city-leased buildings. This came out of the city employee experience during the pandemic and not being able to move council on installing HVAC filtration systems to improve indoor air quality and safety for city employees. The Council discussion flowed from individual councilmember declarations of how much they cared about city employees while justifying opposition to the ballot measure as too expensive to enact.
The last of the ballot initiatives include extending the Sugar Sweetened Beverage Tax and a small increase in the parcel tax to maintain library services. There is a ballot measure of adding a tax for the parks. The property transfer tax (time of sale) to extend Measure P for homeless services finishes off the list with Arreguin, Hahn, Tregub and Bartlett all volunteering to write the argument in favor of the ballot measure.
We will have a lot to think about when the November ballots arrive. For those of us that own property we’re going to need our property tax statements and calculators to work our way through the impact of everything.
No matter what shows up in that long list of ballot measures for the November election, maintaining the library services are on top of my list. I love the ebooks and audiobooks from the library and will be voting for the library ballot measure.
Our book club choice for July was the The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor by Hamilton Nolan which I read as an ebook from the library. One of the book club members complained to me that she wanted to read about books related to the election not a book on labor. That was, of course, before she picked up the book and Sean O’Brien President of the Teamsters spoke at the Republican Convention.
Whatever you have heard about O'Brien's speech and before you surrender to the pundits telling you what to think of Teamster Sean O’Brien as a keynote speaker at the Republican Convention, there is nothing like watching it. https://youtu.be/a5WlI1LK1NY?si=rjuQdig_DsmTZy_k
And yes, The Hammer fit right in to a robust discussion of the book, labor and the November election.
July 17, 2024
It was around 1970 on one of those trips from visiting my parents when I looked out into the night sky through the plane window and felt the thrill of seeing the expanse of bright lights down on the ground as we descended for the landing. The lights were Los Angeles and I was on my way home.
A lot has happened since 1970 beside recognizing those Los Angeles night lights are light pollution damaging ecosystems, habitat, a factor in the sixth extinction and laced with links to breast cancer, colon cancer, thyroid cancer and macular degeneration.
Since 1970, we’ve lost nearly a third of the birds in North America. We read micro plastics are everywhere, in our food, in our bodies and the science hasn’t caught up yet with what havoc those microplastics inside us might be causing. We know about giant garbage patches in the ocean, animals being attracted to eating plastic and dying. We know or should know that much of plastic recycling is wishcycling.
In 1970 the CO2 was only 325 ppm. The famous Exxon paper was still seven years away.
We shouldn’t be surprised by the fix we’re in with the global average temperature of 1.6°C above preindustrial levels for the twelve months from June 2023 through May 2024 according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Eunice Newton Foote wrote in 1856 in the American Journal of Science that the heat trapping ability of CO2 “would give to our earth a high temperature.” It was in 1896 Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius recognized that burning coal could increase carbon dioxide and warm the climate. Sixty-seven years later Edward Teller warned of global warming at a 1959 petroleum conference “Energy and Man” and President Johnson was warned in 1965. https://www.greenbiz.com/article/what-big-oil-knew-about-climate-change-1959
On July 16, 2024, CO2 was measured as 425.79 ppm.
On the night of October 4 and in the early hours of darkness on October 5, 2023 before sunrise, nine hundred sixty-four (964) migrating song birds, thirty-three (33) species died in one night from the combination of night light pollution and glass at McCormick Place Lakeside Center in Chicago, Illinois. It was a shocking preventable event.
In the book A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds, Scoot Weidensaul wrote how through the use of tiny GPS devices on the backs of migrating birds, birds are being pulled off their migration flyways by the bright lights of cities.
It is not just birds that are impacted by artificial night light.
In 1970 washing the family car still required “bug removal” to do the job.
Insects are in rapid decline. Habitat loss, pesticide use, invasive species and climate change all have a role. The article “Light pollution is a driver of insect declines” covers the overlooked role of artificial light at night (ALAN). ALAN causes insect declines due to affecting insect movement, foraging, reproduction, and predation.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320719307797
Douglas Tallamy, entomologist, who speaks around the country on the importance of native plants often starts his talks quoting from E.O. Wilson, “Insects are the little things that run the world.”
Ecosystems can’t function without the millions of insects that make up the base of the food chain. Insects aren’t just the pollinators. The biosphere would rot without Insects as the decomposers.
If we know that birds, insects, amphibians, plants and mammals are impacted by artificial light at night, what about us? We are mammals.
The impact of ALAN on human health was what consent agenda item 13 “Community Health Commission Comments on Dark Skies” addressed.
Following the linked studies and references within those studies in the report on the Dark Skies Ordinance referral makes for very interesting reading on ALAN and breast cancer, thyroid cancer, pancreatic cancer, diabetes and macular degeneration.
So where was Berkeley City Council when given the opportunity to vote on a lukewarm referral on a Dark Skies Ordinance?
This Berkeley City Council with a mayor that brags how advanced Berkeley is as a progressive leader, it was that same mayor, Arreguin who was the first to voice his opposition to agenda item 13 on the Dark Skies Ordinance. The Council rejected in a seven to two vote to add the Community Health Commission comments to the Dark Skies Ordinance that has been languishing in the Planning Commission to do list since November 2019 and to also refer to the City Manager to request the Department of Public Works implement a moratorium on the installation of street and building lighting exceeding 3,000 Kelvin.
Only Councilmembers Bartlett and Tregub stood in support for the Dark Skies Ordinance referral. Councilmembers Kesarwani, Taplin, Humbert, Wengraf and Mayor Arreguin all voted no. Councilmembers Hahn and Lunaparra abstained.
Last summer I joined my childhood friend in Palm Springs for a road trip to Santa Fe with many stops along the way and home again. Our last nights were in Cottonwood, Arizona. Cottonwood is a delightful small city. We had two terrific dinners at local restaurants. The two of us walked around town late in the evening after dinner, hours after sunset, with the night sky above us. It never occurred to me that the well lite streets and sidewalks with lighting where we needed it were in a recognized, designated International Dark-Sky Place.
It was after I got home and attended a Dark Skies webinar that I discovered my friend and I spent our last night in an internationally recognized Dark Sky Community. Cottonwood became a designated location of the International Dark-Sky Places in 2019 four years before my friend and I arrived.
The City of Cottonwood website states, “Since 2016 it has been the City of Cottonwood’s mission to obtain the designation of a Dark-Sky Community to promote and protect our dark skies…Light pollution effects the world as a whole. Excess light disrupts the natural day-night pattern and has negative impacts on the ecosystem, wildlife and human health. The City of Cottonwood is committed to protecting the night skies for present and future generations.” http://cottonwoodaz.gov/747/Dark-Sky-Community
There is a misconception that a Dark Skies Ordinance means our streets will be dangerously dark. Protecting the environment and our own health doesn’t mean the Department of Public Works can’t install lighting. What it does is give direction to not installing the wrong kind of lighting adding to night light pollution and to instead direct light to where it is needed with the lowest amount of brightness to do the job.
Do street lights three stories high above the tree canopy direct lighting to where we need it? Do street lights from the top of tall light poles glaring down at us put light where we need it? I would answer both of those with a resounding no.
The new Director of Public Works Terrance Davis wasn’t called on to comment on night light and the Dark Skies Ordinance referral.
I have no idea where Director Davis stands on the impact of night light pollution or where he stands on other environmental and climate measures that cross into public works like tree canopy and heat island effect and water runoff and permeable paving. His profile on Linkedin and the internet doesn’t offer a clue to where he might stand on climate change, rising ground water with sea level rise, protecting ecosystems and habitat.
As for our councilmembers that couldn’t bring themselves to support a Dark Skies Ordinance was this ordinary ignorance or as Minnijean Brown-Trickey from the Little Rock Nine would say, “Profound Intentional Ignorance”.
I certainly expect more from our councilmembers. If we were truly a progressive city we would be like Cottonwood, Arizona actively pursuing the designation as a Dark Skies Place.
And, certainly a progressive City Council wouldn’t be sacrificing such an easily mitigated hazard to our health and the health of ecosystems, just to give free rein to developers if that is what lurks beneath the languishing Dark Skies Ordinance.
I always learn something when I make it to the Commission on Disability. And it is not just that commissioner Helen Walsh sent me the link to the National Center on Disability and Journalism. https://ncdj.org/style-guide/ These commissioners should be everywhere. They truly are wonderful and deeply knowledgeable.
Rex Brown, City of Berkeley DEI Officer, was the first speaker at the Commission on Disability.
I didn’t know Berkeley had hired a DEI Officer.
Programs on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) are what governors in the South like DeSantis are banning from education calling such programs discrimination, exclusion and indoctrination.
If Trump is re-elected DEI is on the hit list for elimination along with the FDA, EPA, NOAA, Department of Education, school lunch programs, contraception, marriage equality, no fault divorce, plus so much more in the Mandate for Leadership Project 2025.
In Brown’s answer to the question on why he took the DEI Officer job in Berkeley, it boiled down to his perception of Berkeley as a progressive city.
Someone (I didn’t catch who) responded that Berkeley as progressive city was past history not current.
Brown was hired November 27, 2023. DEI is a start-up program and I didn’t get the sense that there is a vision to where this program is going or what it should encompass. It didn’t sound like anyone had filled Brown in on the Mason-Tillman Report and contracting habits in Berkeley, the report on biased policing, the Police Bicycle Team and racist texting.
Brown had been filled in enough that he couldn’t talk about the Disability Rights Advocates lawsuit against the City of Berkeley for disability discrimination. It isn’t just the Commission on Disability commissioners who are feeling the discrimination from the heel dragging of providing remote access (ZOOM) to City of Berkeley public meetings. This is front and center to DEI.
The closed captioning for City Council meetings is definitely lacking of late. I notice it more now that I have become a heavy user of voice recognition software in zoom meetings where it is made available and more importantly when the meeting is set up to allow attendees to save the transcript. The City Council and Zoning Adjustment Board meetings use a live transcriber (captioner). The City Council Policy Committees use voice recognition software and the commissions, that is where the gap in access lacks citywide.
The next presentation came from AC Transit Planner Crystal Wang on the proposed Transit-Supportive Design Guidelines, i.e. bus stop design and its multimodal integration with paratransit, sidewalk users, and bikeways. We can only hope Wang took good notes as the commissioners were full of suggestions to improve the design of bus stops. These meetings need to be recorded.
The Commission Chair Rena Fischer who is a wheelchair user said she can get to Point Isabel with her senior aged dog using Paratransit, but to get home by AC Transit it is a mile across the park to the bus stop and a six hour wait.
When it comes to transit, I often complain it doesn’t get me to where I want to go. Commissioner Fisher pointed out the other dilemma, when transit may get you to where you want to go, the amount of time waiting for it makes it impractical before even considering the location of the bus stops and other factors.
At an AC Transit presentation, I heard some months ago, it isn’t just budget that is impacting service. Another problem is there are not enough bus drivers filling the ranks to replace the bus drivers that are retiring.
I thoroughly support making bus stops accessible, but I am not an enthusiast of spending millions of dollars on infrastructure if we don’t have the other pieces to make it a functional system. Dedicated bus lanes do make it easier for buses to be efficient and on time. Buses have the flexibility over rail to change routes which isn’t always an advantage when that route change is a takeaway instead of an addition.
When it comes to door to door convenience, mass transit is in tough competition for those who can use Uber and Lyft. A friend who uses the GoGo Grandparent program for seniors 70 and older and disabled had saved up enough in her ride “bank” to use to GoGo Grandparent to go to the Exploratorium in San Francisco. I could have driven – I have a car, but the service was amazing. The ride home arrived nearly instantaneously not even the expected three minutes.
It is great for the users, but I am not so sure the drivers are getting a fair deal. (I’ve been reading Rana Foroohar’s book Don’t Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed It’s Founding Principles – and All of Us. Chapter 8 is The Uberization of Everything)
I left the Commission on Disability early to catch the Will Knight Presentation and Q&A on the City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson Supreme Court decision. It was promised to be recorded, but Carole Marasovic reported at the Agenda Committee that city staff lost the recording. Such a shame.
Knight gave an excellent presentation. He saw the Grants Pass ruling as narrow which leaves some ways out for homeless persons. However, as we observe, this Supreme Court with its secure six to three majority doesn’t leave the courts as answer.
Councilmember Lunaparra, submitted an emergency agenda item at council on July 9 after the Grants Pass ruling stating, “Adopt a Resolution reaffirming the City of Berkeley’s commitments to enact no additional restrictions to effectively prohibit sleeping by an unhoused individual if there is no shelter space available in the jurisdiction for the unhoused individual to sleep, to not impose criminal penalties for sleeping in public spaces without first making an offer of shelter, and to construct, repurpose, and offer non-congregate shelter and permanent housing options whenever possible.”
The resolution lost in a four to five vote. Taplin, Bartlett, Tregub, and Lunaparra voted for the resolution, Kesarwani and Humbert voted against and Hahn, Wengraf and Arreguin abstained.
At the beginning of the council meeting Kesarwani, Wengraf and Humbert all voted against evening bringing up the resolution for consideration.
Arreguin’s alternate motion on the resolution for the unhoused was to refer the item to the City Attorney for analysis and to schedule a closed session for consideration of the issue. The impression was left that such a meeting could take place before summer recess begins on July 31. The City Attorney had answered yes to Arreguin’s question if an analysis could be completed within two weeks to precede a closed council session.
The motion passed in an 8 to 1 vote. Lunaparra voted no. Whether anything gets done before summer recess, we shall see.
The votes on Lunaparra’s emergency resolution on the unhoused came at the end of the council meeting after the report on “Gap Analysis of Berkeley’s Homelessnesss system of Care” by Peter Radu from the City Manager’s Office who introduced himself as the Neighborhood Services Manager and Zoe Klingman from Berkeley Public Policy, The Goldman School.
For all the bragging coming from Mayor Arreguin and last evening from Sophie Hahn candidate for mayor at the mayor’s forum, in how well Berkeley is doing on homelessness, there are still big gaps (more on the mayor’s forum in my next Activist’s Diary).
The average wait for an unhoused person to get permanent housing after being referred to the waiting list is 280 days (more than nine months). Sixty-six percent of the funds that support homelessness services come from Measure P which according to the presentation charts have been declining since Fiscal Years 2021 – 2022. The recommendation in the supplemental report summary is in bold, “Berkeley should look for opportunities to increase funding for homelessness services and affordable housing.”
The Point-in-Time homeless count which is done every two years nationwide at the end of January counted 844 homeless individuals in Berkeley in 2024 down from 1,057 in 2022. It is an improvement that the city elected celebrated.
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/simtech.solutions/viz/AlamedaCountyPoint-in-TimeCountResultsSummary/PITTrends?publish=yes
There will be a boost in affordable housing with the two BART Housing projects, but those are years away. There are affordable housing projects in the pipeline/planning but when rent for a studio apartment in Berkeley can fall somewhere between $1595 in an old building to over $3000 in a new building that doesn’t give much hope for the unhoused. There is no place for someone with low income to go except on the street unless they can get subsidized housing or stuff more people into an apartment than can reasonably expected to live there.
If the Republicans clean up in the fall election as they are now projected to do, the poor are going to have harder times ahead.
It was around 1970 on one of those trips from visiting my parents when I looked out into the night sky through the plane window and felt the thrill of seeing the expanse of bright lights down on the ground as we descended for the landing. The lights were Los Angeles and I was on my way home.
A lot has happened since 1970 beside recognizing those Los Angeles night lights are light pollution damaging ecosystems, habitat, a factor in the sixth extinction and laced with links to breast cancer, colon cancer, thyroid cancer and macular degeneration.
Since 1970, we’ve lost nearly a third of the birds in North America. We read micro plastics are everywhere, in our food, in our bodies and the science hasn’t caught up yet with what havoc those microplastics inside us might be causing. We know about giant garbage patches in the ocean, animals being attracted to eating plastic and dying. We know or should know that much of plastic recycling is wishcycling.
In 1970 the CO2 was only 325 ppm. The famous Exxon paper was still seven years away.
We shouldn’t be surprised by the fix we’re in with the global average temperature of 1.6°C above preindustrial levels for the twelve months from June 2023 through May 2024 according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Eunice Newton Foote wrote in 1856 in the American Journal of Science that the heat trapping ability of CO2 “would give to our earth a high temperature.” It was in 1896 Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius recognized that burning coal could increase carbon dioxide and warm the climate. Sixty-seven years later Edward Teller warned of global warming at a 1959 petroleum conference “Energy and Man” and President Johnson was warned in 1965. https://www.greenbiz.com/article/what-big-oil-knew-about-climate-change-1959
On July 16, 2024, CO2 was measured as 425.79 ppm.
On the night of October 4 and in the early hours of darkness on October 5, 2023 before sunrise, nine hundred sixty-four (964) migrating song birds, thirty-three (33) species died in one night from the combination of night light pollution and glass at McCormick Place Lakeside Center in Chicago, Illinois. It was a shocking preventable event.
In the book A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds, Scoot Weidensaul wrote how through the use of tiny GPS devices on the backs of migrating birds, birds are being pulled off their migration flyways by the bright lights of cities.
It is not just birds that are impacted by artificial night light.
In 1970 washing the family car still required “bug removal” to do the job.
Insects are in rapid decline. Habitat loss, pesticide use, invasive species and climate change all have a role. The article “Light pollution is a driver of insect declines” covers the overlooked role of artificial light at night (ALAN). ALAN causes insect declines due to affecting insect movement, foraging, reproduction, and predation.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320719307797
Douglas Tallamy, entomologist, who speaks around the country on the importance of native plants often starts his talks quoting from E.O. Wilson, “Insects are the little things that run the world.”
Ecosystems can’t function without the millions of insects that make up the base of the food chain. Insects aren’t just the pollinators. The biosphere would rot without Insects as the decomposers.
If we know that birds, insects, amphibians, plants and mammals are impacted by artificial light at night, what about us? We are mammals.
The impact of ALAN on human health was what consent agenda item 13 “Community Health Commission Comments on Dark Skies” addressed.
Following the linked studies and references within those studies in the report on the Dark Skies Ordinance referral makes for very interesting reading on ALAN and breast cancer, thyroid cancer, pancreatic cancer, diabetes and macular degeneration.
So where was Berkeley City Council when given the opportunity to vote on a lukewarm referral on a Dark Skies Ordinance?
This Berkeley City Council with a mayor that brags how advanced Berkeley is as a progressive leader, it was that same mayor, Arreguin who was the first to voice his opposition to agenda item 13 on the Dark Skies Ordinance. The Council rejected in a seven to two vote to add the Community Health Commission comments to the Dark Skies Ordinance that has been languishing in the Planning Commission to do list since November 2019 and to also refer to the City Manager to request the Department of Public Works implement a moratorium on the installation of street and building lighting exceeding 3,000 Kelvin.
Only Councilmembers Bartlett and Tregub stood in support for the Dark Skies Ordinance referral. Councilmembers Kesarwani, Taplin, Humbert, Wengraf and Mayor Arreguin all voted no. Councilmembers Hahn and Lunaparra abstained.
Last summer I joined my childhood friend in Palm Springs for a road trip to Santa Fe with many stops along the way and home again. Our last nights were in Cottonwood, Arizona. Cottonwood is a delightful small city. We had two terrific dinners at local restaurants. The two of us walked around town late in the evening after dinner, hours after sunset, with the night sky above us. It never occurred to me that the well lite streets and sidewalks with lighting where we needed it were in a recognized, designated International Dark-Sky Place.
It was after I got home and attended a Dark Skies webinar that I discovered my friend and I spent our last night in an internationally recognized Dark Sky Community. Cottonwood became a designated location of the International Dark-Sky Places in 2019 four years before my friend and I arrived.
The City of Cottonwood website states, “Since 2016 it has been the City of Cottonwood’s mission to obtain the designation of a Dark-Sky Community to promote and protect our dark skies…Light pollution effects the world as a whole. Excess light disrupts the natural day-night pattern and has negative impacts on the ecosystem, wildlife and human health. The City of Cottonwood is committed to protecting the night skies for present and future generations.” http://cottonwoodaz.gov/747/Dark-Sky-Community
There is a misconception that a Dark Skies Ordinance means our streets will be dangerously dark. Protecting the environment and our own health doesn’t mean the Department of Public Works can’t install lighting. What it does is give direction to not installing the wrong kind of lighting adding to night light pollution and to instead direct light to where it is needed with the lowest amount of brightness to do the job.
Do street lights three stories high above the tree canopy direct lighting to where we need it? Do street lights from the top of tall light poles glaring down at us put light where we need it? I would answer both of those with a resounding no.
The new Director of Public Works Terrance Davis wasn’t called on to comment on night light and the Dark Skies Ordinance referral.
I have no idea where Director Davis stands on the impact of night light pollution or where he stands on other environmental and climate measures that cross into public works like tree canopy and heat island effect and water runoff and permeable paving. His profile on Linkedin and the internet doesn’t offer a clue to where he might stand on climate change, rising ground water with sea level rise, protecting ecosystems and habitat.
As for our councilmembers that couldn’t bring themselves to support a Dark Skies Ordinance was this ordinary ignorance or as Minnijean Brown-Trickey from the Little Rock Nine would say, “Profound Intentional Ignorance”.
I certainly expect more from our councilmembers. If we were truly a progressive city we would be like Cottonwood, Arizona actively pursuing the designation as a Dark Skies Place.
And, certainly a progressive City Council wouldn’t be sacrificing such an easily mitigated hazard to our health and the health of ecosystems, just to give free rein to developers if that is what lurks beneath the languishing Dark Skies Ordinance.
I always learn something when I make it to the Commission on Disability. And it is not just that commissioner Helen Walsh sent me the link to the National Center on Disability and Journalism. https://ncdj.org/style-guide/ These commissioners should be everywhere. They truly are wonderful and deeply knowledgeable.
Rex Brown, City of Berkeley DEI Officer, was the first speaker at the Commission on Disability.
I didn’t know Berkeley had hired a DEI Officer.
Programs on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) are what governors in the South like DeSantis are banning from education calling such programs discrimination, exclusion and indoctrination.
If Trump is re-elected DEI is on the hit list for elimination along with the FDA, EPA, NOAA, Department of Education, school lunch programs, contraception, marriage equality, no fault divorce, plus so much more in the Mandate for Leadership Project 2025.
In Brown’s answer to the question on why he took the DEI Officer job in Berkeley, it boiled down to his perception of Berkeley as a progressive city.
Someone (I didn’t catch who) responded that Berkeley as progressive city was past history not current.
Brown was hired November 27, 2023. DEI is a start-up program and I didn’t get the sense that there is a vision to where this program is going or what it should encompass. It didn’t sound like anyone had filled Brown in on the Mason-Tillman Report and contracting habits in Berkeley, the report on biased policing, the Police Bicycle Team and racist texting.
Brown had been filled in enough that he couldn’t talk about the Disability Rights Advocates lawsuit against the City of Berkeley for disability discrimination. It isn’t just the Commission on Disability commissioners who are feeling the discrimination from the heel dragging of providing remote access (ZOOM) to City of Berkeley public meetings. This is front and center to DEI.
The closed captioning for City Council meetings is definitely lacking of late. I notice it more now that I have become a heavy user of voice recognition software in zoom meetings where it is made available and more importantly when the meeting is set up to allow attendees to save the transcript. The City Council and Zoning Adjustment Board meetings use a live transcriber (captioner). The City Council Policy Committees use voice recognition software and the commissions, that is where the gap in access lacks citywide.
The next presentation came from AC Transit Planner Crystal Wang on the proposed Transit-Supportive Design Guidelines, i.e. bus stop design and its multimodal integration with paratransit, sidewalk users, and bikeways. We can only hope Wang took good notes as the commissioners were full of suggestions to improve the design of bus stops. These meetings need to be recorded.
The Commission Chair Rena Fischer who is a wheelchair user said she can get to Point Isabel with her senior aged dog using Paratransit, but to get home by AC Transit it is a mile across the park to the bus stop and a six hour wait.
When it comes to transit, I often complain it doesn’t get me to where I want to go. Commissioner Fisher pointed out the other dilemma, when transit may get you to where you want to go, the amount of time waiting for it makes it impractical before even considering the location of the bus stops and other factors.
At an AC Transit presentation, I heard some months ago, it isn’t just budget that is impacting service. Another problem is there are not enough bus drivers filling the ranks to replace the bus drivers that are retiring.
I thoroughly support making bus stops accessible, but I am not an enthusiast of spending millions of dollars on infrastructure if we don’t have the other pieces to make it a functional system. Dedicated bus lanes do make it easier for buses to be efficient and on time. Buses have the flexibility over rail to change routes which isn’t always an advantage when that route change is a takeaway instead of an addition.
When it comes to door to door convenience, mass transit is in tough competition for those who can use Uber and Lyft. A friend who uses the GoGo Grandparent program for seniors 70 and older and disabled had saved up enough in her ride “bank” to use to GoGo Grandparent to go to the Exploratorium in San Francisco. I could have driven – I have a car, but the service was amazing. The ride home arrived nearly instantaneously not even the expected three minutes.
It is great for the users, but I am not so sure the drivers are getting a fair deal. (I’ve been reading Rana Foroohar’s book Don’t Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed It’s Founding Principles – and All of Us. Chapter 8 is The Uberization of Everything)
I left the Commission on Disability early to catch the Will Knight Presentation and Q&A on the City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson Supreme Court decision. It was promised to be recorded, but Carole Marasovic reported at the Agenda Committee that city staff lost the recording. Such a shame.
Knight gave an excellent presentation. He saw the Grants Pass ruling as narrow which leaves some ways out for homeless persons. However, as we observe, this Supreme Court with its secure six to three majority doesn’t leave the courts as answer.
Councilmember Lunaparra, submitted an emergency agenda item at council on July 9 after the Grants Pass ruling stating, “Adopt a Resolution reaffirming the City of Berkeley’s commitments to enact no additional restrictions to effectively prohibit sleeping by an unhoused individual if there is no shelter space available in the jurisdiction for the unhoused individual to sleep, to not impose criminal penalties for sleeping in public spaces without first making an offer of shelter, and to construct, repurpose, and offer non-congregate shelter and permanent housing options whenever possible.”
The resolution lost in a four to five vote. Taplin, Bartlett, Tregub, and Lunaparra voted for the resolution, Kesarwani and Humbert voted against and Hahn, Wengraf and Arreguin abstained.
At the beginning of the council meeting Kesarwani, Wengraf and Humbert all voted against evening bringing up the resolution for consideration.
Arreguin’s alternate motion on the resolution for the unhoused was to refer the item to the City Attorney for analysis and to schedule a closed session for consideration of the issue. The impression was left that such a meeting could take place before summer recess begins on July 31. The City Attorney had answered yes to Arreguin’s question if an analysis could be completed within two weeks to precede a closed council session.
The motion passed in an 8 to 1 vote. Lunaparra voted no. Whether anything gets done before summer recess, we shall see.
The votes on Lunaparra’s emergency resolution on the unhoused came at the end of the council meeting after the report on “Gap Analysis of Berkeley’s Homelessnesss system of Care” by Peter Radu from the City Manager’s Office who introduced himself as the Neighborhood Services Manager and Zoe Klingman from Berkeley Public Policy, The Goldman School.
For all the bragging coming from Mayor Arreguin and last evening from Sophie Hahn candidate for mayor at the mayor’s forum, in how well Berkeley is doing on homelessness, there are still big gaps (more on the mayor’s forum in my next Activist’s Diary).
The average wait for an unhoused person to get permanent housing after being referred to the waiting list is 280 days (more than nine months). Sixty-six percent of the funds that support homelessness services come from Measure P which according to the presentation charts have been declining since Fiscal Years 2021 – 2022. The recommendation in the supplemental report summary is in bold, “Berkeley should look for opportunities to increase funding for homelessness services and affordable housing.”
The Point-in-Time homeless count which is done every two years nationwide at the end of January counted 844 homeless individuals in Berkeley in 2024 down from 1,057 in 2022. It is an improvement that the city elected celebrated.
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/simtech.solutions/viz/AlamedaCountyPoint-in-TimeCountResultsSummary/PITTrends?publish=yes
There will be a boost in affordable housing with the two BART Housing projects, but those are years away. There are affordable housing projects in the pipeline/planning but when rent for a studio apartment in Berkeley can fall somewhere between $1595 in an old building to over $3000 in a new building that doesn’t give much hope for the unhoused. There is no place for someone with low income to go except on the street unless they can get subsidized housing or stuff more people into an apartment than can reasonably expected to live there.
If the Republicans clean up in the fall election as they are now projected to do, the poor are going to have harder times ahead.
July 10, 2024
Before getting into the meat of this Activist’s Diary, at the July 1, 2024 Land Use, Housing & Economic Development Committee Councilmember Taplin’s Affordable Housing for Artists and Berkeley Green New Deal: Just Transition Framework for the General Plan’s Environmental Justice Element were continued to a future meeting with no action or discussion (a message from Taplin’s office was sent to continue the items) and COPA/TOPA (Community Opportunity to Purchase Act / Tenants’ Opportunity to Purchase Act) is moving on to council with votes by Councilmembers Humbert and Wengraf to kill it with a negative recommendation. (Lunaparra voted against the Humbert – Wengraf motion).
I missed the Land Use Meeting, but I picked up the discussion from listening to the recording. (FYI every Council Committee meeting is recorded. The link is at the bottom of the committee webpage.) There were just a handful of speakers. Humbert, committee chair, started off the discussion with his opinion TOPA should not be pursued and should be forwarded with a negative recommendation. Wengraf concurred.
Councilmember Lunaparra spoke in favor of TOPA, about the years of work put into it, stabilizing affordable housing and asked staff if she could pick up TOPA from former councilmember Harrison and proceed as the sponsor. City staff told Lunaparra she could not.
Interestingly in the July 8 Agenda Committee discussion on legislative reform, committee members Mayor Arreguin and Councilmembers Hahn and Wengraf had a long discussion of how proposed ordinances and resolutions from councilmembers who have left office could move forward with new sponsors.
If TOPA had ever passed, it would require property owners to notify tenants that the property they are living in was being put up for sale. TOPA would give tenants the first right of refusal meaning first right to purchase the property. The real estate industry, property owners of rental property as you might expect had a small fit when it was first presented back in 2018 by Arreguin. Tenants clamored for it.
I never thought there would be a huge number of tenants that could scrape the money /deposits / loans together to purchase a multi-unit building, but it could have been a stabilizing factor in housing. In the resubmission by Harrison (the first submission was by Arreguin who presented various versions over months and years and then let it disappear) COPA added a new dimension for the building purchase through affordable housing nonprofits in the COPA arm of the proposal.
At the July 3 FITES (Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment and Sustainability) Committee, Taplin’s Train Quiet Zones in West Berkeley slipped off the table as too expensive to pursue though the staff presentation on the costs of various options was excellent. Councilmember Bartlett’s EVITP (Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Training Program) was referred out of committee for review by the City Attorney. This is an ordinance requiring 50% of electricians per job installing and maintaining city-funded electric vehicle supply equipment and infrastructure to be certified through a training program to reduce risk of fire.
FITES Committee members Taplin, Humbert and Lunaparra had already made up their minds to refer the Curb Management Plan from the Environment and Climate Commission to the City Manager when they rejected my recommendation that this item really needed input from the Commission on Disability, the Design Review Committee (DRC) and the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) before sending the item off to sit (languish) in the very long City Manager “to do” list. Plus using these resources could speed up the process.
Attending as many City meetings as I do (and life experiences as a caregiver and a RN) gives me a different perspective on how we can use the expertise in the community including citizen scientists and commissioners to get things done.
Curb Management which is about loading zones, parking, bus stops and bicycle lanes really needs broad input. Disability parking isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. I remember handicapped spaces that didn’t work with our handicapped van. The inability of the DRC and ZAB to place loading zones where they would work best for new mixed-use developments, hampers project design.
My recall of creating the Council Committees was sold on Councilmembers developing and refining proposals in committee. Former Councilmember Harrison often used the FITES Committee as a forum to bring in representatives from business and the community for input before finalizing ideas into ordinances. I miss that.
As I have written many times before, City Council Committees are often a detour on the way to getting things done.
The Bicycle Access Improvements on the Virginia Street Bikeway were in the draft agenda for July 23 City Council meeting until it was pulled on Monday to be postponed until fall. The Virginia Street Bikeway went through the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission on June 20. I arrived a little late that evening having attended the DRC first. I counted about forty people (most of whom spoke) on whether the Virginia bikeway should be 9 feet wide and preserve parking or 12 feet wide and remove parking. I did not count how many speakers pleaded for each alternative, but there was a heavy showing for preserving parking and a third alternative suggested by Bryce Nesbit complete with a map.
Ray Yep the Commissioner chairing the meeting tried to put together a compromise or at the very least at a community meeting to explore the bikeway alternatives further. The Commission was having none of it, declined to support Yep’s motion and voted for the 12 foot wide bikeway.
I am not an enthusiast of curbed protected bikeways. If we ever really get people out of cars and on bicycles and scooters, narrow protected bikeways will not handle a real increase in usage.
For all the attention to bike infrastructure, when Bryce Nesbit with a group of volunteers duplicated the prior bicycle rider counts by approximating the same locations, conditions and times, their bicycle counts found fewer bicycle riders in the 2023 count than the 2010 and 2015 counts. The population of Berkeley during that same time increased from 112,580 (2010) to 118,962 (2023). At the Transportation Commission meeting where the bicycle survey results were presented, the commissioners expressed no interest in pursuing why the investment in bicycle infrastructure wasn’t translating into changing behavior.
My favored response to encouraging the switch from cars to bicycles and improving safety is reducing/restricting speed on residential streets and directing vehicle traffic to identified traffic corridors resulting in bicycle and scooter friendly streets (quiet streets) instead of curbed bike lanes.
At the June 25 City Council meeting the main event was the Council managing to pass the biennial budget for fiscal years 2025 and 2026. Councilmember Kesarwani made her pitch to remove the budgeted $10,000,000 for the small sites program and did not walk out as she did at the Budget and Finance Committee on June 19 when Councilmember Hahn countered Kesarwani by speaking for the importance of funding the purchase of existing small apartment buildings and thereby supporting existing affordable housing and community diversity.
The $10,000,000 is more like seed money for housing trusts, grants, etc.
The budget passed unanimously.
What didn’t get any attention was agenda item 58. Climate lost.
In 2021 when Former Councilmember Kate Harrison proposed adopting an ordinance on climate with the overwhelming title “Establishing Emergency Greenhouse Gas Limits, Process for Updated Climate Action Plan, Monitoring, Evaluation, Reporting and Regional Collaboration.”
The carbon dioxide level was described as staggering at 418 parts per million (ppm). Now three years later on July 6, 2024 CO2 was 425.50 ppm.
Global warming which was at 1.1 °C above preindustrial levels in 2021 and given as justification for taking action came with this warning, “[C]urrent global growth trends and policies could push humanity past 1.5 degrees by mid-century…” and “[T]he ‘Global North,’ which includes Berkeley, has far exceeded its fair share of the emissions …[and] must reduce its emissions rapidly and justly”.
In 2018 when the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published the special report on the importance of keeping the global temperature rise to 1.5°C instead of 2°C to avoid the most catastrophic impacts from climate change the prediction for reaching/crossing the 1.5°C threshold was sometime between 2030 and 2050.
The report came with this directive to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of global warming.
“The report finds that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require ‘rapid and far-reaching’ transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport and cities. Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050. This means any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO2 from the air.” http://tiny.cc/82n3zz
The proposed Harrison climate ordinance was already dead long before City Council voted to take no action on May 25. I counted twenty-one meetings/opportunities for action, but found it was brought up for discussion only three times. The last FITES Committee discussion was on June 6, 2022 with nothing until May 15, 2024 when FITES took no action and sent it back to council.
According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, we have already crossed the 1.5°C threshold. The global average temperature was 1.6°C above preindustrial levels for the twelve months from June 2023 through May 2024.
The latest climate news is anything but reassuring. On June 7, 2024 on Democracy Now the closing interview was with Jeff Goodall the author of The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. Just four days earlier Goodall wrote an op-ed “The Heat Wave Scenario That Keeps Climate Scientists Up at Night” in the New York Times. That climate scenario is a power failure in the height of an extreme heat wave. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/03/opinion/heat-technology-climate.html
Researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology, Arizona State University and the University of Michigan looked at the potential consequences of a total blackout for two days with three days of restoring power in three cities (Phoenix, Detroit, Atlanta) during an extreme heat wave. The results for Phoenix predicted 800,000 emergency room visits and 13,000 deaths, for Detroit 221 deaths and Atlanta 12,540 emergency room visits and 6 deaths.
The first 2024 draft update to Berkeley’s federally required Local Hazard Mitigation Plan (LHMP) projects a potential annual average of six to seven 90-100 degree days in Berkeley in ten years and follows that with there isn’t much useful research on the economic impacts of high heat at the local level.
Six or seven days doesn’t seem like much to worry about, though I certainly remember during 2022 heat wave receiving the text alert at 5:48 pm on September 6, 2022 to shut down all unnecessary power to save the grid.
On July 10, 2024 the Mercury News published the California Department of Insurance found the hidden costs of extreme heat to be $7.7 billion for California over the last decade from lost productivity to healthcare for heat related illnesses. The evening news announced fourteen deaths (the number is expected to go up) in San Jose from heat in the current heat wave.
In Berkeley, our first 2024 summer “heat wave” according to my iPhone Berkeley reached only 81° on July 4, but Palm Springs reached 124° on July 5 (day after reports in the newspaper). Now we’re in another temperature swing under the heat dome covering much of the U.S. West.
In the LHMP, if in a ten year future the heat wave for Berkeley is projected at six to seven 90° to 100° days then what are the temperatures going to be east, north and south of us?
Jeff Goodall in The Heat Will Kill You First doesn’t stop with what happens to us humans. He includes what happens to plants (it isn’t good) our food in this heated future. Councilmember Bartlett’s Berkeley Food Utility and Access Resilience Measure (FARM) passed by City Council and sitting in the City Manager’s long referral “to do” list isn’t going to save us. In the committee discussion, the food resilience was to look at sources of food within 100 miles of Berkeley, seemingly forgetting that there are hundreds of thousands of other people living in that same 100 miles and what might happen to those food sources in a drought and on a heated planet.
Mayor Arreguin’s April 11, 2024 email “Implementing Climate Policies for a Greener Future makes it sound as if here in Berkeley we’ve made incredible progress. I beg to differ.
I went back to Mayor Arreguin’s email from April 11, 2024 extolling how great Berkeley is doing on climate action with temperature rise of 1.18 C° for 2023. (The 1.18 °C is from NOAA) A bulk of the conclusions Arreguin cited on GHG reductions attribute 54% of Berkeley’s GHG to transportation were from 2021 when we were still barely coming out of the pandemic shutdowns.
Looking at the December 12, 2023 Climate Action Plan and Resilience Update from Jordon Klein, Director, Department of Planning and Development linked in Arreguin’s email, Berkeley has some big work to do this year with a budget that is undergoing some belt tightening. The goal for public Level 2 EV chargers is 420 by 2025. There were 110 in October 2023. The goal for public direct current fast chargers by 2025 is 100. There were 19 in 2023.
More worrisome risks in the LHMP are active and potential landslide areas, wildland urban wildfire and the overdue big earthquake whenever that comes. Looking at the maps in the LHMP there is very little land in Berkeley that is not in one of the identified high-risk areas, i.e. the Hayward Fault, landslide, liquefaction or wildfire.
You can read the LHMP at https://berkeleyca.gov/safety-health/disaster-preparedness/local-hazard-mitigation-plan-update
The LHMP includes lots of charts and maps, but it does not include this link where you can type in an address and see whether that address/land parcel is on a fault line, landside area or both or sitting in a liquefaction zone. https://maps.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/EQZApp/app/
One thing Wengraf and I totally agree on, is Berkeley should not be adding density, building more housing and putting more people in the high fire zones which also happen to be next to or on top of the Hayward Fault and in landslide zones.
Arreguin cited in his email the “Deep Green Building Initiative” which he authored with Hahn. The Deep Green Building Initiative was an incentive-based plan. I said at the time as a participant in the meetings, that incentives would never work and they haven’t. Developers do use the state measure SB 330 density bonus with the formula for how far a project can exceed zoning restrictions by including a pittance of income restricted units in the building.
From my perspective, we have a lot of work to do to warrant labeling Berkeley as a leader.
A year of record global heat has pushed Earth closer to dangerous threshold by Scott Dance
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/06/05/global-temperatures-1-5-celsius-record-year/
When it comes to climate I have to ask what are we thinking? Are we believing that some magical technology is going to come along and save us from the repercussions of our actions? Is the way we live so precious to us that we wish to blind ourselves to the impact of our lifestyles? And what about all the habitat, ecosystems that we destroy in the process of endless building that is really suited to the last century and not the future.
We need to think, plan, act and live differently if we want a livable planet for those babies pictured in my facebook feed from friends and family.
I have much more to say and some interesting reading to report, but this is on my usual writing long side already, so watch for the next edition of the Activist’s Diary.
Before getting into the meat of this Activist’s Diary, at the July 1, 2024 Land Use, Housing & Economic Development Committee Councilmember Taplin’s Affordable Housing for Artists and Berkeley Green New Deal: Just Transition Framework for the General Plan’s Environmental Justice Element were continued to a future meeting with no action or discussion (a message from Taplin’s office was sent to continue the items) and COPA/TOPA (Community Opportunity to Purchase Act / Tenants’ Opportunity to Purchase Act) is moving on to council with votes by Councilmembers Humbert and Wengraf to kill it with a negative recommendation. (Lunaparra voted against the Humbert – Wengraf motion).
I missed the Land Use Meeting, but I picked up the discussion from listening to the recording. (FYI every Council Committee meeting is recorded. The link is at the bottom of the committee webpage.) There were just a handful of speakers. Humbert, committee chair, started off the discussion with his opinion TOPA should not be pursued and should be forwarded with a negative recommendation. Wengraf concurred.
Councilmember Lunaparra spoke in favor of TOPA, about the years of work put into it, stabilizing affordable housing and asked staff if she could pick up TOPA from former councilmember Harrison and proceed as the sponsor. City staff told Lunaparra she could not.
Interestingly in the July 8 Agenda Committee discussion on legislative reform, committee members Mayor Arreguin and Councilmembers Hahn and Wengraf had a long discussion of how proposed ordinances and resolutions from councilmembers who have left office could move forward with new sponsors.
If TOPA had ever passed, it would require property owners to notify tenants that the property they are living in was being put up for sale. TOPA would give tenants the first right of refusal meaning first right to purchase the property. The real estate industry, property owners of rental property as you might expect had a small fit when it was first presented back in 2018 by Arreguin. Tenants clamored for it.
I never thought there would be a huge number of tenants that could scrape the money /deposits / loans together to purchase a multi-unit building, but it could have been a stabilizing factor in housing. In the resubmission by Harrison (the first submission was by Arreguin who presented various versions over months and years and then let it disappear) COPA added a new dimension for the building purchase through affordable housing nonprofits in the COPA arm of the proposal.
At the July 3 FITES (Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment and Sustainability) Committee, Taplin’s Train Quiet Zones in West Berkeley slipped off the table as too expensive to pursue though the staff presentation on the costs of various options was excellent. Councilmember Bartlett’s EVITP (Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Training Program) was referred out of committee for review by the City Attorney. This is an ordinance requiring 50% of electricians per job installing and maintaining city-funded electric vehicle supply equipment and infrastructure to be certified through a training program to reduce risk of fire.
FITES Committee members Taplin, Humbert and Lunaparra had already made up their minds to refer the Curb Management Plan from the Environment and Climate Commission to the City Manager when they rejected my recommendation that this item really needed input from the Commission on Disability, the Design Review Committee (DRC) and the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) before sending the item off to sit (languish) in the very long City Manager “to do” list. Plus using these resources could speed up the process.
Attending as many City meetings as I do (and life experiences as a caregiver and a RN) gives me a different perspective on how we can use the expertise in the community including citizen scientists and commissioners to get things done.
Curb Management which is about loading zones, parking, bus stops and bicycle lanes really needs broad input. Disability parking isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. I remember handicapped spaces that didn’t work with our handicapped van. The inability of the DRC and ZAB to place loading zones where they would work best for new mixed-use developments, hampers project design.
My recall of creating the Council Committees was sold on Councilmembers developing and refining proposals in committee. Former Councilmember Harrison often used the FITES Committee as a forum to bring in representatives from business and the community for input before finalizing ideas into ordinances. I miss that.
As I have written many times before, City Council Committees are often a detour on the way to getting things done.
The Bicycle Access Improvements on the Virginia Street Bikeway were in the draft agenda for July 23 City Council meeting until it was pulled on Monday to be postponed until fall. The Virginia Street Bikeway went through the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission on June 20. I arrived a little late that evening having attended the DRC first. I counted about forty people (most of whom spoke) on whether the Virginia bikeway should be 9 feet wide and preserve parking or 12 feet wide and remove parking. I did not count how many speakers pleaded for each alternative, but there was a heavy showing for preserving parking and a third alternative suggested by Bryce Nesbit complete with a map.
Ray Yep the Commissioner chairing the meeting tried to put together a compromise or at the very least at a community meeting to explore the bikeway alternatives further. The Commission was having none of it, declined to support Yep’s motion and voted for the 12 foot wide bikeway.
I am not an enthusiast of curbed protected bikeways. If we ever really get people out of cars and on bicycles and scooters, narrow protected bikeways will not handle a real increase in usage.
For all the attention to bike infrastructure, when Bryce Nesbit with a group of volunteers duplicated the prior bicycle rider counts by approximating the same locations, conditions and times, their bicycle counts found fewer bicycle riders in the 2023 count than the 2010 and 2015 counts. The population of Berkeley during that same time increased from 112,580 (2010) to 118,962 (2023). At the Transportation Commission meeting where the bicycle survey results were presented, the commissioners expressed no interest in pursuing why the investment in bicycle infrastructure wasn’t translating into changing behavior.
My favored response to encouraging the switch from cars to bicycles and improving safety is reducing/restricting speed on residential streets and directing vehicle traffic to identified traffic corridors resulting in bicycle and scooter friendly streets (quiet streets) instead of curbed bike lanes.
At the June 25 City Council meeting the main event was the Council managing to pass the biennial budget for fiscal years 2025 and 2026. Councilmember Kesarwani made her pitch to remove the budgeted $10,000,000 for the small sites program and did not walk out as she did at the Budget and Finance Committee on June 19 when Councilmember Hahn countered Kesarwani by speaking for the importance of funding the purchase of existing small apartment buildings and thereby supporting existing affordable housing and community diversity.
The $10,000,000 is more like seed money for housing trusts, grants, etc.
The budget passed unanimously.
What didn’t get any attention was agenda item 58. Climate lost.
In 2021 when Former Councilmember Kate Harrison proposed adopting an ordinance on climate with the overwhelming title “Establishing Emergency Greenhouse Gas Limits, Process for Updated Climate Action Plan, Monitoring, Evaluation, Reporting and Regional Collaboration.”
The carbon dioxide level was described as staggering at 418 parts per million (ppm). Now three years later on July 6, 2024 CO2 was 425.50 ppm.
Global warming which was at 1.1 °C above preindustrial levels in 2021 and given as justification for taking action came with this warning, “[C]urrent global growth trends and policies could push humanity past 1.5 degrees by mid-century…” and “[T]he ‘Global North,’ which includes Berkeley, has far exceeded its fair share of the emissions …[and] must reduce its emissions rapidly and justly”.
In 2018 when the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published the special report on the importance of keeping the global temperature rise to 1.5°C instead of 2°C to avoid the most catastrophic impacts from climate change the prediction for reaching/crossing the 1.5°C threshold was sometime between 2030 and 2050.
The report came with this directive to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of global warming.
“The report finds that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require ‘rapid and far-reaching’ transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport and cities. Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050. This means any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO2 from the air.” http://tiny.cc/82n3zz
The proposed Harrison climate ordinance was already dead long before City Council voted to take no action on May 25. I counted twenty-one meetings/opportunities for action, but found it was brought up for discussion only three times. The last FITES Committee discussion was on June 6, 2022 with nothing until May 15, 2024 when FITES took no action and sent it back to council.
According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, we have already crossed the 1.5°C threshold. The global average temperature was 1.6°C above preindustrial levels for the twelve months from June 2023 through May 2024.
The latest climate news is anything but reassuring. On June 7, 2024 on Democracy Now the closing interview was with Jeff Goodall the author of The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. Just four days earlier Goodall wrote an op-ed “The Heat Wave Scenario That Keeps Climate Scientists Up at Night” in the New York Times. That climate scenario is a power failure in the height of an extreme heat wave. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/03/opinion/heat-technology-climate.html
Researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology, Arizona State University and the University of Michigan looked at the potential consequences of a total blackout for two days with three days of restoring power in three cities (Phoenix, Detroit, Atlanta) during an extreme heat wave. The results for Phoenix predicted 800,000 emergency room visits and 13,000 deaths, for Detroit 221 deaths and Atlanta 12,540 emergency room visits and 6 deaths.
The first 2024 draft update to Berkeley’s federally required Local Hazard Mitigation Plan (LHMP) projects a potential annual average of six to seven 90-100 degree days in Berkeley in ten years and follows that with there isn’t much useful research on the economic impacts of high heat at the local level.
Six or seven days doesn’t seem like much to worry about, though I certainly remember during 2022 heat wave receiving the text alert at 5:48 pm on September 6, 2022 to shut down all unnecessary power to save the grid.
On July 10, 2024 the Mercury News published the California Department of Insurance found the hidden costs of extreme heat to be $7.7 billion for California over the last decade from lost productivity to healthcare for heat related illnesses. The evening news announced fourteen deaths (the number is expected to go up) in San Jose from heat in the current heat wave.
In Berkeley, our first 2024 summer “heat wave” according to my iPhone Berkeley reached only 81° on July 4, but Palm Springs reached 124° on July 5 (day after reports in the newspaper). Now we’re in another temperature swing under the heat dome covering much of the U.S. West.
In the LHMP, if in a ten year future the heat wave for Berkeley is projected at six to seven 90° to 100° days then what are the temperatures going to be east, north and south of us?
Jeff Goodall in The Heat Will Kill You First doesn’t stop with what happens to us humans. He includes what happens to plants (it isn’t good) our food in this heated future. Councilmember Bartlett’s Berkeley Food Utility and Access Resilience Measure (FARM) passed by City Council and sitting in the City Manager’s long referral “to do” list isn’t going to save us. In the committee discussion, the food resilience was to look at sources of food within 100 miles of Berkeley, seemingly forgetting that there are hundreds of thousands of other people living in that same 100 miles and what might happen to those food sources in a drought and on a heated planet.
Mayor Arreguin’s April 11, 2024 email “Implementing Climate Policies for a Greener Future makes it sound as if here in Berkeley we’ve made incredible progress. I beg to differ.
I went back to Mayor Arreguin’s email from April 11, 2024 extolling how great Berkeley is doing on climate action with temperature rise of 1.18 C° for 2023. (The 1.18 °C is from NOAA) A bulk of the conclusions Arreguin cited on GHG reductions attribute 54% of Berkeley’s GHG to transportation were from 2021 when we were still barely coming out of the pandemic shutdowns.
Looking at the December 12, 2023 Climate Action Plan and Resilience Update from Jordon Klein, Director, Department of Planning and Development linked in Arreguin’s email, Berkeley has some big work to do this year with a budget that is undergoing some belt tightening. The goal for public Level 2 EV chargers is 420 by 2025. There were 110 in October 2023. The goal for public direct current fast chargers by 2025 is 100. There were 19 in 2023.
More worrisome risks in the LHMP are active and potential landslide areas, wildland urban wildfire and the overdue big earthquake whenever that comes. Looking at the maps in the LHMP there is very little land in Berkeley that is not in one of the identified high-risk areas, i.e. the Hayward Fault, landslide, liquefaction or wildfire.
You can read the LHMP at https://berkeleyca.gov/safety-health/disaster-preparedness/local-hazard-mitigation-plan-update
The LHMP includes lots of charts and maps, but it does not include this link where you can type in an address and see whether that address/land parcel is on a fault line, landside area or both or sitting in a liquefaction zone. https://maps.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/EQZApp/app/
One thing Wengraf and I totally agree on, is Berkeley should not be adding density, building more housing and putting more people in the high fire zones which also happen to be next to or on top of the Hayward Fault and in landslide zones.
Arreguin cited in his email the “Deep Green Building Initiative” which he authored with Hahn. The Deep Green Building Initiative was an incentive-based plan. I said at the time as a participant in the meetings, that incentives would never work and they haven’t. Developers do use the state measure SB 330 density bonus with the formula for how far a project can exceed zoning restrictions by including a pittance of income restricted units in the building.
From my perspective, we have a lot of work to do to warrant labeling Berkeley as a leader.
A year of record global heat has pushed Earth closer to dangerous threshold by Scott Dance
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/06/05/global-temperatures-1-5-celsius-record-year/
When it comes to climate I have to ask what are we thinking? Are we believing that some magical technology is going to come along and save us from the repercussions of our actions? Is the way we live so precious to us that we wish to blind ourselves to the impact of our lifestyles? And what about all the habitat, ecosystems that we destroy in the process of endless building that is really suited to the last century and not the future.
We need to think, plan, act and live differently if we want a livable planet for those babies pictured in my facebook feed from friends and family.
I have much more to say and some interesting reading to report, but this is on my usual writing long side already, so watch for the next edition of the Activist’s Diary.
July 5, 2024
My neighbor and I are out looking in anticipation for little bites in the leaves of the plants in the strip between the sidewalk and the street. I call it the median, though a new friend constantly corrects me that the median is in the middle of the street. The strip has many names like road verge, parkways, medians, berms, hellstrip. It’s really owned by the city, but we’re responsible for maintaining it.
I got help to dig up, pull out the weeds in my strip and my neighbor hired the same “helper” to take out the concrete. We’ve been going to the native plant stores and put in native plants, for birds, butterflies and caterpillars. We thought we had lost the caterpillars, but I got a text there were two. I’m thinking, I might have to put up a sign on the sidewalk, “caterpillar crossing” when they leave the plants to form their chrysalis and return as a butterfly. I planted the pipevine inside the front yard.
Erin Diehm who introduced me to the thrill of native plants said it might be three or four years before I see the pipevine caterpillars and the black and iridescent blue pipevine butterflies. In pre-pandemic days as we walked together to the downtown Y, she would point out the yards with native plants with skippers, bees and butterflies and she would point out the yards with non-native imported plants as dead zones with no pollinators flitting from plant to plant.
I shudder when I think of both the massive and focused herbicide and pesticide spraying to maintain big green lawns when I visit family in the Midwest. This along with monoculture, alien
/non-native plants, urban sprawl, glass architecture and climate change is why we’ve lost a third of the birds in North America and are sitting on the edge of the collapse of nature.
With all the swirling bad news, finding caterpillars is brightening my day.
When I see the development plans at the Design Review Committee (DRC) and Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB), I feel like the designs are for a past that is gone, not a warming future especially not an excessive heat warning day. Those building plans with bedrooms with no windows become deadly in a power failure.
The 1598 University project (the bedrooms have windows) came back for final design approval to DRC on May 16 with a new architectural firm DJR out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. DRC rejected the changes DJR made to the design by Trachtenberg Architects and sent them back to the drawing board. DJR returned on June 20 bringing back the featured shading over windows and full samples of the exterior finish. The building exterior/finish was much improved, but landscape plans had a row of Canary pines.
Mary Muszynski, MLA (Master of Landscape Architecture) is the DRC member with the responsibility for assessing and advising on project development landscape plans.
Muszynski addressed the Canary pines in a way that was a first for DRC. She said that Canary pines are a highly flammable tree with resin and even though 1598 University is in the flats and not in one of the very high fire hazard severity zones, highly flammable trees should not be planted next to residences.
Muszynski also asked DJR to reduce cultivars and increase native plants.
It is summer, it is hot, we need to think and act differently which takes us to the property insurance crisis in the very high fire hazard severity zones (VHFHSZ).
First to the Insurance Crisis Panel arranged by Councilmember Wengraf.
I live in the formerly redlined area of Berkeley, the flats, not the wildland urban interface (WUI) or in fire zone 2 (Berkeley Hills) or 3 (Panoramic Hill).
Here are my takeaways from the webinar: 1) If you own property in one of the high risk wildland urban interface fire areas or happen to sit in the same zip code, when you get that homeowner insurance policy cancellation notice or giant rate hike, check if you can change your status through home hardening measures (measures to make your property more resistant to wildfire). 2) Get to work immediately to find a replacement even if the actual cancellation may still be a couple of months or more away. 3) If you find an insurer the advice is jump on it as the offer can quickly slip away. 4) When all else fails, there is the California Fair Plan. 5) The California Fair Plan is intended to be temporary while searching for an insurer and may not (more like will not) offer the full coverage homeowners seek in normal circumstances.
Though the name California Fair Plan makes it sound like it is a State of California sponsored backstop it is not.
You can watch the Insurance Crisis webinar at https://youtu.be/76TV56X3dLk?si=GVAHverDe632u5Hk
There wasn’t a lot of detail on the California Fair Plan by the panel. For a better understanding of the Fair Plan, Livable California sponsored an in-depth session which can be watched at: https://youtu.be/OWCewh-_26g?si=Czvbxeeeel2FOW8G&t=1
The property insurance crisis is much broader than just California and Florida. ‘How ‘Kitty cats’ are wrecking the home insurance industry” by Jake Bittle originally published in Grist and republished in the Guardian gives a taste to how the cumulative impact of smaller catastrophic storms fueled by climate change are hitting the home insurance markets in the Midwest, plains and south. https://grist.org/extreme-weather/home-insurance-midwest-climate-disasters/
None of this is good news.
When catastrophic events hit, they make a splash in the news cycle for a couple of days and then disappear. In Jake Bittle’s book The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, Bittle takesus into the personal stories of how people’s lives and community are impacted and changed from the Four Horsemen of the Anthropocene, fire, heat, drought and flood. This book is definitely worth reading and not just because the section on fires is close to home, the Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa and the Camp fire that destroyed Paradise. As for floods, I will never look at Houston the same way.
If you don’t have a TV with connection to CNN or didn’t watch the series Violent Earth you can still watch episode 2 Wildfire for $1.99+ https://www.vudu.com/content/browse/details/Violent-Earth-Wildfire/3305747
My neighbor and I are out looking in anticipation for little bites in the leaves of the plants in the strip between the sidewalk and the street. I call it the median, though a new friend constantly corrects me that the median is in the middle of the street. The strip has many names like road verge, parkways, medians, berms, hellstrip. It’s really owned by the city, but we’re responsible for maintaining it.
I got help to dig up, pull out the weeds in my strip and my neighbor hired the same “helper” to take out the concrete. We’ve been going to the native plant stores and put in native plants, for birds, butterflies and caterpillars. We thought we had lost the caterpillars, but I got a text there were two. I’m thinking, I might have to put up a sign on the sidewalk, “caterpillar crossing” when they leave the plants to form their chrysalis and return as a butterfly. I planted the pipevine inside the front yard.
Erin Diehm who introduced me to the thrill of native plants said it might be three or four years before I see the pipevine caterpillars and the black and iridescent blue pipevine butterflies. In pre-pandemic days as we walked together to the downtown Y, she would point out the yards with native plants with skippers, bees and butterflies and she would point out the yards with non-native imported plants as dead zones with no pollinators flitting from plant to plant.
I shudder when I think of both the massive and focused herbicide and pesticide spraying to maintain big green lawns when I visit family in the Midwest. This along with monoculture, alien
/non-native plants, urban sprawl, glass architecture and climate change is why we’ve lost a third of the birds in North America and are sitting on the edge of the collapse of nature.
With all the swirling bad news, finding caterpillars is brightening my day.
When I see the development plans at the Design Review Committee (DRC) and Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB), I feel like the designs are for a past that is gone, not a warming future especially not an excessive heat warning day. Those building plans with bedrooms with no windows become deadly in a power failure.
The 1598 University project (the bedrooms have windows) came back for final design approval to DRC on May 16 with a new architectural firm DJR out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. DRC rejected the changes DJR made to the design by Trachtenberg Architects and sent them back to the drawing board. DJR returned on June 20 bringing back the featured shading over windows and full samples of the exterior finish. The building exterior/finish was much improved, but landscape plans had a row of Canary pines.
Mary Muszynski, MLA (Master of Landscape Architecture) is the DRC member with the responsibility for assessing and advising on project development landscape plans.
Muszynski addressed the Canary pines in a way that was a first for DRC. She said that Canary pines are a highly flammable tree with resin and even though 1598 University is in the flats and not in one of the very high fire hazard severity zones, highly flammable trees should not be planted next to residences.
Muszynski also asked DJR to reduce cultivars and increase native plants.
It is summer, it is hot, we need to think and act differently which takes us to the property insurance crisis in the very high fire hazard severity zones (VHFHSZ).
First to the Insurance Crisis Panel arranged by Councilmember Wengraf.
I live in the formerly redlined area of Berkeley, the flats, not the wildland urban interface (WUI) or in fire zone 2 (Berkeley Hills) or 3 (Panoramic Hill).
Here are my takeaways from the webinar: 1) If you own property in one of the high risk wildland urban interface fire areas or happen to sit in the same zip code, when you get that homeowner insurance policy cancellation notice or giant rate hike, check if you can change your status through home hardening measures (measures to make your property more resistant to wildfire). 2) Get to work immediately to find a replacement even if the actual cancellation may still be a couple of months or more away. 3) If you find an insurer the advice is jump on it as the offer can quickly slip away. 4) When all else fails, there is the California Fair Plan. 5) The California Fair Plan is intended to be temporary while searching for an insurer and may not (more like will not) offer the full coverage homeowners seek in normal circumstances.
Though the name California Fair Plan makes it sound like it is a State of California sponsored backstop it is not.
You can watch the Insurance Crisis webinar at https://youtu.be/76TV56X3dLk?si=GVAHverDe632u5Hk
There wasn’t a lot of detail on the California Fair Plan by the panel. For a better understanding of the Fair Plan, Livable California sponsored an in-depth session which can be watched at: https://youtu.be/OWCewh-_26g?si=Czvbxeeeel2FOW8G&t=1
The property insurance crisis is much broader than just California and Florida. ‘How ‘Kitty cats’ are wrecking the home insurance industry” by Jake Bittle originally published in Grist and republished in the Guardian gives a taste to how the cumulative impact of smaller catastrophic storms fueled by climate change are hitting the home insurance markets in the Midwest, plains and south. https://grist.org/extreme-weather/home-insurance-midwest-climate-disasters/
None of this is good news.
When catastrophic events hit, they make a splash in the news cycle for a couple of days and then disappear. In Jake Bittle’s book The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, Bittle takesus into the personal stories of how people’s lives and community are impacted and changed from the Four Horsemen of the Anthropocene, fire, heat, drought and flood. This book is definitely worth reading and not just because the section on fires is close to home, the Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa and the Camp fire that destroyed Paradise. As for floods, I will never look at Houston the same way.
If you don’t have a TV with connection to CNN or didn’t watch the series Violent Earth you can still watch episode 2 Wildfire for $1.99+ https://www.vudu.com/content/browse/details/Violent-Earth-Wildfire/3305747
July 2, 2024
I’ve been doing more reading than writing in the recent weeks and as usual the reading content is heavy, bringing a different frame to the war in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, the debate and the Supreme Court.
After reading Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine on the Holodomor the entirely manmade famine of the 1930s also known as the Ukrainian Famine engineered by Joseph Stalin, it is difficult to believe the Ukrainians all these years later would be willing to negotiate a peace agreement with Russia that would give away any Ukrainian land.
Memories are long.
When I read Ronen Bergman’s book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted AssassinationsI described it as brutal and it was with descriptions of bombings and torture followed by murder. But even that did not prepare me for the brutality in Ilan Pappe’s description of the Nakba in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
In Ashfaaq Carim’s March 15, 2024 interview with Pappe, Pappe describes his journey sharing how through declassification of the historical documents of the Nakba in 1978 challenged the narrative and everything he and his friends had come to believe. Reading the declassified documents changed the trajectory of his career as a historian resulting in becoming an Israeli dissident and authoring The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine in 2006. https://youtu.be/Bu1_OFUcd0g?si=81-xdtA6ftEmSPfO
There seems to be an endless list of books on Israel and Palestine. Since November 2023, I’ve made my way through thirteen, have three in process and six more on hold. But it was Peter Maass’s April 9, 2024 opinion piece in the Washington Post, “I’m Jewish, and I’ve covered wars. I know war crimes when I see them” that led me to reading about the war in Bosnia in his first book Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War published in 1996.
There is a through line in my recent reading. Maass ponders in Love Thy Neighbor how the “wild beast” in human nature can so easily break the restraints of civilization and incite neighbors to torture, rape and murder one another.
Bosnia was an integrated pluralistic society in 1992 prior to the war.
There is so much that is quotable and memorable in Love Thy Neighbor that it seemed like the entire book was underlined when I borrowed it from the Berkeley library. The book isn’t easy to get. The Berkeley Central Library has one print copy and there are no e-editions. My reading journal is filled with pages of notes.
From Love Thy Neighbor
“What happened in Bosnia was not a Balkan Freak Show, but a violent process of national breakdown at the hand of political manipulators. The dynamics of fear and loathing between people of different backgrounds – ethnic or religious or economic – are not as unique or complex as we might like to believe. Violent breakdowns can occur in virtually any country during times of economic hardship, political transition or moral infirmity; such troubles create opportunities for manipulators and the manipulators create opportunities for the wild beast.”
We are in a perilous time for our country. With the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 as a guide, Donald Trump and all of his enabling sycophants are poised to dismantle the governing we have known into an authoritarian state.
With no hope of expanding the Supreme Court or impeaching the corrupted Clarence Thomas, the secure conservative majority of six to three has free rein or better free reign to create endless damage.
We could say the dismantling has already begun with the decisions coming from the Supreme Court.
The Court has even gone so far as to encourage payoffs. In Snyder v. United States, the Court decided in a 6 – 3 opinion that generous gifts after a “service” by state and local officials is not bribery/corruption. This was before Monday, July 1, 2024 when the Court bestowed broad immunity on a past and future Trump presidency, “The Court thus concludes that the President is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority.” (page 2 TRUMP v. UNITED STATES) https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2024/07/scotus_immunity-7-1.pdf
Women, pregnant people were already disposable with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the abortion bans that followed. As if that wasn’t enough, through the use of the filibuster the Senate minority blocked legislation to protect the right to contraception on June 5, 2024. And then, there was Biden’s inability to articulate a coherent answer to a question on abortion at the June 27, 2024 debate.
Biden’s performance in the debate was a disaster. Friends were texting me they couldn’t take it anymore and shut off the debate.
In the thread of emails, I’ve been receiving from a Democratic party-based group sending links to donating to Biden’s campaign and articles supporting Biden countering my comment that Biden looked like a deer in headlights and that his performance reinforced all my fears about his aging, they are all in.
Biden has accomplished a lot, but these are no ordinary times. And prior to the debate, his accomplishments weren’t translating into a lead over Trump. In fact, besides being on the losing end, Biden has been polling behind Democratic Senators and Representatives.
In the fallout from the debate, it is not the loyal Democrats that worry me. They will vote the ticket regardless. It is the people like the woman standing next to me waiting for the light to change to cross the street on Friday afternoon. I asked her if she watched the debate and what she thought. To her the debate was such a disaster, she said she can’t vote for either Biden or Trump. She expects to sit out voting. She voted for Biden last time.
There was the young man at my house for the inspection of my rooftop solar. He didn’t watch the debate and wasn’t planning on voting. If he did vote he said he would probably vote for Trump as he is not impressed with Biden.
What appears obvious is that Biden can perform exceptionally when he has a teleprompter. But, stepping away from scripted settings and rote glad-handing interactions, Biden falls apart. Biden lost his train of thought, was at times incoherent, was unable to counter Trump’s barrage of lies and on the question on abortion which is undoubtedly one of the most important issues for young voters he blew it.
This cannot be explained away, by saying Biden has a stutter or he had a cold or was tired.
We need a fully functioning president or at the very least we need a team around Biden who have enough sense, not to put him into situations where he will fail.
Think back to the 2020 Biden Trump debate. Biden was sharp in control. This time Biden struggled through responses. The description I heard that was most fitting was in the Ezra Klein post-debate podcast. It was, as if Biden’s cue cards fell on the floor in a pile and as he was trying to pick them up he spouted off in whatever order he found them.
Friday morning following the debate on Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough left behind his usual cheer leading for another Biden term and spoke honestly “failure is not an option” and asked if any Fortune 500 company would keep a CEO in place who appeared as Biden did last night losing his train of thought unable to respond to Trump’s continuous string of lies. The answer is, of course, no.
Mika (on Morning Joe) came to Biden’s defense, saying we shouldn’t be so quick to judge.
I agree with Ezra Klein’s post saying that the job of the president is not just to do the job, but to instill confidence that as president he is capable of doing the job.
I can’t imagine a President Biden able to fulfill his responsibilities for another term.
As I see it, we don’t have a large enough core of faithful supporters who will vote for Biden to defeat Trump even without considering third party candidates siphoning away votes.
Plus, Biden losing means an unrestrained Trump. When Trump tells his followers, “I am your retribution” we should believe him.
Biden’s responses in the debate told me why we are nine months into a war on Gaza that is an unremitting horror, a moral and political failure and the move to peace in Ukraine is beyond grasp.
Biden has burned through voters who supported him in 2020 in his handling of Israel in the war on Gaza.
This is a train wreck.
Back to Love Thy Neighbor.
“The goal of imperial wars, which we are most familiar with is to conquer and rule [Russia’s war on Ukraine]. The goal of nationalist wars, as in Bosnia [and the Nakba] is to conquer and cleanse. These contests are winner take-all. When you are faced with enemies who wish to expunge you from your land, and when those enemies offer a treaty that ensures their boots will stay on your throat, suffocating you one day, you have little choice but to keep struggling, even though the odds are against you and people who call themselves your friends are saying you should give up. Resistance becomes not an option but an imperative.”
An article on Gaza in the Guardian many weeks ago described the destruction of housing and the toxins from bombings left behind would take possibly fourteen years to clean up. Looking at the photos of the devastation that make it out despite the targeted killing of journalists in Palestine makes fourteen years sound like unrealistic optimism. Along with the destruction of housing (domicide), hospitals and infrastructure, there is the destruction of schools and universities (scholasticide) and the killing of scholars, educators, artists – the erasure of history.
Then there is the war crime of starvation.
I find it difficult to describe what is happening in Gaza as anything other than genocide.
Councilmember Lunaparra at the dais with the keffiyeh over her shoulders is smart, articulate, well-informed, impressive as someone who is young and a fresh college graduate, but she is no match for the pro-Israel power players dominating Berkeley City Council leadership. Her promise of a ceasefire resolution is dead just like the thousands of innocent Palestinian children.
There was one bright spot in my recent reading, Ali Velshi’s just released Small Acts of Courage: A legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy. The book is part memoir, part history. It is the story of immigration, finding country and home beginning with Velshi’s great grandfather leaving India for South Africa and family members crossing paths with Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Tolstoy Farm, living through Apartheid, the liberation of Kenya to self-governing and landing in Canada. The section on the pluralistic, multi-culture, immigrant welcoming Canada is inspiring. Small Acts of Courage is a book I highly recommend.
I’ve been doing more reading than writing in the recent weeks and as usual the reading content is heavy, bringing a different frame to the war in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, the debate and the Supreme Court.
After reading Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine on the Holodomor the entirely manmade famine of the 1930s also known as the Ukrainian Famine engineered by Joseph Stalin, it is difficult to believe the Ukrainians all these years later would be willing to negotiate a peace agreement with Russia that would give away any Ukrainian land.
Memories are long.
When I read Ronen Bergman’s book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted AssassinationsI described it as brutal and it was with descriptions of bombings and torture followed by murder. But even that did not prepare me for the brutality in Ilan Pappe’s description of the Nakba in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
In Ashfaaq Carim’s March 15, 2024 interview with Pappe, Pappe describes his journey sharing how through declassification of the historical documents of the Nakba in 1978 challenged the narrative and everything he and his friends had come to believe. Reading the declassified documents changed the trajectory of his career as a historian resulting in becoming an Israeli dissident and authoring The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine in 2006. https://youtu.be/Bu1_OFUcd0g?si=81-xdtA6ftEmSPfO
There seems to be an endless list of books on Israel and Palestine. Since November 2023, I’ve made my way through thirteen, have three in process and six more on hold. But it was Peter Maass’s April 9, 2024 opinion piece in the Washington Post, “I’m Jewish, and I’ve covered wars. I know war crimes when I see them” that led me to reading about the war in Bosnia in his first book Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War published in 1996.
There is a through line in my recent reading. Maass ponders in Love Thy Neighbor how the “wild beast” in human nature can so easily break the restraints of civilization and incite neighbors to torture, rape and murder one another.
Bosnia was an integrated pluralistic society in 1992 prior to the war.
There is so much that is quotable and memorable in Love Thy Neighbor that it seemed like the entire book was underlined when I borrowed it from the Berkeley library. The book isn’t easy to get. The Berkeley Central Library has one print copy and there are no e-editions. My reading journal is filled with pages of notes.
From Love Thy Neighbor
“What happened in Bosnia was not a Balkan Freak Show, but a violent process of national breakdown at the hand of political manipulators. The dynamics of fear and loathing between people of different backgrounds – ethnic or religious or economic – are not as unique or complex as we might like to believe. Violent breakdowns can occur in virtually any country during times of economic hardship, political transition or moral infirmity; such troubles create opportunities for manipulators and the manipulators create opportunities for the wild beast.”
We are in a perilous time for our country. With the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 as a guide, Donald Trump and all of his enabling sycophants are poised to dismantle the governing we have known into an authoritarian state.
With no hope of expanding the Supreme Court or impeaching the corrupted Clarence Thomas, the secure conservative majority of six to three has free rein or better free reign to create endless damage.
We could say the dismantling has already begun with the decisions coming from the Supreme Court.
The Court has even gone so far as to encourage payoffs. In Snyder v. United States, the Court decided in a 6 – 3 opinion that generous gifts after a “service” by state and local officials is not bribery/corruption. This was before Monday, July 1, 2024 when the Court bestowed broad immunity on a past and future Trump presidency, “The Court thus concludes that the President is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority.” (page 2 TRUMP v. UNITED STATES) https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2024/07/scotus_immunity-7-1.pdf
Women, pregnant people were already disposable with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the abortion bans that followed. As if that wasn’t enough, through the use of the filibuster the Senate minority blocked legislation to protect the right to contraception on June 5, 2024. And then, there was Biden’s inability to articulate a coherent answer to a question on abortion at the June 27, 2024 debate.
Biden’s performance in the debate was a disaster. Friends were texting me they couldn’t take it anymore and shut off the debate.
In the thread of emails, I’ve been receiving from a Democratic party-based group sending links to donating to Biden’s campaign and articles supporting Biden countering my comment that Biden looked like a deer in headlights and that his performance reinforced all my fears about his aging, they are all in.
Biden has accomplished a lot, but these are no ordinary times. And prior to the debate, his accomplishments weren’t translating into a lead over Trump. In fact, besides being on the losing end, Biden has been polling behind Democratic Senators and Representatives.
In the fallout from the debate, it is not the loyal Democrats that worry me. They will vote the ticket regardless. It is the people like the woman standing next to me waiting for the light to change to cross the street on Friday afternoon. I asked her if she watched the debate and what she thought. To her the debate was such a disaster, she said she can’t vote for either Biden or Trump. She expects to sit out voting. She voted for Biden last time.
There was the young man at my house for the inspection of my rooftop solar. He didn’t watch the debate and wasn’t planning on voting. If he did vote he said he would probably vote for Trump as he is not impressed with Biden.
What appears obvious is that Biden can perform exceptionally when he has a teleprompter. But, stepping away from scripted settings and rote glad-handing interactions, Biden falls apart. Biden lost his train of thought, was at times incoherent, was unable to counter Trump’s barrage of lies and on the question on abortion which is undoubtedly one of the most important issues for young voters he blew it.
This cannot be explained away, by saying Biden has a stutter or he had a cold or was tired.
We need a fully functioning president or at the very least we need a team around Biden who have enough sense, not to put him into situations where he will fail.
Think back to the 2020 Biden Trump debate. Biden was sharp in control. This time Biden struggled through responses. The description I heard that was most fitting was in the Ezra Klein post-debate podcast. It was, as if Biden’s cue cards fell on the floor in a pile and as he was trying to pick them up he spouted off in whatever order he found them.
Friday morning following the debate on Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough left behind his usual cheer leading for another Biden term and spoke honestly “failure is not an option” and asked if any Fortune 500 company would keep a CEO in place who appeared as Biden did last night losing his train of thought unable to respond to Trump’s continuous string of lies. The answer is, of course, no.
Mika (on Morning Joe) came to Biden’s defense, saying we shouldn’t be so quick to judge.
I agree with Ezra Klein’s post saying that the job of the president is not just to do the job, but to instill confidence that as president he is capable of doing the job.
I can’t imagine a President Biden able to fulfill his responsibilities for another term.
As I see it, we don’t have a large enough core of faithful supporters who will vote for Biden to defeat Trump even without considering third party candidates siphoning away votes.
Plus, Biden losing means an unrestrained Trump. When Trump tells his followers, “I am your retribution” we should believe him.
Biden’s responses in the debate told me why we are nine months into a war on Gaza that is an unremitting horror, a moral and political failure and the move to peace in Ukraine is beyond grasp.
Biden has burned through voters who supported him in 2020 in his handling of Israel in the war on Gaza.
This is a train wreck.
Back to Love Thy Neighbor.
“The goal of imperial wars, which we are most familiar with is to conquer and rule [Russia’s war on Ukraine]. The goal of nationalist wars, as in Bosnia [and the Nakba] is to conquer and cleanse. These contests are winner take-all. When you are faced with enemies who wish to expunge you from your land, and when those enemies offer a treaty that ensures their boots will stay on your throat, suffocating you one day, you have little choice but to keep struggling, even though the odds are against you and people who call themselves your friends are saying you should give up. Resistance becomes not an option but an imperative.”
An article on Gaza in the Guardian many weeks ago described the destruction of housing and the toxins from bombings left behind would take possibly fourteen years to clean up. Looking at the photos of the devastation that make it out despite the targeted killing of journalists in Palestine makes fourteen years sound like unrealistic optimism. Along with the destruction of housing (domicide), hospitals and infrastructure, there is the destruction of schools and universities (scholasticide) and the killing of scholars, educators, artists – the erasure of history.
Then there is the war crime of starvation.
I find it difficult to describe what is happening in Gaza as anything other than genocide.
Councilmember Lunaparra at the dais with the keffiyeh over her shoulders is smart, articulate, well-informed, impressive as someone who is young and a fresh college graduate, but she is no match for the pro-Israel power players dominating Berkeley City Council leadership. Her promise of a ceasefire resolution is dead just like the thousands of innocent Palestinian children.
There was one bright spot in my recent reading, Ali Velshi’s just released Small Acts of Courage: A legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy. The book is part memoir, part history. It is the story of immigration, finding country and home beginning with Velshi’s great grandfather leaving India for South Africa and family members crossing paths with Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Tolstoy Farm, living through Apartheid, the liberation of Kenya to self-governing and landing in Canada. The section on the pluralistic, multi-culture, immigrant welcoming Canada is inspiring. Small Acts of Courage is a book I highly recommend.
May 6, 2024
The resignation of the City Manager, Dee Williams-Ridley wasn’t the only surprise on May 6, 2024.
This was the email sent at 1:09:20 PM PDT on May 6, 2024 to the Peace and Justice Commissioners by Peter Radu giving notice to the Commissioners that the evening Commission meeting scheduled at 7 pm was cancelled. (Note: Okeya is the Peace and Justice Commission Secretary.)
“Dear Commissioners,
With sincere apologies for the late notice, I am writing to inform you that the City Manager has directed staff to cancel tonight’s Peace and Justice Commission meeting. We will pause on rescheduling this meeting until City staff can meet to discuss how we can better plan for and accommodate meetings with potentially volatile agenda items, at this and other commissions. [emphasis added]
Okeya will be taking the formal administrative steps to cancel tonight’s meeting shortly. But I wanted to give you advanced notice, out of respect for your schedules this evening.
Respectfully,
Peter Radu
Assistant to the City Manager - Neighborhood Services
Interim Deputy Director – Health, Housing, and Community Services Department
City of Berkeley
2180 Milvia St, 5th Floor | Berkeley, CA 94704
Desk: 510-981-7045 | Cell: 510-853-2368
Email: [email protected]”
The three Discussion/Action items for the evening were: 8. Update on Planning Gaza Peace Conversation for Berkeley Residents. 9. Discussion on History of Commission Action in the Past Years and Potential 2024 Actions., 10. Discussion and Possible Action on Potential UC Police Removal of Demonstrators from Sproul Plaza.
College student pro-Palestinian demonstrations have taken center stage with some national media anchors and pundits calling students terrorists, comparing them to January 6, 2021 insurrectionists, describing them as brainwashed and a string of other derogatory terms.
Chris Hayes had this to say on the long history of college activism in his eight-minute commentary on All In on May 1, “What I find particularly maddening about the focus on the protesters of the conflict is that it is an evasion. It avoids the difficult task of being universally empathetic to our fellow human beings and truly reckoning with the scale of devastation that is wrought by our country in our names, with our support.” (the full commentary at https://youtu.be/LZi7gxXEh5I?si=z85rQf870F8QlvIG )
On Saturday, May 4 Ayman Mohyeldin made his commentary on pro-Palestine protests by starting his first hour with Israa University in Gaza established in 2014 to ensure poverty would not stand in the way of pursuing a college degree. He described the University’s main building as constructed as a love letter to Islamic architecture. The school planned to open a museum in celebration of its tenth anniversary with more than 3000 artifacts from Roman to modern pieces of history and culture.
On January 17, 2024, the IDF demolished that beautiful Israa University building. Nothing is left but rubble, but you can see what it was in pictures of the main building, past conferences, activities and events on the Israa University website. https://en.israa.edu.ps
The UN describes the destruction of educational institutions in Gaza as Scholasticide.
Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine said this about the complete and partial demolition of five of seven educational institutions in Gaza including Israa University, “You are not fighting Hamas, you’re fighting the existence of Palestinians. You’re fighting their capability to have memory and to have records and be educated.”
Friday afternoon, I walked up to Sproul Plaza with a friend to see the UC Berkeley pro-Palestinian encampment. On the sidewalk outside campus grounds members of the worldwide peace movement Women in Black greeted us offering 4” by 6” cards with “Apartheid Israel” in large bold letters. https://womeninblack.org
On one side were four maps with the title “Israeli Theft of Palestinian & Syrian Land, 1947 to Present” with the website, https://ifamericansknew.org at the bottom. On the other side were three quotes from Ariel Sharon. The first quote dated 1973 stated “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them… we’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.” The third quote dated 2000 stated “the Bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict.”
Given all the media coverage of police violently clearing student encampments across the country, we weren’t sure what we would find at Berkeley.
The demonstration was unexpectantly quiet. Other than a speaker surrounded by people sitting quietly on the plaza and two young people (presumably students) with information and free buttons not much was happening. There was a woman painting a portrait on one of the large plywood boards. The tents were packed in closely on the grass in front of Sproul Hall with several porta potties barely visible on north end. Not everyone was paying attention to the encampment. People were walking around on the plaza as one might expect on any normal pleasantly sunny noontime day.
The resignation of the City Manager, Dee Williams-Ridley wasn’t the only surprise on May 6, 2024.
This was the email sent at 1:09:20 PM PDT on May 6, 2024 to the Peace and Justice Commissioners by Peter Radu giving notice to the Commissioners that the evening Commission meeting scheduled at 7 pm was cancelled. (Note: Okeya is the Peace and Justice Commission Secretary.)
“Dear Commissioners,
With sincere apologies for the late notice, I am writing to inform you that the City Manager has directed staff to cancel tonight’s Peace and Justice Commission meeting. We will pause on rescheduling this meeting until City staff can meet to discuss how we can better plan for and accommodate meetings with potentially volatile agenda items, at this and other commissions. [emphasis added]
Okeya will be taking the formal administrative steps to cancel tonight’s meeting shortly. But I wanted to give you advanced notice, out of respect for your schedules this evening.
Respectfully,
Peter Radu
Assistant to the City Manager - Neighborhood Services
Interim Deputy Director – Health, Housing, and Community Services Department
City of Berkeley
2180 Milvia St, 5th Floor | Berkeley, CA 94704
Desk: 510-981-7045 | Cell: 510-853-2368
Email: [email protected]”
The three Discussion/Action items for the evening were: 8. Update on Planning Gaza Peace Conversation for Berkeley Residents. 9. Discussion on History of Commission Action in the Past Years and Potential 2024 Actions., 10. Discussion and Possible Action on Potential UC Police Removal of Demonstrators from Sproul Plaza.
College student pro-Palestinian demonstrations have taken center stage with some national media anchors and pundits calling students terrorists, comparing them to January 6, 2021 insurrectionists, describing them as brainwashed and a string of other derogatory terms.
Chris Hayes had this to say on the long history of college activism in his eight-minute commentary on All In on May 1, “What I find particularly maddening about the focus on the protesters of the conflict is that it is an evasion. It avoids the difficult task of being universally empathetic to our fellow human beings and truly reckoning with the scale of devastation that is wrought by our country in our names, with our support.” (the full commentary at https://youtu.be/LZi7gxXEh5I?si=z85rQf870F8QlvIG )
On Saturday, May 4 Ayman Mohyeldin made his commentary on pro-Palestine protests by starting his first hour with Israa University in Gaza established in 2014 to ensure poverty would not stand in the way of pursuing a college degree. He described the University’s main building as constructed as a love letter to Islamic architecture. The school planned to open a museum in celebration of its tenth anniversary with more than 3000 artifacts from Roman to modern pieces of history and culture.
On January 17, 2024, the IDF demolished that beautiful Israa University building. Nothing is left but rubble, but you can see what it was in pictures of the main building, past conferences, activities and events on the Israa University website. https://en.israa.edu.ps
The UN describes the destruction of educational institutions in Gaza as Scholasticide.
Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine said this about the complete and partial demolition of five of seven educational institutions in Gaza including Israa University, “You are not fighting Hamas, you’re fighting the existence of Palestinians. You’re fighting their capability to have memory and to have records and be educated.”
Friday afternoon, I walked up to Sproul Plaza with a friend to see the UC Berkeley pro-Palestinian encampment. On the sidewalk outside campus grounds members of the worldwide peace movement Women in Black greeted us offering 4” by 6” cards with “Apartheid Israel” in large bold letters. https://womeninblack.org
On one side were four maps with the title “Israeli Theft of Palestinian & Syrian Land, 1947 to Present” with the website, https://ifamericansknew.org at the bottom. On the other side were three quotes from Ariel Sharon. The first quote dated 1973 stated “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them… we’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.” The third quote dated 2000 stated “the Bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict.”
Given all the media coverage of police violently clearing student encampments across the country, we weren’t sure what we would find at Berkeley.
The demonstration was unexpectantly quiet. Other than a speaker surrounded by people sitting quietly on the plaza and two young people (presumably students) with information and free buttons not much was happening. There was a woman painting a portrait on one of the large plywood boards. The tents were packed in closely on the grass in front of Sproul Hall with several porta potties barely visible on north end. Not everyone was paying attention to the encampment. People were walking around on the plaza as one might expect on any normal pleasantly sunny noontime day.
May 6, 2024 - City Manager Resigns
In a surprise move to anyone watching City of Berkeley politics, the City Manager, Dee Williams-Ridley resigned (as reported in Berkeleyside) one hour after the scheduled City Council closed session with one agenda item, city manager evaluation. https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/05/06/berkeley-city-manager-resignation
Brushing aside public performance concerns In November 2021, the City Council under the recommendation of Mayor Jesse Arreguin awarded Williams-Ridley a 28% raise of $84,732 to the new annualized salary of $386,160 making Berkeley’s City Manager the fourth highest paid city administrator in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Of the thirteen cities surveyed for salary comparisons, Berkeley rated 13th in area (10.5 square miles) and 11th in population (124,321). The highest paid administrator in the survey was the Contra Costa County Administrator at $393,216 with an area of 716 square miles and a population of 1,165,927.
In the recent months, Berkeley has had an unusual number of very visible resignations. Councilmembers Rigel Robinson and Kate Harrison resigned. Liam Garland, Director of Public Works resigned. Farid Javandel, Transportation Division Manager left in 2023 after the Hopkins Corridor Project fell apart.
Williams-Ridley’s last day is reported as being July 10, 2024.
In a surprise move to anyone watching City of Berkeley politics, the City Manager, Dee Williams-Ridley resigned (as reported in Berkeleyside) one hour after the scheduled City Council closed session with one agenda item, city manager evaluation. https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/05/06/berkeley-city-manager-resignation
Brushing aside public performance concerns In November 2021, the City Council under the recommendation of Mayor Jesse Arreguin awarded Williams-Ridley a 28% raise of $84,732 to the new annualized salary of $386,160 making Berkeley’s City Manager the fourth highest paid city administrator in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Of the thirteen cities surveyed for salary comparisons, Berkeley rated 13th in area (10.5 square miles) and 11th in population (124,321). The highest paid administrator in the survey was the Contra Costa County Administrator at $393,216 with an area of 716 square miles and a population of 1,165,927.
In the recent months, Berkeley has had an unusual number of very visible resignations. Councilmembers Rigel Robinson and Kate Harrison resigned. Liam Garland, Director of Public Works resigned. Farid Javandel, Transportation Division Manager left in 2023 after the Hopkins Corridor Project fell apart.
Williams-Ridley’s last day is reported as being July 10, 2024.
April 7, 2024 Part 1
Israel and Palestine continue to consume my attention and reading. Each book, each article, each interview adds another layer to my understanding and perspective, but to put an end to the maiming, killing and genocide in Gaza, orthopedic surgeons Drs. Feroze Sidhwa and Mark Perlmutter who have just returned from Gaza call on us in their graphic description of two weeks at the Gaza European Hospital in Khan Younis.
If you read nothing else in this Diary, read “As Surgeons, We Have Never Seen Cruelty Like Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: We urge anyone who reads this to publicly oppose sending weapons to Israel as long as this onslaught continues” by Drs. Feroze Sidhwa and Mark Perlmutter, April 11, 2024. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/surgeons-cruelty-israel-gaza
If any of us are thinking that replacing Netanyahu will change the direction of the war, Chris Hayes’ podcast interview with Israeli dissident Meir Baruchin, a Jewish history and civics teacher in Jerusalem, who was jailed and fired from his job (he has since been reinstated) gives us a reality check. You can read or listen at: https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-podcast/why-is-this-happening/story-israeli-dissident-meir-baruchin-podcast-transcript-rcna146927
Now that council ended pursuing the merger of the Peace and Justice Commission and the Human Welfare Community Action Commission, the time is ripe for the Peace and Justice Commission to act on its mission to “Advise the Council and the School Board on issues of peace and social justice. Creates citizen awareness and develops educational programs” and proceed with the planning for the Gaza Peace Roundtable.
If the Peace and Justice Commission roundtable ends with a ceasefire resolution, then getting anywhere with city council will be a mountainous climb with Mayor Arreguin and councilmembers Hahn and Wengraf firmly entrenched in opposition.
At least when it comes to local elections, I can vote my conscience. There are other choices. Come November, the box will have to be checked for Biden, but that doesn’t mean that vote will go quietly. There are letters to write, visits to be made, demonstrations to attend.
What really caught my attention in the framing by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now for the interview with middle east analyst Mouin Rabbini was two words in the quote from President Biden. The quoted paragraph was taken from a release of Biden’s comments on Univision following the attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy. Biden called for a temporary ceasefire and aid to the Palestinians in Gaza.
The two words received no special emphasis though they were cut off when I heard the same recorded Biden comments in a different podcast. If I hadn’t been doing so much reading they might have slipped by, but they sum up where Biden stands when it comes to Israel and Palestine and define policy and the actions of the U.S. Biden’s two words referencing Palestinians were “those people”. https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/10/mouin_rabbani_gaza_biden_netanyahu
It is the “othering” that runs through the history of the Palestinians. The words “those people” denote people who are not like us. They are less than us.
President Carter received blistering criticism and backlash when he wrote Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. (If you are looking for a book on Israel and Palestine with maps, the text of agreements and an easy to read list of events up to 2009 this book has it.)
Apartheid is the correct description. Nathan Thrall describes the walls, the barriers, the checkpoints to control Palestinians in the West Bank in excruciating detail in A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy.
Aaron David Miller captures it in the second chapter of The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli when he wrote, “[Palestinians] Unlike the Israelis, who had an American Jewish community that generally could be depended on as a champion, Palestinians had few allies in the United States to explain their plight, let alone to create a Hollywood mythology. No Exodus or Cast a Giant Shadow told the world of their suffering and heroism. No United Jewish Appeal raised money or mobilized a community and few allies in Congress pleaded their cause…when Americans thought of Palestine, they thought of refugees and terrorists.”
The title of Khaled Elginoy’s book focusing on the decades of the U.S. taking the side of Israel in negotiations says it so clearly Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians From Balfour to Trump.
Then comes President Biden.
Reuters reported that when Biden met with Netanyahu and the war cabinet on October 21, 2023 on his visit to Israel that he said, “I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.” https://www.reuters.com/world/us/i-am-zionist-how-joe-bidens-lifelong-bond-with-israel-shapes-war-policy-2023-10-21/
It is true you don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist. While Theodor Herzl is often credited as establishing the political organization for a Jewish nation at the end of the nineteenth century, the Christian Zionist movement precedes Herzl and the 1917 Balfour Declaration by decades. Some references push Christian Zionism back centuries. Reading “The Impact of Christian Zionism on American Policy” by William N. Dale is a quick primer on the history of Christian Zionism up to the Evangelical embrace of Zionism which serves as a guide to the present-day Republican Party and Trump. https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/ad/ad_v9_2/daw01.html
Tim Alberta covers the entanglement of Evangelicals, Trumpism and Trump in The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.
The missile attack on the World Central Kitchen three vehicle convoy by the IDF (Israeli Defense Force), put a crack in Biden’s full unconditional support of Israel as a self-proclaimed Zionist turning his prior requests to Netanyahu into outrage.
What was it that made this so impactful?
How did the deaths of seven World Central Kitchen workers move President Biden to outrage when the deaths of 224 aid workers couldn’t, the deaths of over 400 doctors, nurses and health care workers couldn’t, the deaths of over 33,000 Palestinians couldn’t, the estimated deaths of 14,000 Palestinian children couldn’t, the deaths of Palestinian children from starvation couldn’t? How could the unparalleled suffering of innocent Palestinians not move a president who is recognized for extending his own personal losses to empathy for others?
Was it that Jose Andres isn’t just the Spanish chef and US naturalized citizen who founded World Central Kitchen, Andres is a charismatic humanitarian with vision and knowhow? Andres has literally walked into crises worldwide, more often catastrophes and used social media, videos of conditions to bring the goodness of serving food to hungry people for all to see. Andres finds chefs, volunteers and resources to feed hundreds of people accomplishing the seemingly impossible.
Or was it that this time, six of the seven World Central Kitchen workers killed were not Palestinian Muslims like all those other deaths and instead came from around the world? Was it that this time, President Biden expressed outrage because Jose Andres is a fellow Catholic with whom President Biden has formed a friendship?
Or, is it those people?
Jeet Heer ponders this question in “What It Takes to Break Joe Biden’s Zionist Bubble” published April 5, 2024 in The Nation with the sub header, “The President’s rigid ideological commitment has led him to shut out government dissenters – and his own voters.” The article chronicles how Biden going back to his early days as a Senator has been a firmly entrenched Zionist Hawk. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/biden-zionist-bubble-gaza-muslims/
On Friday, Nancy Pelosi with thirty-six congressional Democrats signed on to the strong letter to President Biden that ended with, “we again urge you to ensure that any future military assistance to Israel, including already authorized transfers, is subject to conditions to ensure it is used in compliance with U.S. and international law.”
The letter should have arrived in Biden’s inbox, the same day, those of us who listen to Democracy Now first heard of “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy”.
“Lavender” is the AI machine directed program selecting Gazans for assassination who fit a profile making them suspect to being connected to Hamas. A component of that AI program “Where’s Daddy” follows the Gazan men home where the IDF can bomb their assassination target with ease.
Here we worry about AI generated disinformation.
In Gaza, a surreal science fiction future with drones buzzing overhead turns life in Gaza into a real present-day war horror where “no place is safe” children are injured, maimed, orphaned, killed, entire families and neighbors eliminated and buildings destroyed along with the target.
The April 3, 2024 article by Yuval Abraham is disturbing and chilling. https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
In this swirl it was agenda item 10 Update the Gaza Peace Round Table Subgroup that pushed my attendance at the Peace and Justice Commission. When I arrived, the room was filled with attendees wrapped in keffiyehs and a man sitting at the table of commissioners wearing a Yamaka who I soon learned was Nimrod Pitsker Elias.
I asked a few of the attendees if they had been coming to the meetings or whether this was their first. For the few that answered this was the first meeting.
Expecting that they were there for the roundtable update, I was surprised when nearly everyone stood up for non-agenda comments. There were more than a dozen who one after another spoke to an incident involving Hahn’s appointee commissioner Nimrod Pitsker Elias at the March 26, city council meeting. He was described as pushing his phone into the face of a Palestinian woman in an act of intimidation and harassment. The speakers asked for his removal from the commission.
One young man said he had four videos of the incident. I handed him my email and asked for the links. So far, no videos or links have appeared in my email. The city council meeting video stream of speakers is of such poor quality, that nothing is visible except the timer filling most of the screen.
In councilmember Taplin’s newsletter, he described being appalled by the harassment of a Jewish woman at the same meeting.
At 7:50 pm councilmember Hahn showed up at the commission meeting, said nothing, took a seat and held her phone in the air evidently to record the meeting. While it came off as an act of intended intimidation, by the time she arrived, most of the attendees who had lined up had already spoken and one of the remaining speakers noted Hahn’s attendance.
This was the second meeting in less than a week that I wished I had a recorder turned on for the entire meeting.
Grace Morizawa explained at the end of the comments that the commission does not have the power to remove a commissioner, that rests with the councilmember. Morizawa did not mention that the number of commissioner terms are limited as that does not apply. Commissioner Elias was appointed by Hahn on December 5, 2023.
When councilmembers are replaced through elections, the new councilmember can choose a new appointee, though often the existing commissioner stays in place.
After the non-agenda comment period, most of the attendees left missing what was probably the most important discussion of the evening, item 13 titled as Discussion on Berkeley High School Ethnic Studies. There was no way of knowing from the agenda packet, meeting minutes or the description Ethnic Studies that this was about sending a letter to BHS from the commission regarding the Berkeley High School (BHS) curriculum on Israel and Palestine unless you attended the prior Peace and Justice Commission meeting.
The proposed letter was not in the agenda packet, as a supplement online or printed for public review. It was read aloud at the meeting.
The letter asked BHS to review class curriculum for errors and respond when according to the evening commission discussion the lesson plan in question had already been corrected.
We heard from Jewish parents who stated they had not heard from their children expressing concerns or acts of anti-Semitism, but in following up they found an organized group of parents claiming anti-Semitism and pushing to change the ethnic studies curriculum to one approved by the Brandeis Center and Anti-Defamation League.
Both commissioners Morizawa and Lippman expressed they did not support sending a letter, that the problem had already been resolved and that the Peace and Justice Commission should not be involved in dictating Berkeley High School curriculum.
Thinking about all the censoring, book banning and threatening to dismiss teachers and librarians from their jobs that is taking place in the south and even some conservative areas in California, I was disappointed that only one more commissioner Bohn joined Morizawa and Lippman to oppose any further consideration over sending a letter.
The final outcome in a four to three vote was to revise the letter and bring it back at the next meeting for final commission approval. Commissioners Jacqulin, Elias, Menscher and Guarino all voted for sending a letter.
There was little to report on the Gaza Peace Roundtable. subgroup. The next step is for the subgroup commissioners Lippman, Morizawa and Elias to find a facilitator for the roundtable.
April 7, 2024, Part 2 is still in the works covering the Planning Commission, the Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour and the Parks Commission.
Israel and Palestine continue to consume my attention and reading. Each book, each article, each interview adds another layer to my understanding and perspective, but to put an end to the maiming, killing and genocide in Gaza, orthopedic surgeons Drs. Feroze Sidhwa and Mark Perlmutter who have just returned from Gaza call on us in their graphic description of two weeks at the Gaza European Hospital in Khan Younis.
If you read nothing else in this Diary, read “As Surgeons, We Have Never Seen Cruelty Like Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: We urge anyone who reads this to publicly oppose sending weapons to Israel as long as this onslaught continues” by Drs. Feroze Sidhwa and Mark Perlmutter, April 11, 2024. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/surgeons-cruelty-israel-gaza
If any of us are thinking that replacing Netanyahu will change the direction of the war, Chris Hayes’ podcast interview with Israeli dissident Meir Baruchin, a Jewish history and civics teacher in Jerusalem, who was jailed and fired from his job (he has since been reinstated) gives us a reality check. You can read or listen at: https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-podcast/why-is-this-happening/story-israeli-dissident-meir-baruchin-podcast-transcript-rcna146927
Now that council ended pursuing the merger of the Peace and Justice Commission and the Human Welfare Community Action Commission, the time is ripe for the Peace and Justice Commission to act on its mission to “Advise the Council and the School Board on issues of peace and social justice. Creates citizen awareness and develops educational programs” and proceed with the planning for the Gaza Peace Roundtable.
If the Peace and Justice Commission roundtable ends with a ceasefire resolution, then getting anywhere with city council will be a mountainous climb with Mayor Arreguin and councilmembers Hahn and Wengraf firmly entrenched in opposition.
At least when it comes to local elections, I can vote my conscience. There are other choices. Come November, the box will have to be checked for Biden, but that doesn’t mean that vote will go quietly. There are letters to write, visits to be made, demonstrations to attend.
What really caught my attention in the framing by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now for the interview with middle east analyst Mouin Rabbini was two words in the quote from President Biden. The quoted paragraph was taken from a release of Biden’s comments on Univision following the attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy. Biden called for a temporary ceasefire and aid to the Palestinians in Gaza.
The two words received no special emphasis though they were cut off when I heard the same recorded Biden comments in a different podcast. If I hadn’t been doing so much reading they might have slipped by, but they sum up where Biden stands when it comes to Israel and Palestine and define policy and the actions of the U.S. Biden’s two words referencing Palestinians were “those people”. https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/10/mouin_rabbani_gaza_biden_netanyahu
It is the “othering” that runs through the history of the Palestinians. The words “those people” denote people who are not like us. They are less than us.
President Carter received blistering criticism and backlash when he wrote Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. (If you are looking for a book on Israel and Palestine with maps, the text of agreements and an easy to read list of events up to 2009 this book has it.)
Apartheid is the correct description. Nathan Thrall describes the walls, the barriers, the checkpoints to control Palestinians in the West Bank in excruciating detail in A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy.
Aaron David Miller captures it in the second chapter of The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli when he wrote, “[Palestinians] Unlike the Israelis, who had an American Jewish community that generally could be depended on as a champion, Palestinians had few allies in the United States to explain their plight, let alone to create a Hollywood mythology. No Exodus or Cast a Giant Shadow told the world of their suffering and heroism. No United Jewish Appeal raised money or mobilized a community and few allies in Congress pleaded their cause…when Americans thought of Palestine, they thought of refugees and terrorists.”
The title of Khaled Elginoy’s book focusing on the decades of the U.S. taking the side of Israel in negotiations says it so clearly Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians From Balfour to Trump.
Then comes President Biden.
Reuters reported that when Biden met with Netanyahu and the war cabinet on October 21, 2023 on his visit to Israel that he said, “I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.” https://www.reuters.com/world/us/i-am-zionist-how-joe-bidens-lifelong-bond-with-israel-shapes-war-policy-2023-10-21/
It is true you don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist. While Theodor Herzl is often credited as establishing the political organization for a Jewish nation at the end of the nineteenth century, the Christian Zionist movement precedes Herzl and the 1917 Balfour Declaration by decades. Some references push Christian Zionism back centuries. Reading “The Impact of Christian Zionism on American Policy” by William N. Dale is a quick primer on the history of Christian Zionism up to the Evangelical embrace of Zionism which serves as a guide to the present-day Republican Party and Trump. https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/ad/ad_v9_2/daw01.html
Tim Alberta covers the entanglement of Evangelicals, Trumpism and Trump in The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.
The missile attack on the World Central Kitchen three vehicle convoy by the IDF (Israeli Defense Force), put a crack in Biden’s full unconditional support of Israel as a self-proclaimed Zionist turning his prior requests to Netanyahu into outrage.
What was it that made this so impactful?
How did the deaths of seven World Central Kitchen workers move President Biden to outrage when the deaths of 224 aid workers couldn’t, the deaths of over 400 doctors, nurses and health care workers couldn’t, the deaths of over 33,000 Palestinians couldn’t, the estimated deaths of 14,000 Palestinian children couldn’t, the deaths of Palestinian children from starvation couldn’t? How could the unparalleled suffering of innocent Palestinians not move a president who is recognized for extending his own personal losses to empathy for others?
Was it that Jose Andres isn’t just the Spanish chef and US naturalized citizen who founded World Central Kitchen, Andres is a charismatic humanitarian with vision and knowhow? Andres has literally walked into crises worldwide, more often catastrophes and used social media, videos of conditions to bring the goodness of serving food to hungry people for all to see. Andres finds chefs, volunteers and resources to feed hundreds of people accomplishing the seemingly impossible.
Or was it that this time, six of the seven World Central Kitchen workers killed were not Palestinian Muslims like all those other deaths and instead came from around the world? Was it that this time, President Biden expressed outrage because Jose Andres is a fellow Catholic with whom President Biden has formed a friendship?
Or, is it those people?
Jeet Heer ponders this question in “What It Takes to Break Joe Biden’s Zionist Bubble” published April 5, 2024 in The Nation with the sub header, “The President’s rigid ideological commitment has led him to shut out government dissenters – and his own voters.” The article chronicles how Biden going back to his early days as a Senator has been a firmly entrenched Zionist Hawk. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/biden-zionist-bubble-gaza-muslims/
On Friday, Nancy Pelosi with thirty-six congressional Democrats signed on to the strong letter to President Biden that ended with, “we again urge you to ensure that any future military assistance to Israel, including already authorized transfers, is subject to conditions to ensure it is used in compliance with U.S. and international law.”
The letter should have arrived in Biden’s inbox, the same day, those of us who listen to Democracy Now first heard of “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy”.
“Lavender” is the AI machine directed program selecting Gazans for assassination who fit a profile making them suspect to being connected to Hamas. A component of that AI program “Where’s Daddy” follows the Gazan men home where the IDF can bomb their assassination target with ease.
Here we worry about AI generated disinformation.
In Gaza, a surreal science fiction future with drones buzzing overhead turns life in Gaza into a real present-day war horror where “no place is safe” children are injured, maimed, orphaned, killed, entire families and neighbors eliminated and buildings destroyed along with the target.
The April 3, 2024 article by Yuval Abraham is disturbing and chilling. https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
In this swirl it was agenda item 10 Update the Gaza Peace Round Table Subgroup that pushed my attendance at the Peace and Justice Commission. When I arrived, the room was filled with attendees wrapped in keffiyehs and a man sitting at the table of commissioners wearing a Yamaka who I soon learned was Nimrod Pitsker Elias.
I asked a few of the attendees if they had been coming to the meetings or whether this was their first. For the few that answered this was the first meeting.
Expecting that they were there for the roundtable update, I was surprised when nearly everyone stood up for non-agenda comments. There were more than a dozen who one after another spoke to an incident involving Hahn’s appointee commissioner Nimrod Pitsker Elias at the March 26, city council meeting. He was described as pushing his phone into the face of a Palestinian woman in an act of intimidation and harassment. The speakers asked for his removal from the commission.
One young man said he had four videos of the incident. I handed him my email and asked for the links. So far, no videos or links have appeared in my email. The city council meeting video stream of speakers is of such poor quality, that nothing is visible except the timer filling most of the screen.
In councilmember Taplin’s newsletter, he described being appalled by the harassment of a Jewish woman at the same meeting.
At 7:50 pm councilmember Hahn showed up at the commission meeting, said nothing, took a seat and held her phone in the air evidently to record the meeting. While it came off as an act of intended intimidation, by the time she arrived, most of the attendees who had lined up had already spoken and one of the remaining speakers noted Hahn’s attendance.
This was the second meeting in less than a week that I wished I had a recorder turned on for the entire meeting.
Grace Morizawa explained at the end of the comments that the commission does not have the power to remove a commissioner, that rests with the councilmember. Morizawa did not mention that the number of commissioner terms are limited as that does not apply. Commissioner Elias was appointed by Hahn on December 5, 2023.
When councilmembers are replaced through elections, the new councilmember can choose a new appointee, though often the existing commissioner stays in place.
After the non-agenda comment period, most of the attendees left missing what was probably the most important discussion of the evening, item 13 titled as Discussion on Berkeley High School Ethnic Studies. There was no way of knowing from the agenda packet, meeting minutes or the description Ethnic Studies that this was about sending a letter to BHS from the commission regarding the Berkeley High School (BHS) curriculum on Israel and Palestine unless you attended the prior Peace and Justice Commission meeting.
The proposed letter was not in the agenda packet, as a supplement online or printed for public review. It was read aloud at the meeting.
The letter asked BHS to review class curriculum for errors and respond when according to the evening commission discussion the lesson plan in question had already been corrected.
We heard from Jewish parents who stated they had not heard from their children expressing concerns or acts of anti-Semitism, but in following up they found an organized group of parents claiming anti-Semitism and pushing to change the ethnic studies curriculum to one approved by the Brandeis Center and Anti-Defamation League.
Both commissioners Morizawa and Lippman expressed they did not support sending a letter, that the problem had already been resolved and that the Peace and Justice Commission should not be involved in dictating Berkeley High School curriculum.
Thinking about all the censoring, book banning and threatening to dismiss teachers and librarians from their jobs that is taking place in the south and even some conservative areas in California, I was disappointed that only one more commissioner Bohn joined Morizawa and Lippman to oppose any further consideration over sending a letter.
The final outcome in a four to three vote was to revise the letter and bring it back at the next meeting for final commission approval. Commissioners Jacqulin, Elias, Menscher and Guarino all voted for sending a letter.
There was little to report on the Gaza Peace Roundtable. subgroup. The next step is for the subgroup commissioners Lippman, Morizawa and Elias to find a facilitator for the roundtable.
April 7, 2024, Part 2 is still in the works covering the Planning Commission, the Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour and the Parks Commission.
March 27, 2024
City Council leaves for spring recess from March 27, 2024 through May 6. A six-week spring recess seems to be an unusual length of time, but I couldn’t be happier to see council meetings disappear from my weekly Activist’s Calendar.
At the Tuesday March 19 council meeting, Mayor Arreguin connected from Mexico by ZOOM and Vice Mayor Wengraf was present in person to run the show. I can’t recall a meeting she has previously attended in person since pre-pandemic though I think there was one.
I keep thinking I should show up to council in person to capture the atmosphere in the room, but the convenience of walking over to my computer instead wins out every time.
The person controlling the media cancels out the chanting in the room so the closest I get to the room atmosphere is counting the speakers for each side of a ceasefire and the pleas from the dais to the attendees to control themselves.
My niece was shocked to learn the mayor and councilmembers in Berkeley are opposed to a ceasefire resolution. She told our book club even Minneapolis voted for a ceasefire. As of Monday evening March 25, so has our neighboring city to the north, Albany.
Albany used community meetings to open discussion and develop a ceasefire resolution to bring to council which they passed unanimously. As I reported in the last Activist’s Diary, I was told by a commissioner, Berkeley councilmembers pressured their appointees on the Peace and Justice Commission to drop the planning for a community forum on Israel and Palestine.
The count for speakers on non-agenda items at the March 19 council meeting was fourteen for a ceasefire, three for the council not to take action (these are the speakers who oppose a ceasefire) and three on other subjects.
The City Auditor Jenny Wong noted the status report from the Department of Public Works on “Fleet Replacement Fund Short Millions & Rocky Road: Berkeley Streets At Risk and Significantly Underfunded” was under Information Reports on the agenda which is an unbearably long title to say our streets are crap and there was no cohesive plan for replacing city owned trucks, cars, etc. I characterize Berkeley streets as the city’s answer to permeable paving.
There are two petitions circulating by community groups on Berkeley streets. One is called “Fix the Streets” found in the website “Berkeleyans for Better Planning”. https://www.berkeleyansforbetterplanning.org/ The other is called “Safe Streets” with the website “Berkeley Citizens for Safe Streets”. https://www.berkeleysafestreets.com/home
Whichever one passes in November with at least 50% plus 1 and the most votes will prevail. Both are parcel taxes which will show up on the property owners’ tax bill. Property owners with very low income can apply for an exemption from parcel taxes.
I was going to do an in-depth side by side comparison into the difference between the two petitions, but I have decided to take a lighter comparison now though somewhat more detailed than you may wish.
Since we won’t be voting on the petitions until November we have plenty of time to make up our minds.
For right now the task is gaining signatures. I am on the “Fix the Streets” side. Please sign that petition.
The “Fix the Streets” parcel tax is 13 cents on “improvements” on a parcel (property) and it includes repairing/replacing sidewalks at 100% not the 50/50 sharing between the city and property owners that exists now. Fix the Streets is the same tax for all property owners.
For renters who never see property tax bills, this will be another line on the long list of add-ons (I counted 32 on my bill). Property taxes begin with the gross assessment of the land value and improvements (buildings).
Under Proposition 13 the gross assessment starts with 1% of the purchase price (used as the assessed value) and then increases by no more than 2% per year. Change of ownership or new construction will trigger reassessment. Any property that has not changed hands since before 1975 uses the 1975 value as the base.
Parcel taxes can be a flat tax per parcel with all property owners having the same fee or they can be based on the size of the parcel or the size of improvements i.e. the size of the buildings or livable space. Parcel taxes can be a split roll where the amount of the tax varies on the use of the parcel, i.e. residential versus commercial. Parcel taxes are not based on the assessed value of the property. Bond measures also appear in the list of add-ons.
When I spoke with Jim McGrath who was instrumental in the “Fix the Streets” ballot initiative, a big concern was using the best estimates to fix our deteriorating streets and sidewalks and how long it would take to complete the task. He expressed his concern for all the small independent businesses that are still struggling. That is why the “Fix the Streets” group uses the same 13 cents per square foot for all property owners regardless of use (residential or commercial). The PCI (Pavement Condition Index) to bring all street to a PCI of 70 or good condition is for the entirety of the street not the average. The parcel tax is for twelve years.
I have my bias. I’ve had a driver’s license for over 60 years. I’ve driven in all kinds of weather and road conditions all over this country, across Europe, the German autobahn and even in the center of Rome in congested 5 pm traffic. I was the caregiver for a wheelchair dependent partner and driver of our disability modified van. I had a parent who was in constant bone pain for whom walking any distance was painful and difficult. And, I’ve had my own personal experiences with injuries, casts, crutches, splints, boots, slings. I’m up to thirteen lifetime fractures. These days I mostly walk for exercise and to be a good climate citizen leaving using my car when walking or BART doesn’t work.
As I look at who and what is being done in the name of Vision Zero (reducing traffic injuries to zero) some of it is great, some good and some would fall into, “what were you thinking.” I see an absence of disabled, mobility limited persons and their caregivers in creating and evaluating plans for street infrastructure. I see bicycle enthusiasts filling the center of transportation planning and those same groups as participants and endorsers of the “Safe Streets” ballot initiative.
Until the big Hopkins Corridor Plan blew up, emergency and evacuation routes and the Fire Department were kind of an afterthought, if considered at all. See “What Has Happened with Hopkins and Why” from April 10, 2023 in the Berkeley Daily Planet for a bigger explanation. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-04-09/article/50248?headline=What-Has-Happened-with-Hopkins-and-Why--Kelly-Hammargren
The “Safe Streets” ballot initiative is a “split roll” which means the residential rate is 17 cents per square foot and the non-residential rate is at 25 cents per square foot. With “Safe Streets” our neighborhood stores and restaurants will pay almost double the “Fix the Streets” parcel tax not just Bayer and Sutter. Sidewalk repair/replacement stays at 50/50. The PCI is the “average” which means that a street can have potholes in one section and be repaired in the rest, but as long as it averages out it will meet the repair criteria. It also includes infrastructure to the streets like bus lanes, loading platforms, etc. This is where I worry we will get the “what were you thinking” kinds of changes to our streets. This parcel tax runs for fourteen years.
Cities always love more money. You will probably see the elected and politicians jumping for enthusiasm around “Safe Streets” and certainly the bicyclist with their infrastructure change wishes. As for the promise in the ballot initiative not to use “Safe Streets” funds for bicycle lanes on Hopkins from “Safe Streets” there is nothing stopping the city from adding in money from the general fund to finish the job.
There is a lot that is going to change in the coming decade. I would really prefer we weren’t put in this bind of choosing one or the other now, but here we are. I am on the “Fix the Streets” side as that does the most good with the least risk of “what were you thinking?” and puts better oversight and evaluation into the mix.
Last Saturday at the Livable California review of legislation, one of the attendees said that since Los Angeles implemented “Vision Zero” traffic deaths, pedestrian deaths have increased.
Karen Parolek who is the chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission, member of Walk Bike Berkeley and co-founder and president of Opticos Design, Inc was listed as a Planner in the presentation to the Commission on Aging on Wednesday on Missing Middle Housing and Zoning Measures. On linkedin her education lists a B. Arch, Architecture and Graphic Design from the University of Notre Dame.
The examples in her presentation of missing middle housing which is duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes was filled with lovely pictures of buildings surrounded by yards that were inviting and fit into neighborhoods.
Berkeley is already an incredibly dense city, built up with little space between houses, back yards with small apartment buildings, ADUs/cottages and a shortage of parks. The push is to pack even more in, reduce separations between buildings and setbacks (the space between buildings and the lot line).
I wish what Parolek was presenting was where we are going. It is not. Unfortunately, what I see coming out of the Planning Department, Planning Commission and the YIMBYs (the group funded by big tech and real estate industry that is pushing building everywhere) is zoning changes for city council to approve to cover as much land as possible with new developments.
March 19 was the last day of filing an appeal of the Landmarks Preservation Commission NOD (Notice of Decision) for 2274 Shattuck Avenue currently the closed United Artists movie theater. When 2274 Shattuck is demolished for a student housing project, the only hint of its former use will be what little is left of the movie marquee in the Shattuck facing façade of the new project.
In Berkeley, the city that was formerly known as the center for viewing independent and foreign film only the Elmwood is left with three screens unless you count the single screening room in the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). In the last few years 20 film screens went to the chopping block to be demolished. This is an enormous loss.
The item of the evening that drew a crowd to respond was the single action item 9 on the agenda “Adoption of a Master License Agreement Template for the Non-Exclusive Installation of Small Cell Telecommunications Facilities on City Owned and Maintained Streetlight Poles in the Public Right-of-Way”. Councilmember Hahn, motioned to move the item to consent, but Councilmember Bartlett intervened saying that many people had shown up to speak and Council should hear them.
There were 24 speakers. I was one. My issue was not Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS), I thought the contract should have been beefed up to cover the city’s responsibility if a light pole with equipment on it needs to be removed for public safety in a weather or other emergency. That situation does not allow for the contract prescribed 10-day notice. The other speakers were there to declare their EHS symptoms and object to the contract.
The best article I found on Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) is from the NIH National Library of Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7201940/
The article is long. The symptoms the speakers declare are real, but linking the symptoms to electromagnetic fields (EMF) as the cause is where research, studies and science come up empty.
You can put me down with my RN credentials as an EHS, EMF skeptic, however, a friend reminded me that birds and other species in nature migrate by electromagnetic fields. There is a lot to learn about the world we live in. Just pick up Ed Yong’s wonderful book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. Chapter 11 is Magnetic Fields.
The Master Lease passed with a yes by everyone present.
In my Friday morning podcasts it was “ceasefire” whiplash with Phyllis Bennis on Democracy Now going right into the word salad in the U.S, resolution to the U.N. Security Council that uses the words “immediate ceasefire” while not actually calling for a ceasefire.
Over the weekend Mary Robinson former president of Ireland called out the U.S. as playing games and the U.S. vetoes to a ceasefire resolution at the UN Security Council a disgrace.
As I am finishing up on Monday, March 25, 2024, the U.S. abstained instead of casting a veto allowing the UN Security Council to pass a resolution for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel Hamas War. Russia and China were unsuccessful in inserting/keeping the word “permanent” with ceasefire so it is only during Ramadan.
Even with that resolution nothing is stopping the bombing, raids climbing Palestinian deaths and injuries.
I will continue to send back requests for campaign donations with no money and the words “permanent ceasefire” and “stop arming Israel” a practice I shared with a friend who says she throws them in the trash.
By Friday night I had had watched clips of the disgraceful attacks by Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz on President Biden’s nominee on Adeel A. Mangi who would have been the first Muslim American federal appellate judge. But, it was the Democrat Senator Catherine Cortez Masteo of Nevada who sank the nomination by saying she would not vote for Adeel followed by Senator Joe Manchin.
There seems to be a continuous string of investigations into anti-Semitism. The ceasefire mural Free Palestine by Berkeley High Students was item 2 in the March 27 City Council closed session as anticipated litigation.
I looked up the list of Jewish judges. It is long covering screen after screen. Elena Kagan is the eighth Jewish Supreme Court Justice. I found three Muslim American judges in the federal court system and now none will have advanced as far as the federal appeals court. According to online sources about 2% of Americans identify as Jewish and 1.1% of Americans identify as Muslim.
I finally finished Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman published in 2019. I switched to the audiobook a long 26 hours and then back to the ebook to take notes for my reading journal. The book carries the reader through assassination after assassination how methods for killing succeeded or failed, who approved them and how techniques became more sophisticated through the years, stopping occasionally to include those who were tortured by the Israelis before being murdered. The book is brutal. When drones were added to their killing repertoire, I thought about how the U.S. used drones to kill in the war in Afghanistan.
As the book closes Bergman writes of his last conversation with Meir Dagan who transformed the Mossad. After all Dagan had done directing the Israeli assassination killing machine, at the end of his life as he was dying of cancer, Dagan concluded only a political solution with the Palestinians, the two state solution could end the 150-year conflict.
City Council leaves for spring recess from March 27, 2024 through May 6. A six-week spring recess seems to be an unusual length of time, but I couldn’t be happier to see council meetings disappear from my weekly Activist’s Calendar.
At the Tuesday March 19 council meeting, Mayor Arreguin connected from Mexico by ZOOM and Vice Mayor Wengraf was present in person to run the show. I can’t recall a meeting she has previously attended in person since pre-pandemic though I think there was one.
I keep thinking I should show up to council in person to capture the atmosphere in the room, but the convenience of walking over to my computer instead wins out every time.
The person controlling the media cancels out the chanting in the room so the closest I get to the room atmosphere is counting the speakers for each side of a ceasefire and the pleas from the dais to the attendees to control themselves.
My niece was shocked to learn the mayor and councilmembers in Berkeley are opposed to a ceasefire resolution. She told our book club even Minneapolis voted for a ceasefire. As of Monday evening March 25, so has our neighboring city to the north, Albany.
Albany used community meetings to open discussion and develop a ceasefire resolution to bring to council which they passed unanimously. As I reported in the last Activist’s Diary, I was told by a commissioner, Berkeley councilmembers pressured their appointees on the Peace and Justice Commission to drop the planning for a community forum on Israel and Palestine.
The count for speakers on non-agenda items at the March 19 council meeting was fourteen for a ceasefire, three for the council not to take action (these are the speakers who oppose a ceasefire) and three on other subjects.
The City Auditor Jenny Wong noted the status report from the Department of Public Works on “Fleet Replacement Fund Short Millions & Rocky Road: Berkeley Streets At Risk and Significantly Underfunded” was under Information Reports on the agenda which is an unbearably long title to say our streets are crap and there was no cohesive plan for replacing city owned trucks, cars, etc. I characterize Berkeley streets as the city’s answer to permeable paving.
There are two petitions circulating by community groups on Berkeley streets. One is called “Fix the Streets” found in the website “Berkeleyans for Better Planning”. https://www.berkeleyansforbetterplanning.org/ The other is called “Safe Streets” with the website “Berkeley Citizens for Safe Streets”. https://www.berkeleysafestreets.com/home
Whichever one passes in November with at least 50% plus 1 and the most votes will prevail. Both are parcel taxes which will show up on the property owners’ tax bill. Property owners with very low income can apply for an exemption from parcel taxes.
I was going to do an in-depth side by side comparison into the difference between the two petitions, but I have decided to take a lighter comparison now though somewhat more detailed than you may wish.
Since we won’t be voting on the petitions until November we have plenty of time to make up our minds.
For right now the task is gaining signatures. I am on the “Fix the Streets” side. Please sign that petition.
The “Fix the Streets” parcel tax is 13 cents on “improvements” on a parcel (property) and it includes repairing/replacing sidewalks at 100% not the 50/50 sharing between the city and property owners that exists now. Fix the Streets is the same tax for all property owners.
For renters who never see property tax bills, this will be another line on the long list of add-ons (I counted 32 on my bill). Property taxes begin with the gross assessment of the land value and improvements (buildings).
Under Proposition 13 the gross assessment starts with 1% of the purchase price (used as the assessed value) and then increases by no more than 2% per year. Change of ownership or new construction will trigger reassessment. Any property that has not changed hands since before 1975 uses the 1975 value as the base.
Parcel taxes can be a flat tax per parcel with all property owners having the same fee or they can be based on the size of the parcel or the size of improvements i.e. the size of the buildings or livable space. Parcel taxes can be a split roll where the amount of the tax varies on the use of the parcel, i.e. residential versus commercial. Parcel taxes are not based on the assessed value of the property. Bond measures also appear in the list of add-ons.
When I spoke with Jim McGrath who was instrumental in the “Fix the Streets” ballot initiative, a big concern was using the best estimates to fix our deteriorating streets and sidewalks and how long it would take to complete the task. He expressed his concern for all the small independent businesses that are still struggling. That is why the “Fix the Streets” group uses the same 13 cents per square foot for all property owners regardless of use (residential or commercial). The PCI (Pavement Condition Index) to bring all street to a PCI of 70 or good condition is for the entirety of the street not the average. The parcel tax is for twelve years.
I have my bias. I’ve had a driver’s license for over 60 years. I’ve driven in all kinds of weather and road conditions all over this country, across Europe, the German autobahn and even in the center of Rome in congested 5 pm traffic. I was the caregiver for a wheelchair dependent partner and driver of our disability modified van. I had a parent who was in constant bone pain for whom walking any distance was painful and difficult. And, I’ve had my own personal experiences with injuries, casts, crutches, splints, boots, slings. I’m up to thirteen lifetime fractures. These days I mostly walk for exercise and to be a good climate citizen leaving using my car when walking or BART doesn’t work.
As I look at who and what is being done in the name of Vision Zero (reducing traffic injuries to zero) some of it is great, some good and some would fall into, “what were you thinking.” I see an absence of disabled, mobility limited persons and their caregivers in creating and evaluating plans for street infrastructure. I see bicycle enthusiasts filling the center of transportation planning and those same groups as participants and endorsers of the “Safe Streets” ballot initiative.
Until the big Hopkins Corridor Plan blew up, emergency and evacuation routes and the Fire Department were kind of an afterthought, if considered at all. See “What Has Happened with Hopkins and Why” from April 10, 2023 in the Berkeley Daily Planet for a bigger explanation. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-04-09/article/50248?headline=What-Has-Happened-with-Hopkins-and-Why--Kelly-Hammargren
The “Safe Streets” ballot initiative is a “split roll” which means the residential rate is 17 cents per square foot and the non-residential rate is at 25 cents per square foot. With “Safe Streets” our neighborhood stores and restaurants will pay almost double the “Fix the Streets” parcel tax not just Bayer and Sutter. Sidewalk repair/replacement stays at 50/50. The PCI is the “average” which means that a street can have potholes in one section and be repaired in the rest, but as long as it averages out it will meet the repair criteria. It also includes infrastructure to the streets like bus lanes, loading platforms, etc. This is where I worry we will get the “what were you thinking” kinds of changes to our streets. This parcel tax runs for fourteen years.
Cities always love more money. You will probably see the elected and politicians jumping for enthusiasm around “Safe Streets” and certainly the bicyclist with their infrastructure change wishes. As for the promise in the ballot initiative not to use “Safe Streets” funds for bicycle lanes on Hopkins from “Safe Streets” there is nothing stopping the city from adding in money from the general fund to finish the job.
There is a lot that is going to change in the coming decade. I would really prefer we weren’t put in this bind of choosing one or the other now, but here we are. I am on the “Fix the Streets” side as that does the most good with the least risk of “what were you thinking?” and puts better oversight and evaluation into the mix.
Last Saturday at the Livable California review of legislation, one of the attendees said that since Los Angeles implemented “Vision Zero” traffic deaths, pedestrian deaths have increased.
Karen Parolek who is the chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission, member of Walk Bike Berkeley and co-founder and president of Opticos Design, Inc was listed as a Planner in the presentation to the Commission on Aging on Wednesday on Missing Middle Housing and Zoning Measures. On linkedin her education lists a B. Arch, Architecture and Graphic Design from the University of Notre Dame.
The examples in her presentation of missing middle housing which is duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes was filled with lovely pictures of buildings surrounded by yards that were inviting and fit into neighborhoods.
Berkeley is already an incredibly dense city, built up with little space between houses, back yards with small apartment buildings, ADUs/cottages and a shortage of parks. The push is to pack even more in, reduce separations between buildings and setbacks (the space between buildings and the lot line).
I wish what Parolek was presenting was where we are going. It is not. Unfortunately, what I see coming out of the Planning Department, Planning Commission and the YIMBYs (the group funded by big tech and real estate industry that is pushing building everywhere) is zoning changes for city council to approve to cover as much land as possible with new developments.
March 19 was the last day of filing an appeal of the Landmarks Preservation Commission NOD (Notice of Decision) for 2274 Shattuck Avenue currently the closed United Artists movie theater. When 2274 Shattuck is demolished for a student housing project, the only hint of its former use will be what little is left of the movie marquee in the Shattuck facing façade of the new project.
In Berkeley, the city that was formerly known as the center for viewing independent and foreign film only the Elmwood is left with three screens unless you count the single screening room in the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). In the last few years 20 film screens went to the chopping block to be demolished. This is an enormous loss.
The item of the evening that drew a crowd to respond was the single action item 9 on the agenda “Adoption of a Master License Agreement Template for the Non-Exclusive Installation of Small Cell Telecommunications Facilities on City Owned and Maintained Streetlight Poles in the Public Right-of-Way”. Councilmember Hahn, motioned to move the item to consent, but Councilmember Bartlett intervened saying that many people had shown up to speak and Council should hear them.
There were 24 speakers. I was one. My issue was not Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS), I thought the contract should have been beefed up to cover the city’s responsibility if a light pole with equipment on it needs to be removed for public safety in a weather or other emergency. That situation does not allow for the contract prescribed 10-day notice. The other speakers were there to declare their EHS symptoms and object to the contract.
The best article I found on Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) is from the NIH National Library of Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7201940/
The article is long. The symptoms the speakers declare are real, but linking the symptoms to electromagnetic fields (EMF) as the cause is where research, studies and science come up empty.
You can put me down with my RN credentials as an EHS, EMF skeptic, however, a friend reminded me that birds and other species in nature migrate by electromagnetic fields. There is a lot to learn about the world we live in. Just pick up Ed Yong’s wonderful book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. Chapter 11 is Magnetic Fields.
The Master Lease passed with a yes by everyone present.
In my Friday morning podcasts it was “ceasefire” whiplash with Phyllis Bennis on Democracy Now going right into the word salad in the U.S, resolution to the U.N. Security Council that uses the words “immediate ceasefire” while not actually calling for a ceasefire.
Over the weekend Mary Robinson former president of Ireland called out the U.S. as playing games and the U.S. vetoes to a ceasefire resolution at the UN Security Council a disgrace.
As I am finishing up on Monday, March 25, 2024, the U.S. abstained instead of casting a veto allowing the UN Security Council to pass a resolution for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel Hamas War. Russia and China were unsuccessful in inserting/keeping the word “permanent” with ceasefire so it is only during Ramadan.
Even with that resolution nothing is stopping the bombing, raids climbing Palestinian deaths and injuries.
I will continue to send back requests for campaign donations with no money and the words “permanent ceasefire” and “stop arming Israel” a practice I shared with a friend who says she throws them in the trash.
By Friday night I had had watched clips of the disgraceful attacks by Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz on President Biden’s nominee on Adeel A. Mangi who would have been the first Muslim American federal appellate judge. But, it was the Democrat Senator Catherine Cortez Masteo of Nevada who sank the nomination by saying she would not vote for Adeel followed by Senator Joe Manchin.
There seems to be a continuous string of investigations into anti-Semitism. The ceasefire mural Free Palestine by Berkeley High Students was item 2 in the March 27 City Council closed session as anticipated litigation.
I looked up the list of Jewish judges. It is long covering screen after screen. Elena Kagan is the eighth Jewish Supreme Court Justice. I found three Muslim American judges in the federal court system and now none will have advanced as far as the federal appeals court. According to online sources about 2% of Americans identify as Jewish and 1.1% of Americans identify as Muslim.
I finally finished Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman published in 2019. I switched to the audiobook a long 26 hours and then back to the ebook to take notes for my reading journal. The book carries the reader through assassination after assassination how methods for killing succeeded or failed, who approved them and how techniques became more sophisticated through the years, stopping occasionally to include those who were tortured by the Israelis before being murdered. The book is brutal. When drones were added to their killing repertoire, I thought about how the U.S. used drones to kill in the war in Afghanistan.
As the book closes Bergman writes of his last conversation with Meir Dagan who transformed the Mossad. After all Dagan had done directing the Israeli assassination killing machine, at the end of his life as he was dying of cancer, Dagan concluded only a political solution with the Palestinians, the two state solution could end the 150-year conflict.
March 17, 2024
I took my scissors to Joe Mathews’ op-ed “Please stop trying to ‘save democracy’” and taped this to my monitor: “…democracy isn’t something you save. It’s something you do – with other people…”
Now when I sit at my computer until I am blurry eyed trying to capture what happened in our government wondering if it makes a difference, I look at that clipping and get a little smile, democracy is something we do and this is a very big year.
On Wednesday, March 13, I saw the giant mural by Berkeley High students on Allston at MLK with Ceasefire, Free Palestine and a figure wearing a keffiyeh in the middle with a book. I was disappointed to read in Berkeleyside that it was painted with water-soluble tempra paint instead of the permanent paint used in other street murals, but given the current opposition of the Mayor and City Council to a ceasefire resolution, paint that will wash away in the next rain is probably the safest for the students. The mural was too large to capture with my iPhone camera so if you want to see it take a trip to the Civic Center.
While I was waiting at the corner for the light to change I struck up a conversation with the woman next to me asking if she had noticed it. Yes, of course, was the answer as she told me the students painted it during their lunch break. She said “they need to stop telling lies about us.” I asked if she was a teacher. She answered yes as we crossed the street before separating heading in different directions.
At each City Council meeting I count how many speakers call for a ceasefire during the non-agenda comment period and how many oppose the city taking any action. The total allotment for non-agenda comment speakers has been ten in-person speakers, ten on zoom with each person receiving one minute. Speakers can give away their minute to another person. When someone receives time from others I count the time slots. The actual number of speakers may be less. On Tuesday, March 12, I counted nine asking for a ceasefire, five opposed and three on other topics. Not all of the online time slots were used. The apparent neo-Nazi who called in online was quickly disconnected from zoom by the mayor and is not in the count.
The big news on Tuesday, March 12, 2024 came in the special 3:30 pm meeting that was posted on Monday, with only ten minutes to spare to make 24-hour notice requirement. The contentious housing project planned for 1900 Fourth Street on the West Berkeley Shellmound and the lawsuit Ruegg & Ellsworth v. City of Berkeley is done and over. In an incredible mediation settlement, the City of Berkeley paid the claim of attorney fees using city funds of up to $1.5 million, obtained release of all remaining claims in exchange for acquisition of 1900 Fourth Street and transferred the property to the Sogorea Te Land Trust, thereby returning the land to the Ohlone people. The 25 million dollars to finish the settlement came from the trust. https://sogoreate-landtrust.org/lisjan-history-and-territory/
In this case the land acknowledgement read at city meetings that recognizes the City of Berkeley occupies stolen unceded land of the Ohlone Tribes with a documented 5,000 year history to the West Berkeley Shellmound actually means something.
The vision for the Shellmound https://shellmound.org/learn-more/ohlone-vision/
A few Berkeley City Council meetings ago a woman speaking against the City taking up a ceasefire resolution wanted to start history in 2005.
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi is at the top of this week’s best seller list. Just think how much further along we would be on peace between Israel and Palestine instead of the perpetual cycles of violence, retaliation and revenge, if Israel acknowledged that Israel was created and built through settler colonialism instead of the perpetual myth that Palestine was, “a land without people for a people without land.”
Much of the reading I’ve been doing (almost done with my 10th book) start with the rise of the Zionist movement in the 1800s (though some books go back centuries) and follow with the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917 to support the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine before moving up to the present.
After hearing clips from Senator Schumer’s speech on the Senate floor criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu, I read the entire speech. Schumer was blunt. https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-senator-chuck-schumers-speech-israeli-elections-are-the-only-way/
Schumer listed four obstacles to peace: Hamas, and the Palestinians who support and tolerate their evil ways, radical right-wing Israelis in government and society, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Schumer called out Finance Minister Bexalel Smotrich and Ministry of National Security Itmar Ben Gvir as the worst examples of radicalism in government.
Saturday, March 16, 2024 was the 21st anniversary of the death of 23 year-old Rachel Corrie. Corrie was trying to protect the home of a local pharmacist in Gaza from demolition when she was standing to be visible and was run over and killed by an armored bulldozer operated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The stage play based on her diaries and emails is called “My Name Is Rachel Corrie”.
Back to the City
There was more to the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council (BNC) meeting on March 9th than 2902 Adeline and eminent domain that I covered in my last Diary.
If you don’t attend any other city or community meetings (or even if you do) signing on to the two-hour BNC zoom meeting on the second Saturday of the month from 10 am to noon is definitely an informative and worthwhile expenditure of time.
The North Berkeley BART Project was the main subject at the March 9, 2024 BNC meeting with Jon McCall from BRIDGE and Daniel Simons and Josie Morgan from DBA (David Baker Architects) presenting for North Berkeley Housing Partners. The current state of the project is 739 units with a little over the required minimum of 1000 bedrooms and a little over 50% of the units as affordable. The complex will have 50,000 square feet of publicly accessible open space, 6000 square feet of publicly accessible ground floor uses and around 300 parking spaces in a central garage with 176 allocated to residents. The current count of parking spaces at North Berkeley BART ranges from 620 to 700 depending on the source accessed.
All the bedrooms will have windows. The bike/pedestrian paths will be shared. There will be 70 units with case management services. There will be an evaluation of the project by bird-safe experts to identify locations where windows need to be reconfigured or bird-safe glass used. There are plans for a café and childcare space, but not a grocery.
The questions that didn’t get answered with follow up requested were the breakdown/count of units by number of bedrooms and shadow studies to show how much natural light will reach internal units (around open space).
I arrived at the Commission on Disability late and was surprised two members were attending on ZOOM. There was no announcement that the meeting was being conducted in a hybrid format, but then members of the Commission on Disability have a lawsuit against the City for not providing meetings in the hybrid format so disabled commissioners can attend. It appears the City has come halfway with ZOOM for commissioners, but not the public.
The City has not accommodated the blind commissioner for the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission (HWCAC) who needs documents in Braille. She left the HWCAC in the midst of the funding of service agencies. As described in the March 14th Activist’s Diary, It was hard enough for those of us in the room with vision to track on our pieces of scratch paper and devices the impact of changing allocation recommendations to squeeze $1,113,124 of requests into $563,266 of available funds. Imagine how that chaos landed on a commissioner who is blind and who was not accommodated with documents she could read.
I was present for most of the discussion at the Commission on Disability on AB 413 the “Daylighting Bill” which prohibits drivers from stopping or parking within 20 feet of a crosswalk or 15 feet from crosswalks with curb extensions (bulb outs).
While commissioners agreed prohibiting stopping or parking near intersections will greatly improve pedestrian and traffic safety there are issues for handicapped parking spaces that currently exist within the restricted zone and AB 413 will add difficulties for handicapped persons whose handicapped spaces need to be moved. The handicapped space at the top of California at Rose is one that looks to be in the daylighting zone.
There are also increased potential risks for disabled persons depending on how they access vehicles especially for disabled persons who enter on the traffic side as vehicle drivers. Depending on the configuration of handicapped spaces and handicapped vehicles, disabled persons who enter from the rear or even on the passenger side may also be impacted.
Between now and December 31, 2024 drivers will receive only a warning for parking in the daylighting zone unless the curb is marked with red paint or there is a sign. Starting January 1, 2025 stopping or parking in the restricted zone risks ticketing whether the zone or crosswalk is marked or not. The bill contains prohibitions from parking over a curb onto a sidewalk, something that is common practice on narrow streets in the hills. Parking in front of driveways whether public or private is prohibited (there is no exception in the bill if the driveway is to your own garage).
If you are a driver, reading AB 413 in full (it is very short) just might save you from a hefty ticket. https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB413/id/2845316
The first major item of interest at the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission was the parking study for the proposed ferry. Kittleson & Associates has been hired by the city to do the parking study. In general, I have a hard time believing ferry ridership will meet the early projections except on occasions when there are big events in San Francisco.
I noticed the Waterfront Emergency Transportation Authority (WETA) stopped publishing the ferry occupancy rate during the busiest hour of the day in the Board meeting ridership reports. That usually hovered between 33% – 36% which meant that mostly near empty ferries typically travel back and forth across the bay. I would expect that low utilization to be about the same looking at the current charts and tables.
What concerns me the most besides the impact on marine life, is that the ferry looks like another money sink for city residents to shoulder so high income earners can have a boutique subsidized ferry service. WETA lowered the fare to increase ridership. From their own surveys the majority of the subsidized fares support high income earners.
Any increase in parking demand will be felt on the weekends when families access the waterfront. Once more charging for parking slipped into the presentation. I saw little interest from the presenter on receiving input from the commission or public on their parking studies.
There are plans for six weekday and 4 weekend “intercept surveys” when persons parking at the waterfront will be asked about their destinations, activities, parking duration and parking issues.
The Zoning Adjust Board (ZAB) met for a total of eighteen minutes to approve three Use Permits on consent. The next ZAB meeting on March 28 will be on 2136-2154 San Pablo a 6-story SB 330 state density project with 122 units (including 10 very low-income density bonus qualifying units), 3 live-work units and 50 ground floor parking spaces. This is the project that occupied the rest of the Parks Commission meeting and initiated a lively discussion.
The discussion started with should the San Pablo project which backs up to the George Florence Park on Tenth Street have its own gate from the private property into the park.
When I saw the plans at the Design Review Committee, my issue was the gates (there were several in the initial design now there is one) opened right into the pollinator garden so anyone entering from the development would trample the garden volunteers have been working so hard to create.
George Florence Park was a problematic neighborhood eyesore in the middle of a city block that has been completely restored by neighbors, volunteers and the City Parks Department into a delightful neighborhood resource with new play equipment for children. In this built up densely populated city with a shortage of parks and tiny yards between housing if there is any yard at all, these little “mini” parks fill the gap where children can play.
The commission focused on whether the project should have direct access through the fence into the park or should residents walk to the park like the other neighbors. The park is currently fenced on three sides and completely open on Tenth Street.
The commissioners were mixed on whether to allow a gate and in the final vote dropped that appropriately in the lap of the Parks Director and voted to require that the project applicant meet with the volunteers of the pollinator garden and that the entire project be required to install bird-safe glass.
Commissioner Abshez noted that Berkeley has a Civic Arts fee for mixed use projects, but does not have a parks fee which is common in other cities. With the shortage of public parks in Berkeley, the increasing population expected with large projects and decreased requirements for open space in new projects such as the rezoning approved for the Southside, the impetus to propose a parks fee with new construction is going to be on future agendas.
In closing, the Alabama Supreme Court ruling on IVF (in vitro fertilization) defining embryos as children released on February 16, 2024, was the reason for finally finishing the book that has been recirculating in my reading list for months
The opinion written by the Chief Justice Tom Parker filled with biblical quotes and references and writings by Christian Theologians treads all over separation of church and state.
In summary, the theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama encompasses the following: (1) God made every person in His image; (2) each person therefore has a value that far exceeds the ability of human beings to calculate; and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself. Section 36.06 recognized that this is true of the unborn human life no less than it is of all other human life – that even before birth all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.
The book is, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is UN-AMERICAN by Andrew L. Seidel. Seidel, a constitutional attorney for the Freedom from Religion Foundation, takes apart the myth that the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were founded on Judeo-Christian principles step by step using the ten commandments and biblical references with lots of quotes.
If you dip into The Founding Myth you will be grateful the framers of the Constitution were very skeptical of religion and wrote into the Constitution the separation of church and state. Seidel writes how religious fundamentalism cultivates submission to extreme authority and adulation to a punishing vengeful god and goes on to connect fundamentalism to the cultish adulation for the vengeful Trump who demands loyalty above all else and boasts if he is reelected of being “a dictator for a day”.
If we’re paying attention, Trump promises to pardon the January 6th seditionists, calls those convicted of crimes committed on January 6, 2021 “hostages” and describes immigrants as less than human and “poisoning the blood of our country”.
Things can change quickly if a wannabe dictator is elected. 2024 should not be a close election, but it is.
I took my scissors to Joe Mathews’ op-ed “Please stop trying to ‘save democracy’” and taped this to my monitor: “…democracy isn’t something you save. It’s something you do – with other people…”
Now when I sit at my computer until I am blurry eyed trying to capture what happened in our government wondering if it makes a difference, I look at that clipping and get a little smile, democracy is something we do and this is a very big year.
On Wednesday, March 13, I saw the giant mural by Berkeley High students on Allston at MLK with Ceasefire, Free Palestine and a figure wearing a keffiyeh in the middle with a book. I was disappointed to read in Berkeleyside that it was painted with water-soluble tempra paint instead of the permanent paint used in other street murals, but given the current opposition of the Mayor and City Council to a ceasefire resolution, paint that will wash away in the next rain is probably the safest for the students. The mural was too large to capture with my iPhone camera so if you want to see it take a trip to the Civic Center.
While I was waiting at the corner for the light to change I struck up a conversation with the woman next to me asking if she had noticed it. Yes, of course, was the answer as she told me the students painted it during their lunch break. She said “they need to stop telling lies about us.” I asked if she was a teacher. She answered yes as we crossed the street before separating heading in different directions.
At each City Council meeting I count how many speakers call for a ceasefire during the non-agenda comment period and how many oppose the city taking any action. The total allotment for non-agenda comment speakers has been ten in-person speakers, ten on zoom with each person receiving one minute. Speakers can give away their minute to another person. When someone receives time from others I count the time slots. The actual number of speakers may be less. On Tuesday, March 12, I counted nine asking for a ceasefire, five opposed and three on other topics. Not all of the online time slots were used. The apparent neo-Nazi who called in online was quickly disconnected from zoom by the mayor and is not in the count.
The big news on Tuesday, March 12, 2024 came in the special 3:30 pm meeting that was posted on Monday, with only ten minutes to spare to make 24-hour notice requirement. The contentious housing project planned for 1900 Fourth Street on the West Berkeley Shellmound and the lawsuit Ruegg & Ellsworth v. City of Berkeley is done and over. In an incredible mediation settlement, the City of Berkeley paid the claim of attorney fees using city funds of up to $1.5 million, obtained release of all remaining claims in exchange for acquisition of 1900 Fourth Street and transferred the property to the Sogorea Te Land Trust, thereby returning the land to the Ohlone people. The 25 million dollars to finish the settlement came from the trust. https://sogoreate-landtrust.org/lisjan-history-and-territory/
In this case the land acknowledgement read at city meetings that recognizes the City of Berkeley occupies stolen unceded land of the Ohlone Tribes with a documented 5,000 year history to the West Berkeley Shellmound actually means something.
The vision for the Shellmound https://shellmound.org/learn-more/ohlone-vision/
A few Berkeley City Council meetings ago a woman speaking against the City taking up a ceasefire resolution wanted to start history in 2005.
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi is at the top of this week’s best seller list. Just think how much further along we would be on peace between Israel and Palestine instead of the perpetual cycles of violence, retaliation and revenge, if Israel acknowledged that Israel was created and built through settler colonialism instead of the perpetual myth that Palestine was, “a land without people for a people without land.”
Much of the reading I’ve been doing (almost done with my 10th book) start with the rise of the Zionist movement in the 1800s (though some books go back centuries) and follow with the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917 to support the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine before moving up to the present.
After hearing clips from Senator Schumer’s speech on the Senate floor criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu, I read the entire speech. Schumer was blunt. https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-senator-chuck-schumers-speech-israeli-elections-are-the-only-way/
Schumer listed four obstacles to peace: Hamas, and the Palestinians who support and tolerate their evil ways, radical right-wing Israelis in government and society, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Schumer called out Finance Minister Bexalel Smotrich and Ministry of National Security Itmar Ben Gvir as the worst examples of radicalism in government.
Saturday, March 16, 2024 was the 21st anniversary of the death of 23 year-old Rachel Corrie. Corrie was trying to protect the home of a local pharmacist in Gaza from demolition when she was standing to be visible and was run over and killed by an armored bulldozer operated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The stage play based on her diaries and emails is called “My Name Is Rachel Corrie”.
Back to the City
There was more to the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council (BNC) meeting on March 9th than 2902 Adeline and eminent domain that I covered in my last Diary.
If you don’t attend any other city or community meetings (or even if you do) signing on to the two-hour BNC zoom meeting on the second Saturday of the month from 10 am to noon is definitely an informative and worthwhile expenditure of time.
The North Berkeley BART Project was the main subject at the March 9, 2024 BNC meeting with Jon McCall from BRIDGE and Daniel Simons and Josie Morgan from DBA (David Baker Architects) presenting for North Berkeley Housing Partners. The current state of the project is 739 units with a little over the required minimum of 1000 bedrooms and a little over 50% of the units as affordable. The complex will have 50,000 square feet of publicly accessible open space, 6000 square feet of publicly accessible ground floor uses and around 300 parking spaces in a central garage with 176 allocated to residents. The current count of parking spaces at North Berkeley BART ranges from 620 to 700 depending on the source accessed.
All the bedrooms will have windows. The bike/pedestrian paths will be shared. There will be 70 units with case management services. There will be an evaluation of the project by bird-safe experts to identify locations where windows need to be reconfigured or bird-safe glass used. There are plans for a café and childcare space, but not a grocery.
The questions that didn’t get answered with follow up requested were the breakdown/count of units by number of bedrooms and shadow studies to show how much natural light will reach internal units (around open space).
I arrived at the Commission on Disability late and was surprised two members were attending on ZOOM. There was no announcement that the meeting was being conducted in a hybrid format, but then members of the Commission on Disability have a lawsuit against the City for not providing meetings in the hybrid format so disabled commissioners can attend. It appears the City has come halfway with ZOOM for commissioners, but not the public.
The City has not accommodated the blind commissioner for the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission (HWCAC) who needs documents in Braille. She left the HWCAC in the midst of the funding of service agencies. As described in the March 14th Activist’s Diary, It was hard enough for those of us in the room with vision to track on our pieces of scratch paper and devices the impact of changing allocation recommendations to squeeze $1,113,124 of requests into $563,266 of available funds. Imagine how that chaos landed on a commissioner who is blind and who was not accommodated with documents she could read.
I was present for most of the discussion at the Commission on Disability on AB 413 the “Daylighting Bill” which prohibits drivers from stopping or parking within 20 feet of a crosswalk or 15 feet from crosswalks with curb extensions (bulb outs).
While commissioners agreed prohibiting stopping or parking near intersections will greatly improve pedestrian and traffic safety there are issues for handicapped parking spaces that currently exist within the restricted zone and AB 413 will add difficulties for handicapped persons whose handicapped spaces need to be moved. The handicapped space at the top of California at Rose is one that looks to be in the daylighting zone.
There are also increased potential risks for disabled persons depending on how they access vehicles especially for disabled persons who enter on the traffic side as vehicle drivers. Depending on the configuration of handicapped spaces and handicapped vehicles, disabled persons who enter from the rear or even on the passenger side may also be impacted.
Between now and December 31, 2024 drivers will receive only a warning for parking in the daylighting zone unless the curb is marked with red paint or there is a sign. Starting January 1, 2025 stopping or parking in the restricted zone risks ticketing whether the zone or crosswalk is marked or not. The bill contains prohibitions from parking over a curb onto a sidewalk, something that is common practice on narrow streets in the hills. Parking in front of driveways whether public or private is prohibited (there is no exception in the bill if the driveway is to your own garage).
If you are a driver, reading AB 413 in full (it is very short) just might save you from a hefty ticket. https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB413/id/2845316
The first major item of interest at the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission was the parking study for the proposed ferry. Kittleson & Associates has been hired by the city to do the parking study. In general, I have a hard time believing ferry ridership will meet the early projections except on occasions when there are big events in San Francisco.
I noticed the Waterfront Emergency Transportation Authority (WETA) stopped publishing the ferry occupancy rate during the busiest hour of the day in the Board meeting ridership reports. That usually hovered between 33% – 36% which meant that mostly near empty ferries typically travel back and forth across the bay. I would expect that low utilization to be about the same looking at the current charts and tables.
What concerns me the most besides the impact on marine life, is that the ferry looks like another money sink for city residents to shoulder so high income earners can have a boutique subsidized ferry service. WETA lowered the fare to increase ridership. From their own surveys the majority of the subsidized fares support high income earners.
Any increase in parking demand will be felt on the weekends when families access the waterfront. Once more charging for parking slipped into the presentation. I saw little interest from the presenter on receiving input from the commission or public on their parking studies.
There are plans for six weekday and 4 weekend “intercept surveys” when persons parking at the waterfront will be asked about their destinations, activities, parking duration and parking issues.
The Zoning Adjust Board (ZAB) met for a total of eighteen minutes to approve three Use Permits on consent. The next ZAB meeting on March 28 will be on 2136-2154 San Pablo a 6-story SB 330 state density project with 122 units (including 10 very low-income density bonus qualifying units), 3 live-work units and 50 ground floor parking spaces. This is the project that occupied the rest of the Parks Commission meeting and initiated a lively discussion.
The discussion started with should the San Pablo project which backs up to the George Florence Park on Tenth Street have its own gate from the private property into the park.
When I saw the plans at the Design Review Committee, my issue was the gates (there were several in the initial design now there is one) opened right into the pollinator garden so anyone entering from the development would trample the garden volunteers have been working so hard to create.
George Florence Park was a problematic neighborhood eyesore in the middle of a city block that has been completely restored by neighbors, volunteers and the City Parks Department into a delightful neighborhood resource with new play equipment for children. In this built up densely populated city with a shortage of parks and tiny yards between housing if there is any yard at all, these little “mini” parks fill the gap where children can play.
The commission focused on whether the project should have direct access through the fence into the park or should residents walk to the park like the other neighbors. The park is currently fenced on three sides and completely open on Tenth Street.
The commissioners were mixed on whether to allow a gate and in the final vote dropped that appropriately in the lap of the Parks Director and voted to require that the project applicant meet with the volunteers of the pollinator garden and that the entire project be required to install bird-safe glass.
Commissioner Abshez noted that Berkeley has a Civic Arts fee for mixed use projects, but does not have a parks fee which is common in other cities. With the shortage of public parks in Berkeley, the increasing population expected with large projects and decreased requirements for open space in new projects such as the rezoning approved for the Southside, the impetus to propose a parks fee with new construction is going to be on future agendas.
In closing, the Alabama Supreme Court ruling on IVF (in vitro fertilization) defining embryos as children released on February 16, 2024, was the reason for finally finishing the book that has been recirculating in my reading list for months
The opinion written by the Chief Justice Tom Parker filled with biblical quotes and references and writings by Christian Theologians treads all over separation of church and state.
In summary, the theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama encompasses the following: (1) God made every person in His image; (2) each person therefore has a value that far exceeds the ability of human beings to calculate; and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself. Section 36.06 recognized that this is true of the unborn human life no less than it is of all other human life – that even before birth all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.
The book is, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is UN-AMERICAN by Andrew L. Seidel. Seidel, a constitutional attorney for the Freedom from Religion Foundation, takes apart the myth that the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were founded on Judeo-Christian principles step by step using the ten commandments and biblical references with lots of quotes.
If you dip into The Founding Myth you will be grateful the framers of the Constitution were very skeptical of religion and wrote into the Constitution the separation of church and state. Seidel writes how religious fundamentalism cultivates submission to extreme authority and adulation to a punishing vengeful god and goes on to connect fundamentalism to the cultish adulation for the vengeful Trump who demands loyalty above all else and boasts if he is reelected of being “a dictator for a day”.
If we’re paying attention, Trump promises to pardon the January 6th seditionists, calls those convicted of crimes committed on January 6, 2021 “hostages” and describes immigrants as less than human and “poisoning the blood of our country”.
Things can change quickly if a wannabe dictator is elected. 2024 should not be a close election, but it is.
March 11, 2024
Now that I have been so slow to finish off this Activist’s Diary and fallen into covering two weeks of meetings, it feels like the world has shifted again.
Trump’s visit with Viktor Orban at Mar-a-Lago is over, but for the voters with Trump amnesia or think we made it through fours years the first time and we can do it again, here is some food for thought.
In the November 20, 2021 Activist’s Diary, I reviewed After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made by Ben Rhodes. In Rhodes’ travels for writing the book he met with a Hungarian who described how Orban transformed Hungary from an open democracy to a largely authoritarian system in the span of ten years through twelve steps.
1)Win elections through right-wing populism that taps into people’s outrage over the corruption and inequities wrought by unbridled globalization.
2)Enrich corrupt oligarchs who in turn fund your politics.
3)Create a vast partisan propaganda machine.
4)Redraw parliamentary districts to entrench your party in power.
5)Pack the courts with right-wing judges and erode the independence of the rule of law.
6)Keep big business on your side with low taxes and favorable treatment.
7)Demonize your political opponents through social media disinformation.
8)Attack civil society as a tool of George Soros.
9)Cast yourself as the legitimate defender of national security.
10)Wrap the whole project in a Christian nationalist message that taps into the longing for a great past.
11)Offer a sense of belonging for the disaffected masses.
12)Relentlessly attack the Other: immigrants, Muslims, liberal elites.
Thanks to the Heritage Foundation, Trump has the 920 page Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project for any needed help. Trump isn’t known to be a heavy reader, but he doesn’t have to be. He’ll have his loyalists to do that work. https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
I watched Biden’s State of the Union (SOTU), the post address panels, interviews and the Republican response. I know some people are spilling over with enthusiasm. My anxiety level over the election is in the red alert range.
The Democrats are splintering over Israel and Gaza. The conditions in Gaza are horrific. More children, women, journalists, aid workers, health workers have died in Gaza in five months from Israeli attacks than any other war in history. Children are dying of starvation now.
People identifying as Hispanic represent 19% of the population and 14.7% of the eligible voters. Hispanic voters who supported Biden in 2020 by a 21 point margin (Biden 59% Trump 38%) in a post election Pew poll are now according to the New York Times and Sienna College March 3, 2024 poll at 43% for Biden and 48% for Trump. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/us/politics/biden-trump-times-siena-poll.html
As Ben Rhodes said on Friday after SOTU on All In with Chris Hayes, Biden’s response on Gaza was very unsatisfactory. Biden needs to change course. The conditions in Gaza are dire. It’s the moral thing to do. The number of uncommitted voters in Michigan is not insignificant and ended with, “[W}hat an irony, a terrible tragic irony if a Democratic President’s support for BeBe Netanyahu ends up being a deciding factor in the swing states…He’s [Biden] very underwater on the issue in total. The longer it goes, the more he is underwater on this issue…”
On to the local scene.
At the Agenda Committee on Monday, February 26, 2024, Mayor Arreguin said in the discussion around the merger of the Peace and Justice Commission and the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission, “I have talked to the City Manager and asked that another option be presented which would not involve merging of the two commissions…and I will also state for the record that I will not be supporting the merger. “
When former councilmember Droste first proposed merging commissions as a cost saving measure, back in 2020, I felt then and do now there is a lack of appreciation for the work done by commissions and what that work means to the city and us as residents.
By the time the commission mergers were before Council on June 15, 2021 at the special 4 pm meeting Councilmembers Robinson, Kesarwani and Mayor Arreguin were signed on as supporters. The full council voted unanimously for the mergers.
Arreguin’s shift to not supporting the merger is very good news as the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission has federal mandated responsibilities to fulfill for the City of Berkeley to receive Community Service Block Grants (CSBG). Members of the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission have been calling out that Berkeley is at risk of losing Community Service Block Grant Funds for a very long time. Apparently, their warnings are finally getting through.
Wednesday March 6, I attended the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission in the Cypress Room at 2180 Milvia. This is important as the Cypress Room is fully equipped for hybrid meetings to connect people on zoom and people in the room. City staff told those of us in the room, the commission’s chair Mary Behm-Steinberg (who told us she was recovering from surgery) would be joining by phone.
I learned after the meeting closed that the depiction of Behm-Steinberg calling in by phone was not true. Behm-Steinberg was connecting to the meeting on her computer using the zoom link proved by staff to attend the meeting.
The first issue of the evening was the response to the strongly worded letter from Jason Wimbley, Acting Director, California Department of Community Services and Development. The letter started with the stated purpose of:
“Re: 45-Day Notice of Anticipated High-Risk Designation Based on The City of Berkeley’s Failure to Maintain Required CSBG Tripartite Board Structure and Failure to Administer Programs Through Tripartite Board; Required Response and Corrective Action Due by March 18, 2024.”
The letter starts on page 13 of the meeting packet for March 6, 2024. The very long letter with attachments states Berkeley has been out of compliance since 2012 and goes on with:
“[W]ithout board members in position comprised of different sectors of the population, no tripartite board exists to perform the oversight and governance duties and assure effective planning, implementation and evaluation of Berkeley’s CSBG program, as intended by CSBG laws and regulations and Berkeley’s own bylaws. An ongoing inability to recruit and retain board members constitutes noncompliance with federal law and disqualifies Berkeley as an eligible entity for the receipt and administration of the CSBG grant…” [emphasis added] https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/boards-commissions/human-welfare-and-community-action-commission
The Tripartite Board membership is defined in the letter as consisting of not fewer than 1/3 of the members being poor/low income persons, 1/3 are elected officials holding office or their representatives and the remaining members must be chosen from business, industry, labor, law enforcement, education or other major groups and interests in the community served.
This mess sits squarely in the failure of City of Berkeley Administration all the way up the food chain and the City Council. Reviewing the published commission membership list. Mary Behm-Steinberg was appointed by Harrison 4/30/2019, J. George Lippman was appointed by Bartlett 12/7/2023, Jose Lara Cruz was appointed by Kesarwani 2/8/2024 and Diana Bohn was appointed by Arreguin 2/27/2024. That leaves Taplin, Hahn, Wengraf, Humbert and Robinson (who resigned in January) as not making appointments.
The Commission Secretary Mary-Claire Katz, Program Analyst and Margot Ernst, Executive Director were both present at a virtual meeting on May 5, 2022 where deficiencies were cited by the California Department of Community Services and Development.
The City is required to respond with corrective action by March 18. At the meeting when Behm-Steinberg asked to see the response before it was sent, the Commission Secretary Mary-Claire Katz said Behm-Steinberg will get a copy when it is sent. It wasn’t clear to me if the Commission Chair will have the opportunity to review the response before it is sent, though that was the request.
Katz also related to the commission that the alternate plan requested by the mayor to keep the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission intact was done and ready for the March 26 City Council meeting, however, the commission will not be allowed to see it any sooner than the general public. I expect that to be after 5 pm on March 14 when the final agenda is posted for the March 26 council meeting.
The alternate plan for the Human Welfare Commission is listed in the draft agenda for March 26 as item 22.b., however, there is no content as to what the plan is. The Agenda and Rules Committee (members Arreguin, Wengraf, Hahn) will review the agenda on Tuesday, March 13.
If the alternative plan from City Administration is already done, then why must it remain a secret? Do we actually believe there is no internal communication and that everyone is in the dark including the mayor and only the person who wrote it knows the content?
I wrote on February 8, I was shocked by the tone of the Director of Health, Housing and Community Services Lisa Warhuus when she presented the plan for merging the two commissions. Warhuus has moved on to her new job in Marin, but the tone doesn’t seem to have left.
The next item was the commission’s recommendation on the distribution of funding for community agencies. As this discussion was getting started, the staff secretary Katz left the room and then returned telling the commissioners and public the building security person’s shift was ending at 8:30 pm and they needed to be out of the building by 8:45 pm giving the commission about an hour to decide how to respond to applications for funding totaling $1,113,124 with only $563,266 in funds to distribute.
With the commission chair already on ZOOM, if the meeting had been set up to use the equipment in the room, commissioner Jose Lara Cruz could have displayed the budget sheet on his computer on the large screen for everyone to see including the commission chair at home. Commissioner Lara Cruz had all the application current funding and application requests in the accounting program excel where adding or subtracting funding would show the impact on the total funds available.
But instead we sat with inadequate meeting documents, our separate pieces of paper while Catherine Hutching was trying to respond to the discussion in the room and put the organizations being called out on the white board on the wall for the commissioners present to see. I had my own scratch sheet trying to keep up with the changing recommendations to squeeze over $1,000,000 in application requests into $563,266.
It was a totally unnecessary chaos. But, it is demonstrative of the unwillingness of the City of Berkeley Administration to use the tools/technology already available in the City Facilities when that use means supporting the commissioners and commissions. And, it is demonstrative of this mayor and this city council failure to step in and insist that existing equipment be made available for public meetings.
When the City of Berkeley is already on notice of non-compliance by the State of California, one would think the City of Berkeley would be doing everything possible to support the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission commissioners.
This is how the funding ended. The Bay Area Outreach & Recreation Program – Recreational Services for Disabled, Life Long Medical and East Bay Law Center will all stay at their current level of funding. The Berkeley Food Project ($150,000) and ASUC ($32,000), which were not previously funded received no funding. The Bonita House with current funding of $15,324, a request of $25,000 and substantial funding from other sources was not funded.
The Family Violence Law Center
Current Award $61,842, Requested $82,080, Final $75,000
Berkeley Community Gardening Collaborative
Current $11,895, Requested $153,052, Final $51,632
J-Sei Senior Services
Current $9,110, Requested $30,000, Final $20,000
Through the Looking Glass
Current $27,206, Requested $52,000, Final $35,000
I’ve attended meetings at three fully equipped conference rooms in 2180 Milvia. I suspect there is at least one and probably more fully equipped conference rooms in the Planning Department in the building on Center Street. There is equipment with giant display screens at the Fire Department Training Center on Cedar and in Public Works on Allston.
Commissions and the public have been requesting hybrid meetings for months. The excuse has been there isn’t equipment. Two days before the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission the Agenda Committee discussed and responded to the recommendations from the Open Government Commission where Arreguin, Hahn and Wengraf did agree hybrid meetings should be pursued.
At the Saturday at the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council it was mentioned that there was scaffolding up at 2902 Adeline, but there was no building permit. I didn’t see any scaffolding when I went to look at the property after the meeting, but the property certainly looked like it would fit the description of blighted.
On February 27, City Council passed on consent Councilmember Bartlett’s referral to the City Manager to investigate the feasibility of using eminent domain for 2902 and 2908 Adeline and the abandoned house on 1946 Russell to build affordable housing.
This is all very interesting as there was a Trachtenberg designed project for these three parcels approved by City Council in 2017. After losing the appeal to council the neighbors filed a lawsuit. That was settled in favor of the developer on July 10, 2018.
I found three closed expired permits for the property on the City of Berkeley website dated 5/1/2023 (received 11/30/2021), 11/16/2023 (received 9/20/2021), and 11/16/2023 (received 5/4/2022). https://berkeley.buildingeye.com/building
This was a very contentious projects when it was first proposed. I remember being told by one very active Berkeley resident who has since passed away, that REALTEX never built anything and that their game was to get projects entitled. That game isn’t limited to REALTEX. There are many projects approved that never seem to go anywhere for years if at all. There was no apparent application for a permit for anything for 2902 Adeline until over three years after REALTEX won the lawsuit filed by the neighbors.
What happens now sits in the City Manager’s to do list which gets longer with every new council referral.
The Peace and Justice Commission agenda item Update from the Gaza Roundtable Subgroup put that meeting on my list to attend, but I missed the meeting. I have since heard pressure on commissioners from councilmembers have squashed the effort for a Rountable on Gaza. This is such a shame. The Peace and Justice Commission is the place for a panel and public discussion.
I expect that a roundtable on Gaza would be difficult. There are lots of strong feelings, and many minds are made up, but it is a conversation that we need to have.
The Peace and Justice Commission did an outstanding job on the Fukushima Roundtable.
International Women’s Day was March 8 and the month of March is Women’s History Month.
If you are wondering just what is the Comstock Act of 1873 and how the Comstock Act could upend access to Mifepristone then pick up the entertaining biography by Jennifer Wright Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist. The book Madame Restell covers a time in U.S. history when abortionists competed and advertised in newspapers and Andrew Comstock was intent to put an end to it.
Now that I have been so slow to finish off this Activist’s Diary and fallen into covering two weeks of meetings, it feels like the world has shifted again.
Trump’s visit with Viktor Orban at Mar-a-Lago is over, but for the voters with Trump amnesia or think we made it through fours years the first time and we can do it again, here is some food for thought.
In the November 20, 2021 Activist’s Diary, I reviewed After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made by Ben Rhodes. In Rhodes’ travels for writing the book he met with a Hungarian who described how Orban transformed Hungary from an open democracy to a largely authoritarian system in the span of ten years through twelve steps.
1)Win elections through right-wing populism that taps into people’s outrage over the corruption and inequities wrought by unbridled globalization.
2)Enrich corrupt oligarchs who in turn fund your politics.
3)Create a vast partisan propaganda machine.
4)Redraw parliamentary districts to entrench your party in power.
5)Pack the courts with right-wing judges and erode the independence of the rule of law.
6)Keep big business on your side with low taxes and favorable treatment.
7)Demonize your political opponents through social media disinformation.
8)Attack civil society as a tool of George Soros.
9)Cast yourself as the legitimate defender of national security.
10)Wrap the whole project in a Christian nationalist message that taps into the longing for a great past.
11)Offer a sense of belonging for the disaffected masses.
12)Relentlessly attack the Other: immigrants, Muslims, liberal elites.
Thanks to the Heritage Foundation, Trump has the 920 page Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project for any needed help. Trump isn’t known to be a heavy reader, but he doesn’t have to be. He’ll have his loyalists to do that work. https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
I watched Biden’s State of the Union (SOTU), the post address panels, interviews and the Republican response. I know some people are spilling over with enthusiasm. My anxiety level over the election is in the red alert range.
The Democrats are splintering over Israel and Gaza. The conditions in Gaza are horrific. More children, women, journalists, aid workers, health workers have died in Gaza in five months from Israeli attacks than any other war in history. Children are dying of starvation now.
People identifying as Hispanic represent 19% of the population and 14.7% of the eligible voters. Hispanic voters who supported Biden in 2020 by a 21 point margin (Biden 59% Trump 38%) in a post election Pew poll are now according to the New York Times and Sienna College March 3, 2024 poll at 43% for Biden and 48% for Trump. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/us/politics/biden-trump-times-siena-poll.html
As Ben Rhodes said on Friday after SOTU on All In with Chris Hayes, Biden’s response on Gaza was very unsatisfactory. Biden needs to change course. The conditions in Gaza are dire. It’s the moral thing to do. The number of uncommitted voters in Michigan is not insignificant and ended with, “[W}hat an irony, a terrible tragic irony if a Democratic President’s support for BeBe Netanyahu ends up being a deciding factor in the swing states…He’s [Biden] very underwater on the issue in total. The longer it goes, the more he is underwater on this issue…”
On to the local scene.
At the Agenda Committee on Monday, February 26, 2024, Mayor Arreguin said in the discussion around the merger of the Peace and Justice Commission and the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission, “I have talked to the City Manager and asked that another option be presented which would not involve merging of the two commissions…and I will also state for the record that I will not be supporting the merger. “
When former councilmember Droste first proposed merging commissions as a cost saving measure, back in 2020, I felt then and do now there is a lack of appreciation for the work done by commissions and what that work means to the city and us as residents.
By the time the commission mergers were before Council on June 15, 2021 at the special 4 pm meeting Councilmembers Robinson, Kesarwani and Mayor Arreguin were signed on as supporters. The full council voted unanimously for the mergers.
Arreguin’s shift to not supporting the merger is very good news as the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission has federal mandated responsibilities to fulfill for the City of Berkeley to receive Community Service Block Grants (CSBG). Members of the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission have been calling out that Berkeley is at risk of losing Community Service Block Grant Funds for a very long time. Apparently, their warnings are finally getting through.
Wednesday March 6, I attended the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission in the Cypress Room at 2180 Milvia. This is important as the Cypress Room is fully equipped for hybrid meetings to connect people on zoom and people in the room. City staff told those of us in the room, the commission’s chair Mary Behm-Steinberg (who told us she was recovering from surgery) would be joining by phone.
I learned after the meeting closed that the depiction of Behm-Steinberg calling in by phone was not true. Behm-Steinberg was connecting to the meeting on her computer using the zoom link proved by staff to attend the meeting.
The first issue of the evening was the response to the strongly worded letter from Jason Wimbley, Acting Director, California Department of Community Services and Development. The letter started with the stated purpose of:
“Re: 45-Day Notice of Anticipated High-Risk Designation Based on The City of Berkeley’s Failure to Maintain Required CSBG Tripartite Board Structure and Failure to Administer Programs Through Tripartite Board; Required Response and Corrective Action Due by March 18, 2024.”
The letter starts on page 13 of the meeting packet for March 6, 2024. The very long letter with attachments states Berkeley has been out of compliance since 2012 and goes on with:
“[W]ithout board members in position comprised of different sectors of the population, no tripartite board exists to perform the oversight and governance duties and assure effective planning, implementation and evaluation of Berkeley’s CSBG program, as intended by CSBG laws and regulations and Berkeley’s own bylaws. An ongoing inability to recruit and retain board members constitutes noncompliance with federal law and disqualifies Berkeley as an eligible entity for the receipt and administration of the CSBG grant…” [emphasis added] https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/boards-commissions/human-welfare-and-community-action-commission
The Tripartite Board membership is defined in the letter as consisting of not fewer than 1/3 of the members being poor/low income persons, 1/3 are elected officials holding office or their representatives and the remaining members must be chosen from business, industry, labor, law enforcement, education or other major groups and interests in the community served.
This mess sits squarely in the failure of City of Berkeley Administration all the way up the food chain and the City Council. Reviewing the published commission membership list. Mary Behm-Steinberg was appointed by Harrison 4/30/2019, J. George Lippman was appointed by Bartlett 12/7/2023, Jose Lara Cruz was appointed by Kesarwani 2/8/2024 and Diana Bohn was appointed by Arreguin 2/27/2024. That leaves Taplin, Hahn, Wengraf, Humbert and Robinson (who resigned in January) as not making appointments.
The Commission Secretary Mary-Claire Katz, Program Analyst and Margot Ernst, Executive Director were both present at a virtual meeting on May 5, 2022 where deficiencies were cited by the California Department of Community Services and Development.
The City is required to respond with corrective action by March 18. At the meeting when Behm-Steinberg asked to see the response before it was sent, the Commission Secretary Mary-Claire Katz said Behm-Steinberg will get a copy when it is sent. It wasn’t clear to me if the Commission Chair will have the opportunity to review the response before it is sent, though that was the request.
Katz also related to the commission that the alternate plan requested by the mayor to keep the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission intact was done and ready for the March 26 City Council meeting, however, the commission will not be allowed to see it any sooner than the general public. I expect that to be after 5 pm on March 14 when the final agenda is posted for the March 26 council meeting.
The alternate plan for the Human Welfare Commission is listed in the draft agenda for March 26 as item 22.b., however, there is no content as to what the plan is. The Agenda and Rules Committee (members Arreguin, Wengraf, Hahn) will review the agenda on Tuesday, March 13.
If the alternative plan from City Administration is already done, then why must it remain a secret? Do we actually believe there is no internal communication and that everyone is in the dark including the mayor and only the person who wrote it knows the content?
I wrote on February 8, I was shocked by the tone of the Director of Health, Housing and Community Services Lisa Warhuus when she presented the plan for merging the two commissions. Warhuus has moved on to her new job in Marin, but the tone doesn’t seem to have left.
The next item was the commission’s recommendation on the distribution of funding for community agencies. As this discussion was getting started, the staff secretary Katz left the room and then returned telling the commissioners and public the building security person’s shift was ending at 8:30 pm and they needed to be out of the building by 8:45 pm giving the commission about an hour to decide how to respond to applications for funding totaling $1,113,124 with only $563,266 in funds to distribute.
With the commission chair already on ZOOM, if the meeting had been set up to use the equipment in the room, commissioner Jose Lara Cruz could have displayed the budget sheet on his computer on the large screen for everyone to see including the commission chair at home. Commissioner Lara Cruz had all the application current funding and application requests in the accounting program excel where adding or subtracting funding would show the impact on the total funds available.
But instead we sat with inadequate meeting documents, our separate pieces of paper while Catherine Hutching was trying to respond to the discussion in the room and put the organizations being called out on the white board on the wall for the commissioners present to see. I had my own scratch sheet trying to keep up with the changing recommendations to squeeze over $1,000,000 in application requests into $563,266.
It was a totally unnecessary chaos. But, it is demonstrative of the unwillingness of the City of Berkeley Administration to use the tools/technology already available in the City Facilities when that use means supporting the commissioners and commissions. And, it is demonstrative of this mayor and this city council failure to step in and insist that existing equipment be made available for public meetings.
When the City of Berkeley is already on notice of non-compliance by the State of California, one would think the City of Berkeley would be doing everything possible to support the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission commissioners.
This is how the funding ended. The Bay Area Outreach & Recreation Program – Recreational Services for Disabled, Life Long Medical and East Bay Law Center will all stay at their current level of funding. The Berkeley Food Project ($150,000) and ASUC ($32,000), which were not previously funded received no funding. The Bonita House with current funding of $15,324, a request of $25,000 and substantial funding from other sources was not funded.
The Family Violence Law Center
Current Award $61,842, Requested $82,080, Final $75,000
Berkeley Community Gardening Collaborative
Current $11,895, Requested $153,052, Final $51,632
J-Sei Senior Services
Current $9,110, Requested $30,000, Final $20,000
Through the Looking Glass
Current $27,206, Requested $52,000, Final $35,000
I’ve attended meetings at three fully equipped conference rooms in 2180 Milvia. I suspect there is at least one and probably more fully equipped conference rooms in the Planning Department in the building on Center Street. There is equipment with giant display screens at the Fire Department Training Center on Cedar and in Public Works on Allston.
Commissions and the public have been requesting hybrid meetings for months. The excuse has been there isn’t equipment. Two days before the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission the Agenda Committee discussed and responded to the recommendations from the Open Government Commission where Arreguin, Hahn and Wengraf did agree hybrid meetings should be pursued.
At the Saturday at the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council it was mentioned that there was scaffolding up at 2902 Adeline, but there was no building permit. I didn’t see any scaffolding when I went to look at the property after the meeting, but the property certainly looked like it would fit the description of blighted.
On February 27, City Council passed on consent Councilmember Bartlett’s referral to the City Manager to investigate the feasibility of using eminent domain for 2902 and 2908 Adeline and the abandoned house on 1946 Russell to build affordable housing.
This is all very interesting as there was a Trachtenberg designed project for these three parcels approved by City Council in 2017. After losing the appeal to council the neighbors filed a lawsuit. That was settled in favor of the developer on July 10, 2018.
I found three closed expired permits for the property on the City of Berkeley website dated 5/1/2023 (received 11/30/2021), 11/16/2023 (received 9/20/2021), and 11/16/2023 (received 5/4/2022). https://berkeley.buildingeye.com/building
This was a very contentious projects when it was first proposed. I remember being told by one very active Berkeley resident who has since passed away, that REALTEX never built anything and that their game was to get projects entitled. That game isn’t limited to REALTEX. There are many projects approved that never seem to go anywhere for years if at all. There was no apparent application for a permit for anything for 2902 Adeline until over three years after REALTEX won the lawsuit filed by the neighbors.
What happens now sits in the City Manager’s to do list which gets longer with every new council referral.
The Peace and Justice Commission agenda item Update from the Gaza Roundtable Subgroup put that meeting on my list to attend, but I missed the meeting. I have since heard pressure on commissioners from councilmembers have squashed the effort for a Rountable on Gaza. This is such a shame. The Peace and Justice Commission is the place for a panel and public discussion.
I expect that a roundtable on Gaza would be difficult. There are lots of strong feelings, and many minds are made up, but it is a conversation that we need to have.
The Peace and Justice Commission did an outstanding job on the Fukushima Roundtable.
International Women’s Day was March 8 and the month of March is Women’s History Month.
If you are wondering just what is the Comstock Act of 1873 and how the Comstock Act could upend access to Mifepristone then pick up the entertaining biography by Jennifer Wright Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist. The book Madame Restell covers a time in U.S. history when abortionists competed and advertised in newspapers and Andrew Comstock was intent to put an end to it.
February 25, 2024
As I close out this Diary, late again from my Saturday February 24. 2024 target, the protest vote from Michigan is in with over with 100,000 as uncommitted. The Democratic leadership is banking on the protest voters coming home in November to support Biden against Trump who is known to be worse for Palestinian recognition, but will they? Will the MSNBC weekday and weeknight anchors and pundits falling all over themselves to praise Biden be enough?
Only two of the former three Muslim anchors remain with shows on Saturday and Sunday. Mehdi Hasan who gave the strongest coverage of the Israel Hamas war and toughest interviews is gone.
The Hilary Clinton team thought they could count on Democrats too in 2016, but in Michigan voters checked the down ballot boxes and left the president box blank. Conspiracies abounded over those empty boxes, but it was yet another protest by voters.
I’ve finished eight books on Israel and Palestine in the recent weeks (listed from last read to first, the bolded are on important to read lists), 1) Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians From Balfour to Trump by Khaled Elginoy, 2) Inter / Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine by Steven Salaita, 3) Letters to my Palestinian Neighbor by Yossi Klein Halevi, 4) The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi, 5) Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, The Bible by Mitri Raheb, 6) The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust: A Memoir by Naom Chayut, 7) Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe and 8) A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by Nathan Thrall.
I’m a third of the way through Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman and have seven more books waiting on hold at the library. Rise and Kill First is brutal and it will leave you wondering who should really be called the terrorists. You might be shocked, I know I was, at how many of the assassins and assassination plotters ended up in the formation of the Israeli political parties especially the Likud and various arms of the Israeli government as Israeli prime ministers, members of the Knesset, the Mossad, the IDF and as advisors.
Sunday, I saw the film Israelism at the Little Roxie in San Francisco. I highly recommend it especially for those of us not raised in a Jewish household and unfamiliar with the free Birthright Israel trips for 18 to 26 year old Jewish young adults and early education locking Israel and Jewish identity as inseparable. Simone Zimmerman one of the two featured Jewish Americans in the film called that education indoctrination.
I place the current horror in Gaza squarely in the lap of the United States and the failure of every president from Truman to the present including President Biden. It is Elginoy in Blind Spot who pulls it together and so clearly details how the U.S. alliance with Israel makes the U.S. far from an honest mediator to broker peace agreements between Israel and Palestine.
All the power rests with the United States and Israel. The U.S. negotiators have been Zionists at heart pushing the right to dignity, self-determination for Palestinians off the table. The Palestinians have no right of return while Jewish persons from around the world are invited to settle in Israel with settlers taking land away from Palestinians and destroying Palestinian homes.
The history is ugly and sickening like a festering boil that explodes in cycles of violence and retaliation and revenge.
The vengeance of Israel against the Palestinians under Netanyahu unfolding before our eyes over the last five months is like no other war in history in the number of deaths of children, women, aid workers, journalists, the destruction of hospitals, schools, universities, cultural sites, housing and suffering from starvation and no safe place anywhere.
Mehdi Hasan wrote in the Guardian on February 21, 2024 “Biden can end the bombing of Gaza right now. Here’s how” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/21/biden-stop-gaza-bombing-genocide-israel
Reading the early February 29 reports of the IDF opening fire on Palestinians gathering for a food convoy and murdering over 100 with more than 700 injured is no surprise. This kind of violence is described over and over in my reading along with the mindset behind it. We need to ask again who are the terrorists.
As long as Biden who has self-identified as a Zionist can’t bring himself beyond comments like describing the war on Gaza as “over the top” or reducing this latest massacre to interfering with negotiations while the U.S. continues to veto calls for a ceasefire at the U.N. and funds the Israeli war machine nothing will change.
The policy turnaround with action to match in the Biden administration will only come with increasing public pressure. We need it to save the lives of Palestinians and Israelis. And, we need to do it to save our own democracy.
James Carville warns if there is no de-escalation we could be looking at a repeat of 1968 with a splintered party. Nixon won that election.
All of this is the exact reason why Berkeley City Council with Mayor Arreguin and councilmembers Wengraf and Hahn need to experience a turnaround in their opposition to a ceasefire resolution. We as a City and we as individuals must come together for a permanent ceasefire and humanitarian aid to Palestinians.
As for City meetings It was a quiet week. With Monday as the Presidents’ Day Holiday and City Council off for the week except for the closed session on Tuesday, I made it to only one uneventful City meeting, the Zoning Adjustment Board. All four projects were approved on consent: 1287 Gilman establish a wine bar, 1205 Kains lift a dwelling 18 inches and move it 3 feet 3 inches, 1340 Haskell demolish a single-family home and build 2 new single-family homes on the lot, and 2901-2903 Deakin lift a duplex 10 feet 6 inches and add a new 1st floor and 8th bedroom.
As for the closed Council session, could someone tell me if it is normal for a city to be in continuous labor negotiations?
I did watch the Berkeley Mayoral Forum, the Wellstone panel on calling for a Ceasefire in Gaza, part of the Wellstone Candidate Forum for City Council District 7, the presentation by Rex Frazier on the California insurance industry to Livable California and served as the driver for my favorite candidate Margot Smith for the Meet and Greet the Candidates at the Allen Temple Baptist Church.
Margot Smith is a long shot for State Assembly and I encourage you to vote for her in the March 5th primary. I think she would do a great job, most importantly, she would break the grip of big money on the Assembly seat. While Margot has attended multiple candidate events (ten and counting), Buffy Wicks (current State Assembly person) showed up once. Forums to debate/speak to the issues have been canceled, because Wicks doesn’t show up.
Even if Wicks doesn’t think she has real competition to be reelected, these forums are opportunities and not taking them tells me where Wicks places the interests of her constituents.
You can watch the Mayoral Forum on the Berkeley Community Media YouTube Channel and form your own opinion. https://www.youtube.com/user/BerkeleyCommMedia
There is no primary for mayor and it seems most unusual for the Chamber of Commerce to sponsor a mayor forum when we need to be focusing on the primary. I don’t have a handle on who pushed for this forum, but it doesn’t settle right. A lot can change between now and November when we cast our rank choice votes for mayor and council districts 2,3,5 and 6.
Candidates can submit paperwork to run until August 9, 2024. Since Arreguin is running for State Senate he won’t be running for mayor unless he misses the top two in the primary which is very unlikely. When the incumbent does not run, the filing period extends by one day to August 10, 2024. Here is the full schedule: https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/November%20Calendar%202024%20PUBLIC.pdf
I listened to part of the recording of the Wellstone District 7 Candidate Forum with James Chang and Cecilia Lunaparra and got as far as their stands on Israel and Palestine. I planned to go back to it, but it disappeared from my screen and the forum is not posted on the Wellstone website. Only residents of District 7 can vote in the special April 16 special election. I live in District 4. Our election will be May 28. Wellstone endorsed Lunaparra who supports a ceasefire. Chang does not.
The entire two-hour Livable California meeting was devoted to the presentation by Rex Frazier on the California insurance industry. Frazier explained how the California FAIR Plan works. The Fair Plan is an insurance option for residents and businesses that cannot obtain insurance through a regular insurance company. Listening to presentation and the questions at the end, I believe we can expect more homeowner insurance companies to leave California.
There is another problem. John Vailant refers to it over and over in his book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. It is the Lucretius Problem, humans have difficulty imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience. The very nature of fire is changing. Fires burn hotter and faster. I did not get a sense from the attendees’ questions that they grasped how quickly their homes and everything in them can burn and leave nothing but ashes.
You can watch the presentation at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWCewh-_26g
I’ve found my favorite book for Black History Month, Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity by Michele Norris creator of the Race Card Project.
Our Hidden Conversations was just released January 16, 2024. I had the audiobook from the Los Angeles Public Library read by the author with a full cast. There are long waits for the audiobook at Contra Costa, San Francisco, Alameda County and the Northern California Digital Libraries. The Berkeley library has the hard copy/print and ebook. Oakland has print only.
The Race Card Project started with Norris (former co-host of NPR’s “All Things Considered”) leaving postcards in all sorts of places with the message “Race. Identity. Your Thoughts 6-Words. Please Send”. https://theracecardproject.com/
Norris says in the introduction the reader/listener can skip around. I chose to listen from the beginning to the end. Norris writes there is an honesty that comes from the six-word postcards. There was no request for people to sign their names, though many did. The cards expanded into stories of families, connections, pain, worries, grace, love and how race invades and reaches through all of us whether we admit it or not.
Chapter 5 connects with the book I recommended in the last Activist’s Diary by Susan Nieman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. Norris talks at length about needing conversations about slavery and racism.
Norris described Arlington, Virginia as taking on a project much like the Stolperstein (stumbling stone) in Berlin. These are stepping stones in the sidewalk in front of the person’s final residence before being sent to the death camps commemorating the lives of Jewish People, Sinti, Roma, disabled, gay and other victims of the Nazis. The plan for Arlington is to commemorate the enslaved.
This, reminds me of how the Landmarks Preservation Commissioners voted against Steve Finacom’s motion for a plaque to commemorate the history of 1652 – 1658 University (Jefferson and University) where in 1923 the white neighbors objected to the West Gate Masonic Association from building the Masonic Lodge for African Americans. Even though the City Council didn’t change the zoning, the project stalled and the Lodge was never built at the corner of University and Jefferson. Soon a new mixed-use housing development will sit at this corner. The last occupant of the current building headed for demolition was Radio Shack.
On some days, I think we should recognize the impact of redlining and Executive Order #9066 the forced removal of Japanese Americans from their homes to guarded internment camps with permanent civic art projects.
Our Hidden Conversations is too new to be censured, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it lands on a banned book list in the future. We are living in a time when history is being aggressively censured and rewritten.
As I close out this Diary, late again from my Saturday February 24. 2024 target, the protest vote from Michigan is in with over with 100,000 as uncommitted. The Democratic leadership is banking on the protest voters coming home in November to support Biden against Trump who is known to be worse for Palestinian recognition, but will they? Will the MSNBC weekday and weeknight anchors and pundits falling all over themselves to praise Biden be enough?
Only two of the former three Muslim anchors remain with shows on Saturday and Sunday. Mehdi Hasan who gave the strongest coverage of the Israel Hamas war and toughest interviews is gone.
The Hilary Clinton team thought they could count on Democrats too in 2016, but in Michigan voters checked the down ballot boxes and left the president box blank. Conspiracies abounded over those empty boxes, but it was yet another protest by voters.
I’ve finished eight books on Israel and Palestine in the recent weeks (listed from last read to first, the bolded are on important to read lists), 1) Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians From Balfour to Trump by Khaled Elginoy, 2) Inter / Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine by Steven Salaita, 3) Letters to my Palestinian Neighbor by Yossi Klein Halevi, 4) The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi, 5) Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, The Bible by Mitri Raheb, 6) The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust: A Memoir by Naom Chayut, 7) Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe and 8) A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by Nathan Thrall.
I’m a third of the way through Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman and have seven more books waiting on hold at the library. Rise and Kill First is brutal and it will leave you wondering who should really be called the terrorists. You might be shocked, I know I was, at how many of the assassins and assassination plotters ended up in the formation of the Israeli political parties especially the Likud and various arms of the Israeli government as Israeli prime ministers, members of the Knesset, the Mossad, the IDF and as advisors.
Sunday, I saw the film Israelism at the Little Roxie in San Francisco. I highly recommend it especially for those of us not raised in a Jewish household and unfamiliar with the free Birthright Israel trips for 18 to 26 year old Jewish young adults and early education locking Israel and Jewish identity as inseparable. Simone Zimmerman one of the two featured Jewish Americans in the film called that education indoctrination.
I place the current horror in Gaza squarely in the lap of the United States and the failure of every president from Truman to the present including President Biden. It is Elginoy in Blind Spot who pulls it together and so clearly details how the U.S. alliance with Israel makes the U.S. far from an honest mediator to broker peace agreements between Israel and Palestine.
All the power rests with the United States and Israel. The U.S. negotiators have been Zionists at heart pushing the right to dignity, self-determination for Palestinians off the table. The Palestinians have no right of return while Jewish persons from around the world are invited to settle in Israel with settlers taking land away from Palestinians and destroying Palestinian homes.
The history is ugly and sickening like a festering boil that explodes in cycles of violence and retaliation and revenge.
The vengeance of Israel against the Palestinians under Netanyahu unfolding before our eyes over the last five months is like no other war in history in the number of deaths of children, women, aid workers, journalists, the destruction of hospitals, schools, universities, cultural sites, housing and suffering from starvation and no safe place anywhere.
Mehdi Hasan wrote in the Guardian on February 21, 2024 “Biden can end the bombing of Gaza right now. Here’s how” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/21/biden-stop-gaza-bombing-genocide-israel
Reading the early February 29 reports of the IDF opening fire on Palestinians gathering for a food convoy and murdering over 100 with more than 700 injured is no surprise. This kind of violence is described over and over in my reading along with the mindset behind it. We need to ask again who are the terrorists.
As long as Biden who has self-identified as a Zionist can’t bring himself beyond comments like describing the war on Gaza as “over the top” or reducing this latest massacre to interfering with negotiations while the U.S. continues to veto calls for a ceasefire at the U.N. and funds the Israeli war machine nothing will change.
The policy turnaround with action to match in the Biden administration will only come with increasing public pressure. We need it to save the lives of Palestinians and Israelis. And, we need to do it to save our own democracy.
James Carville warns if there is no de-escalation we could be looking at a repeat of 1968 with a splintered party. Nixon won that election.
All of this is the exact reason why Berkeley City Council with Mayor Arreguin and councilmembers Wengraf and Hahn need to experience a turnaround in their opposition to a ceasefire resolution. We as a City and we as individuals must come together for a permanent ceasefire and humanitarian aid to Palestinians.
As for City meetings It was a quiet week. With Monday as the Presidents’ Day Holiday and City Council off for the week except for the closed session on Tuesday, I made it to only one uneventful City meeting, the Zoning Adjustment Board. All four projects were approved on consent: 1287 Gilman establish a wine bar, 1205 Kains lift a dwelling 18 inches and move it 3 feet 3 inches, 1340 Haskell demolish a single-family home and build 2 new single-family homes on the lot, and 2901-2903 Deakin lift a duplex 10 feet 6 inches and add a new 1st floor and 8th bedroom.
As for the closed Council session, could someone tell me if it is normal for a city to be in continuous labor negotiations?
I did watch the Berkeley Mayoral Forum, the Wellstone panel on calling for a Ceasefire in Gaza, part of the Wellstone Candidate Forum for City Council District 7, the presentation by Rex Frazier on the California insurance industry to Livable California and served as the driver for my favorite candidate Margot Smith for the Meet and Greet the Candidates at the Allen Temple Baptist Church.
Margot Smith is a long shot for State Assembly and I encourage you to vote for her in the March 5th primary. I think she would do a great job, most importantly, she would break the grip of big money on the Assembly seat. While Margot has attended multiple candidate events (ten and counting), Buffy Wicks (current State Assembly person) showed up once. Forums to debate/speak to the issues have been canceled, because Wicks doesn’t show up.
Even if Wicks doesn’t think she has real competition to be reelected, these forums are opportunities and not taking them tells me where Wicks places the interests of her constituents.
You can watch the Mayoral Forum on the Berkeley Community Media YouTube Channel and form your own opinion. https://www.youtube.com/user/BerkeleyCommMedia
There is no primary for mayor and it seems most unusual for the Chamber of Commerce to sponsor a mayor forum when we need to be focusing on the primary. I don’t have a handle on who pushed for this forum, but it doesn’t settle right. A lot can change between now and November when we cast our rank choice votes for mayor and council districts 2,3,5 and 6.
Candidates can submit paperwork to run until August 9, 2024. Since Arreguin is running for State Senate he won’t be running for mayor unless he misses the top two in the primary which is very unlikely. When the incumbent does not run, the filing period extends by one day to August 10, 2024. Here is the full schedule: https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/November%20Calendar%202024%20PUBLIC.pdf
I listened to part of the recording of the Wellstone District 7 Candidate Forum with James Chang and Cecilia Lunaparra and got as far as their stands on Israel and Palestine. I planned to go back to it, but it disappeared from my screen and the forum is not posted on the Wellstone website. Only residents of District 7 can vote in the special April 16 special election. I live in District 4. Our election will be May 28. Wellstone endorsed Lunaparra who supports a ceasefire. Chang does not.
The entire two-hour Livable California meeting was devoted to the presentation by Rex Frazier on the California insurance industry. Frazier explained how the California FAIR Plan works. The Fair Plan is an insurance option for residents and businesses that cannot obtain insurance through a regular insurance company. Listening to presentation and the questions at the end, I believe we can expect more homeowner insurance companies to leave California.
There is another problem. John Vailant refers to it over and over in his book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. It is the Lucretius Problem, humans have difficulty imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience. The very nature of fire is changing. Fires burn hotter and faster. I did not get a sense from the attendees’ questions that they grasped how quickly their homes and everything in them can burn and leave nothing but ashes.
You can watch the presentation at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWCewh-_26g
I’ve found my favorite book for Black History Month, Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity by Michele Norris creator of the Race Card Project.
Our Hidden Conversations was just released January 16, 2024. I had the audiobook from the Los Angeles Public Library read by the author with a full cast. There are long waits for the audiobook at Contra Costa, San Francisco, Alameda County and the Northern California Digital Libraries. The Berkeley library has the hard copy/print and ebook. Oakland has print only.
The Race Card Project started with Norris (former co-host of NPR’s “All Things Considered”) leaving postcards in all sorts of places with the message “Race. Identity. Your Thoughts 6-Words. Please Send”. https://theracecardproject.com/
Norris says in the introduction the reader/listener can skip around. I chose to listen from the beginning to the end. Norris writes there is an honesty that comes from the six-word postcards. There was no request for people to sign their names, though many did. The cards expanded into stories of families, connections, pain, worries, grace, love and how race invades and reaches through all of us whether we admit it or not.
Chapter 5 connects with the book I recommended in the last Activist’s Diary by Susan Nieman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. Norris talks at length about needing conversations about slavery and racism.
Norris described Arlington, Virginia as taking on a project much like the Stolperstein (stumbling stone) in Berlin. These are stepping stones in the sidewalk in front of the person’s final residence before being sent to the death camps commemorating the lives of Jewish People, Sinti, Roma, disabled, gay and other victims of the Nazis. The plan for Arlington is to commemorate the enslaved.
This, reminds me of how the Landmarks Preservation Commissioners voted against Steve Finacom’s motion for a plaque to commemorate the history of 1652 – 1658 University (Jefferson and University) where in 1923 the white neighbors objected to the West Gate Masonic Association from building the Masonic Lodge for African Americans. Even though the City Council didn’t change the zoning, the project stalled and the Lodge was never built at the corner of University and Jefferson. Soon a new mixed-use housing development will sit at this corner. The last occupant of the current building headed for demolition was Radio Shack.
On some days, I think we should recognize the impact of redlining and Executive Order #9066 the forced removal of Japanese Americans from their homes to guarded internment camps with permanent civic art projects.
Our Hidden Conversations is too new to be censured, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it lands on a banned book list in the future. We are living in a time when history is being aggressively censured and rewritten.
February 18, 2024
There is a lot to pick up from my last Activist’s Diary and several very interesting meetings.
The League of Women Voters Berkeley Albany Emeryville forums of District 7 Senate candidates, District 5 Alameda County Supervisor candidates and House of Representatives are posted at: https://www.lwvbae.org/league-news/candidate-forums-for-the-2024-primary-2/
I still have not made any decisions on the Alameda County Supervisor’s race. The Berkeley Neighborhoods Council Forum from the 15th isn’t posted yet. Watch for it at: https://berkeleyneighborhoodscouncil.com/
I received several communications from Councilmember Ben Bartlett and his office in fallow-up that I didn’t recall his association with the SCU (Special Care Unit).
Here are the results. Bartlett submitted the Safety for All: The George Floyd Community Safety Act on June 16, 2020. It was submitted as an urgency item and it is not listed with the agenda. The meeting minutes show the first part of the Act passed as a budget referral to reallocate Berkeley Police Department funds spent on non-criminal activity and reinvest in a Specialized Care Unit pilot along with $150,000 to hire a consultant to analyze police calls and responses that could be responded to by non-police services.
The motion for the second part of the Act passed as, “to Direct the City Manager to reduce the footprint of the police department and limit the police’s response to violent and criminal service calls” was scheduled for the July 14, 2020 council meeting.
On July 14, 2020 the George Floyd Community Safety Act by Ben Bartlett was one of the five submissions from councilmembers with various proposals on policing and community engagement, which Mayor Arreguin wrapped into one measure. This became the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force and the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR) was hired as the consulting organization. The NICJR and Task Force started shortly after the July 2020 council vote. Both the NICJR and Task Force reports were submitted in the spring of 2022 with the Task Force taking issue and rejecting many of the conclusions in the NICJR report. The Task Force was disbanded after the submission of the report. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/RPSTF%20Final%20Report.pdf
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd murder and the demonstrations that followed, the focus for Reimagining Public Safety was fair and impartial policing, early intervention to identify problem officers with respect to racial disparities, to remove sworn police officers from noncriminal tasks and to provide those services not requiring a sworn officer by appropriately skilled persons like the mental health crisis (SCU team) and through social service programs for crime prevention.
The July 14, 2020 meeting was the evening when the Council committed to the intent to reduce the Police Department budget by 50%. That never happened.
As pointed out by Bartlett in his July 14 supplements to the George Floyd Act proposal sending a response team (the SCU) instead of police officers to a person in a mental health crisis is not a new idea. Such a program CAHOOTS has been in operation in Eugene Oregon for over 30 years.
The SCU did open in the fall of 2023 with a contract with Bonita House. The SCU currently provides service from 6 am to 4 pm. The plan is to expand services to 24 hours. The three-person health team consisting of a clinician, peer specialist and EMT arrives without police to the location of the person in crisis in a van. To access help for a mental health crisis without police call (510) 948-0075. https://berkeleyca.gov/safety-health/mental-health/crisis-services
Other than the SCU, the Reimagining Public Safety appeared to be headed off as another shelved effort.
Finally, on January 23, 2024, the City Manager, Deputy Managers, Department Directors and staff presented the progress on Reimagining Public Safety. I listened to the council meeting twice (live and the recording). It came across as a well-orchestrated scripted word salad with a 61-page presentation.
I can’t say that at the end of it including all the documents that I have a grasp of what has been accomplished other than quite a number of people have been hired into what appear to be program planning roles and program development is continuing. I continue to wonder how many hours were spent on creating the 61-page power point presentation document, writing the script, dividing up who would talk through the sections to give the council and the public a report of generalities.
It left me asking does everything need to turn into a presentation production. These productions make me feel like the effort is in the show for the council not in the work on the ground.
The responses were more informative than the presentation. George Lipman reported no progress has been made in disparate policing of persons of color and the same situation exists (no progress) in early police officer intervention efforts with problem officers.
Edward Opton, who was a member of the Reimagining Task Force and serves on the Mental Health Commission, pointed out transition to a different model of service is complicated and Governor Newsom’s initiative (if it passes) on the March 5 Ballot to emphasize institutionalization of schizophrenics is going to be a big change and it won’t go smoothly. Opton stated the Mental Health Commission could provide advice and analysis, but has not been asked to do so.
The suggestion of involving commissions instead of the endless hiring of consultants is ongoing.
Alex N. Gecan in Berkeleyside brought attention to the February 13, 2024 report from the Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice titled “California Law Enforcement Agencies Are Spending More But Solving Fewer Crimes” and that Berkeley spending per capita on law enforcement is greater than the average and Berkeley Police Department solves fewer crimes than the state average.
Going directly to the report the header states “[D]espite record spending on law enforcement, crime-solving is at record lows” The link to the interactive section of the report where cities and counties can be entered for comparisons is at: https://www.cjcj.org/reports-publications/report/charts
The report gives the kind of data that we don’t hear in the annual crime report from the Police Chief.
The evening when Councilmember Harrison resigned was January 30 (before the release) during the multi-million-dollar expenditure proposal on fixed surveillance cameras introduced by Councilmember Humbert and approved by Humbert, Bartlett, Kesarwani, Taplin and Arreguin. Hahn abstained, Harrison left, Wengraf was absent and District 7 council seat was vacant.
Harrison had a long list of better ways to spend millions of dollars to reduce crime and enhance safety which were essentially rejected in favor of fixed cameras.
In Harrison’s resignation, she described Berkeley as broken. I certainly agree.
Hahn is focused on the redesigning the legislative process, the steps to go through to submit major legislation. Many of the referrals that councilmembers submit could and should be more complete, but should hours upon hours be spent on designing a process especially when there will be at least four new councilmembers by December, plus a new mayor. Also, what role does the mayor play in mentoring new councilmembers? In a novel concept, couldn’t some of these problems in councilmember submissions be resolved through mentoring new councilmembers. Should that be an expectation of who we select as mayor in November.
At the February 13, 2024 City Council meeting Bartlett submitted an urgency item for continuing District constituent services in the event of a resignation or death or expulsion of a councilmember. The measure would provide for continuity of services until a new councilmember is elected by continuing to employ the office staff of district without a councilmember to respond to Berkeley residents. And, that the staff would report to the mayor in the interim.
Berkeley does not have a procedure for expulsion so that was dropped.
Arreguin complained that having those staff report to him would be too much added work for him and his office. There was discussion of passing this off to the City Manager something that would change the separation between staff working for councilmembers and reporting relationships to the City Manager.
I doubt my comment had any impact on the final vote which assigned the reporting relationship to be to the mayor. I basically said if you want the big job then you do the work.
In the afternoon of February 13 at the Agenda Committee in the discussion of expanding representatives of the poor, Hahn asked the question if the City attorney had reviewed the dissolution /merging of the Human Welfare and Community Action Committee and the Peace and Justice Commission into the new Community Action Commission satisfied the governing requirements for receiving Community Service Block Grants. The answer was no.
The Block Grants are funds from the Federal Government administered by the states. There are rules/ government codes/regulations to follow.
The City of Berkeley is at risk of losing Community Service Block Grants through the failure of city councilmembers and council as a whole to fill positions in the existing commission and for the apparent failure of meeting reporting on the status of the commission and grant review.
The dissolution / merger was the last agenda of the February 13th evening before council. Arreguin stated he was ready to move forward despite the afternoon discussion.
Fortunately, the discussion on whether Arreguin as mayor would have to pick up City of Berkeley work ate up considerable time, so the vote on the dissolution / merger of the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission and the Peace and Justice Commission was pushed off to be rescheduled another day.
There is some rumbling that there are persons who would be content with losing Block Grants. After all, receiving Block Grants comes with following regulations and serving the needy, the people that some would like to disappear.
I’m beginning to think the real estate, developer and building industries won’t be satisfied until every inch of land is turned into a building project. The Planning Department and Planning Commission seem to be all in.
On February 7, the Planning Commission conducted a hearing to encourage “middle housing” in all residential areas of Berkeley from current single-family housing to mixed use residential. Middle housing are duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and small (10 units or less) multi-unit buildings. In the 7 to 2 vote, open space is decreased, lot coverage is increased to 60%, the maximum residential density standard for all zones is removed and to permit construction of all housing types that increase density with a Zoning Certificate (issued by Zoning staff through the online service center).
The density increases include all the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones even Panoramic Hill with only one way in and out and places with roads so narrow two cars can’t pass.
This is crazy stuff, but the City, boards and commissions have been taken over by the YIMBYs who seem to believe if enough housing is built it will trickle down to them and save the planet. The investors are on the side filing their pockets. There is nothing sustainable about the demolition of existing buildings and building these new structures. Forests are cut down, resources are extracted, habitat is destroyed. What goes into these buildings comes from somewhere. Somehow, we keep forgetting this planet is finite.
There is a Berkeley Mayoral Candidate forum with Sophie Hahn, Adena Ishii and Kate Harrison at the David Brower Center on February 22 from 5 to 6:30 pm moderated by Beth Roessner, Berkeley Chamber of Commerce CEO. I don’t have to worry about going. It is already sold out, but you can watch it on Berkeley Community Media’s YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7JZDJguFhk
My question on a mayoral forum remains. WHY? Can’t we get through the primary first. Applications to run for mayor don’t close until August. I’d really like more forums on the candidates and issues for the primary.
Item 13 on the February 27, 2024 Council Agenda with Arreguin and Hahn as the authors and Wengraf as the co-sponsor is to allocate $300,000 to “Resources to Plan for Future Health Care Access for Berkeley Residents” (Alta Bates closure).
I attended one of the early meetings (2018) on the closure of Alta Bates. My comments were not welcome and these won’t be either. I continue to see the closure of Alta Bates and any replacement as regional not Berkeley based issue. The location of a new hospital should involve a broad look at population, service, existing medical centers, even traffic corridors.
There were hard lessons learned with the pandemic. The future should look very different from the past.
We should all be grateful that medicine has progressed. Cataract surgery is an outpatient procedure not ten days in a dark room with your head braced in sandbags so you don’t move. That truly was the procedure decades ago. Gallbladder surgery means showing up in the morning and being on your way home by early afternoon, not seven to ten days in a hospital room.
It is Black History Month. On Saturday, February 17, masked men marched carrying Nazi flags in downtown Nashville Tennessee.
It may seem strange to end an Activist’s Diary in Black History Month with a book by a Jewish American who moved to Israel and then to Berlin, but the book is fitting for where we find ourselves in a divided nation with the banning of books about slavery, racism, LBGTQ+ and whatever “red” states don’t want children and young people to read with Texas and Florida leading in the volume of books banned. But, there are some blue states too with laws of concern moving forward. https://www.everylibrary.org/billtracking
The book is Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. I started with an ebook from the library and then followed with an action that I rarely take, I bought the book. Pegasus doesn’t stock it, but took my request and the special order is in my hands.
Neiman shifts back and forth between Germany’s long and difficult path from the Holocaust to the present and the failure of the United States to come to grips with the horrors of crimes committed here, slavery, Jim Crow, and the Native American genocide.
Neiman writes, “[N}azi jurists studied American race laws extensively, particularly concerning citizenship rights, immigration and miscegenation, before drafting the notorious Nuremberg Laws. Chillingly, those jurists found American racial policies too harsh to apply in Germany, and replaced the infamous “one drop of blood” by which American law determined race with more lenient criteria, allowing Germans possessing but one Jewish grandparent to count…”
The Nazi’s also studied the Native American genocide in the westward expansion using it to create the Nazi template for eastward expansion called Lebensraum (translation room to live).
As I read, I thought a lot about Palestine and how the current annihilation of Palestinians fits into the Native American genocide.
In another chapter Neiman addresses the Confederate monuments that still stand and asks if we could imagine Germany having monuments to the Nazis. Then she challenges us with the question how is it that there are still monuments glorifying the confederacy continuing to stand.
On Saturdays I like to catch Ali Velshi’s Banned Book Club. It is from that show that I read South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry, Black Boy by Richard Wright, Kindred by Octavia E. Butler and learned Visit Philadelphia is celebrating Black History Month with distributing banned books by Black authors in Little Free(dom) Libraries. Reading is resistance. https://www.visitphilly.com/articles/philadelphia/little-freedom-library/
The film Origin written and directed by Ava DuVernay based on Isabel Wilkerson’s journalistic life as she explores and writes the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is showing at the Rialto in El Cerrito and AMC in Emeryville. It is wonderfully done. Be sure to stay after the credits to listen to DuVernay’s answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about the film. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/origin-movie-review-2023
There is a lot to pick up from my last Activist’s Diary and several very interesting meetings.
The League of Women Voters Berkeley Albany Emeryville forums of District 7 Senate candidates, District 5 Alameda County Supervisor candidates and House of Representatives are posted at: https://www.lwvbae.org/league-news/candidate-forums-for-the-2024-primary-2/
I still have not made any decisions on the Alameda County Supervisor’s race. The Berkeley Neighborhoods Council Forum from the 15th isn’t posted yet. Watch for it at: https://berkeleyneighborhoodscouncil.com/
I received several communications from Councilmember Ben Bartlett and his office in fallow-up that I didn’t recall his association with the SCU (Special Care Unit).
Here are the results. Bartlett submitted the Safety for All: The George Floyd Community Safety Act on June 16, 2020. It was submitted as an urgency item and it is not listed with the agenda. The meeting minutes show the first part of the Act passed as a budget referral to reallocate Berkeley Police Department funds spent on non-criminal activity and reinvest in a Specialized Care Unit pilot along with $150,000 to hire a consultant to analyze police calls and responses that could be responded to by non-police services.
The motion for the second part of the Act passed as, “to Direct the City Manager to reduce the footprint of the police department and limit the police’s response to violent and criminal service calls” was scheduled for the July 14, 2020 council meeting.
On July 14, 2020 the George Floyd Community Safety Act by Ben Bartlett was one of the five submissions from councilmembers with various proposals on policing and community engagement, which Mayor Arreguin wrapped into one measure. This became the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force and the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR) was hired as the consulting organization. The NICJR and Task Force started shortly after the July 2020 council vote. Both the NICJR and Task Force reports were submitted in the spring of 2022 with the Task Force taking issue and rejecting many of the conclusions in the NICJR report. The Task Force was disbanded after the submission of the report. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/RPSTF%20Final%20Report.pdf
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd murder and the demonstrations that followed, the focus for Reimagining Public Safety was fair and impartial policing, early intervention to identify problem officers with respect to racial disparities, to remove sworn police officers from noncriminal tasks and to provide those services not requiring a sworn officer by appropriately skilled persons like the mental health crisis (SCU team) and through social service programs for crime prevention.
The July 14, 2020 meeting was the evening when the Council committed to the intent to reduce the Police Department budget by 50%. That never happened.
As pointed out by Bartlett in his July 14 supplements to the George Floyd Act proposal sending a response team (the SCU) instead of police officers to a person in a mental health crisis is not a new idea. Such a program CAHOOTS has been in operation in Eugene Oregon for over 30 years.
The SCU did open in the fall of 2023 with a contract with Bonita House. The SCU currently provides service from 6 am to 4 pm. The plan is to expand services to 24 hours. The three-person health team consisting of a clinician, peer specialist and EMT arrives without police to the location of the person in crisis in a van. To access help for a mental health crisis without police call (510) 948-0075. https://berkeleyca.gov/safety-health/mental-health/crisis-services
Other than the SCU, the Reimagining Public Safety appeared to be headed off as another shelved effort.
Finally, on January 23, 2024, the City Manager, Deputy Managers, Department Directors and staff presented the progress on Reimagining Public Safety. I listened to the council meeting twice (live and the recording). It came across as a well-orchestrated scripted word salad with a 61-page presentation.
I can’t say that at the end of it including all the documents that I have a grasp of what has been accomplished other than quite a number of people have been hired into what appear to be program planning roles and program development is continuing. I continue to wonder how many hours were spent on creating the 61-page power point presentation document, writing the script, dividing up who would talk through the sections to give the council and the public a report of generalities.
It left me asking does everything need to turn into a presentation production. These productions make me feel like the effort is in the show for the council not in the work on the ground.
The responses were more informative than the presentation. George Lipman reported no progress has been made in disparate policing of persons of color and the same situation exists (no progress) in early police officer intervention efforts with problem officers.
Edward Opton, who was a member of the Reimagining Task Force and serves on the Mental Health Commission, pointed out transition to a different model of service is complicated and Governor Newsom’s initiative (if it passes) on the March 5 Ballot to emphasize institutionalization of schizophrenics is going to be a big change and it won’t go smoothly. Opton stated the Mental Health Commission could provide advice and analysis, but has not been asked to do so.
The suggestion of involving commissions instead of the endless hiring of consultants is ongoing.
Alex N. Gecan in Berkeleyside brought attention to the February 13, 2024 report from the Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice titled “California Law Enforcement Agencies Are Spending More But Solving Fewer Crimes” and that Berkeley spending per capita on law enforcement is greater than the average and Berkeley Police Department solves fewer crimes than the state average.
Going directly to the report the header states “[D]espite record spending on law enforcement, crime-solving is at record lows” The link to the interactive section of the report where cities and counties can be entered for comparisons is at: https://www.cjcj.org/reports-publications/report/charts
The report gives the kind of data that we don’t hear in the annual crime report from the Police Chief.
The evening when Councilmember Harrison resigned was January 30 (before the release) during the multi-million-dollar expenditure proposal on fixed surveillance cameras introduced by Councilmember Humbert and approved by Humbert, Bartlett, Kesarwani, Taplin and Arreguin. Hahn abstained, Harrison left, Wengraf was absent and District 7 council seat was vacant.
Harrison had a long list of better ways to spend millions of dollars to reduce crime and enhance safety which were essentially rejected in favor of fixed cameras.
In Harrison’s resignation, she described Berkeley as broken. I certainly agree.
Hahn is focused on the redesigning the legislative process, the steps to go through to submit major legislation. Many of the referrals that councilmembers submit could and should be more complete, but should hours upon hours be spent on designing a process especially when there will be at least four new councilmembers by December, plus a new mayor. Also, what role does the mayor play in mentoring new councilmembers? In a novel concept, couldn’t some of these problems in councilmember submissions be resolved through mentoring new councilmembers. Should that be an expectation of who we select as mayor in November.
At the February 13, 2024 City Council meeting Bartlett submitted an urgency item for continuing District constituent services in the event of a resignation or death or expulsion of a councilmember. The measure would provide for continuity of services until a new councilmember is elected by continuing to employ the office staff of district without a councilmember to respond to Berkeley residents. And, that the staff would report to the mayor in the interim.
Berkeley does not have a procedure for expulsion so that was dropped.
Arreguin complained that having those staff report to him would be too much added work for him and his office. There was discussion of passing this off to the City Manager something that would change the separation between staff working for councilmembers and reporting relationships to the City Manager.
I doubt my comment had any impact on the final vote which assigned the reporting relationship to be to the mayor. I basically said if you want the big job then you do the work.
In the afternoon of February 13 at the Agenda Committee in the discussion of expanding representatives of the poor, Hahn asked the question if the City attorney had reviewed the dissolution /merging of the Human Welfare and Community Action Committee and the Peace and Justice Commission into the new Community Action Commission satisfied the governing requirements for receiving Community Service Block Grants. The answer was no.
The Block Grants are funds from the Federal Government administered by the states. There are rules/ government codes/regulations to follow.
The City of Berkeley is at risk of losing Community Service Block Grants through the failure of city councilmembers and council as a whole to fill positions in the existing commission and for the apparent failure of meeting reporting on the status of the commission and grant review.
The dissolution / merger was the last agenda of the February 13th evening before council. Arreguin stated he was ready to move forward despite the afternoon discussion.
Fortunately, the discussion on whether Arreguin as mayor would have to pick up City of Berkeley work ate up considerable time, so the vote on the dissolution / merger of the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission and the Peace and Justice Commission was pushed off to be rescheduled another day.
There is some rumbling that there are persons who would be content with losing Block Grants. After all, receiving Block Grants comes with following regulations and serving the needy, the people that some would like to disappear.
I’m beginning to think the real estate, developer and building industries won’t be satisfied until every inch of land is turned into a building project. The Planning Department and Planning Commission seem to be all in.
On February 7, the Planning Commission conducted a hearing to encourage “middle housing” in all residential areas of Berkeley from current single-family housing to mixed use residential. Middle housing are duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and small (10 units or less) multi-unit buildings. In the 7 to 2 vote, open space is decreased, lot coverage is increased to 60%, the maximum residential density standard for all zones is removed and to permit construction of all housing types that increase density with a Zoning Certificate (issued by Zoning staff through the online service center).
The density increases include all the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones even Panoramic Hill with only one way in and out and places with roads so narrow two cars can’t pass.
This is crazy stuff, but the City, boards and commissions have been taken over by the YIMBYs who seem to believe if enough housing is built it will trickle down to them and save the planet. The investors are on the side filing their pockets. There is nothing sustainable about the demolition of existing buildings and building these new structures. Forests are cut down, resources are extracted, habitat is destroyed. What goes into these buildings comes from somewhere. Somehow, we keep forgetting this planet is finite.
There is a Berkeley Mayoral Candidate forum with Sophie Hahn, Adena Ishii and Kate Harrison at the David Brower Center on February 22 from 5 to 6:30 pm moderated by Beth Roessner, Berkeley Chamber of Commerce CEO. I don’t have to worry about going. It is already sold out, but you can watch it on Berkeley Community Media’s YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7JZDJguFhk
My question on a mayoral forum remains. WHY? Can’t we get through the primary first. Applications to run for mayor don’t close until August. I’d really like more forums on the candidates and issues for the primary.
Item 13 on the February 27, 2024 Council Agenda with Arreguin and Hahn as the authors and Wengraf as the co-sponsor is to allocate $300,000 to “Resources to Plan for Future Health Care Access for Berkeley Residents” (Alta Bates closure).
I attended one of the early meetings (2018) on the closure of Alta Bates. My comments were not welcome and these won’t be either. I continue to see the closure of Alta Bates and any replacement as regional not Berkeley based issue. The location of a new hospital should involve a broad look at population, service, existing medical centers, even traffic corridors.
There were hard lessons learned with the pandemic. The future should look very different from the past.
We should all be grateful that medicine has progressed. Cataract surgery is an outpatient procedure not ten days in a dark room with your head braced in sandbags so you don’t move. That truly was the procedure decades ago. Gallbladder surgery means showing up in the morning and being on your way home by early afternoon, not seven to ten days in a hospital room.
It is Black History Month. On Saturday, February 17, masked men marched carrying Nazi flags in downtown Nashville Tennessee.
It may seem strange to end an Activist’s Diary in Black History Month with a book by a Jewish American who moved to Israel and then to Berlin, but the book is fitting for where we find ourselves in a divided nation with the banning of books about slavery, racism, LBGTQ+ and whatever “red” states don’t want children and young people to read with Texas and Florida leading in the volume of books banned. But, there are some blue states too with laws of concern moving forward. https://www.everylibrary.org/billtracking
The book is Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. I started with an ebook from the library and then followed with an action that I rarely take, I bought the book. Pegasus doesn’t stock it, but took my request and the special order is in my hands.
Neiman shifts back and forth between Germany’s long and difficult path from the Holocaust to the present and the failure of the United States to come to grips with the horrors of crimes committed here, slavery, Jim Crow, and the Native American genocide.
Neiman writes, “[N}azi jurists studied American race laws extensively, particularly concerning citizenship rights, immigration and miscegenation, before drafting the notorious Nuremberg Laws. Chillingly, those jurists found American racial policies too harsh to apply in Germany, and replaced the infamous “one drop of blood” by which American law determined race with more lenient criteria, allowing Germans possessing but one Jewish grandparent to count…”
The Nazi’s also studied the Native American genocide in the westward expansion using it to create the Nazi template for eastward expansion called Lebensraum (translation room to live).
As I read, I thought a lot about Palestine and how the current annihilation of Palestinians fits into the Native American genocide.
In another chapter Neiman addresses the Confederate monuments that still stand and asks if we could imagine Germany having monuments to the Nazis. Then she challenges us with the question how is it that there are still monuments glorifying the confederacy continuing to stand.
On Saturdays I like to catch Ali Velshi’s Banned Book Club. It is from that show that I read South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry, Black Boy by Richard Wright, Kindred by Octavia E. Butler and learned Visit Philadelphia is celebrating Black History Month with distributing banned books by Black authors in Little Free(dom) Libraries. Reading is resistance. https://www.visitphilly.com/articles/philadelphia/little-freedom-library/
The film Origin written and directed by Ava DuVernay based on Isabel Wilkerson’s journalistic life as she explores and writes the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is showing at the Rialto in El Cerrito and AMC in Emeryville. It is wonderfully done. Be sure to stay after the credits to listen to DuVernay’s answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about the film. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/origin-movie-review-2023
February 8, 2024
Buckle up
After multiple stops and starts, I hope to finally get this off my desk. It has taken nearly three weeks from my first day of COVID episode two (the first was Delta in 2021) to feel normal again.
I am still making up my mind on a few candidates, but I know who I am definitely not voting for.
If the Peace and Justice Commission had been on ZOOM Monday evening, I definitely would have attended, but I tuned into the League of Women Voters forum on District State Senate Candidates instead and then gave up on more meetings for the evening. In my biased view, the City of Berkeley is more interested in killing the commissions than it making it easier to attend.
At the Agenda and Rules meeting on January 29, 2024, I was actually shocked by the tone of the Director of Health, Housing and Community Services Lisa Warhuus’ comments on the merging of the Peace and Justice Commission and the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission.
The dissolution of the two commissions each of which has fifteen members and the creation of the new Berkeley Community Action Commission was on the agenda as a consent item for the February 13, 2024 city council meeting. Items coming from the city manager and department heads arrive with the header, a brief description and none of the documents, which means that none of commissioners attending the Agenda Committee to give public comment had any idea of how many commissioners would be on the new commission and the content of the new commission responsibilities.
Warhuus response: “I just want to share the it’s a lot of work [merging the Peace and Justice Commission and the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission]. And so, the department should not be left in a position of having to negotiate with different commissions. Ultimately, we’re going to bring things back to council direction and that is up to council to determine whether or not they want to go forward, but the staff can’t be left in a situation where they’re negotiating on behalf of council.”
That might sound fine to some readers, however, dismissing commissioners as an impediment with nothing meaningful to contribute instead of engaging with and hearing from commissioners in how a merged commission could work best exemplifies the attitude of city councilmembers, the mayor, the city manager and city department heads and staff. The Berkeley residents who volunteer their time in trying to make this a better city are dismissed as a pesky interference.
What burns me in attending city council meetings is that councilmembers will fall all over themselves to thank city staff for reports whether those reports are thorough or sloppy, work for which they are paid to do and council has thus far been unable to bring themselves to thank the Berkeley residents who answered the call to give [unpaid] their expertise and evenings and days month after month for the benefit of this city. The members of the Police Accountability Board and the representatives of the poor do receive a stipend.
I put councilmember Hahn at the top of that not thanking list. Hahn took over former councilmember Lori Droste’s proposal to merge and eliminate commissions.
I expect after this hits the press, there will be some comment about caring so much about the work of commissioners, but past action is what we might want to consider when those ballots are in our hands in March and November.
The dissolution of the two commissions and the creation of the new Berkeley Community Action Commission was moved to action. The documents published with the final agenda define a commission of nine members, three representatives of the poor, three members appointed by council majority and three members representing officials of business, industry, labor religious, welfare, education or major groups and interests in the community.
When Mayor Arreguin and Williams-Ridley first proposed the creation of City Council Committees, I saw that as the beginning of the end of commissions.
The council cancelled their committee meetings until May 1 at their January 22 special morning meeting, with the reason city staff have too much work with the special election to replace former councilmember Robinson who resigned from District 7.
Some see committee meeting cancellations as a loss.
I have characterized the council committees as a detour in the path to getting things done. The only committee that functioned as it should in my view was Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment and Sustainability (FITES) chaired by Kate Harrison. Now with Harrison’s resignation, I doubt we will get the kind of thoroughness that I saw under her leadership.
The Council Land Use Committee at one time held multiple meetings on TOPA (Tenants Opportunity to Purchase Act) which would have given tenants the first right to purchase the building when it goes up for sale. Arreguin did multiple rewrites of his TOPA proposal, but tenant voices lost under the weight of the investor class. TOPA disappeared from sight until Harrison tried to revive it. The Agenda Committee with Arreguin, Hahn and Wengraf quickly sent the proposal to revive TOPA off to a council committee to die.
There was one useful suggestion from Droste that should have been pursued and fell flat. That was to decrease the size of the council from nine to seven. Palo Alto did this in 2018. It is a shame that Berkeley did not follow that example. With Robinson and Harrison both resigning and Wengraf getting ready to retire, this would have been the perfect time to reduce overhead both in the present and in long term pension costs. Council might even be more functional. Alameda County, Concord, Contra Costa County, Fremont, Hayward, Palo Alto, Richmond, San Mateo County and Santa Clara County Boards and Councils all number five to seven. Oakland City Council has nine members, San Jose has eleven members and San Francisco has eleven supervisors plus the mayor. Those three entities are significantly larger than Berkeley in both square miles and population.
The Peace and Justice Commission agenda included an update on the Gaza Peace Roundtable subgroup and an update on the November 2023 roundtable regarding the Fukushima Waste Water. The Fukushima Waste Water roundtable was really excellent, so much better than I ever expected with an impressive panel of experts. In the Q&A that followed the presentations, one attendee stood up and asked, “Who do we believe?”
Isn’t that always the question, “Who do we believe?” Who do we trust?
The League of Women Voters Berkeley Albany Emeryville Candidate Forum for California State Senate District 7 forum included Jesse Arreguin, Jovanka Beckles, Dan Kalb, Kathryn Lybarger, and Sandre R. Swanson. Jeanne Solnordal was invited and a no show.
The recording is up. You can find it with the list of the other forums for the March 5 Primary at: https://www.lwvbae.org/league-news/candidate-forums-for-the-2024-primary-2/
I’ve been swinging back and forth between Kalb and Lybarger. I think either one of them would do a terrific job despite complaints with no specifics from friends in Oakland regarding Kalb. Office follow-up seems to be the problem rather than action on city issues in Oakland. Other friends in Oakland are strong supporters.
Kathryn Lybarger was totally impressive the afternoon she spent with East Bay Community for Action answering questions though it was really more like a conversation. We even covered disappointments in candidates that say one thing and then once in office put ambition above everything. There was nothing canned about her responses.
I particularly appreciated that Lybarger stated she did not believe in trickle down housing, which is if we just keep building market rate (overpriced) housing it will trickle down with lower costs. At another forum Dan Kalb raised his hand when asked if he was a YIMBY (Lybarger and Swanson did not). My questions on nature, ecosystems and habitat were best answered by Lybarger. Kalb with the bulk of his career dedicated to climate legislation relegated nature to parks. Beckles was so clueless to my questions that I interrupted her and informed her that none of the answers she was giving had anything to do with nature, ecosystems or habitat.
Climate, nature, habitat and ecosystems are what I care deeply about besides ending the war in the middle east. I have written previously about the biodiversity crisis. It hasn’t gone away.
I just finished John Vaillant’s book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World on the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire that started on May 1, 2016 and was not declared extinguished until August 2, 2017. There is so much packed into the 395 pages, I couldn’t put the book down. The speed at which the fire devoured houses was so fast that the fire fighters clocked the “beast” as vaporizing houses and everything in them in just five minutes per house. There is more in the book, the people, the changing nature of fire in a heating planet and the serious message of climate science.
Everyone needs to read and hear the climate message. The planet crossed the 1.5°C of temperature rise in 2023, another hottest year recorded. The jet stream is so off kilter it looks like a loopy string sliding off the top of the planet. This is bad news. It is what David Wallace-Wells warned of in his 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.
It is raining not snowing today in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Minneapolis finished off January with temperatures up to 53° and no snow on the ground. We are in deep trouble.
The LWV moderator did not ask where the candidates stood on a ceasefire resolution. Both Kalb and Lybarger support a ceasefire in the Israel Hamas War. Kalb voted with the Oakland Council to support their resolution (his amendments lost) and Lybarger spoke to leading the union through discussion that evolved into support for ceasefire.
The U.S. bombing in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq is turning the Israel Hamas war into a middle east war when what is needed is heavy diplomacy not heavy bombing. With every mention of Iran, I think about the 2019 film Coup 53 the British documentary on the 1953 CIA & M16 staged coup to overthrow the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh. The coup was, of course, over the control oil.
How different would this world be if the U.S. wasn’t constantly involved in coups?
I’m reading about Israel’s military involvement in Mexico and Central America in Inter / Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine by Steven Salita
Arreguin, Hahn and Wengraf published their opposition to a ceasefire resolution weeks ago and there is nothing to indicate they will change their minds though the public continues to try. City Council meetings continue to be disrupted with the clamor for a ceasefire resolution. The number of speakers calling for a ceasefire far outnumber the few asking the council not to take a stand which is reflective of the country.
I plan to attend the film Israelism at the Roxie. I watched the trailer. “[I]sraelism uniquely explores how Jewish attitudes towards Israel are changing dramatically, with massive consequences for the region and for Judaism itself.” https://roxie.com/film/israelism/
On Sunday, January 28, 2024 just two days after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to take action to prevent acts of genocide, (Genocide is defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”)
the Nachala settlement activist group held a conference in Jerusalem attended by thousands with the message to take advantage of the war to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza and build Jewish settlements in Gaza. Eleven Israeli government ministers and fifteen coalition lawmakers attended including the Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. https://www.timesofisrael.com/12-ministers-call-to-resettle-gaza-encourage-gazans-to-leave-at-jubilant-conference/
Chris Hayes said on the Thursday evening before the U.S. started dropping bombs, “this can’t go on, it is politically wrong, strategically wrong, and morally wrong.” I agree. Besides the heartbreaking suffering of the Palestinians, massive bombing, maimed children and civilian deaths, the war is adding to the destruction of the planet.
After listening to the February 7, 2024 interview of Jeremy Scahill on Democracy Now (a news source I trust) I read Scahill’s article “Netanyahu’s War on Truth Israel’s Ruthless Propaganda Campaign to Dehumanize Palestinians”. You can catch both at: https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/7/israel_propaganda_gaza
Scahill’s article is long and lays question to the portrayal of Palestinians as savages. https://theintercept.com/2024/02/07/gaza-israel-netanyahu-propaganda-lies-palestinians/
There is so much wrapped up in this small plot of land, religious identity and beliefs, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Jewish Zionism, Christian Zionism, the rapture, the expulsion of the indigenous Palestinians who have occupied this land for centuries and those who remained.
Of the five books I’ve finished so far on Israel and Palestine The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi is the most thorough in covering the failures in negotiations and the U.S. greenlighting wars.
Councilmember Kate Harrison resigned over what she called a broken system.
While the mayor and council as a whole were supportive of Robinson, Councilmember Taplin was quick to accuse Harrison of racist microaggression. Councilmember Hahn turned Harrison’s resignation into a promotional piece for her run for mayor.
The council agenda item under discussion when Harrison read her resignation was the $7,000,000 fixed surveillance cameras. Harrison went through a lengthy list of actions that could be taken with $7,000,000 that would reduce crime and the threat of crime.
Fixed cameras that aren’t monitored and are checked only after an event as is the plan by Berkeley Police for the $7 million investment fall more into the placebo category. That didn’t stop Councilmember Humbert as the author and Ben Bartlett as the co-sponsor. Nor did it stop Humbert, Bartlett, Kesarwani, Taplin and Arreguin for voting for the measure. Hahn abstained, Wengraf was absent and Harrison had left.
In the string of candidates running for Alameda County Supervisor, I was quite stunned to hear Ben Bartlett claim in his list of accomplishments as being instrumental in establishing the Special Care Unit (SCU). At the Wellstone forum, I was even more surprised by the clapping response. That left me wondering what meetings those supporters attended and I missed. One person has been most involved in pushing for the SCU through commissions, presentations and tracking progress. At my request, they checked all their sources and were unable to come up with Bartlett’s involvement.
When I think of Bartlett’s proposals to council the one I can’t forget was to use blockchain for public financing. Cryptocurrency uses blockchain technology. Berkeley did not bite on the blockchain proposal.
Most of us have probably heard by now of Sam Bankman-Fried the collapse of the cryptocurrency he founded FTX and the guilty verdict.
The last meeting I attended before COVID was the Ohlone Greenway Safety Improvements Project presentation at the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission on January 18.
When former mayor Shirley Dean called on behalf of the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council (BNC), to request a presentation on the Ohlone Greenway Safety Improvements Project, she was told by the Project Manager he wasn’t giving any more presentations to anyone. Then he followed up by submitting a request to have Dean’s phone blocked. On January 25, Dean received a call from someone identifying himself as Reynaldo who told her that her phone was being blocked which resulted in being unable to contact any city services, councilmembers, the mayor and the city manager.
By Monday, January 29 the city manager was involved and lifted the block.
I’m not sure what to make of a city employee blocking the phone number of a person representing a Berkeley organization asking for a presentation on a city project that impacts city residents. I wonder if the city manager would have bothered to get involved or for that matter councilmembers Hahn and Harrison who Dean also contacted if it had been anyone other than the former mayor Shirley Dean who was shut off from being able to contact the city.
As for the project, the main concerns are electric bikes on shared paths with pedestrians, how the neighborhood will be impacted and how many trees will be removed.
Buckle up
After multiple stops and starts, I hope to finally get this off my desk. It has taken nearly three weeks from my first day of COVID episode two (the first was Delta in 2021) to feel normal again.
I am still making up my mind on a few candidates, but I know who I am definitely not voting for.
If the Peace and Justice Commission had been on ZOOM Monday evening, I definitely would have attended, but I tuned into the League of Women Voters forum on District State Senate Candidates instead and then gave up on more meetings for the evening. In my biased view, the City of Berkeley is more interested in killing the commissions than it making it easier to attend.
At the Agenda and Rules meeting on January 29, 2024, I was actually shocked by the tone of the Director of Health, Housing and Community Services Lisa Warhuus’ comments on the merging of the Peace and Justice Commission and the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission.
The dissolution of the two commissions each of which has fifteen members and the creation of the new Berkeley Community Action Commission was on the agenda as a consent item for the February 13, 2024 city council meeting. Items coming from the city manager and department heads arrive with the header, a brief description and none of the documents, which means that none of commissioners attending the Agenda Committee to give public comment had any idea of how many commissioners would be on the new commission and the content of the new commission responsibilities.
Warhuus response: “I just want to share the it’s a lot of work [merging the Peace and Justice Commission and the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission]. And so, the department should not be left in a position of having to negotiate with different commissions. Ultimately, we’re going to bring things back to council direction and that is up to council to determine whether or not they want to go forward, but the staff can’t be left in a situation where they’re negotiating on behalf of council.”
That might sound fine to some readers, however, dismissing commissioners as an impediment with nothing meaningful to contribute instead of engaging with and hearing from commissioners in how a merged commission could work best exemplifies the attitude of city councilmembers, the mayor, the city manager and city department heads and staff. The Berkeley residents who volunteer their time in trying to make this a better city are dismissed as a pesky interference.
What burns me in attending city council meetings is that councilmembers will fall all over themselves to thank city staff for reports whether those reports are thorough or sloppy, work for which they are paid to do and council has thus far been unable to bring themselves to thank the Berkeley residents who answered the call to give [unpaid] their expertise and evenings and days month after month for the benefit of this city. The members of the Police Accountability Board and the representatives of the poor do receive a stipend.
I put councilmember Hahn at the top of that not thanking list. Hahn took over former councilmember Lori Droste’s proposal to merge and eliminate commissions.
I expect after this hits the press, there will be some comment about caring so much about the work of commissioners, but past action is what we might want to consider when those ballots are in our hands in March and November.
The dissolution of the two commissions and the creation of the new Berkeley Community Action Commission was moved to action. The documents published with the final agenda define a commission of nine members, three representatives of the poor, three members appointed by council majority and three members representing officials of business, industry, labor religious, welfare, education or major groups and interests in the community.
When Mayor Arreguin and Williams-Ridley first proposed the creation of City Council Committees, I saw that as the beginning of the end of commissions.
The council cancelled their committee meetings until May 1 at their January 22 special morning meeting, with the reason city staff have too much work with the special election to replace former councilmember Robinson who resigned from District 7.
Some see committee meeting cancellations as a loss.
I have characterized the council committees as a detour in the path to getting things done. The only committee that functioned as it should in my view was Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment and Sustainability (FITES) chaired by Kate Harrison. Now with Harrison’s resignation, I doubt we will get the kind of thoroughness that I saw under her leadership.
The Council Land Use Committee at one time held multiple meetings on TOPA (Tenants Opportunity to Purchase Act) which would have given tenants the first right to purchase the building when it goes up for sale. Arreguin did multiple rewrites of his TOPA proposal, but tenant voices lost under the weight of the investor class. TOPA disappeared from sight until Harrison tried to revive it. The Agenda Committee with Arreguin, Hahn and Wengraf quickly sent the proposal to revive TOPA off to a council committee to die.
There was one useful suggestion from Droste that should have been pursued and fell flat. That was to decrease the size of the council from nine to seven. Palo Alto did this in 2018. It is a shame that Berkeley did not follow that example. With Robinson and Harrison both resigning and Wengraf getting ready to retire, this would have been the perfect time to reduce overhead both in the present and in long term pension costs. Council might even be more functional. Alameda County, Concord, Contra Costa County, Fremont, Hayward, Palo Alto, Richmond, San Mateo County and Santa Clara County Boards and Councils all number five to seven. Oakland City Council has nine members, San Jose has eleven members and San Francisco has eleven supervisors plus the mayor. Those three entities are significantly larger than Berkeley in both square miles and population.
The Peace and Justice Commission agenda included an update on the Gaza Peace Roundtable subgroup and an update on the November 2023 roundtable regarding the Fukushima Waste Water. The Fukushima Waste Water roundtable was really excellent, so much better than I ever expected with an impressive panel of experts. In the Q&A that followed the presentations, one attendee stood up and asked, “Who do we believe?”
Isn’t that always the question, “Who do we believe?” Who do we trust?
The League of Women Voters Berkeley Albany Emeryville Candidate Forum for California State Senate District 7 forum included Jesse Arreguin, Jovanka Beckles, Dan Kalb, Kathryn Lybarger, and Sandre R. Swanson. Jeanne Solnordal was invited and a no show.
The recording is up. You can find it with the list of the other forums for the March 5 Primary at: https://www.lwvbae.org/league-news/candidate-forums-for-the-2024-primary-2/
I’ve been swinging back and forth between Kalb and Lybarger. I think either one of them would do a terrific job despite complaints with no specifics from friends in Oakland regarding Kalb. Office follow-up seems to be the problem rather than action on city issues in Oakland. Other friends in Oakland are strong supporters.
Kathryn Lybarger was totally impressive the afternoon she spent with East Bay Community for Action answering questions though it was really more like a conversation. We even covered disappointments in candidates that say one thing and then once in office put ambition above everything. There was nothing canned about her responses.
I particularly appreciated that Lybarger stated she did not believe in trickle down housing, which is if we just keep building market rate (overpriced) housing it will trickle down with lower costs. At another forum Dan Kalb raised his hand when asked if he was a YIMBY (Lybarger and Swanson did not). My questions on nature, ecosystems and habitat were best answered by Lybarger. Kalb with the bulk of his career dedicated to climate legislation relegated nature to parks. Beckles was so clueless to my questions that I interrupted her and informed her that none of the answers she was giving had anything to do with nature, ecosystems or habitat.
Climate, nature, habitat and ecosystems are what I care deeply about besides ending the war in the middle east. I have written previously about the biodiversity crisis. It hasn’t gone away.
I just finished John Vaillant’s book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World on the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire that started on May 1, 2016 and was not declared extinguished until August 2, 2017. There is so much packed into the 395 pages, I couldn’t put the book down. The speed at which the fire devoured houses was so fast that the fire fighters clocked the “beast” as vaporizing houses and everything in them in just five minutes per house. There is more in the book, the people, the changing nature of fire in a heating planet and the serious message of climate science.
Everyone needs to read and hear the climate message. The planet crossed the 1.5°C of temperature rise in 2023, another hottest year recorded. The jet stream is so off kilter it looks like a loopy string sliding off the top of the planet. This is bad news. It is what David Wallace-Wells warned of in his 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.
It is raining not snowing today in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Minneapolis finished off January with temperatures up to 53° and no snow on the ground. We are in deep trouble.
The LWV moderator did not ask where the candidates stood on a ceasefire resolution. Both Kalb and Lybarger support a ceasefire in the Israel Hamas War. Kalb voted with the Oakland Council to support their resolution (his amendments lost) and Lybarger spoke to leading the union through discussion that evolved into support for ceasefire.
The U.S. bombing in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq is turning the Israel Hamas war into a middle east war when what is needed is heavy diplomacy not heavy bombing. With every mention of Iran, I think about the 2019 film Coup 53 the British documentary on the 1953 CIA & M16 staged coup to overthrow the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh. The coup was, of course, over the control oil.
How different would this world be if the U.S. wasn’t constantly involved in coups?
I’m reading about Israel’s military involvement in Mexico and Central America in Inter / Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine by Steven Salita
Arreguin, Hahn and Wengraf published their opposition to a ceasefire resolution weeks ago and there is nothing to indicate they will change their minds though the public continues to try. City Council meetings continue to be disrupted with the clamor for a ceasefire resolution. The number of speakers calling for a ceasefire far outnumber the few asking the council not to take a stand which is reflective of the country.
I plan to attend the film Israelism at the Roxie. I watched the trailer. “[I]sraelism uniquely explores how Jewish attitudes towards Israel are changing dramatically, with massive consequences for the region and for Judaism itself.” https://roxie.com/film/israelism/
On Sunday, January 28, 2024 just two days after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to take action to prevent acts of genocide, (Genocide is defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”)
the Nachala settlement activist group held a conference in Jerusalem attended by thousands with the message to take advantage of the war to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza and build Jewish settlements in Gaza. Eleven Israeli government ministers and fifteen coalition lawmakers attended including the Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. https://www.timesofisrael.com/12-ministers-call-to-resettle-gaza-encourage-gazans-to-leave-at-jubilant-conference/
Chris Hayes said on the Thursday evening before the U.S. started dropping bombs, “this can’t go on, it is politically wrong, strategically wrong, and morally wrong.” I agree. Besides the heartbreaking suffering of the Palestinians, massive bombing, maimed children and civilian deaths, the war is adding to the destruction of the planet.
After listening to the February 7, 2024 interview of Jeremy Scahill on Democracy Now (a news source I trust) I read Scahill’s article “Netanyahu’s War on Truth Israel’s Ruthless Propaganda Campaign to Dehumanize Palestinians”. You can catch both at: https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/7/israel_propaganda_gaza
Scahill’s article is long and lays question to the portrayal of Palestinians as savages. https://theintercept.com/2024/02/07/gaza-israel-netanyahu-propaganda-lies-palestinians/
There is so much wrapped up in this small plot of land, religious identity and beliefs, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Jewish Zionism, Christian Zionism, the rapture, the expulsion of the indigenous Palestinians who have occupied this land for centuries and those who remained.
Of the five books I’ve finished so far on Israel and Palestine The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi is the most thorough in covering the failures in negotiations and the U.S. greenlighting wars.
Councilmember Kate Harrison resigned over what she called a broken system.
While the mayor and council as a whole were supportive of Robinson, Councilmember Taplin was quick to accuse Harrison of racist microaggression. Councilmember Hahn turned Harrison’s resignation into a promotional piece for her run for mayor.
The council agenda item under discussion when Harrison read her resignation was the $7,000,000 fixed surveillance cameras. Harrison went through a lengthy list of actions that could be taken with $7,000,000 that would reduce crime and the threat of crime.
Fixed cameras that aren’t monitored and are checked only after an event as is the plan by Berkeley Police for the $7 million investment fall more into the placebo category. That didn’t stop Councilmember Humbert as the author and Ben Bartlett as the co-sponsor. Nor did it stop Humbert, Bartlett, Kesarwani, Taplin and Arreguin for voting for the measure. Hahn abstained, Wengraf was absent and Harrison had left.
In the string of candidates running for Alameda County Supervisor, I was quite stunned to hear Ben Bartlett claim in his list of accomplishments as being instrumental in establishing the Special Care Unit (SCU). At the Wellstone forum, I was even more surprised by the clapping response. That left me wondering what meetings those supporters attended and I missed. One person has been most involved in pushing for the SCU through commissions, presentations and tracking progress. At my request, they checked all their sources and were unable to come up with Bartlett’s involvement.
When I think of Bartlett’s proposals to council the one I can’t forget was to use blockchain for public financing. Cryptocurrency uses blockchain technology. Berkeley did not bite on the blockchain proposal.
Most of us have probably heard by now of Sam Bankman-Fried the collapse of the cryptocurrency he founded FTX and the guilty verdict.
The last meeting I attended before COVID was the Ohlone Greenway Safety Improvements Project presentation at the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission on January 18.
When former mayor Shirley Dean called on behalf of the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council (BNC), to request a presentation on the Ohlone Greenway Safety Improvements Project, she was told by the Project Manager he wasn’t giving any more presentations to anyone. Then he followed up by submitting a request to have Dean’s phone blocked. On January 25, Dean received a call from someone identifying himself as Reynaldo who told her that her phone was being blocked which resulted in being unable to contact any city services, councilmembers, the mayor and the city manager.
By Monday, January 29 the city manager was involved and lifted the block.
I’m not sure what to make of a city employee blocking the phone number of a person representing a Berkeley organization asking for a presentation on a city project that impacts city residents. I wonder if the city manager would have bothered to get involved or for that matter councilmembers Hahn and Harrison who Dean also contacted if it had been anyone other than the former mayor Shirley Dean who was shut off from being able to contact the city.
As for the project, the main concerns are electric bikes on shared paths with pedestrians, how the neighborhood will be impacted and how many trees will be removed.
January 14, 2024
The bigger local news of the week we just finished on January 13, 2024 is definitely not the meetings I attended, it is the people who are leaving their Berkeley careers behind and moving on.
Another department director is leaving Berkeley. Supriya Yelimeli from Berkeleyside covered it. Lisa Warhuus the Director of Health, Housing and Community Services is leaving Berkeley for less money and more responsibility in Marin. Warhuus is taking almost a $50,000 pay cut, $46,723 to be exact according to the article to manage a staff “almost eight times as large…with about double the budget” as her job in Berkeley. https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/01/11/berkeley-health-lisa-warhuus-pandemic-housing-health
A website titled bestplaces listed the cost of living in San Rafael where offices are located as 15% higher than Berkeley though average home prices in Berkeley are $110,000 more in the chart. https://www.bestplaces.net/compare-cities/san_rafael_ca/berkeley_ca/overview
This is not to comment about Warhuus’ work here in Berkeley, except to state that there is a threshold where people want more challenging satisfying work and will accept a lower salary and benefit package to move on. Warhuus will still receive a generous salary package in Marin which makes another point for the ridiculousness of the salary ranges for the City of Berkeley administrators.
Some us recall that under Mayor Jesse Arreguin’s leadership and recommendation in 2021, the Berkeley City Council gave the Berkeley City Manager a 28.11% raise of $84,732 to elevate Dee Williams-Ridley, as the fourth highest paid manager of thirteen City/County manager positions surveyed in the Bay Area when Berkeley is the smallest city in square miles (land area 10.5 sq mi) of the thirteen cities surveyed, and was eleventh in population (124,321). This move placed the Berkeley City Manager as receiving $2,784 less than the Santa Clara County Executive a county of 1304 square miles and 1,936,259 people.
Prior to the raise, Williams-Ridley was earning $18,624 more than the city manager of Richmond and $7,716 more than the city manager of Concord which seems reasonable.
Of course, neither of those cities have a 2.8 acre plot of land officially listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) and a commons recognized internationally surrounded by stacked shipping containers with razor wire on top guarded by police and other persons with SECURITY on the chest of their dark uniforms. It’s quite a scene.
No one seems to want to admit how the City of Berkeley allowed UC Berkeley to take such actions though the Berkeley City Council has been all in on the clear cutting of over 80 mature trees covering the NRHP plot of land and the erasure of historic memory of Peoples Park under the premise that student housing had to be built there when there were and are plenty of other available plots of land owned by UCB to build. State Assembly person Buffy Wicks is all in too.
In less than two months ballots for selecting who should replace Nancy Skinner in the California State Senate will be in our mailboxes for the March 5 primary. You might want to skip by the emails from Arreguin with his latest endorsements and take a hard look at the other four candidates Lybarger, Kalb, Swanson and Beckles. I know I will.
I attended the early debates/forums last fall. There should be more in the coming weeks. The best forums were sponsored by East Bay Community Activists (EBCA) at Live Oak Park last September and October where Lybarger, Kalb and Beckles each had their own Saturday afternoon to be peppered with unscreened, unfiltered questions until everyone who attended ran out of things to ask. These were so much better than all the candidates sitting together in a row answering the same questions and raising their hands as to who identified as a YIMBY. Lybarger who has said she doesn’t believe in “trickle down housing” and Swanson skipped that motion and kept their hands in their laps.
Councilmember Rigel Robinson resigned from City Council and ended his bid for mayor writing that he was “spent” “burnt out” that he has had to tolerate various forms of harassment and that he is prioritizing his well-being and his family and that he will focus on his “greatest passion: wedding planning.” Really?
Robinson who was 22 when first elected and 27 when he left office last week managed to capture a lengthy article in the Chronicle and space in Berkeleyside. I guess when you are 27 your wedding day is the biggest day in your life.
Those of us on the sidelines expect there will be some flourish over an “unexpected opportunity” in the coming months that is probably already in the works.
The SF Chronicle listed Robinson as a front runner for mayor. I’m not so sure about that analysis. The YIMBYs were able to take over the Northern Alameda County Sierra Club as only 6% of the membership bothered to vote.
Councilmembers Sophie Hahn and Kate Harrison are the two remaining candidates for mayor, but others have until August to jump in.
The second week of January was full with City meetings. I made three of them, the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission, the Zoning Adjustment Board and the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council on Saturday. When every meeting was on ZOOM it was so much easier to pick up more meetings.
Brennan Cox, Landscape Architect and Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commissioner gave a presentation to the Parks Commission on traditional versus innovative play equipment for children. The differences were stark especially when it comes to designing play areas in public spaces that also welcome children with disabilities. The traditional play equipment really isn’t accessible and the usual play area design often isn’t planned in a way that welcomes the adult accompanying the child who may need accessible space and seating options.
Cox also shared a picture of non-gender assigned public restrooms in a public park that had a central hand washing area surrounded by toilet stalls with full doors for privacy. Such an arrangement could certainly solve the freak out in “conservative” areas over transgender bathroom use or even help caregivers/parents assisting a child or disabled adult of a different sex.
Scott Ferris, Director of Parks, Recreation and Waterfront stated he expects the proposed February 6 date for the Waterfront Specific Plan presentation to City Council to be moved. Ferris said that there are still documents / reports /updates that need to be posted on the City Waterfront Specific Plan webpage. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/our-work/capital-projects/waterfront-specific-plan
The Zoning Adjustment Board meeting was more interesting than I expected. The first project of the evening at 2420 Shattuck, a 17-story 132 unit building of which 14 units will be available to very low-income households was continued to a date uncertain. It is a SB 330 project which means that it only has to comply with the ordinances in place at the time the application was complete.
The next project at 2120 McKinley to raise a house (needing lots of love) three feet passed on consent.
The last project of the evening at 2113 - 2115 Kittredge was an ambitious SB 330 18-story project with 211 units of which 22 are for very low-income households. The project is at the site of the now closed California movie theater. The project will retain the street facing California Theater façade (building up behind it) and proposes to include a 24,273 square foot live performance theater.
The City of Berkeley requires a total of 20% of the units to be affordable with 10% for very low income households and 10% to be available to low income households or to pay an in lieu mitigation fee instead of providing all or a portion of the affordable units. The project will provide the 10% very low-income units (22) to qualify for the state density bonus and pay the in lieu fee of $81,161.58 instead of providing the other 10% for low income households.
Imagine that. When we desperately need affordable housing this project gets a 50% bonus, 70 more units for 22 very low-income units and $81,161.58. The 211 units consists of 133 studio units with 14 BMR (below market rate), 66 2-bedroom units with 7 BMR and 12 4-bedroom units with one BMR.
Mark Rhoades representative for the developer said they have been working with the community on the live performance theater. If they can’t make the numbers work, make it financially feasible, they will be back requesting a modification to omit the theater. Conveniently the plans put the theater in levels B1 and B2, so it would be pretty easy to just build from the ground up. This project like nearly every project planned as student housing has no parking.
Since the application was complete in 2022 before the Bird Safe Ordinance passed, as an SB 330 project, the building is exempted from that requirement though Rhoades did say they will do bird safe glass for the first 36 feet, better than nothing, but the ordinance calls for the first 75 feet and all high risk features. The balconies are designed as glass so that means every balcony will have the hazard that killed the fledgling peregrine falcon Lux. After that incident UC installed bird safe streamers to prevent future accidents.
A tenant from the neighboring building spoke to his concern regarding adding so many people and the sidewalk and street traffic that will come with them next to a building with a number of disabled persons.
Board member Igor Tregrub appointed by Arreguin made a motion to approve 2113 – 2115 Kittredge with two recommendations, 1) that the applicant evaluate and if possible conform to the Bird Safe Glass Ordinance currently in effect and 2) the applicant abide by the provisions of the Hard Hats Ordinance (relates to prevailing pay and benefits). Board member Deborah Sanderson a former Planning Department Employee appointed by Councilmember Humbert vehemently opposed adding recommendations and made a substitute motion without the recommendations which passed.
It often feels like there is a game to stall ordinances so developers can get their applications completed before ordinances are passed and go into effect. Non-binding recommendations are the only persuasive tool the ZAB has with the SB 330 projects.
In November it is expected that there will be two ballot measures to fund fixing the streets in Berkeley. Given the poor condition of streets in Berkeley of which 42% are classified as failed or poor it is also expected that both measures will gain substantial support over the 50% threshold to pass. Whichever one gets the most votes wins.
In the City’s 2020 survey of Berkeley voters for city council to determine the probability of what ballot measures would pass, the voter’s preference was a parcel tax for street repairs and a small bond measure for infrastructure. The city council chose to ignore the survey results and instead threw everything into the whopping $650 million Measure L with a grab bag of ideas and commitment to none. Measure L failed.
On Saturday at the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council, Nancy Radar and James McGrath presented the Berkeleyans for Better Planning special parcel tax measure. Click on the “view the measure” to read the full proposed ballot initiative. https://www.berkeleyansforbetterplanning.org/our-measure/
Basically, the parcel tax ballot initiative ($0.13 per square foot of improvements for 12 years) from Berkeleyans for Better Planning is to repair all the existing Berkeley streets, sidewalks and pedestrian paths starting with those in the worst condition in the neediest neighborhoods until all are brought to good condition using an index that grades the entire street not an average where poor or fair conditions are hidden. Very low-income property owners are exempted.
Rebeca Mirvish who is represents the other proposal ($0.17 per square foot over 14 years) will be presenting the other measure on February 10.
As you are wondering what to do during the rainy days ahead here are two suggestions.
If you are one of the many who never believed the Warren Commission Magic Bullet theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of President Kennedy, the final episode of ten-part podcast serial Who Killed JFK finished on January 10.
President Biden signed the Memorandum on Certifications Regarding Disclosure of Information in Certain Records Related to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy on June 30, 2023 that left 4,684 documents still withheld from the public. But, there is enough already released to put pieces together of who was likely involved and it wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald. You can search for Who Killed JFK in your podcast ap, your browser or use this link. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29898350/episodes/?season=1
I finished the book Sedition Hunters: How January 6th Broke the Justice Department by Ryan J. Reilly. The book starts out slow going through all the missteps and outdated equipment and methods. As I was just about ready to give up ever getting the story, Reilly moves on to the citizen sleuths who used the publicly available January 6th tapes, facial recognition, Facebook, twitter and a variety of applications. The National Book Review by Paul Markowitz does a much better job of describing the book than I can ever do here, but reading the book is way better than thinking you have the whole picture by scanning the review. Sedition Hunters is available at our local libraries. https://www.thenationalbookreview.com/features/2023/10/21/review-how-online-amateur-detectives-helped-bring-down-the-jan-6-insurrectionists
The bigger local news of the week we just finished on January 13, 2024 is definitely not the meetings I attended, it is the people who are leaving their Berkeley careers behind and moving on.
Another department director is leaving Berkeley. Supriya Yelimeli from Berkeleyside covered it. Lisa Warhuus the Director of Health, Housing and Community Services is leaving Berkeley for less money and more responsibility in Marin. Warhuus is taking almost a $50,000 pay cut, $46,723 to be exact according to the article to manage a staff “almost eight times as large…with about double the budget” as her job in Berkeley. https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/01/11/berkeley-health-lisa-warhuus-pandemic-housing-health
A website titled bestplaces listed the cost of living in San Rafael where offices are located as 15% higher than Berkeley though average home prices in Berkeley are $110,000 more in the chart. https://www.bestplaces.net/compare-cities/san_rafael_ca/berkeley_ca/overview
This is not to comment about Warhuus’ work here in Berkeley, except to state that there is a threshold where people want more challenging satisfying work and will accept a lower salary and benefit package to move on. Warhuus will still receive a generous salary package in Marin which makes another point for the ridiculousness of the salary ranges for the City of Berkeley administrators.
Some us recall that under Mayor Jesse Arreguin’s leadership and recommendation in 2021, the Berkeley City Council gave the Berkeley City Manager a 28.11% raise of $84,732 to elevate Dee Williams-Ridley, as the fourth highest paid manager of thirteen City/County manager positions surveyed in the Bay Area when Berkeley is the smallest city in square miles (land area 10.5 sq mi) of the thirteen cities surveyed, and was eleventh in population (124,321). This move placed the Berkeley City Manager as receiving $2,784 less than the Santa Clara County Executive a county of 1304 square miles and 1,936,259 people.
Prior to the raise, Williams-Ridley was earning $18,624 more than the city manager of Richmond and $7,716 more than the city manager of Concord which seems reasonable.
Of course, neither of those cities have a 2.8 acre plot of land officially listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) and a commons recognized internationally surrounded by stacked shipping containers with razor wire on top guarded by police and other persons with SECURITY on the chest of their dark uniforms. It’s quite a scene.
No one seems to want to admit how the City of Berkeley allowed UC Berkeley to take such actions though the Berkeley City Council has been all in on the clear cutting of over 80 mature trees covering the NRHP plot of land and the erasure of historic memory of Peoples Park under the premise that student housing had to be built there when there were and are plenty of other available plots of land owned by UCB to build. State Assembly person Buffy Wicks is all in too.
In less than two months ballots for selecting who should replace Nancy Skinner in the California State Senate will be in our mailboxes for the March 5 primary. You might want to skip by the emails from Arreguin with his latest endorsements and take a hard look at the other four candidates Lybarger, Kalb, Swanson and Beckles. I know I will.
I attended the early debates/forums last fall. There should be more in the coming weeks. The best forums were sponsored by East Bay Community Activists (EBCA) at Live Oak Park last September and October where Lybarger, Kalb and Beckles each had their own Saturday afternoon to be peppered with unscreened, unfiltered questions until everyone who attended ran out of things to ask. These were so much better than all the candidates sitting together in a row answering the same questions and raising their hands as to who identified as a YIMBY. Lybarger who has said she doesn’t believe in “trickle down housing” and Swanson skipped that motion and kept their hands in their laps.
Councilmember Rigel Robinson resigned from City Council and ended his bid for mayor writing that he was “spent” “burnt out” that he has had to tolerate various forms of harassment and that he is prioritizing his well-being and his family and that he will focus on his “greatest passion: wedding planning.” Really?
Robinson who was 22 when first elected and 27 when he left office last week managed to capture a lengthy article in the Chronicle and space in Berkeleyside. I guess when you are 27 your wedding day is the biggest day in your life.
Those of us on the sidelines expect there will be some flourish over an “unexpected opportunity” in the coming months that is probably already in the works.
The SF Chronicle listed Robinson as a front runner for mayor. I’m not so sure about that analysis. The YIMBYs were able to take over the Northern Alameda County Sierra Club as only 6% of the membership bothered to vote.
Councilmembers Sophie Hahn and Kate Harrison are the two remaining candidates for mayor, but others have until August to jump in.
The second week of January was full with City meetings. I made three of them, the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission, the Zoning Adjustment Board and the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council on Saturday. When every meeting was on ZOOM it was so much easier to pick up more meetings.
Brennan Cox, Landscape Architect and Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commissioner gave a presentation to the Parks Commission on traditional versus innovative play equipment for children. The differences were stark especially when it comes to designing play areas in public spaces that also welcome children with disabilities. The traditional play equipment really isn’t accessible and the usual play area design often isn’t planned in a way that welcomes the adult accompanying the child who may need accessible space and seating options.
Cox also shared a picture of non-gender assigned public restrooms in a public park that had a central hand washing area surrounded by toilet stalls with full doors for privacy. Such an arrangement could certainly solve the freak out in “conservative” areas over transgender bathroom use or even help caregivers/parents assisting a child or disabled adult of a different sex.
Scott Ferris, Director of Parks, Recreation and Waterfront stated he expects the proposed February 6 date for the Waterfront Specific Plan presentation to City Council to be moved. Ferris said that there are still documents / reports /updates that need to be posted on the City Waterfront Specific Plan webpage. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/our-work/capital-projects/waterfront-specific-plan
The Zoning Adjustment Board meeting was more interesting than I expected. The first project of the evening at 2420 Shattuck, a 17-story 132 unit building of which 14 units will be available to very low-income households was continued to a date uncertain. It is a SB 330 project which means that it only has to comply with the ordinances in place at the time the application was complete.
The next project at 2120 McKinley to raise a house (needing lots of love) three feet passed on consent.
The last project of the evening at 2113 - 2115 Kittredge was an ambitious SB 330 18-story project with 211 units of which 22 are for very low-income households. The project is at the site of the now closed California movie theater. The project will retain the street facing California Theater façade (building up behind it) and proposes to include a 24,273 square foot live performance theater.
The City of Berkeley requires a total of 20% of the units to be affordable with 10% for very low income households and 10% to be available to low income households or to pay an in lieu mitigation fee instead of providing all or a portion of the affordable units. The project will provide the 10% very low-income units (22) to qualify for the state density bonus and pay the in lieu fee of $81,161.58 instead of providing the other 10% for low income households.
Imagine that. When we desperately need affordable housing this project gets a 50% bonus, 70 more units for 22 very low-income units and $81,161.58. The 211 units consists of 133 studio units with 14 BMR (below market rate), 66 2-bedroom units with 7 BMR and 12 4-bedroom units with one BMR.
Mark Rhoades representative for the developer said they have been working with the community on the live performance theater. If they can’t make the numbers work, make it financially feasible, they will be back requesting a modification to omit the theater. Conveniently the plans put the theater in levels B1 and B2, so it would be pretty easy to just build from the ground up. This project like nearly every project planned as student housing has no parking.
Since the application was complete in 2022 before the Bird Safe Ordinance passed, as an SB 330 project, the building is exempted from that requirement though Rhoades did say they will do bird safe glass for the first 36 feet, better than nothing, but the ordinance calls for the first 75 feet and all high risk features. The balconies are designed as glass so that means every balcony will have the hazard that killed the fledgling peregrine falcon Lux. After that incident UC installed bird safe streamers to prevent future accidents.
A tenant from the neighboring building spoke to his concern regarding adding so many people and the sidewalk and street traffic that will come with them next to a building with a number of disabled persons.
Board member Igor Tregrub appointed by Arreguin made a motion to approve 2113 – 2115 Kittredge with two recommendations, 1) that the applicant evaluate and if possible conform to the Bird Safe Glass Ordinance currently in effect and 2) the applicant abide by the provisions of the Hard Hats Ordinance (relates to prevailing pay and benefits). Board member Deborah Sanderson a former Planning Department Employee appointed by Councilmember Humbert vehemently opposed adding recommendations and made a substitute motion without the recommendations which passed.
It often feels like there is a game to stall ordinances so developers can get their applications completed before ordinances are passed and go into effect. Non-binding recommendations are the only persuasive tool the ZAB has with the SB 330 projects.
In November it is expected that there will be two ballot measures to fund fixing the streets in Berkeley. Given the poor condition of streets in Berkeley of which 42% are classified as failed or poor it is also expected that both measures will gain substantial support over the 50% threshold to pass. Whichever one gets the most votes wins.
In the City’s 2020 survey of Berkeley voters for city council to determine the probability of what ballot measures would pass, the voter’s preference was a parcel tax for street repairs and a small bond measure for infrastructure. The city council chose to ignore the survey results and instead threw everything into the whopping $650 million Measure L with a grab bag of ideas and commitment to none. Measure L failed.
On Saturday at the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council, Nancy Radar and James McGrath presented the Berkeleyans for Better Planning special parcel tax measure. Click on the “view the measure” to read the full proposed ballot initiative. https://www.berkeleyansforbetterplanning.org/our-measure/
Basically, the parcel tax ballot initiative ($0.13 per square foot of improvements for 12 years) from Berkeleyans for Better Planning is to repair all the existing Berkeley streets, sidewalks and pedestrian paths starting with those in the worst condition in the neediest neighborhoods until all are brought to good condition using an index that grades the entire street not an average where poor or fair conditions are hidden. Very low-income property owners are exempted.
Rebeca Mirvish who is represents the other proposal ($0.17 per square foot over 14 years) will be presenting the other measure on February 10.
As you are wondering what to do during the rainy days ahead here are two suggestions.
If you are one of the many who never believed the Warren Commission Magic Bullet theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of President Kennedy, the final episode of ten-part podcast serial Who Killed JFK finished on January 10.
President Biden signed the Memorandum on Certifications Regarding Disclosure of Information in Certain Records Related to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy on June 30, 2023 that left 4,684 documents still withheld from the public. But, there is enough already released to put pieces together of who was likely involved and it wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald. You can search for Who Killed JFK in your podcast ap, your browser or use this link. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29898350/episodes/?season=1
I finished the book Sedition Hunters: How January 6th Broke the Justice Department by Ryan J. Reilly. The book starts out slow going through all the missteps and outdated equipment and methods. As I was just about ready to give up ever getting the story, Reilly moves on to the citizen sleuths who used the publicly available January 6th tapes, facial recognition, Facebook, twitter and a variety of applications. The National Book Review by Paul Markowitz does a much better job of describing the book than I can ever do here, but reading the book is way better than thinking you have the whole picture by scanning the review. Sedition Hunters is available at our local libraries. https://www.thenationalbookreview.com/features/2023/10/21/review-how-online-amateur-detectives-helped-bring-down-the-jan-6-insurrectionists
January 6, 2024
There was only one Berkeley City meeting in this first week of January 2024, the Agenda and Rules Committee. With a three member committee all of whom have publicly declared their opposition to a Ceasefire Resolution in the Israel Hamas war, it does not take any imagination to know what will not be on the agenda for the first city council meeting after winter recess on January 16. The three Councilmembers Bartlett, Robinson and Taplin who each posted their version of a Ceasefire Resolution on X (formerly Twitter) folded under pressure and never submitted them. Taplin’s proposed resolution called for an end to hostilities which I characterized as too timid in a previous Activist’s Diary given the conditions in Gaza.
Committee member Councilmember Susan Wengraf who is retiring in 2024 was absent to the meeting which barely made the 24-hour posting requirement. The current Mayor Jesse Arreguin State Senate hopeful and Councilmember Sophie Hahn who hopes to be anointed by the voters in 2024 to replace Arreguin as mayor were present to finalize the agenda.
The January 16th agenda has items like adding 3-way stop signs at McGee and Hopkins (a good idea), funding a real bathroom to replace the porta potty at Ohlone Park, admitting there is a long term Homeless Shelter Crisis with a declaration that forecasts a shelter crisis end on January 17, 2029, adopting the first reading of the prevailing wage requirements in the Southside for projects with more than 50 units or 50,000 square feet and continuing the clean-up of the City of Berkeley’s failure in the handling of union contracts on CalPERS and PEPRA (retirement funding).
Councilmember Harrison’s proposed ordinance related to racehorses will go through another review by the City Attorney. The only expected action on January 16 on the conditions regarding horses for racing and sports is to move that item to consent to be rescheduled to a date certain.
In the agenda, non-agenda comment period at the beginning of the meeting, nine speakers called for the Berkeley City Council to vote for a ceasefire to which there was no response from either Arreguin or Hahn.
By the time this Diary is finished and published we will have an answer from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on their response to their Ceasefire Resolution. The weekend news announced San Francisco Supervisors will take public comment on Monday and vote on Tuesday.
When it came time to comment on Discussion and Possible Action on City Council Rules of Decorum, two of the regular Agenda Committee attendees expressed their distress and being appalled by the behavior and disruption at city council meetings by the people calling for a Ceasefire Resolution from the Berkeley City Council.
There is desperation in the voices of the people coming to council meetings pleading for Berkeley to join other cities. The desperation here is nothing compared to the horror in Gaza.
The death toll as month four of this war begins is around 23,000 with the deaths of children numbering over 10,000. That approximation is only those whose bodies can be counted. How many are under the rubble in unknown.
To put the deaths of children in Gaza in a broader perspective. Gaza has a population around 2.2 million. In Ukraine with a population of a little under 44 million an estimated 1800 children have died in the nearly two years since the Russian invasion in February 2022.
We are watching a genocide in Gaza.
Israel’s blockade of food, water and supplies and medicines continues.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) emergency relief chief Martin Griffiths said this: “Gaza has simply become uninhabitable…The humanitarian community has been left with the impossible mission of supporting more than 2 million people even as its own staff are being killed and displaced, as communication blackouts continue, as roads are damaged and convoys are shot at, and as commercial supplies vital to survival are almost non-existent”.
Please read Griffiths’ full statement from January 5, 2024. https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/war-gaza-must-end-statement-martin-griffiths-under-secretary-general-humanitarian-affairs-and-emergency-relief-coordinator-5-january-2024-enhear
Children in Gaza with such devastating injuries that their limbs have to be amputated are reduced to suffering that was common in the Civil War 170 years ago, surgeries without anesthesia. All this because of the Israeli blockade and relentless bombardment.
It is only because of dedicated journalists facing constant threat of death that the news reaches us. Somewhere between 79 and 110 journalists and media workers have been killed depending on which news source is referenced. Al Jazeera accused Israel of targeted killing of two of their journalists on Sunday.
The desperation in the voices of those coming to council and showing up on the street might best be interpreted that there are still some who hold shreds of hope that if enough people demonstrate somehow the killing of children, their parents and families in this war will stop.
Trita Parsi had this to say on Democracy Now: “I think the Biden administration made a huge miscalculation from the outset. They did not think there would be this type of backlash amongst the American public, including his own supporters, against the Israeli campaign…it appears that the conclusion in the White House is that they have already lost these votes…if they shift their position they will likely lose some of the voters that are in support of Israel’s Campaign”.
Calculation sounds like the retired generals who come on mainstream media shows to talk about war strategies in the detachment that disregards the lives and pain on the ground.
If this continues as Prime Minister Netanyahu promises and President Biden fails to use his leverage to end this war (It is American weapons, munitions and tax dollars that are used in the killing and maiming of civilians in Gaza) speeches on saving democracy to win reelection in 2024 pale in the horror of it all.
Now that two states Colorado (through the courts) and Maine (by Secretary of the State) have barred former President Trump from the primary ballot and stayed their decisions pending an appeal to the Supreme Court, the TV pundits on MSNBC and CNN have wrapped themselves into knots commenting on everything except the last sentence of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
I happen to keep a copy of the Constitution on my desk, but you can pull it up with your browser to read Section 3 for yourself.
Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United states, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. [emphasis added]
I’m not sure that I would trust Congress any more than I trust the Supreme Court. Would all the Democrats or at least enough still hold to prevent a two-thirds vote? The belief that Biden would do best in his bid for reelection against Trump is a risky position.
As the clamor grows, especially but not exclusively on the Republican side, that the voters should choose the President, has everyone ignored or forgotten that most dictators are elected? At least that is what the historians tell us.
Hitler was elected. Mussolini was elected in 1921 to the lower chamber of Italy’s parliament, the Chamber of Deputies before seizing power through the armed march on Rome in 1922 demanding to be named prime minister.
The story of Trump wanting to go to the capitol on January 6 reminded me of the descriptions of Mussolini’s march on Rome with his paramilitary Blackshirts. Trump had his militias the Oathkeepers, the Three Percenters, the violent far right Islamophobic, misogynistic hate group the Proud Boys and his true believers to fill out the mob.
Former Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) gave the warning the U.S. is “sleepwalking into dictatorship” earlier this year. (I am still on the wait list for her book at the Berkeley Library)
If we are really going to hold to the 14th Amendment Section 3, there were eight Senators and one hundred thirty-nine Representatives who voted after the insurrection against certifying the election of President Biden. Their action is more ambiguous. It might be asked did their vote against the certification of Biden as President after the insurrection fall into “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof”? With nearly every one of these 147 still in Congress (only a couple Representatives left), they are still present to make trouble the next time around. And, some of those elected Senators and Representatives actively participated in the planning of schemes to keep Trump in office.
Having just finished reading The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic by Steve Vladeck, I have little faith the Supreme Court will do anything other than ensure that Trump is on the ballot, though they do have an out by following the 14th Amendment and sending the decision to Congress.
Some months ago, when I was out gathering signatures to support daylighting the creek in the Civic Center Park. I stopped to have a long conversation with a student from Stanford. I can’t remember how our conversation drifted to books. What I do remember is his boasting about never reading books.
While each of us has our stories about how the pandemic affected and changed us, mine was, I started reading with a voracious passion and I haven’t stopped. I also started writing.
I shared with my Sunday walk partner, how grateful I am for our book club.
I’m into my fourth book on Palestine and Israel Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People The Bible by Mitri Raheb with two more started in my reading stack The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashi Khalidi and Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Target Assassinations by Ronen Bergman. The three I finished were: Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by Nathan Thrall and The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust: A Memoir by Naom Chayut.
If you asked if you could read only one, which one would I recommend, that is a hard choice. Decolonizing Palestine is absolutely the clearest, that ethnic cleansing of the Arabs from Palestine was always the plan from the earliest visions in the 1800s. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama expands the tragic bus accident into describing daily life in the West Bank. Chayut’s rambling memoir chronicles his indoctrination into Zionism and the IDF (Israel Defense Forces); how they terrorized Palestinians in the West Bank, pushed them out of their homes, destroyed their possessions, killed innocent Palestinians and shot up property for sport.
Whatever I thought about Israel decades ago when I was in high school has been washed away by coming to an understanding of Palestine, settler colonization, race and the force I didn’t consider, Christian Zionism.
Learning From the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil by Susan Newman (another book I just finished) while focusing on racism and the history of slavery in the United States and Germany’s ongoing working off the past overlaps into the conditions in Israel and Palestine. Neiman is an American who moved to Israel to work and raise her three young children and then to Berlin, Germany in 1982 where she still lives.
There is so much in the book Learning From the Germans. In Nieman’s comparison between Germany and the United States slavery and the glorification of the lost cause, she writes and asks could we imagine Germany with statues glorifying Hitler? How is it we sit in the U.S. filled with statues honoring the confederacy glorifying confederate generals and soldiers and allow the Civil War portrayed as the “lost cause”?
It was just December 27, 2023 when Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was asked at a town hall in Berlin, New Hampshire what did she believe caused the Civil War. Haley went into a lengthy response about the role of government, “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do” never mentioning slavery. The person who asked the question said he was “astonished” by the response.
As we crossed the third anniversary of the January 6th insurrection I watched some of the film of that day with the carrying of confederate flags into the capitol.
As the book comes to a close Neiman writes about leadership. It was 2019. Neiman reminds us it was the racist backlash to President Obama, our first Black president that brought us President Trump in 2016.
On Christmas Day over brunch the conversation drifted to past trips. I mentioned I was so worried about the election in 2018 that I left the country on election day to travel solo in Germany for three weeks. I wanted to understand what happened. One of my friends answered with the simple explanation people were afraid.
It’s way more complicated.
I wonder how the Republican Party of today will really look in a historical review with a cult of personality at the center, grievance politics, othering, book banning, retribution, revenge, and an embrace of authoritarianism.
I closed out my week to see for myself the shipping containers surrounding Peoples Park. I’ve never been deeply involved in Peoples Park, but as I think about it and look at it, it strikes me as small-minded leaders passing grudges from one generation of chancellors to the next and developers determined to turn the debacle into a gentrifying opportunity, a process that already has a big head start. The park was destroyed months ago with clear cutting nearly all the trees. There were other places to build.
There was only one Berkeley City meeting in this first week of January 2024, the Agenda and Rules Committee. With a three member committee all of whom have publicly declared their opposition to a Ceasefire Resolution in the Israel Hamas war, it does not take any imagination to know what will not be on the agenda for the first city council meeting after winter recess on January 16. The three Councilmembers Bartlett, Robinson and Taplin who each posted their version of a Ceasefire Resolution on X (formerly Twitter) folded under pressure and never submitted them. Taplin’s proposed resolution called for an end to hostilities which I characterized as too timid in a previous Activist’s Diary given the conditions in Gaza.
Committee member Councilmember Susan Wengraf who is retiring in 2024 was absent to the meeting which barely made the 24-hour posting requirement. The current Mayor Jesse Arreguin State Senate hopeful and Councilmember Sophie Hahn who hopes to be anointed by the voters in 2024 to replace Arreguin as mayor were present to finalize the agenda.
The January 16th agenda has items like adding 3-way stop signs at McGee and Hopkins (a good idea), funding a real bathroom to replace the porta potty at Ohlone Park, admitting there is a long term Homeless Shelter Crisis with a declaration that forecasts a shelter crisis end on January 17, 2029, adopting the first reading of the prevailing wage requirements in the Southside for projects with more than 50 units or 50,000 square feet and continuing the clean-up of the City of Berkeley’s failure in the handling of union contracts on CalPERS and PEPRA (retirement funding).
Councilmember Harrison’s proposed ordinance related to racehorses will go through another review by the City Attorney. The only expected action on January 16 on the conditions regarding horses for racing and sports is to move that item to consent to be rescheduled to a date certain.
In the agenda, non-agenda comment period at the beginning of the meeting, nine speakers called for the Berkeley City Council to vote for a ceasefire to which there was no response from either Arreguin or Hahn.
By the time this Diary is finished and published we will have an answer from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on their response to their Ceasefire Resolution. The weekend news announced San Francisco Supervisors will take public comment on Monday and vote on Tuesday.
When it came time to comment on Discussion and Possible Action on City Council Rules of Decorum, two of the regular Agenda Committee attendees expressed their distress and being appalled by the behavior and disruption at city council meetings by the people calling for a Ceasefire Resolution from the Berkeley City Council.
There is desperation in the voices of the people coming to council meetings pleading for Berkeley to join other cities. The desperation here is nothing compared to the horror in Gaza.
The death toll as month four of this war begins is around 23,000 with the deaths of children numbering over 10,000. That approximation is only those whose bodies can be counted. How many are under the rubble in unknown.
To put the deaths of children in Gaza in a broader perspective. Gaza has a population around 2.2 million. In Ukraine with a population of a little under 44 million an estimated 1800 children have died in the nearly two years since the Russian invasion in February 2022.
We are watching a genocide in Gaza.
Israel’s blockade of food, water and supplies and medicines continues.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) emergency relief chief Martin Griffiths said this: “Gaza has simply become uninhabitable…The humanitarian community has been left with the impossible mission of supporting more than 2 million people even as its own staff are being killed and displaced, as communication blackouts continue, as roads are damaged and convoys are shot at, and as commercial supplies vital to survival are almost non-existent”.
Please read Griffiths’ full statement from January 5, 2024. https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/war-gaza-must-end-statement-martin-griffiths-under-secretary-general-humanitarian-affairs-and-emergency-relief-coordinator-5-january-2024-enhear
Children in Gaza with such devastating injuries that their limbs have to be amputated are reduced to suffering that was common in the Civil War 170 years ago, surgeries without anesthesia. All this because of the Israeli blockade and relentless bombardment.
It is only because of dedicated journalists facing constant threat of death that the news reaches us. Somewhere between 79 and 110 journalists and media workers have been killed depending on which news source is referenced. Al Jazeera accused Israel of targeted killing of two of their journalists on Sunday.
The desperation in the voices of those coming to council and showing up on the street might best be interpreted that there are still some who hold shreds of hope that if enough people demonstrate somehow the killing of children, their parents and families in this war will stop.
Trita Parsi had this to say on Democracy Now: “I think the Biden administration made a huge miscalculation from the outset. They did not think there would be this type of backlash amongst the American public, including his own supporters, against the Israeli campaign…it appears that the conclusion in the White House is that they have already lost these votes…if they shift their position they will likely lose some of the voters that are in support of Israel’s Campaign”.
Calculation sounds like the retired generals who come on mainstream media shows to talk about war strategies in the detachment that disregards the lives and pain on the ground.
If this continues as Prime Minister Netanyahu promises and President Biden fails to use his leverage to end this war (It is American weapons, munitions and tax dollars that are used in the killing and maiming of civilians in Gaza) speeches on saving democracy to win reelection in 2024 pale in the horror of it all.
Now that two states Colorado (through the courts) and Maine (by Secretary of the State) have barred former President Trump from the primary ballot and stayed their decisions pending an appeal to the Supreme Court, the TV pundits on MSNBC and CNN have wrapped themselves into knots commenting on everything except the last sentence of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
I happen to keep a copy of the Constitution on my desk, but you can pull it up with your browser to read Section 3 for yourself.
Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United states, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. [emphasis added]
I’m not sure that I would trust Congress any more than I trust the Supreme Court. Would all the Democrats or at least enough still hold to prevent a two-thirds vote? The belief that Biden would do best in his bid for reelection against Trump is a risky position.
As the clamor grows, especially but not exclusively on the Republican side, that the voters should choose the President, has everyone ignored or forgotten that most dictators are elected? At least that is what the historians tell us.
Hitler was elected. Mussolini was elected in 1921 to the lower chamber of Italy’s parliament, the Chamber of Deputies before seizing power through the armed march on Rome in 1922 demanding to be named prime minister.
The story of Trump wanting to go to the capitol on January 6 reminded me of the descriptions of Mussolini’s march on Rome with his paramilitary Blackshirts. Trump had his militias the Oathkeepers, the Three Percenters, the violent far right Islamophobic, misogynistic hate group the Proud Boys and his true believers to fill out the mob.
Former Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) gave the warning the U.S. is “sleepwalking into dictatorship” earlier this year. (I am still on the wait list for her book at the Berkeley Library)
If we are really going to hold to the 14th Amendment Section 3, there were eight Senators and one hundred thirty-nine Representatives who voted after the insurrection against certifying the election of President Biden. Their action is more ambiguous. It might be asked did their vote against the certification of Biden as President after the insurrection fall into “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof”? With nearly every one of these 147 still in Congress (only a couple Representatives left), they are still present to make trouble the next time around. And, some of those elected Senators and Representatives actively participated in the planning of schemes to keep Trump in office.
Having just finished reading The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic by Steve Vladeck, I have little faith the Supreme Court will do anything other than ensure that Trump is on the ballot, though they do have an out by following the 14th Amendment and sending the decision to Congress.
Some months ago, when I was out gathering signatures to support daylighting the creek in the Civic Center Park. I stopped to have a long conversation with a student from Stanford. I can’t remember how our conversation drifted to books. What I do remember is his boasting about never reading books.
While each of us has our stories about how the pandemic affected and changed us, mine was, I started reading with a voracious passion and I haven’t stopped. I also started writing.
I shared with my Sunday walk partner, how grateful I am for our book club.
I’m into my fourth book on Palestine and Israel Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People The Bible by Mitri Raheb with two more started in my reading stack The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashi Khalidi and Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Target Assassinations by Ronen Bergman. The three I finished were: Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by Nathan Thrall and The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust: A Memoir by Naom Chayut.
If you asked if you could read only one, which one would I recommend, that is a hard choice. Decolonizing Palestine is absolutely the clearest, that ethnic cleansing of the Arabs from Palestine was always the plan from the earliest visions in the 1800s. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama expands the tragic bus accident into describing daily life in the West Bank. Chayut’s rambling memoir chronicles his indoctrination into Zionism and the IDF (Israel Defense Forces); how they terrorized Palestinians in the West Bank, pushed them out of their homes, destroyed their possessions, killed innocent Palestinians and shot up property for sport.
Whatever I thought about Israel decades ago when I was in high school has been washed away by coming to an understanding of Palestine, settler colonization, race and the force I didn’t consider, Christian Zionism.
Learning From the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil by Susan Newman (another book I just finished) while focusing on racism and the history of slavery in the United States and Germany’s ongoing working off the past overlaps into the conditions in Israel and Palestine. Neiman is an American who moved to Israel to work and raise her three young children and then to Berlin, Germany in 1982 where she still lives.
There is so much in the book Learning From the Germans. In Nieman’s comparison between Germany and the United States slavery and the glorification of the lost cause, she writes and asks could we imagine Germany with statues glorifying Hitler? How is it we sit in the U.S. filled with statues honoring the confederacy glorifying confederate generals and soldiers and allow the Civil War portrayed as the “lost cause”?
It was just December 27, 2023 when Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was asked at a town hall in Berlin, New Hampshire what did she believe caused the Civil War. Haley went into a lengthy response about the role of government, “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do” never mentioning slavery. The person who asked the question said he was “astonished” by the response.
As we crossed the third anniversary of the January 6th insurrection I watched some of the film of that day with the carrying of confederate flags into the capitol.
As the book comes to a close Neiman writes about leadership. It was 2019. Neiman reminds us it was the racist backlash to President Obama, our first Black president that brought us President Trump in 2016.
On Christmas Day over brunch the conversation drifted to past trips. I mentioned I was so worried about the election in 2018 that I left the country on election day to travel solo in Germany for three weeks. I wanted to understand what happened. One of my friends answered with the simple explanation people were afraid.
It’s way more complicated.
I wonder how the Republican Party of today will really look in a historical review with a cult of personality at the center, grievance politics, othering, book banning, retribution, revenge, and an embrace of authoritarianism.
I closed out my week to see for myself the shipping containers surrounding Peoples Park. I’ve never been deeply involved in Peoples Park, but as I think about it and look at it, it strikes me as small-minded leaders passing grudges from one generation of chancellors to the next and developers determined to turn the debacle into a gentrifying opportunity, a process that already has a big head start. The park was destroyed months ago with clear cutting nearly all the trees. There were other places to build.
December 22, 2023
My sister recommended the book Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights by Samuel G. Freedman. The New York Times review called the book, “Riveting… A superbly written tale of moral courage and political courage for present day readers who find themselves in similarly dark times.”
Riveting is the best word to describe Freedman’s writing. The Berkeley library has one hard copy and the Oakland library has the ebook.
My memory of Hubert Humphrey is his support of the Vietnam War, the disastrous 1968 Democratic convention and losing the 1968 presidential election to Nixon who promised to end the war and then continued it for four more years until after he was safely reelected.
Humphrey’s pivotal role on civil rights was completely lost under the weight of Vietnam.
I knew nothing about Humphrey’s early political life especially how he addressed racism and anti-Semitism in Minneapolis as mayor or how he changed history with his firm stand on civil rights in 1948. I associated the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Act signed by President Johnson in 1964. Humphrey’s place in civil rights starts long before becoming Johnson’s Vice President on January 20, 1965.
The book title comes from Humphrey’s speech on July 14, 1948 at the Democratic National Convention. The issue was not whether the delegates would nominate President Truman for a second term, but whether the Democrats would include civil rights in the official party platform. Humphrey had 10 minutes to speak for the minority and convince the delegates to support the platform on civil rights. Here is an excerpt:
“To those of you, my friends who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them, we are 172 years late.
To those who say, to those who say that this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this, that the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadows of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”
President Truman is described as not wanting the Democratic minority to win on the civil rights platform. He wanted to bury civil rights, but the party platform on civil rights forced his hand. Twelve days later on July 26, 1948, Truman issued Executive Order 9980 integrating the Federal workforce and Executive Order 9981 banning segregation in the Armed Forces.
Sunday evening, I attended what I thought would be a talk on the book Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe at Revolution Books. The organizers were thinking in terms of starting a book club. The book sold out and most of us either hadn’t read it or barely started. I was the oldest person in the room and the majority in the group were less than half my age. which was exactly the mix I was looking for.
The discussion quickly strayed.
When I added voting to the conversation and that half the country is nuts, it went as might be expected. While probably most of the people in the room were self-selected to be prone to vote third party or wondering whether to vote at all, they were not buying the necessity of voting for President Biden to keep Trump out of office though one person brought up Project 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
I’ve been watching the polling that Biden is losing the support of voters under the age of 35 and Muslim and Arab Americans over his handling of the Israel – Hamas War.
Even before reading Into the Bright Sunshine, I’ve been thinking about the election of 1968 and the impact of the Vietnam war on that election. If people sit out voting, go for one of the third parties or vote only down ballot and skip the presidential vote as they did in Michigan in 2016, we could be in big trouble. Trump could be reelected and this time around he will be surrounded by sycophants and the Project 2025 blueprint to eviscerate the government. Things could change very quickly.
I thought a lot about Trump and Netanyahu as I took notes from Jason Stanley’s book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. They both fit the fascist description; Trump with his grievance politics pledging, “[F]or those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution” and Netanyahu calling up Amalek a war of genocide in the Bible citing Deuteronomy 25:17 on October 28, 2023. https://www.christianpost.com/news/netanyahu-compares-hamas-to-amalek-rival-of-the-israelites.html
The death toll in Gaza surpassed 20,000 several days ago. Over 8000 children have been killed.
Israel’s blockade of food, water and power started weeks ago in October. The UN reports over half a million people in Gaza are starving. The entire population in Gaza is in a food crisis as Israel uses starvation as a weapon of war. There is not safe drinking water. Sewage systems were destroyed leaving sewage untreated. Gazans are squeezed into refugee camps which are under attack from bombing and ground troops. There is no safe place for the 2.2 million people of Gaza.
I read Deuteronomy 25:17 and the entire book of 1 Samuel in the 1952 Revised Standard Version of the Bible (writings on remembrance of Amalek appear in several Biblical texts). I wrote a friend after reading 1 Samuel, it was about killing, jealousy, calling up mediums to speak to the dead and sacrifices (animals on alters). The genocidal command from “The Lord” on Amalek is clearest in 1 Samuel 15:3 (Chapter 15 verse 3), “’Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them; but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass’”.
This is really something to wrap your head around.
President Biden, his administration, the State Department are aligned with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who is using passages from the Bible calling for genocide and total destruction in his rallying cry in the Israel Hamas war.
For anyone who is paying attention, there should be no doubt of the intent of Netanyahu, the Knesset and advisors. They state it openly. Whatever President Biden is credited as saying to Netanyahu to protect the civilian population is obviously brushed aside through speech and action.
When agreement in Congress couldn’t be reached on Biden’s $106 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and national security, the Biden administration bypassed Congress on December 9, 2023 “selling” 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition worth $106,000,000. There is no reporting of any conditions placed on Israel in the furnishing of weapons in the Israel Hamas war.
History did not begin with the horrific attack on October 7, 2023.
The world sees Israel as committing war crimes and those crimes grow each day as the US blocks meaningful action at the UN.
It is in this atmosphere the Berkeley City Council couldn’t bring itself to join neighboring cities in a call for a ceasefire before they all left on their winter recess.
In Bethlehem the celebration of Christmas was canceled. The nativity scene depicted the figure of an infant Jesus with a keffiyeh surrounded by rubble. Reverend Munther Isaac in Bethlehem gave this message (read or listen): https://www.democracynow.org/2023/12/26/christ_in_the_rubble_christmas_sermon
I received another email from Mayor Jesse Arreguin at 9:14 this morning titled Happy Holidays asking for contributions to his run for State Senate.
There was only one City meeting in the last week before the City’s Christmas Holiday. I kept checking the Design Review Committee (DRC) webpage hoping for the word cancelled to appear. It didn’t. I was the only member of the public to attend.
There were only two projects on the agenda 2018 Blake the six-story, multi-unit project for students in the formerly redlined block and 2587 Telegraph an eight-story 52-unit project. Both were SB 330 density bonus projects which, of course, means building bigger taller buildings than allowed through the zoning ordinance. With new Southside zoning, the project on Telegraph could actually be bigger.
I remember the Asian couple in the little house next door to 2018 Blake who appealed the project that would tower over them. They lost their appeal. What is left of the buildings at 2018 Blake still smells like smoke more than three years after the April 2020 fire.
Big tall dense housing is what the Berkeley mayor and city council, the California State Assembly, the State Senate, Buffy Wicks and Nancy Skinner champion.
As I was nosing around on the internet to confirm that the mid-block 2018 Blake project was in the formerly redlined zone, I found the website Mapping Inequality Redlining in New Deal America. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/
It was back in February 2021 when the Berkeley City Council declared it would eliminate single family zoning as single-family zoning is inherently racist. Council declared Berkeley was the first city to establish the inherently racist practice of single family zoning in 1916. If the Council had actually done their homework, they would have noticed it was not single-family zoning that created the protected white neighborhoods. It was the covenants written into deeds restricting the sale of a property to nonwhites which was first introduced in Minneapolis in 1910. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/map/MN/Minneapolis/context#loc=12/44.9726/-93.2631
Covenants didn’t fit the narrative of upzoning Berkeley to make way for multi-unit housing, mid-rises and hi-rises. Calling single family housing racist made a better story. On the evening of the council action there were many who declared their abhorrence to single-family zoning as racist and their support for multi-unit housing as the answer.
Interestingly, the YIMBYs who are vocal supporters of high-density housing are listed under YIMBY Action as one of the financial supporters of the website.
There is an icon of the US that brings up a US map with links to cities and documents.
The D4 zone in Mapping Inequality where 2018 Blake sits comes with this description from 1937. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/map/CA/Oakland/area_descriptions#loc=15/37.8681/-122.2661
“14. CLARIFYING REMARKS (3) This area of modern type bungalows was originally put on as a white subdivision. However, now Negroes have crowded in until there is only a small percentage of white remaining, most Italians. District known as ‘Negro Piedmont’. This district will never recover its original pre-Depression values. Zoned for restricted type residences except about ten blocks in the center, which are zoned for two-family residences and duplexes. This is a high grade Negro area and good loan can be made here if care is exercised.
INHABITANTS
e. Infiltration of: orientals
c. Foreign-born: Latin & Nordic; 15%
d. Negro: yes; 50%
f. Relief families: many
a. Type: store-keepers, professional Negro white-collar workers, etc.
b. Estimated annual family income 1,000 – 2,500
3. FAVORABLE INFLUENCES
Modern type cottages and bungalows prevail; homogeneous types. Convenient to recreational facilities, schools, local and San Francisco transportation and local shopping district
4. DETRIMENTAL INFLUENCES
Predominance of Negroes and Orientals. Also mixed classes of wage earners and colored professional people
2. DESCRIPTION OF TERRAIN
Level”
Under SB 330, projects are held to the standards in place at the time their applications are complete. Neither project is required to comply with the Bird Safe Ordinance though 2587 Telegraph said they were including bird safe glass for the first 36 feet of the building.
I among others felt the Bird Safe Ordinance languished at the bottom the Planning Commission to do list for years for the exact purpose of allowing developers to get their applications in first.
The architect presenting for 2018 Blake quoted the bird safe ordinance standard as 2 feet by 4 feet and said he wasn’t sure if they were required to follow it. The 2 feet by 4 feet was another deliberate slip from the Planning Department. The standard was inches, 2 inches by 4 inches, however, since birds are able to fly through tiny spaces the final ordinance passed with 2 inches by 2 inches.
Anything coming from the Planning Department requires attention to detail as DRC committee member Finacom pointed out at the start of the meeting. Finacom related to the DRC his reading of the signage ordinance and project plans for 600 Addison were correct and that staff admitted at the appeal to the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) that the presentation to DRC was in error. The DRC unknowingly approved signage for 600 Addison using flawed analysis by staff that the proposed signage fit within the City ordinance. The ZAB decided after being informed that the signage was not in compliance with the Berkeley Signage Ordinance to approve it anyway.
After citing the Bird Safe Ordinance is 2 inches not 2 feet and asking that the project to use bird safe glass, I stated that I know gray is a popular color and asked if we have to have gray buildings, that look like they are from East Germany.
The DRC did not approve the final design for 2018 Blake and asked the developer to return with a more colorful proposal and more windows.
The second project at 2587 Telegraph was approved to move on to ZAB with many suggestions for improvements. The DRC asked the project team how the neighborhood responded to the project. Mark Rhodes spoke for the project saying the neighbors weren’t happy, but they were working with them.
Eight, ten and twelve story buildings are the future for neighborhoods near commercial districts. Former Mayor Shirley Dean often relates how unhappy people were during her term as mayor with five story buildings. These days having only five stories next door looks like a gift.
After seeing so many really awful projects, 2587 Telegraph was a major improvement over what usually comes to DRC. The balconies on the Telegraph side were designed into the bulk of the project rather than hanging off the outside of the building visually breaking up the long linear building. It is a design that might work at North Berkeley BART. All the bedrooms had windows.
All of these projects come with bicycle rooms and it wasn’t clear where the increasingly popular e-scooters fit or what was being done to reduce the fire hazard from the scooter lithium ion batteries. The developer related that the Fire Marshall is now requiring bicycle rooms to be fire rated with sprinklers and scooters are not allowed in living spaces.
If you drive and haven’t been down MLK lately between Dwight and Ashby be ready for swerving lanes, pedestrian islands in the middle of the street with the rectangular rapid flashing beacons and curbs in unexpected places in the middle of the street. The flashing beacons and islands are nice for pedestrians, but it looks like there should have been better planning than traffic lanes that swerve in and out in each block. Watch out for the curbs in left turn lanes. They might cause some serious damage if you happen to be unlucky enough to hit one.
2023 is ending as the hottest year on record. It is hard to deny the impacts of climate change though some still try.
I have a protest sign in my kitchen, “Public Response Matters”. Let’s hope we heed it and 2024 turns out better than the pundits predict.
My sister recommended the book Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights by Samuel G. Freedman. The New York Times review called the book, “Riveting… A superbly written tale of moral courage and political courage for present day readers who find themselves in similarly dark times.”
Riveting is the best word to describe Freedman’s writing. The Berkeley library has one hard copy and the Oakland library has the ebook.
My memory of Hubert Humphrey is his support of the Vietnam War, the disastrous 1968 Democratic convention and losing the 1968 presidential election to Nixon who promised to end the war and then continued it for four more years until after he was safely reelected.
Humphrey’s pivotal role on civil rights was completely lost under the weight of Vietnam.
I knew nothing about Humphrey’s early political life especially how he addressed racism and anti-Semitism in Minneapolis as mayor or how he changed history with his firm stand on civil rights in 1948. I associated the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Act signed by President Johnson in 1964. Humphrey’s place in civil rights starts long before becoming Johnson’s Vice President on January 20, 1965.
The book title comes from Humphrey’s speech on July 14, 1948 at the Democratic National Convention. The issue was not whether the delegates would nominate President Truman for a second term, but whether the Democrats would include civil rights in the official party platform. Humphrey had 10 minutes to speak for the minority and convince the delegates to support the platform on civil rights. Here is an excerpt:
“To those of you, my friends who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them, we are 172 years late.
To those who say, to those who say that this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this, that the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadows of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”
President Truman is described as not wanting the Democratic minority to win on the civil rights platform. He wanted to bury civil rights, but the party platform on civil rights forced his hand. Twelve days later on July 26, 1948, Truman issued Executive Order 9980 integrating the Federal workforce and Executive Order 9981 banning segregation in the Armed Forces.
Sunday evening, I attended what I thought would be a talk on the book Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe at Revolution Books. The organizers were thinking in terms of starting a book club. The book sold out and most of us either hadn’t read it or barely started. I was the oldest person in the room and the majority in the group were less than half my age. which was exactly the mix I was looking for.
The discussion quickly strayed.
When I added voting to the conversation and that half the country is nuts, it went as might be expected. While probably most of the people in the room were self-selected to be prone to vote third party or wondering whether to vote at all, they were not buying the necessity of voting for President Biden to keep Trump out of office though one person brought up Project 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
I’ve been watching the polling that Biden is losing the support of voters under the age of 35 and Muslim and Arab Americans over his handling of the Israel – Hamas War.
Even before reading Into the Bright Sunshine, I’ve been thinking about the election of 1968 and the impact of the Vietnam war on that election. If people sit out voting, go for one of the third parties or vote only down ballot and skip the presidential vote as they did in Michigan in 2016, we could be in big trouble. Trump could be reelected and this time around he will be surrounded by sycophants and the Project 2025 blueprint to eviscerate the government. Things could change very quickly.
I thought a lot about Trump and Netanyahu as I took notes from Jason Stanley’s book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. They both fit the fascist description; Trump with his grievance politics pledging, “[F]or those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution” and Netanyahu calling up Amalek a war of genocide in the Bible citing Deuteronomy 25:17 on October 28, 2023. https://www.christianpost.com/news/netanyahu-compares-hamas-to-amalek-rival-of-the-israelites.html
The death toll in Gaza surpassed 20,000 several days ago. Over 8000 children have been killed.
Israel’s blockade of food, water and power started weeks ago in October. The UN reports over half a million people in Gaza are starving. The entire population in Gaza is in a food crisis as Israel uses starvation as a weapon of war. There is not safe drinking water. Sewage systems were destroyed leaving sewage untreated. Gazans are squeezed into refugee camps which are under attack from bombing and ground troops. There is no safe place for the 2.2 million people of Gaza.
I read Deuteronomy 25:17 and the entire book of 1 Samuel in the 1952 Revised Standard Version of the Bible (writings on remembrance of Amalek appear in several Biblical texts). I wrote a friend after reading 1 Samuel, it was about killing, jealousy, calling up mediums to speak to the dead and sacrifices (animals on alters). The genocidal command from “The Lord” on Amalek is clearest in 1 Samuel 15:3 (Chapter 15 verse 3), “’Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them; but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass’”.
This is really something to wrap your head around.
President Biden, his administration, the State Department are aligned with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who is using passages from the Bible calling for genocide and total destruction in his rallying cry in the Israel Hamas war.
For anyone who is paying attention, there should be no doubt of the intent of Netanyahu, the Knesset and advisors. They state it openly. Whatever President Biden is credited as saying to Netanyahu to protect the civilian population is obviously brushed aside through speech and action.
When agreement in Congress couldn’t be reached on Biden’s $106 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and national security, the Biden administration bypassed Congress on December 9, 2023 “selling” 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition worth $106,000,000. There is no reporting of any conditions placed on Israel in the furnishing of weapons in the Israel Hamas war.
History did not begin with the horrific attack on October 7, 2023.
The world sees Israel as committing war crimes and those crimes grow each day as the US blocks meaningful action at the UN.
It is in this atmosphere the Berkeley City Council couldn’t bring itself to join neighboring cities in a call for a ceasefire before they all left on their winter recess.
In Bethlehem the celebration of Christmas was canceled. The nativity scene depicted the figure of an infant Jesus with a keffiyeh surrounded by rubble. Reverend Munther Isaac in Bethlehem gave this message (read or listen): https://www.democracynow.org/2023/12/26/christ_in_the_rubble_christmas_sermon
I received another email from Mayor Jesse Arreguin at 9:14 this morning titled Happy Holidays asking for contributions to his run for State Senate.
There was only one City meeting in the last week before the City’s Christmas Holiday. I kept checking the Design Review Committee (DRC) webpage hoping for the word cancelled to appear. It didn’t. I was the only member of the public to attend.
There were only two projects on the agenda 2018 Blake the six-story, multi-unit project for students in the formerly redlined block and 2587 Telegraph an eight-story 52-unit project. Both were SB 330 density bonus projects which, of course, means building bigger taller buildings than allowed through the zoning ordinance. With new Southside zoning, the project on Telegraph could actually be bigger.
I remember the Asian couple in the little house next door to 2018 Blake who appealed the project that would tower over them. They lost their appeal. What is left of the buildings at 2018 Blake still smells like smoke more than three years after the April 2020 fire.
Big tall dense housing is what the Berkeley mayor and city council, the California State Assembly, the State Senate, Buffy Wicks and Nancy Skinner champion.
As I was nosing around on the internet to confirm that the mid-block 2018 Blake project was in the formerly redlined zone, I found the website Mapping Inequality Redlining in New Deal America. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/
It was back in February 2021 when the Berkeley City Council declared it would eliminate single family zoning as single-family zoning is inherently racist. Council declared Berkeley was the first city to establish the inherently racist practice of single family zoning in 1916. If the Council had actually done their homework, they would have noticed it was not single-family zoning that created the protected white neighborhoods. It was the covenants written into deeds restricting the sale of a property to nonwhites which was first introduced in Minneapolis in 1910. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/map/MN/Minneapolis/context#loc=12/44.9726/-93.2631
Covenants didn’t fit the narrative of upzoning Berkeley to make way for multi-unit housing, mid-rises and hi-rises. Calling single family housing racist made a better story. On the evening of the council action there were many who declared their abhorrence to single-family zoning as racist and their support for multi-unit housing as the answer.
Interestingly, the YIMBYs who are vocal supporters of high-density housing are listed under YIMBY Action as one of the financial supporters of the website.
There is an icon of the US that brings up a US map with links to cities and documents.
The D4 zone in Mapping Inequality where 2018 Blake sits comes with this description from 1937. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/map/CA/Oakland/area_descriptions#loc=15/37.8681/-122.2661
“14. CLARIFYING REMARKS (3) This area of modern type bungalows was originally put on as a white subdivision. However, now Negroes have crowded in until there is only a small percentage of white remaining, most Italians. District known as ‘Negro Piedmont’. This district will never recover its original pre-Depression values. Zoned for restricted type residences except about ten blocks in the center, which are zoned for two-family residences and duplexes. This is a high grade Negro area and good loan can be made here if care is exercised.
INHABITANTS
e. Infiltration of: orientals
c. Foreign-born: Latin & Nordic; 15%
d. Negro: yes; 50%
f. Relief families: many
a. Type: store-keepers, professional Negro white-collar workers, etc.
b. Estimated annual family income 1,000 – 2,500
3. FAVORABLE INFLUENCES
Modern type cottages and bungalows prevail; homogeneous types. Convenient to recreational facilities, schools, local and San Francisco transportation and local shopping district
4. DETRIMENTAL INFLUENCES
Predominance of Negroes and Orientals. Also mixed classes of wage earners and colored professional people
2. DESCRIPTION OF TERRAIN
Level”
Under SB 330, projects are held to the standards in place at the time their applications are complete. Neither project is required to comply with the Bird Safe Ordinance though 2587 Telegraph said they were including bird safe glass for the first 36 feet of the building.
I among others felt the Bird Safe Ordinance languished at the bottom the Planning Commission to do list for years for the exact purpose of allowing developers to get their applications in first.
The architect presenting for 2018 Blake quoted the bird safe ordinance standard as 2 feet by 4 feet and said he wasn’t sure if they were required to follow it. The 2 feet by 4 feet was another deliberate slip from the Planning Department. The standard was inches, 2 inches by 4 inches, however, since birds are able to fly through tiny spaces the final ordinance passed with 2 inches by 2 inches.
Anything coming from the Planning Department requires attention to detail as DRC committee member Finacom pointed out at the start of the meeting. Finacom related to the DRC his reading of the signage ordinance and project plans for 600 Addison were correct and that staff admitted at the appeal to the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) that the presentation to DRC was in error. The DRC unknowingly approved signage for 600 Addison using flawed analysis by staff that the proposed signage fit within the City ordinance. The ZAB decided after being informed that the signage was not in compliance with the Berkeley Signage Ordinance to approve it anyway.
After citing the Bird Safe Ordinance is 2 inches not 2 feet and asking that the project to use bird safe glass, I stated that I know gray is a popular color and asked if we have to have gray buildings, that look like they are from East Germany.
The DRC did not approve the final design for 2018 Blake and asked the developer to return with a more colorful proposal and more windows.
The second project at 2587 Telegraph was approved to move on to ZAB with many suggestions for improvements. The DRC asked the project team how the neighborhood responded to the project. Mark Rhodes spoke for the project saying the neighbors weren’t happy, but they were working with them.
Eight, ten and twelve story buildings are the future for neighborhoods near commercial districts. Former Mayor Shirley Dean often relates how unhappy people were during her term as mayor with five story buildings. These days having only five stories next door looks like a gift.
After seeing so many really awful projects, 2587 Telegraph was a major improvement over what usually comes to DRC. The balconies on the Telegraph side were designed into the bulk of the project rather than hanging off the outside of the building visually breaking up the long linear building. It is a design that might work at North Berkeley BART. All the bedrooms had windows.
All of these projects come with bicycle rooms and it wasn’t clear where the increasingly popular e-scooters fit or what was being done to reduce the fire hazard from the scooter lithium ion batteries. The developer related that the Fire Marshall is now requiring bicycle rooms to be fire rated with sprinklers and scooters are not allowed in living spaces.
If you drive and haven’t been down MLK lately between Dwight and Ashby be ready for swerving lanes, pedestrian islands in the middle of the street with the rectangular rapid flashing beacons and curbs in unexpected places in the middle of the street. The flashing beacons and islands are nice for pedestrians, but it looks like there should have been better planning than traffic lanes that swerve in and out in each block. Watch out for the curbs in left turn lanes. They might cause some serious damage if you happen to be unlucky enough to hit one.
2023 is ending as the hottest year on record. It is hard to deny the impacts of climate change though some still try.
I have a protest sign in my kitchen, “Public Response Matters”. Let’s hope we heed it and 2024 turns out better than the pundits predict.
December 17, 2023
With City Council on winter recess and most of the meetings for the year over, I turned on the audiobook version of McKay Coppins’ book Romney: A Reckoning and finished it in 2 ½ days while I put off writing and cleaned the house; which tells you where housing cleaning fell during the months of attending City meetings and writing about them.
No matter how we view Romney the closing comments from the author center on what I so often consider when I observe and write about our local politics and elected officials. What drives their actions and where do their actions fit with what they professed to stand for when we voted for them.
From McCay Coppins:
“Romney tells me he has been thinking about a question I asked when we first started meeting, I wanted to know if he thought there were any lessons in his story that future political leaders might take…he knows no one emerges from politics free of regret. These days when he speaks to student groups his frequent piece of advice is to not sacrifice their integrity at the altar of ambition, It’s not worth it he tells them. Believe me.
I once asked him if he would have taken the same lonely principled vote to convict Trump if he had been put in the same position thirty years earlier he answered, I don’t know the answer to that. I think I recognize now my capacity to rationalize decisions that are in my self interest and I don’t know that I recognized that to the same degree back then.
At a moment when courage is in vanishing short supply in politics it is worth considering what made Romney finally choose to do the right thing instead of the convenient one and whether the phenomenon can be replicated. Romney tells me he thinks the key is to get political leaders to think more deeply and more often about how they’ll be remembered when they are gone. You can rationalize anything when the only thought is how it will play in the next election…”
As of December 16, Mayor Arreguin and four Berkeley City Councilmembers are running for something. The council terms of Terry Taplin, Ben Bartlett, Sophie Hahn and Susan Wengraf all expire November 30, 2024. Wengraf announced she is retiring. Hahn is running for mayor as are Harrison and Robinson. Bartlett is running for Alameda County Supervisor against eight others. If Bartlett doesn’t make the top two in the primary, he can run to retain his council seat in November. The closing date to declare being a candidate for mayor or city council is August 9, 2023. Arreguin is running for State Senate against four others. Ernesto Falcon dropped out four days ago.
By the end of Sunday, December 10, 2023 Councilmembers Bartlett, Robinson and Taplin had backpedaled and withdrawn their resolutions from December 7. Bartlett and Robinson called for a ceasefire and Taplin called for an end to hostilities in the Hamas – Israel war. Hahn had sent her email that none of these resolutions “…will ever - appear on a Council Agenda prior to Tuesday’s meeting…I am calling on my Council colleagues to stand firm and refuse to place any resolutions on our Agenda as Urgency Items…” and then called for us to write emails and attend the December 12th council meeting to oppose a resolution.
While I’ve been staring at this Diary, the number of Palestinian journalists and media workers killed in the Hamas - Israel war has grown to 97.
I’ve been into records online reading through letters sent to council on the Hamas – Israel war. The emails sent to take no action on a ceasefire resolution far outnumber the emails for a ceasefire resolution. It is the opposite in the people showing up to the council meetings. The vocal in-person attendees support a ceasefire resolution in overwhelming numbers.
I’ve been thinking about the City of Berkeley’s Land Acknowledgement Statement:
The City of Berkeley recognizes that the community we live in was built on the territory of xučyun (Huchiun (Hooch-yoon)), the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo (Cho-chen-yo)-speaking Ohlone (Oh-low-nee) people, the ancestors and descendants of the sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to all of the Ohlone Tribes and descendants of the Verona Band. As we begin our meeting tonight, we acknowledge and honor the original inhabitants of Berkeley, the documented 5,000-year history of a vibrant community at the West Berkeley Shellmound, and the Ohlone people who continue to reside in the East Bay. We recognize that Berkeley’s residents have and continue to benefit from the use and occupation of this unceded stolen land since the City of Berkeley’s incorporation in 1878. As stewards of the laws regulating the City of Berkeley, it is not only vital that we recognize the history of this land, but also recognize that the Ohlone people are present members of Berkeley and other East Bay communities today. The City of Berkeley will continue to build relationships with the Lisjan Tribe and to create meaningful actions that uphold the intention of this land acknowledgement.
Would we see Gaza and the Palestinians differently if the City of Berkeley was replaced with Israel and the inhabitants of the land was replaced with Palestinians? That is the Nakba, the catastrophe, the 750,000 Palestinians removed from their homes, their land to create the nation of Israel in 1948.
History gets complicated overridden with myths, religious beliefs, guilt and fear over the Holocaust, what is erased and revised, and power. History did not start with the horror of October 7, 2023.
What is not complicated is the killing must stop. The genocide must stop. The ethnic cleansing must stop. The liquidation of Gaza must stop. The murder of Palestinians in the West Bank must stop. The killing of Israelis must stop.
It wasn’t the deaths of over 18,000 Palestinians of whom over 7000 were children that brought Germany and the UK to change their minds to call for a sustainable ceasefire, it was the IDF (Israel Defense Force) shooting and killing on Friday three shirtless unarmed October 7 hostages bearing a white makeshift flag calling in Hebrew for help.
Masha Gessen still received the literary Hannah Arendt Prize in Germany, but her comparison of Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto in her article in the New Yorker “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” was viewed as so controversial in Germany that two sponsors withdrew their support of the large ceremony. The literary prize was awarded at a private dinner ceremony as possible venues slipped away.
Gessen’s article is long and at this time when feelings are so hot over the Hamas - Israel war, it should be at the top of your reading list. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust
On December 5, 2023 The House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” in a vote of 311 to 14 with 92 Democrats voting present and 95 supporting it.
The Land Acknowledgement is the work of Councilmember Sophie Hahn.
The recitation of the Land Acknowledgement has turned into a ritual that carries little with it. There will eventually be the Turtle Island Monument placed on top of the fountain in Civic Center Park.
When I suggested at a meeting of the Community for a Cultural Civic Center (the group coordinated by John Caner, on restoring the Maudelle Shirek and Veterans Buildings and revitalizing the Civic Center Park) that the Lisjan should have space in the Maudelle Shirek Building that suggestion fell flat.
I chose to stay home and sign in on zoom for the Tuesday City Council double header expecting a late night. The special meeting on the Objective Design Standards for the North Berkeley BART Housing project started at 3 pm followed with the regular meeting at 6 pm with the Annual Appropriations Ordinance (AAO#1 aka the first midyear budget adjustment).
Of the twenty speakers on non-agenda items at the regular meeting nineteen addressed the Hamas - Israel war. One asked for a dialogue, five opposed a resolution and thirteen asked for a ceasefire.
In a change from previous meetings, Arreguin allowed forty-five minutes for public comment by in person attendees on the consent calendar. All but three speakers wrapped their call for a ceasefire to items on the consent calendar (the City Clerk counted 36 commenters). The forty-five minutes ended with a roll call vote on the consent calendar and adjourned at 7:39 pm. The Annual Appropriations Ordinance had been moved to consent without discussion. The City Manager withdrew the item on Berkeley High School staff parking.
At the 3 pm meeting on the North Berkeley BART Housing project the neighbors requested that Council approve the original objective design standards. They used the word betrayal over and over in describing what happened after all the community meetings including the September 11 open house and what was now before Council for the final vote. There were other speakers who asked council to approve the standards as proposed by staff and the Planning Commission.
When it comes to the large housing projects the divide is stark between the YIMBYs and like groups that push for maximum density everywhere and neighbors next door to the large projects who want projects to blend not towers.
On September 11, 2023, I attended the presentation and open house with City staff and the project developers North Berkeley Housing Partners on the proposed design for the North Berkeley BART Housing project. There were some people who were unhappy, but I thought the plan looked terrific especially after seeing so many projects at the Design Review Committee designed for students with bedrooms without windows.
The pictures showed an open parklike space in the center, setbacks from the sidewalk for plants and trees, major breaks in the long facades giving the units light and air plus a more pleasing blending into the setting of surrounding single family predominately one-story homes.
By October 18, when the objective design standards came to the Planning Commission, North Berkeley Housing Partners had a turn around with the support of the commission for big boxy buildings with smaller setbacks from the sidewalk and maximizing density. Commissioner Alfred Twu suggested the visual breaks through ornamentation. That was set at 5% of the wall on 200 linear feet. The major breaks that guaranteed lots of natural light into living spaces were gone.
Whatever is built at the North Berkeley BART site will be here for decades. Unlike so many projects, the housing at the BART stations is on public land. The developer is not buying the land.
Harrison and Hahn made a substitute motion to bring back these separations at least in the market rate buildings. Wengraf joined. Wengraf’s concern was the setback, the distance from the sidewalk to the ground floor units. They lost. The vote to accept the Planning Department / Planning Commission recommendation with the big boxy buildings with reduced setbacks for maximum density won in an eight to one vote. Harrison abstained.
Berkeley is in a building binge. I often wonder who is going to occupy all these buildings. California’s population is in decline and given the current stand on immigration it is likely to stay that way.
Berkeley’s population is bolstered by the ever increasing UC Berkeley student body. And, the elected are pinning their hopes on expansion in West Berkeley into research and development. Those jobs are seen as the kind of work that can’t be done remotely.
Monday morning was double booked with the Budget and Finance Committee finalizing the Annual Appropriations Ordinance (AAO#1 aka mid-year budget adjustment) and the Health, Life, Enrichment, Equity & Community Committee meeting on two different proposals for the Chess Club.
Arreguin’s proposal for the AAO#1 looked reasonable, the best outcome given the limitations. There were a few things added, Harrison’s request for $6,000 for mentoring Berkeley youth and violence prevention, Harrison’s request for $450,000 of the TNC tax (tax on lyft, Uber) for traffic calming, $50,000 for a prevailing wage study for the Southside and an increase from $2 million to $3 million for COVID hero pay for City staff who worked through the pandemic. Harrison and Arreguin approved the amended AAO#1. Kesarwani abstained.
The Health, Life Enrichment Committee with members Hahn as chair, Humbert and Bartlett blended the two proposals for the Chess Club. Humbert stated he was opposed to any fee reduction and opposed “directing” the City Manager to do anything. Hahn had to explain to Humbert the difference and use of “refer” and “direct” in the committee recommendation and why a permanent installation was less work and less expensive for the City.
The recommendation which in the end was approved by all three committee members included a referral for citywide chess and game facilities program, to explore the development of a parklet at or near the Telegraph and Haste intersection and to direct the City Manager to pause additional fees and to achieve an agreement on maintenance and improvements at 2454 Telegraph in exchange for a reduction/waiver of accumulated fees. The fees (penalties) are somewhere between $70,000 and $100,000 for the Chess Club using the open plaza in front of the former Cody’s books to gather to play chess.
The Telegraph Triangle at the intersection of Dwight and Telegraph keeps coming up in conversations as an alternative site. The Chess Club opposes that site referencing the amount of traffic.
I took a look at the Telegraph/Dwight Triangle. It was larger than I remembered it, but the thought of sitting there for a couple of hours while traffic whizzes by is definitely very unappealing. Thankfully, it was not listed in the recommendation.
The Zoning Adjustment Board was the last City meeting of the week on my schedule. I didn’t record what time it ended, but I think it might have been around 7:30 pm, certainly well before 8 pm. I was attending the Citizens for East Shore Parks where I am a board member and glanced at the captions often enough to see that three lone projects all passed on consent.
The 1287 Gilman to establish a wine bar passed with a continuation to date uncertain, 2573 Shattuck will become a veterinary clinic and 2800 MLK Jr Way will be converted into a duplex.
2800 MLK Jr Way is not new construction as it is an addition to an existing single-family home and is therefore not subject to the Natural Gas Ban. This is so unfortunate. The project essentially guts the existing family home to turn it into a duplex. It is the perfect time to convert it to 100% electric.
At the last Berkeley Neighborhoods Council (BNC) we heard the presentation on the Building Emissions Saving Ordinance (BESO) from City staff. I am always frustrated after sitting through these presentations. They never seem to go any further than flowery talk. I’ve heard way too many times how the BESO surveys/assessments at time of sale are going to improve and then the next time it is the same story.
That was followed with an introduction to the San Pablo Avenue Specific Plan. When someone asked the presenter from the City how this plan fit with San Pablo as an evacuation route, he responded back that San Pablo wasn’t a fire zone so therefore San Pablo wasn’t an evacuation route.
City staff would do a lot better if they came to BNC better informed. San Pablo is an evacuation and emergency access route plainly visible on the Berkeley City map, which several members posted in the chat.
Enough for this sitting. There will be more next time, but it might not appear until after the holidays.
With City Council on winter recess and most of the meetings for the year over, I turned on the audiobook version of McKay Coppins’ book Romney: A Reckoning and finished it in 2 ½ days while I put off writing and cleaned the house; which tells you where housing cleaning fell during the months of attending City meetings and writing about them.
No matter how we view Romney the closing comments from the author center on what I so often consider when I observe and write about our local politics and elected officials. What drives their actions and where do their actions fit with what they professed to stand for when we voted for them.
From McCay Coppins:
“Romney tells me he has been thinking about a question I asked when we first started meeting, I wanted to know if he thought there were any lessons in his story that future political leaders might take…he knows no one emerges from politics free of regret. These days when he speaks to student groups his frequent piece of advice is to not sacrifice their integrity at the altar of ambition, It’s not worth it he tells them. Believe me.
I once asked him if he would have taken the same lonely principled vote to convict Trump if he had been put in the same position thirty years earlier he answered, I don’t know the answer to that. I think I recognize now my capacity to rationalize decisions that are in my self interest and I don’t know that I recognized that to the same degree back then.
At a moment when courage is in vanishing short supply in politics it is worth considering what made Romney finally choose to do the right thing instead of the convenient one and whether the phenomenon can be replicated. Romney tells me he thinks the key is to get political leaders to think more deeply and more often about how they’ll be remembered when they are gone. You can rationalize anything when the only thought is how it will play in the next election…”
As of December 16, Mayor Arreguin and four Berkeley City Councilmembers are running for something. The council terms of Terry Taplin, Ben Bartlett, Sophie Hahn and Susan Wengraf all expire November 30, 2024. Wengraf announced she is retiring. Hahn is running for mayor as are Harrison and Robinson. Bartlett is running for Alameda County Supervisor against eight others. If Bartlett doesn’t make the top two in the primary, he can run to retain his council seat in November. The closing date to declare being a candidate for mayor or city council is August 9, 2023. Arreguin is running for State Senate against four others. Ernesto Falcon dropped out four days ago.
By the end of Sunday, December 10, 2023 Councilmembers Bartlett, Robinson and Taplin had backpedaled and withdrawn their resolutions from December 7. Bartlett and Robinson called for a ceasefire and Taplin called for an end to hostilities in the Hamas – Israel war. Hahn had sent her email that none of these resolutions “…will ever - appear on a Council Agenda prior to Tuesday’s meeting…I am calling on my Council colleagues to stand firm and refuse to place any resolutions on our Agenda as Urgency Items…” and then called for us to write emails and attend the December 12th council meeting to oppose a resolution.
While I’ve been staring at this Diary, the number of Palestinian journalists and media workers killed in the Hamas - Israel war has grown to 97.
I’ve been into records online reading through letters sent to council on the Hamas – Israel war. The emails sent to take no action on a ceasefire resolution far outnumber the emails for a ceasefire resolution. It is the opposite in the people showing up to the council meetings. The vocal in-person attendees support a ceasefire resolution in overwhelming numbers.
I’ve been thinking about the City of Berkeley’s Land Acknowledgement Statement:
The City of Berkeley recognizes that the community we live in was built on the territory of xučyun (Huchiun (Hooch-yoon)), the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo (Cho-chen-yo)-speaking Ohlone (Oh-low-nee) people, the ancestors and descendants of the sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to all of the Ohlone Tribes and descendants of the Verona Band. As we begin our meeting tonight, we acknowledge and honor the original inhabitants of Berkeley, the documented 5,000-year history of a vibrant community at the West Berkeley Shellmound, and the Ohlone people who continue to reside in the East Bay. We recognize that Berkeley’s residents have and continue to benefit from the use and occupation of this unceded stolen land since the City of Berkeley’s incorporation in 1878. As stewards of the laws regulating the City of Berkeley, it is not only vital that we recognize the history of this land, but also recognize that the Ohlone people are present members of Berkeley and other East Bay communities today. The City of Berkeley will continue to build relationships with the Lisjan Tribe and to create meaningful actions that uphold the intention of this land acknowledgement.
Would we see Gaza and the Palestinians differently if the City of Berkeley was replaced with Israel and the inhabitants of the land was replaced with Palestinians? That is the Nakba, the catastrophe, the 750,000 Palestinians removed from their homes, their land to create the nation of Israel in 1948.
History gets complicated overridden with myths, religious beliefs, guilt and fear over the Holocaust, what is erased and revised, and power. History did not start with the horror of October 7, 2023.
What is not complicated is the killing must stop. The genocide must stop. The ethnic cleansing must stop. The liquidation of Gaza must stop. The murder of Palestinians in the West Bank must stop. The killing of Israelis must stop.
It wasn’t the deaths of over 18,000 Palestinians of whom over 7000 were children that brought Germany and the UK to change their minds to call for a sustainable ceasefire, it was the IDF (Israel Defense Force) shooting and killing on Friday three shirtless unarmed October 7 hostages bearing a white makeshift flag calling in Hebrew for help.
Masha Gessen still received the literary Hannah Arendt Prize in Germany, but her comparison of Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto in her article in the New Yorker “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” was viewed as so controversial in Germany that two sponsors withdrew their support of the large ceremony. The literary prize was awarded at a private dinner ceremony as possible venues slipped away.
Gessen’s article is long and at this time when feelings are so hot over the Hamas - Israel war, it should be at the top of your reading list. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust
On December 5, 2023 The House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” in a vote of 311 to 14 with 92 Democrats voting present and 95 supporting it.
The Land Acknowledgement is the work of Councilmember Sophie Hahn.
The recitation of the Land Acknowledgement has turned into a ritual that carries little with it. There will eventually be the Turtle Island Monument placed on top of the fountain in Civic Center Park.
When I suggested at a meeting of the Community for a Cultural Civic Center (the group coordinated by John Caner, on restoring the Maudelle Shirek and Veterans Buildings and revitalizing the Civic Center Park) that the Lisjan should have space in the Maudelle Shirek Building that suggestion fell flat.
I chose to stay home and sign in on zoom for the Tuesday City Council double header expecting a late night. The special meeting on the Objective Design Standards for the North Berkeley BART Housing project started at 3 pm followed with the regular meeting at 6 pm with the Annual Appropriations Ordinance (AAO#1 aka the first midyear budget adjustment).
Of the twenty speakers on non-agenda items at the regular meeting nineteen addressed the Hamas - Israel war. One asked for a dialogue, five opposed a resolution and thirteen asked for a ceasefire.
In a change from previous meetings, Arreguin allowed forty-five minutes for public comment by in person attendees on the consent calendar. All but three speakers wrapped their call for a ceasefire to items on the consent calendar (the City Clerk counted 36 commenters). The forty-five minutes ended with a roll call vote on the consent calendar and adjourned at 7:39 pm. The Annual Appropriations Ordinance had been moved to consent without discussion. The City Manager withdrew the item on Berkeley High School staff parking.
At the 3 pm meeting on the North Berkeley BART Housing project the neighbors requested that Council approve the original objective design standards. They used the word betrayal over and over in describing what happened after all the community meetings including the September 11 open house and what was now before Council for the final vote. There were other speakers who asked council to approve the standards as proposed by staff and the Planning Commission.
When it comes to the large housing projects the divide is stark between the YIMBYs and like groups that push for maximum density everywhere and neighbors next door to the large projects who want projects to blend not towers.
On September 11, 2023, I attended the presentation and open house with City staff and the project developers North Berkeley Housing Partners on the proposed design for the North Berkeley BART Housing project. There were some people who were unhappy, but I thought the plan looked terrific especially after seeing so many projects at the Design Review Committee designed for students with bedrooms without windows.
The pictures showed an open parklike space in the center, setbacks from the sidewalk for plants and trees, major breaks in the long facades giving the units light and air plus a more pleasing blending into the setting of surrounding single family predominately one-story homes.
By October 18, when the objective design standards came to the Planning Commission, North Berkeley Housing Partners had a turn around with the support of the commission for big boxy buildings with smaller setbacks from the sidewalk and maximizing density. Commissioner Alfred Twu suggested the visual breaks through ornamentation. That was set at 5% of the wall on 200 linear feet. The major breaks that guaranteed lots of natural light into living spaces were gone.
Whatever is built at the North Berkeley BART site will be here for decades. Unlike so many projects, the housing at the BART stations is on public land. The developer is not buying the land.
Harrison and Hahn made a substitute motion to bring back these separations at least in the market rate buildings. Wengraf joined. Wengraf’s concern was the setback, the distance from the sidewalk to the ground floor units. They lost. The vote to accept the Planning Department / Planning Commission recommendation with the big boxy buildings with reduced setbacks for maximum density won in an eight to one vote. Harrison abstained.
Berkeley is in a building binge. I often wonder who is going to occupy all these buildings. California’s population is in decline and given the current stand on immigration it is likely to stay that way.
Berkeley’s population is bolstered by the ever increasing UC Berkeley student body. And, the elected are pinning their hopes on expansion in West Berkeley into research and development. Those jobs are seen as the kind of work that can’t be done remotely.
Monday morning was double booked with the Budget and Finance Committee finalizing the Annual Appropriations Ordinance (AAO#1 aka mid-year budget adjustment) and the Health, Life, Enrichment, Equity & Community Committee meeting on two different proposals for the Chess Club.
Arreguin’s proposal for the AAO#1 looked reasonable, the best outcome given the limitations. There were a few things added, Harrison’s request for $6,000 for mentoring Berkeley youth and violence prevention, Harrison’s request for $450,000 of the TNC tax (tax on lyft, Uber) for traffic calming, $50,000 for a prevailing wage study for the Southside and an increase from $2 million to $3 million for COVID hero pay for City staff who worked through the pandemic. Harrison and Arreguin approved the amended AAO#1. Kesarwani abstained.
The Health, Life Enrichment Committee with members Hahn as chair, Humbert and Bartlett blended the two proposals for the Chess Club. Humbert stated he was opposed to any fee reduction and opposed “directing” the City Manager to do anything. Hahn had to explain to Humbert the difference and use of “refer” and “direct” in the committee recommendation and why a permanent installation was less work and less expensive for the City.
The recommendation which in the end was approved by all three committee members included a referral for citywide chess and game facilities program, to explore the development of a parklet at or near the Telegraph and Haste intersection and to direct the City Manager to pause additional fees and to achieve an agreement on maintenance and improvements at 2454 Telegraph in exchange for a reduction/waiver of accumulated fees. The fees (penalties) are somewhere between $70,000 and $100,000 for the Chess Club using the open plaza in front of the former Cody’s books to gather to play chess.
The Telegraph Triangle at the intersection of Dwight and Telegraph keeps coming up in conversations as an alternative site. The Chess Club opposes that site referencing the amount of traffic.
I took a look at the Telegraph/Dwight Triangle. It was larger than I remembered it, but the thought of sitting there for a couple of hours while traffic whizzes by is definitely very unappealing. Thankfully, it was not listed in the recommendation.
The Zoning Adjustment Board was the last City meeting of the week on my schedule. I didn’t record what time it ended, but I think it might have been around 7:30 pm, certainly well before 8 pm. I was attending the Citizens for East Shore Parks where I am a board member and glanced at the captions often enough to see that three lone projects all passed on consent.
The 1287 Gilman to establish a wine bar passed with a continuation to date uncertain, 2573 Shattuck will become a veterinary clinic and 2800 MLK Jr Way will be converted into a duplex.
2800 MLK Jr Way is not new construction as it is an addition to an existing single-family home and is therefore not subject to the Natural Gas Ban. This is so unfortunate. The project essentially guts the existing family home to turn it into a duplex. It is the perfect time to convert it to 100% electric.
At the last Berkeley Neighborhoods Council (BNC) we heard the presentation on the Building Emissions Saving Ordinance (BESO) from City staff. I am always frustrated after sitting through these presentations. They never seem to go any further than flowery talk. I’ve heard way too many times how the BESO surveys/assessments at time of sale are going to improve and then the next time it is the same story.
That was followed with an introduction to the San Pablo Avenue Specific Plan. When someone asked the presenter from the City how this plan fit with San Pablo as an evacuation route, he responded back that San Pablo wasn’t a fire zone so therefore San Pablo wasn’t an evacuation route.
City staff would do a lot better if they came to BNC better informed. San Pablo is an evacuation and emergency access route plainly visible on the Berkeley City map, which several members posted in the chat.
Enough for this sitting. There will be more next time, but it might not appear until after the holidays.
December 10, 2023
Monday feels like it was a month ago. There is so much to cover and I can’t take my eyes off the Israel – Hamas War and the genocide and domicide (destruction of housing) in Gaza. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/07/widespread-destruction-in-gaza-puts-concept-of-domicide-in-focus
Monday evening the Rent Stabilization Board passed a ceasefire resolution in a 7 to 1 vote. Stefan Elgstrand who works in Mayor Arreguin’s office voted no on the ceasefire resolution after reading a statement that the resolution was outside the scope of the Rent Board in the City Charter and the Rent Stabilization Ordinance. Elgstrand did vote for the resolution to allow landlords to provide temporary, below-market rental housing in Berkeley for Palestinian, Israeli and Ukrainian refugees. Andy Kelley was absent.
City Council is yet to act, but there has been some movement since the Tuesday evening council meeting.
Councilmembers Rigel Robinson, Ben Bartlett and Terry Taplin all published their version of resolutions on the Israel-Hamas war on X (formerly twitter) on December 7, 2023. Bartlett and Robinson made it plain they were calling for a ceasefire. Taplin wrote “cessation of hostilities” instead of ceasefire which makes it sound like there is a squabble back and forth.
The death toll of Palestinians increases by hundreds daily. On Friday December 8, 2023 the Ministry of Health in Gaza reported that 17,177 people including 7,112 Children had been killed and 46,000 wounded since the Israeli-Hamas conflict started on October 7. In the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian death toll is 266 with 3,365 wounded. The Israeli army said that 1,147 people on the Israeli side have died including 418 soldiers.
If the US suffered the same amount of deaths as those in Gaza in the two months since the Israel- Hamas War started it would be 2,542,368 people of whom 1,056,480 are children killed and 68,160,000 wounded. This is not a squabble. We are watching a genocide and deliberate acts by Israel that look to be the full intention to leave Gaza uninhabitable.
What sticks in my mind is the September 22, 2023 Prime Minister Netanyahu address to the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) using a map of “The New Middle East”. Just fifteen days before the horrific attack by Hamas on Israel, Netanyahu gave a speech using a map of Israel from the river to the sea with an end to Gaza and the West Bank. https://www.commondreams.org/news/netanyahu-map
I cannot count six votes to get to get a resolution for a ceasefire on the Berkeley City Council agenda on the 12th and I can’t get to five to pass a resolution. Now at least three councilmembers have formally posted a resolution. Harrison declared support for a ceasefire in an October 20 Facebook post.
Councilmembers Rashi Kesarwani and Mark Humbert would have to stand in opposition to Mayor Arreguin for any resolution to pass. Unless Arreguin and councilmembers Sophie Hahn and Susan Wengraf move off their published stands against a ceasefire resolution, this is going nowhere.
This will make an interesting mayor’s race. Robinson, Hahn and Harrison are all running. In one of the many posts I have watched and heard is, “In November we will remember”.
Today, December 8, 2023, the U.S. vetoed the UN security council on an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. The vote was 13 in favor, US against and the UK abstained.
On today’s Joe Scarborough show, the closest the show got to the horrific suffering in Gaza was to say the US is asking Israel to do more to protect civilians, President Biden is pressuring Netanyahu to let more aid into Gaza and the IDF is moving further into the southern part of Gaza on a mission to destroy Hamas. That was followed with an interview with a released hostage going back to her kibbutz being shocked by the destruction and delighted to find her cat.
If Scarborough and like shows are someone’s only source of news, they would never know of the horror in Gaza.
You will not hear on Scarborough that 1,900,000 Palestinians 85% of the population in Gaza are displaced where 30% of the Ukrainians have been displaced by the Russian invasion or the shear scope of destruction from the Israeli bombing of northern Gaza in just two months turning whole neighborhoods into rubble. That news comes from science and journalism elsewhere. https://tinyurl.com/9wvux3k2
The toll on journalists has been heavy. Sixty-three journalists and media workers have been confirmed killed, 56 Palestinians, 4 Israeli and 3 Lebanese.
Mainstream news has always been from the pro-Israel perspective and there are still shows with that line, but younger anchors, more diverse anchors aren’t holding that line.
My current book is from the Palestinian perspective. I’m just a third of the way through The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi one of the foremost historians on the Middle East writes from both archival research and family history which in my reading last night included a deep description of the Nakba. Palestinians were forced off their land, losing their homes, businesses, source of income and scattered into neighboring Arab countries without identity, passports, or papers. Families split as they fled. The Palestinians were expelled from the life they knew as their homes were turned into the new Jewish state.
Back to the City.
The council chambers were packed Tuesday evening with a determined crowd calling for a ceasefire. Nineteen of the twenty speakers allowed to speak on non-agenda items called for the Council to pass a resolution for a ceasefire. Only one spoke against a ceasefire.
December 5 was the first meeting of the month, which gives time to representatives of the Unions to speak and speak they did. Jose Guerrero reported union workers are still waiting for back pay from PEPRA (Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act) amendment with the City. Unbelievable, this has been going on for more than two years. No wonder there are problems with filling positions. Then we heard from Andrea Mullarky speaking for SEIU 1021 representing 60,000 workers that last month the executive board endorsed the movement of a ceasefire. Last Julia Heath from Local 1 spoke to City action resulting in the loss of Liam Garland as Director of Public Works a respected leader.
At times the crowd was disruptive and breaks were taken, but the Council did not exit to conduct business in another room as in previous meetings. Watching from home on zoom, during breaks to regain order Taplin, Bartlett and Harrison could be seen speaking to attendees.
Then it went back to public comment on the consent calendar.
The members of the public wrapped their comments on a ceasefire to agenda items. When it came to Taplin’s item 10 to name the Berkeley Pier after Nancy Skinner, speakers had plenty of suggestions Gus Newport, the Ohlone People, moral courage, justice, ceasefire, the Gaza Palestine Pier, the brave journalists in Gaza who are reporting on the ground, and
Marek Edelman leader in the Warsaw Ghetto who was a lifelong anti-Zionist and stood in solidarity with the Palestinians as fellow resistance fighters, and
James Baldwin was suggested and the speaker read from Balwin’s writing on Jews and Palestinians, and
Shireen Abu Akleh, American Palestinian, one of the most prominent journalists across the Middle East and Palestinian territories who was targeted and killed by Israeli forces while reporting from the West Bank on May 11, 2022. The day of her death was the same day Arreguin left for his trip to Israel sponsored by Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco.
The Consent Calendar was finally approved with the naming of the Berkeley Pier will go to the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission, Harrison’s item on deconstruction was withdrawn, Harrison’s item on traffic calming went to the Budget Committee and the City Manager withdrew the Public Safety Status Report to be rescheduled.
In the motion to adjourn the council meeting, Kesarwani, Bartlett, Hahn, Wengraf, Robinson, and Humbert all voted yes, Taplin voted no and Harrison abstained.
The most significant outcome of the December 4, Monday morning Land Use, Housing & Economic Development Committee was that when Harrison who was filling in for Bartlett asked that her item on the Community/Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) be scheduled for the next meeting, Robinson as the Chair declined making a firm no. The due date to act on TOPA is May 13, 2024 which means that if Robinson keeps TOPA off the agenda, Arreguin who is running for the State Senate seat District 7 won’t have to vote/take a stand on TOPA until after the primary in March.
TOPA has had a long tumultuous history in Berkeley. The earliest date I could find where TOPA was presented to the public in a readily available full Council meeting or Council Committee meeting going back to 2019 was at the Land Use Committee meeting on March 5, 2020. On that date there were 61 speakers and the due date for action was extended to January 21, 2021
When a multi-unit building goes up for sale TOPA gives tenants the first right of refusal to purchase the property. Tenants especially those who have experienced being in a building that was sold are enthusiastic about being notified that a plan to sell is in process and being given the first opportunity to purchase the building. The Chamber of Commerce, the real estate industry, investors, property owners are opposed to TOPA.
After multiple committee meetings, there was a special full council special meeting on just TOPA on January 27, 2022. Discussion was held there were 78 speakers and then it disappeared.
Harrison brought it back. TOPA was listed in the council draft agenda for November 28, 2023 until Wengraf, Hahn and Arreguin voted at the Agenda and Rules Committee to remove TOPA from the agenda for the full council meeting and send TOPA to the Land Use Committee where it now looks like it will languish as long as possible or at least until Arreguin has secured his position in the primary election to be on the ballot for November for that State Senate seat.
Kathryn Lybarger received the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club endorsement not Arreguin after last Saturday’s forum.
The one Land Use Committee agenda item was from Rigel Robinson. It was Neighborhood-Scale Commercial, refer to city manager and Planning Commission to consider policies to permit neighborhood-scale retail uses in residential neighborhoods. It passed with a positive recommendation.
Monday was the second meeting on the item. The motion is about researching returning these old store fronts we see in residential neighborhoods in the flats to neighborhood groceries, restaurants or other like uses. Humbert, Harrison and Robinson were all enthusiastic about the convenience for example of taking just a few steps to buy a gallon of milk instead of driving.
There is a reason these little former storefronts were turned into others uses usually living space.
At neither the first meeting nor this second meeting did Councilmembers Humbert, Robinson or Harrison consider why those storefronts are no longer neighborhood groceries or another business like a restaurant. None of them considered the volume of customers it takes to make enough money to pay employees and cover rent, utilities, insurance, equipment and all the supplies and goods needed for a viable business.
When the volume of customers is added to make a neighborhood business viable, it leaves walkable and bikable behind to bring in enough customers to cover overhead especially if it is a restaurant. And, that means cars and traffic. In their enthusiasm for the idea of businesses in residential neighborhoods Humbert and Harrison were concerned about unpleasant odors, smoke and noise.
Berkeley has empty storefronts in commercial corridors. The latest idea for staff time is to study how to return old neighborhood storefronts that have been turned into interesting buildings for reuse usually as housing could be better spent on empty storefronts in commercial districts.
The last City meeting I attended of the week was the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission. Three items were passed and all of them have been on the agenda for a number of meetings. There was more back and forth than at times seemed reasonable, but that is the democratic process. It can get messy. The Commission voted to list agenda items as “Discussion and Possible Action” which will solve the problem of having to recycle agenda items because they were listed as discussion only. The Commission decided to study how the redesign of streets like curbs for bicycle lanes impact the Fire Department response times. The Commission approved using FF funds for a one-time removal of eucalyptus debris on private property in the very high fire severity hazard zone.
I skipped the Landmarks Preservation Commission on Thursday evening. The Budget and Finance Committee on Thursday morning was cancelled.
Enough for today. I have several books to recommend, but I’ll save them for next time. Just put The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi on your list. The wait at the library is 13 weeks, so your best bet is to head up to Revolution Books. They had a stack of the book in paperback. I’ll check Pegasus tomorrow.
Monday feels like it was a month ago. There is so much to cover and I can’t take my eyes off the Israel – Hamas War and the genocide and domicide (destruction of housing) in Gaza. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/07/widespread-destruction-in-gaza-puts-concept-of-domicide-in-focus
Monday evening the Rent Stabilization Board passed a ceasefire resolution in a 7 to 1 vote. Stefan Elgstrand who works in Mayor Arreguin’s office voted no on the ceasefire resolution after reading a statement that the resolution was outside the scope of the Rent Board in the City Charter and the Rent Stabilization Ordinance. Elgstrand did vote for the resolution to allow landlords to provide temporary, below-market rental housing in Berkeley for Palestinian, Israeli and Ukrainian refugees. Andy Kelley was absent.
City Council is yet to act, but there has been some movement since the Tuesday evening council meeting.
Councilmembers Rigel Robinson, Ben Bartlett and Terry Taplin all published their version of resolutions on the Israel-Hamas war on X (formerly twitter) on December 7, 2023. Bartlett and Robinson made it plain they were calling for a ceasefire. Taplin wrote “cessation of hostilities” instead of ceasefire which makes it sound like there is a squabble back and forth.
The death toll of Palestinians increases by hundreds daily. On Friday December 8, 2023 the Ministry of Health in Gaza reported that 17,177 people including 7,112 Children had been killed and 46,000 wounded since the Israeli-Hamas conflict started on October 7. In the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian death toll is 266 with 3,365 wounded. The Israeli army said that 1,147 people on the Israeli side have died including 418 soldiers.
If the US suffered the same amount of deaths as those in Gaza in the two months since the Israel- Hamas War started it would be 2,542,368 people of whom 1,056,480 are children killed and 68,160,000 wounded. This is not a squabble. We are watching a genocide and deliberate acts by Israel that look to be the full intention to leave Gaza uninhabitable.
What sticks in my mind is the September 22, 2023 Prime Minister Netanyahu address to the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) using a map of “The New Middle East”. Just fifteen days before the horrific attack by Hamas on Israel, Netanyahu gave a speech using a map of Israel from the river to the sea with an end to Gaza and the West Bank. https://www.commondreams.org/news/netanyahu-map
I cannot count six votes to get to get a resolution for a ceasefire on the Berkeley City Council agenda on the 12th and I can’t get to five to pass a resolution. Now at least three councilmembers have formally posted a resolution. Harrison declared support for a ceasefire in an October 20 Facebook post.
Councilmembers Rashi Kesarwani and Mark Humbert would have to stand in opposition to Mayor Arreguin for any resolution to pass. Unless Arreguin and councilmembers Sophie Hahn and Susan Wengraf move off their published stands against a ceasefire resolution, this is going nowhere.
This will make an interesting mayor’s race. Robinson, Hahn and Harrison are all running. In one of the many posts I have watched and heard is, “In November we will remember”.
Today, December 8, 2023, the U.S. vetoed the UN security council on an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. The vote was 13 in favor, US against and the UK abstained.
On today’s Joe Scarborough show, the closest the show got to the horrific suffering in Gaza was to say the US is asking Israel to do more to protect civilians, President Biden is pressuring Netanyahu to let more aid into Gaza and the IDF is moving further into the southern part of Gaza on a mission to destroy Hamas. That was followed with an interview with a released hostage going back to her kibbutz being shocked by the destruction and delighted to find her cat.
If Scarborough and like shows are someone’s only source of news, they would never know of the horror in Gaza.
You will not hear on Scarborough that 1,900,000 Palestinians 85% of the population in Gaza are displaced where 30% of the Ukrainians have been displaced by the Russian invasion or the shear scope of destruction from the Israeli bombing of northern Gaza in just two months turning whole neighborhoods into rubble. That news comes from science and journalism elsewhere. https://tinyurl.com/9wvux3k2
The toll on journalists has been heavy. Sixty-three journalists and media workers have been confirmed killed, 56 Palestinians, 4 Israeli and 3 Lebanese.
Mainstream news has always been from the pro-Israel perspective and there are still shows with that line, but younger anchors, more diverse anchors aren’t holding that line.
My current book is from the Palestinian perspective. I’m just a third of the way through The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi one of the foremost historians on the Middle East writes from both archival research and family history which in my reading last night included a deep description of the Nakba. Palestinians were forced off their land, losing their homes, businesses, source of income and scattered into neighboring Arab countries without identity, passports, or papers. Families split as they fled. The Palestinians were expelled from the life they knew as their homes were turned into the new Jewish state.
Back to the City.
The council chambers were packed Tuesday evening with a determined crowd calling for a ceasefire. Nineteen of the twenty speakers allowed to speak on non-agenda items called for the Council to pass a resolution for a ceasefire. Only one spoke against a ceasefire.
December 5 was the first meeting of the month, which gives time to representatives of the Unions to speak and speak they did. Jose Guerrero reported union workers are still waiting for back pay from PEPRA (Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act) amendment with the City. Unbelievable, this has been going on for more than two years. No wonder there are problems with filling positions. Then we heard from Andrea Mullarky speaking for SEIU 1021 representing 60,000 workers that last month the executive board endorsed the movement of a ceasefire. Last Julia Heath from Local 1 spoke to City action resulting in the loss of Liam Garland as Director of Public Works a respected leader.
At times the crowd was disruptive and breaks were taken, but the Council did not exit to conduct business in another room as in previous meetings. Watching from home on zoom, during breaks to regain order Taplin, Bartlett and Harrison could be seen speaking to attendees.
Then it went back to public comment on the consent calendar.
The members of the public wrapped their comments on a ceasefire to agenda items. When it came to Taplin’s item 10 to name the Berkeley Pier after Nancy Skinner, speakers had plenty of suggestions Gus Newport, the Ohlone People, moral courage, justice, ceasefire, the Gaza Palestine Pier, the brave journalists in Gaza who are reporting on the ground, and
Marek Edelman leader in the Warsaw Ghetto who was a lifelong anti-Zionist and stood in solidarity with the Palestinians as fellow resistance fighters, and
James Baldwin was suggested and the speaker read from Balwin’s writing on Jews and Palestinians, and
Shireen Abu Akleh, American Palestinian, one of the most prominent journalists across the Middle East and Palestinian territories who was targeted and killed by Israeli forces while reporting from the West Bank on May 11, 2022. The day of her death was the same day Arreguin left for his trip to Israel sponsored by Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco.
The Consent Calendar was finally approved with the naming of the Berkeley Pier will go to the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission, Harrison’s item on deconstruction was withdrawn, Harrison’s item on traffic calming went to the Budget Committee and the City Manager withdrew the Public Safety Status Report to be rescheduled.
In the motion to adjourn the council meeting, Kesarwani, Bartlett, Hahn, Wengraf, Robinson, and Humbert all voted yes, Taplin voted no and Harrison abstained.
The most significant outcome of the December 4, Monday morning Land Use, Housing & Economic Development Committee was that when Harrison who was filling in for Bartlett asked that her item on the Community/Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) be scheduled for the next meeting, Robinson as the Chair declined making a firm no. The due date to act on TOPA is May 13, 2024 which means that if Robinson keeps TOPA off the agenda, Arreguin who is running for the State Senate seat District 7 won’t have to vote/take a stand on TOPA until after the primary in March.
TOPA has had a long tumultuous history in Berkeley. The earliest date I could find where TOPA was presented to the public in a readily available full Council meeting or Council Committee meeting going back to 2019 was at the Land Use Committee meeting on March 5, 2020. On that date there were 61 speakers and the due date for action was extended to January 21, 2021
When a multi-unit building goes up for sale TOPA gives tenants the first right of refusal to purchase the property. Tenants especially those who have experienced being in a building that was sold are enthusiastic about being notified that a plan to sell is in process and being given the first opportunity to purchase the building. The Chamber of Commerce, the real estate industry, investors, property owners are opposed to TOPA.
After multiple committee meetings, there was a special full council special meeting on just TOPA on January 27, 2022. Discussion was held there were 78 speakers and then it disappeared.
Harrison brought it back. TOPA was listed in the council draft agenda for November 28, 2023 until Wengraf, Hahn and Arreguin voted at the Agenda and Rules Committee to remove TOPA from the agenda for the full council meeting and send TOPA to the Land Use Committee where it now looks like it will languish as long as possible or at least until Arreguin has secured his position in the primary election to be on the ballot for November for that State Senate seat.
Kathryn Lybarger received the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club endorsement not Arreguin after last Saturday’s forum.
The one Land Use Committee agenda item was from Rigel Robinson. It was Neighborhood-Scale Commercial, refer to city manager and Planning Commission to consider policies to permit neighborhood-scale retail uses in residential neighborhoods. It passed with a positive recommendation.
Monday was the second meeting on the item. The motion is about researching returning these old store fronts we see in residential neighborhoods in the flats to neighborhood groceries, restaurants or other like uses. Humbert, Harrison and Robinson were all enthusiastic about the convenience for example of taking just a few steps to buy a gallon of milk instead of driving.
There is a reason these little former storefronts were turned into others uses usually living space.
At neither the first meeting nor this second meeting did Councilmembers Humbert, Robinson or Harrison consider why those storefronts are no longer neighborhood groceries or another business like a restaurant. None of them considered the volume of customers it takes to make enough money to pay employees and cover rent, utilities, insurance, equipment and all the supplies and goods needed for a viable business.
When the volume of customers is added to make a neighborhood business viable, it leaves walkable and bikable behind to bring in enough customers to cover overhead especially if it is a restaurant. And, that means cars and traffic. In their enthusiasm for the idea of businesses in residential neighborhoods Humbert and Harrison were concerned about unpleasant odors, smoke and noise.
Berkeley has empty storefronts in commercial corridors. The latest idea for staff time is to study how to return old neighborhood storefronts that have been turned into interesting buildings for reuse usually as housing could be better spent on empty storefronts in commercial districts.
The last City meeting I attended of the week was the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission. Three items were passed and all of them have been on the agenda for a number of meetings. There was more back and forth than at times seemed reasonable, but that is the democratic process. It can get messy. The Commission voted to list agenda items as “Discussion and Possible Action” which will solve the problem of having to recycle agenda items because they were listed as discussion only. The Commission decided to study how the redesign of streets like curbs for bicycle lanes impact the Fire Department response times. The Commission approved using FF funds for a one-time removal of eucalyptus debris on private property in the very high fire severity hazard zone.
I skipped the Landmarks Preservation Commission on Thursday evening. The Budget and Finance Committee on Thursday morning was cancelled.
Enough for today. I have several books to recommend, but I’ll save them for next time. Just put The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi on your list. The wait at the library is 13 weeks, so your best bet is to head up to Revolution Books. They had a stack of the book in paperback. I’ll check Pegasus tomorrow.
December 3, 2023
After sitting through the November 28, 2023 City Council meeting on ZOOM from 6 pm until 11:55 pm and reading the string of emails complaining about Hopkins not being included in the 5-year paving plan, I drove the entire length of Hopkins before starting to write this December 3, 2023 Activist’s Diary.
The five-year paving plan through FY 2028 (present to June 30, 2028) was the only agenda action item until Councilmember Harrison’s budget referral item 16 on deconstruction was moved from consent to action.
The calls for a cease-fire kicked off the meeting and once again the Council left the BUSD Boardroom to escape the disruption and moved into a conference room without the pubic in attendance and continued on Zoom. There were so many attendees who signed on to Zoom and wrapped their cease-fire comments onto the two police funding items and the equitable Black Families grant that the discussion on the paving plan didn’t start until 9:22 pm. Due to the lateness of the evening Harrison’s item was moved to December 5 at her request.
It’s Monday December 4 and I should have finished this yesterday morning. While I’ve been working on my December 3 summary, Councilmembers Wengraf and Hahn sent email blasts. They are distressed over the disruptive demonstrations at Council, do not support a resolution and include Mayor Arreguin’s full statement. Arreguin is clear he does not support a resolution with, “[T]hese resolutions will not end the violence abroad, but they do fan the flames of hatred here at home. That’s a threat I cannot ignore.”
Harrison’s position for a ceasefire was posted on her KateHarrisonD4 Facebook page on October 20, 2023. https://www.facebook.com/KateHarrisonD4/
In order to get a ceasefire resolution before Council it has to be approved by the Agenda Committee whose members are Arreguin, Hahn and Wengraf or be accepted by 2/3 of the councilmembers (six yes votes) as an emergency item to be considered for a vote.
As stated in previous Diaries, I can’t count five votes on this Council to call for a ceasefire.
It’s quite amazing that Arreguin whose first campaign for mayor in 2016 highlighted himself as a progressive leader citing his own activism and referenced the fight against apartheid in South Africa as inspiration for his activism now opposes a resolution on a ceasefire as doing nothing but fanning the flames of hate.
I disagree with Arreguin that resolutions have no impact. They do.
It will take a groundswell to move a White House that started with President Biden’s embrace of Netanyahu captured in photos seen around the world.
The Guardian listed 30 unions calling for a ceasefire on Friday starting with the United Auto Workers representing 980,000 retired and current workers, the American Postal Workers Union, the California Nurses Association. That list doesn’t include local Bay Area unions, the cities Richmond and Oakland and doesn’t even touch the many other organizations calling for a ceasefire. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/01/uaw-ceasefire-gaza
.
My mornings normally start with two podcasts, Democracy Now followed with Joe Scarborough. Scarborough is as far right as I can go these days, except that I did watch the DeSantis Newsom debate on Sean Hannity until ZAB started at 7 pm. Other than a couple of Newsom zingers and a lot of Newsom and DeSantis talking over each other, Hannity and DeSantis took Newsom and California apart.
Even I was shocked when Hannity put a chart on the screen of total crime (everything lumped together) that pictured California as having twice the crime rate as the national average and Florida as below the national average. Newsom should know better than to go on Fox.
Democracy Now started with Palestinian journalist Akram al-Satarri in Gaza. The death toll in Gaza is over 15,500. al-Satarri stated in the last 24 hours 1,760 people were killed. There is no safe place. The 1.8 million people that were asked to leave their homes in the northern Gaza strip and move south find themselves being bombed in the very places that were supposed to be safe.
Last night I listened to Medhi Hasan. Between October 7 and November 28, 232 Palestinians including 61 children were killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem where Hamas has never ruled. In Hasan’s interview with Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, Barghouti described the terrorism in the West Bank by Israeli settlers and Israel’s army. Palestinians are being killed, evicted and villages are being bulldozed.
You can watch the show with the video of the destruction in the West Bank at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BaA3htpNzo
If you would rather read the text put the YouTube link into https://youtubetranscript.com/
Hasan pointed out on Sunday, that on September 22, 2023 Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) using a map of “The New Middle East” that eliminated Palestinians. The picture of Netanyahu at the UNGA is 18 minutes into the YouTube video.
I didn’t find any reports of Netanyahu’s September speech in the NY Times, Washington Post or other mainstream press. The poorly attended Netanyahu address was reported in Common Dreams and the international press. https://www.commondreams.org/news/netanyahu-map
Hasan who gives hard hitting interviews announced Sunday that his one-hour show is ending this month. That will leave two weekend shows with Muslim anchors, Ayman Mohyeldin and Ali Velshi. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/04/msnbc-bring-back-mehdi-hasan-show/
Hasan will still appear from time to time as a commenter for MSNBC, but that new role will put an end to interviews like the one of Mark Regev, senior advisor to Netanyahu. Regev who declared to Hasan that Israel had not killed any Palestinian children. The interview has been watched over 6 million times on X. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPz2aCo7W-c
When the mother of Hisham Awartani (one of the three Palestinian college students shot in Vermont) spoke over the weekend, she stated her son is paralyzed from the chest down and pointed to the hateful toxic rhetoric against Palestinians. That hateful toxic warmongering rhetoric is well exampled by what spewed out of Joe Scarborough’s mouth in the first minutes of the December 1, 2023 Scarborough podcast.
I listen to the Scarborough podcast at 1.25 speed not the entire 4 hours, but I have yet to hear anything about the conditions in Gaza. There is nothing about the steady carpet bombing of Gaza, the cutting off of power, the blockade of food and fuel or the collective punishment and suffering of the people of Gaza except to blame them for the actions of Hamas on October 7.
In my memory, the Scarborough early morning show is how mainstream reporting on Israel has always been. This time the horror in Gaza can’t be contained. That is what we are seeing in the heartbreak of the people filling the council chambers. Jews, Palestinians and their supporters are showing up week after week calling for a ceasefire resolution from the Berkeley City Council.
Our book club the choice for January 2024 is The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi. November 2, 1917 is when Britain declared support for the establishment of a Jewish state within Palestine in the Balfour Declaration. At the time the Jewish people were only 6% of the country’s inhabitants. The Balfour Declaration grew out of Theordor Herzl’s foundational text of political Zionism, Der Judenstaat (the Jews’ State) written in 1896.
The Hundred Years War on Palestine is listed as one of the ten best books for understanding the Israel-Hamas War. Another is A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall which I read and recommended previously. Both are available through local libraries, but expect a wait.
On to the City.
The 5-year paving plan is reviewed every two years, but if feels like the 5-year paving plan is in continuous review. After the enormous kerfuffle over the Hopkins Corridor Plan, Hopkins repaving was put on hold in the 2024-2025 budget so other projects like the African American Holistic Center could move forward.
For an in-depth review of all the issues and questionable City actions read “What Has Happened with Hopkins and Why”. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-04-09/article/50248?headline=What-Has-Happened-with-Hopkins-and-Why--Kelly-Hammargren
Hopkins is no worse than the street I live on (I am not complaining) and is in far better condition than McGee and Roosevelt near the high school and many other streets that are not included in the 5-year paving plan.
Councilmembers Hahn and Wengraf submitted a Supplemental and made a substitute motion to put Hopkins from Alameda to Gilman into the 5-year paving plan on the list for paving in 2025. Their motion failed. The final motion from Humbert and Robinson accepted the staff recommendations and added Milvia from Hearst to Rose, the recommendation from the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission, and to complete Hopkins Street segments by FY 2027.
The “Hopkins Street segments” phrase in the motion recorded in the annotated agenda is worrisome as one of the many issues in the Hopkins Corridor Plan was the rush to secure final City Council approval and award the Hopkins Corridor Project before July 1, 2023. Beating that date was to avoid complying with the new San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board stormwater treatment and green infrastructure regulations.
At the Tuesday meeting Karen Parolek, Chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure in her statement to Council said, “[W]e also have been advocating for practices to combine projects including safety enhancement and repaving. Pulling the Hopkins project apart into multiple projects is counter to the fiscal responsibility we’ve been encouraging…”
Ron Nevels, Manager of Engineering, Public Works said the City might not need to do the stormwater treatment.
The worry here is of the City of Berkeley breaking Hopkins into smaller “segments” to escape having to comply with regulations requiring stormwater treatment and green infrastructure.
Harrison asked if there was money in the Hahn and Wengraf plan to cover the infrastructure. The answer was no. At different times during the evening Hahn insisted there was funding and at other times stated a source of funding for the infrastructure could not be identified.
The problem with repaving without the stormwater infrastructure means that with so many of Berkeley’s streets being in poor condition, the likelihood of going back to Hopkins for infrastructure after repaving is close to zero. Hopkins at Monterey is the location where the foam from putting out a garbage truck fire drained into Cordornices Creek wiping out nearly the entire population of threatened steelhead trout.
I’m on the side of requiring the green infrastructure. Rough roads slow down traffic.
The Harrison budget referral with the very long title, “Refer to City Manager to Enhance the City’s Deconstruction and Construction Materials Management Enforcement and Regulations and Refer to AAO#1 Budget Process $250,000 for Social Cost of Carbon Nexus Fee Study for Berkeley Origin Construction and Demolition Debris” is a big deal.
There is nothing “green” about razing existing buildings, sending the debris to landfill and all the extraction, mining, and deforestation that is involved in the materials that will be used to build the new building to take its place. Deconstruction is the process to remove salvageable materials for reuse in new construction and renovation.
Here is a wonderful short video on deconstruction called “Unbuild Better: A case study in deconstruction” from Cornell University explaining the case for deconstruction over demolition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ejjd6E_7SsQ
The complaints about deconstruction taking too long makes me think of all the projects that are pushed through the Design Review Committee, the Zoning Adjustment Board and approved only to sit for years before anything is built. In fact, at one Design Review Committee meeting, a committee member asked the developer for NX Ventures if they ever intended to build since the NX projects approved never seem to transition from approval to construction.
The Environment and Climate Commission met Wednesday. Billi Romain, Manager of Energy and Sustainable Development for the City of Berkeley announced her retirement.
I’m still not sure how the Curbside Management Plan landed in the Environment and Climate Commission. The motion to refer to the City Manager and the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission had many good points like adequate loading zones, short term parking (pick up and drop off), disabled parking, AB 413 the bill to prevent parking within 20 feet of an intersection (daylighting), emergency access in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones (VHFHSZ), additional parking meters and bicycle parking.
There are not enough loading zones and removing so much of parking in the City makes short term parking for quick trips near impossible. Restricting parking in the VHFHSZ comes with hand wringing and little to no visible action every year, which I hear has been the same response for decades. But why the Commission on Disability wasn’t included for input on disabled parking in the final motion looks like an unacceptable oversight.
The Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) was the last city meeting of the week. East Bay for Everyone and YIMBY inspired speakers told their stories of the difficulty of finding housing and how the project at 2127 – 2159 Dwight Way between Shattuck and Fulton must be supported. The Dwight Way project was a SB 330 density bonus with 58 new units for a total of 66 residential units onsite which is impossible to deny.
Soli Alpert, who is on the Rent Board and was filling in on ZAB for the first time, questioned whether the City was following the law. In his reading of SB 330 when eight rent-controlled or affordable units are demolished, they need to be replaced with eight units onsite. The mix of units posted in the ZAB agenda description was 3 very low-income units, 2 very low-income units, 2 low income units and 1 moderate income unit, however, in the Findings and Conditions for approval from City staff, the eighth unit, the moderate-income unit was dropped and replaced with a market rate unit. Only seven units were going to be below market. It was a good catch by Alpert, but only Shoshana O’Keefe and Brandon Yung supported Alpert’s substitute motion which lost for the 8th below market unit.
The 5-story project at 1652 University with 26 units including 2 very-low income units plus two live/work units approved the same evening comes with a history that was missed by city staff and the historian hired by the project.
Fran Cappelletti, Archivist for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association found that in 1923, a permit was taken for the West Gate Masonic Association to build a building on that corner (University and Jefferson) for the Masonic Lodge for African Americans. Objections arose from the neighbors who did not want African Americans at this site in any form and went so far as to pressure the City to change the zoning. The City Council did not approve the zoning change, but the construction stopped and the lot sat vacant for twenty-four years until the current commercial building was constructed in 1947.
At the Landmarks Preservation Commission, Commissioner Finacom asked for a plaque to be at the site to commemorate the history, but was met with pushback and objections from the Landmarks Preservation Commissioners including Chair Enchill. Encill’s statement that there is nothing particularly unique about the history of 1652 – 1658 University seems to be all the more reason to memorialize how racism ended building a Masonic Lodge for African Americans at the corner of University and Jefferson. How many other stories need to be told and memorialized?
ZAB member O’Keefe thanked me for sharing the history and said that the developer didn’t need approval to include the history at the site.
After sitting through the November 28, 2023 City Council meeting on ZOOM from 6 pm until 11:55 pm and reading the string of emails complaining about Hopkins not being included in the 5-year paving plan, I drove the entire length of Hopkins before starting to write this December 3, 2023 Activist’s Diary.
The five-year paving plan through FY 2028 (present to June 30, 2028) was the only agenda action item until Councilmember Harrison’s budget referral item 16 on deconstruction was moved from consent to action.
The calls for a cease-fire kicked off the meeting and once again the Council left the BUSD Boardroom to escape the disruption and moved into a conference room without the pubic in attendance and continued on Zoom. There were so many attendees who signed on to Zoom and wrapped their cease-fire comments onto the two police funding items and the equitable Black Families grant that the discussion on the paving plan didn’t start until 9:22 pm. Due to the lateness of the evening Harrison’s item was moved to December 5 at her request.
It’s Monday December 4 and I should have finished this yesterday morning. While I’ve been working on my December 3 summary, Councilmembers Wengraf and Hahn sent email blasts. They are distressed over the disruptive demonstrations at Council, do not support a resolution and include Mayor Arreguin’s full statement. Arreguin is clear he does not support a resolution with, “[T]hese resolutions will not end the violence abroad, but they do fan the flames of hatred here at home. That’s a threat I cannot ignore.”
Harrison’s position for a ceasefire was posted on her KateHarrisonD4 Facebook page on October 20, 2023. https://www.facebook.com/KateHarrisonD4/
In order to get a ceasefire resolution before Council it has to be approved by the Agenda Committee whose members are Arreguin, Hahn and Wengraf or be accepted by 2/3 of the councilmembers (six yes votes) as an emergency item to be considered for a vote.
As stated in previous Diaries, I can’t count five votes on this Council to call for a ceasefire.
It’s quite amazing that Arreguin whose first campaign for mayor in 2016 highlighted himself as a progressive leader citing his own activism and referenced the fight against apartheid in South Africa as inspiration for his activism now opposes a resolution on a ceasefire as doing nothing but fanning the flames of hate.
I disagree with Arreguin that resolutions have no impact. They do.
It will take a groundswell to move a White House that started with President Biden’s embrace of Netanyahu captured in photos seen around the world.
The Guardian listed 30 unions calling for a ceasefire on Friday starting with the United Auto Workers representing 980,000 retired and current workers, the American Postal Workers Union, the California Nurses Association. That list doesn’t include local Bay Area unions, the cities Richmond and Oakland and doesn’t even touch the many other organizations calling for a ceasefire. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/01/uaw-ceasefire-gaza
.
My mornings normally start with two podcasts, Democracy Now followed with Joe Scarborough. Scarborough is as far right as I can go these days, except that I did watch the DeSantis Newsom debate on Sean Hannity until ZAB started at 7 pm. Other than a couple of Newsom zingers and a lot of Newsom and DeSantis talking over each other, Hannity and DeSantis took Newsom and California apart.
Even I was shocked when Hannity put a chart on the screen of total crime (everything lumped together) that pictured California as having twice the crime rate as the national average and Florida as below the national average. Newsom should know better than to go on Fox.
Democracy Now started with Palestinian journalist Akram al-Satarri in Gaza. The death toll in Gaza is over 15,500. al-Satarri stated in the last 24 hours 1,760 people were killed. There is no safe place. The 1.8 million people that were asked to leave their homes in the northern Gaza strip and move south find themselves being bombed in the very places that were supposed to be safe.
Last night I listened to Medhi Hasan. Between October 7 and November 28, 232 Palestinians including 61 children were killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem where Hamas has never ruled. In Hasan’s interview with Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, Barghouti described the terrorism in the West Bank by Israeli settlers and Israel’s army. Palestinians are being killed, evicted and villages are being bulldozed.
You can watch the show with the video of the destruction in the West Bank at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BaA3htpNzo
If you would rather read the text put the YouTube link into https://youtubetranscript.com/
Hasan pointed out on Sunday, that on September 22, 2023 Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) using a map of “The New Middle East” that eliminated Palestinians. The picture of Netanyahu at the UNGA is 18 minutes into the YouTube video.
I didn’t find any reports of Netanyahu’s September speech in the NY Times, Washington Post or other mainstream press. The poorly attended Netanyahu address was reported in Common Dreams and the international press. https://www.commondreams.org/news/netanyahu-map
Hasan who gives hard hitting interviews announced Sunday that his one-hour show is ending this month. That will leave two weekend shows with Muslim anchors, Ayman Mohyeldin and Ali Velshi. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/04/msnbc-bring-back-mehdi-hasan-show/
Hasan will still appear from time to time as a commenter for MSNBC, but that new role will put an end to interviews like the one of Mark Regev, senior advisor to Netanyahu. Regev who declared to Hasan that Israel had not killed any Palestinian children. The interview has been watched over 6 million times on X. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPz2aCo7W-c
When the mother of Hisham Awartani (one of the three Palestinian college students shot in Vermont) spoke over the weekend, she stated her son is paralyzed from the chest down and pointed to the hateful toxic rhetoric against Palestinians. That hateful toxic warmongering rhetoric is well exampled by what spewed out of Joe Scarborough’s mouth in the first minutes of the December 1, 2023 Scarborough podcast.
I listen to the Scarborough podcast at 1.25 speed not the entire 4 hours, but I have yet to hear anything about the conditions in Gaza. There is nothing about the steady carpet bombing of Gaza, the cutting off of power, the blockade of food and fuel or the collective punishment and suffering of the people of Gaza except to blame them for the actions of Hamas on October 7.
In my memory, the Scarborough early morning show is how mainstream reporting on Israel has always been. This time the horror in Gaza can’t be contained. That is what we are seeing in the heartbreak of the people filling the council chambers. Jews, Palestinians and their supporters are showing up week after week calling for a ceasefire resolution from the Berkeley City Council.
Our book club the choice for January 2024 is The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi. November 2, 1917 is when Britain declared support for the establishment of a Jewish state within Palestine in the Balfour Declaration. At the time the Jewish people were only 6% of the country’s inhabitants. The Balfour Declaration grew out of Theordor Herzl’s foundational text of political Zionism, Der Judenstaat (the Jews’ State) written in 1896.
The Hundred Years War on Palestine is listed as one of the ten best books for understanding the Israel-Hamas War. Another is A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall which I read and recommended previously. Both are available through local libraries, but expect a wait.
On to the City.
The 5-year paving plan is reviewed every two years, but if feels like the 5-year paving plan is in continuous review. After the enormous kerfuffle over the Hopkins Corridor Plan, Hopkins repaving was put on hold in the 2024-2025 budget so other projects like the African American Holistic Center could move forward.
For an in-depth review of all the issues and questionable City actions read “What Has Happened with Hopkins and Why”. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-04-09/article/50248?headline=What-Has-Happened-with-Hopkins-and-Why--Kelly-Hammargren
Hopkins is no worse than the street I live on (I am not complaining) and is in far better condition than McGee and Roosevelt near the high school and many other streets that are not included in the 5-year paving plan.
Councilmembers Hahn and Wengraf submitted a Supplemental and made a substitute motion to put Hopkins from Alameda to Gilman into the 5-year paving plan on the list for paving in 2025. Their motion failed. The final motion from Humbert and Robinson accepted the staff recommendations and added Milvia from Hearst to Rose, the recommendation from the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission, and to complete Hopkins Street segments by FY 2027.
The “Hopkins Street segments” phrase in the motion recorded in the annotated agenda is worrisome as one of the many issues in the Hopkins Corridor Plan was the rush to secure final City Council approval and award the Hopkins Corridor Project before July 1, 2023. Beating that date was to avoid complying with the new San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board stormwater treatment and green infrastructure regulations.
At the Tuesday meeting Karen Parolek, Chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure in her statement to Council said, “[W]e also have been advocating for practices to combine projects including safety enhancement and repaving. Pulling the Hopkins project apart into multiple projects is counter to the fiscal responsibility we’ve been encouraging…”
Ron Nevels, Manager of Engineering, Public Works said the City might not need to do the stormwater treatment.
The worry here is of the City of Berkeley breaking Hopkins into smaller “segments” to escape having to comply with regulations requiring stormwater treatment and green infrastructure.
Harrison asked if there was money in the Hahn and Wengraf plan to cover the infrastructure. The answer was no. At different times during the evening Hahn insisted there was funding and at other times stated a source of funding for the infrastructure could not be identified.
The problem with repaving without the stormwater infrastructure means that with so many of Berkeley’s streets being in poor condition, the likelihood of going back to Hopkins for infrastructure after repaving is close to zero. Hopkins at Monterey is the location where the foam from putting out a garbage truck fire drained into Cordornices Creek wiping out nearly the entire population of threatened steelhead trout.
I’m on the side of requiring the green infrastructure. Rough roads slow down traffic.
The Harrison budget referral with the very long title, “Refer to City Manager to Enhance the City’s Deconstruction and Construction Materials Management Enforcement and Regulations and Refer to AAO#1 Budget Process $250,000 for Social Cost of Carbon Nexus Fee Study for Berkeley Origin Construction and Demolition Debris” is a big deal.
There is nothing “green” about razing existing buildings, sending the debris to landfill and all the extraction, mining, and deforestation that is involved in the materials that will be used to build the new building to take its place. Deconstruction is the process to remove salvageable materials for reuse in new construction and renovation.
Here is a wonderful short video on deconstruction called “Unbuild Better: A case study in deconstruction” from Cornell University explaining the case for deconstruction over demolition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ejjd6E_7SsQ
The complaints about deconstruction taking too long makes me think of all the projects that are pushed through the Design Review Committee, the Zoning Adjustment Board and approved only to sit for years before anything is built. In fact, at one Design Review Committee meeting, a committee member asked the developer for NX Ventures if they ever intended to build since the NX projects approved never seem to transition from approval to construction.
The Environment and Climate Commission met Wednesday. Billi Romain, Manager of Energy and Sustainable Development for the City of Berkeley announced her retirement.
I’m still not sure how the Curbside Management Plan landed in the Environment and Climate Commission. The motion to refer to the City Manager and the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission had many good points like adequate loading zones, short term parking (pick up and drop off), disabled parking, AB 413 the bill to prevent parking within 20 feet of an intersection (daylighting), emergency access in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones (VHFHSZ), additional parking meters and bicycle parking.
There are not enough loading zones and removing so much of parking in the City makes short term parking for quick trips near impossible. Restricting parking in the VHFHSZ comes with hand wringing and little to no visible action every year, which I hear has been the same response for decades. But why the Commission on Disability wasn’t included for input on disabled parking in the final motion looks like an unacceptable oversight.
The Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) was the last city meeting of the week. East Bay for Everyone and YIMBY inspired speakers told their stories of the difficulty of finding housing and how the project at 2127 – 2159 Dwight Way between Shattuck and Fulton must be supported. The Dwight Way project was a SB 330 density bonus with 58 new units for a total of 66 residential units onsite which is impossible to deny.
Soli Alpert, who is on the Rent Board and was filling in on ZAB for the first time, questioned whether the City was following the law. In his reading of SB 330 when eight rent-controlled or affordable units are demolished, they need to be replaced with eight units onsite. The mix of units posted in the ZAB agenda description was 3 very low-income units, 2 very low-income units, 2 low income units and 1 moderate income unit, however, in the Findings and Conditions for approval from City staff, the eighth unit, the moderate-income unit was dropped and replaced with a market rate unit. Only seven units were going to be below market. It was a good catch by Alpert, but only Shoshana O’Keefe and Brandon Yung supported Alpert’s substitute motion which lost for the 8th below market unit.
The 5-story project at 1652 University with 26 units including 2 very-low income units plus two live/work units approved the same evening comes with a history that was missed by city staff and the historian hired by the project.
Fran Cappelletti, Archivist for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association found that in 1923, a permit was taken for the West Gate Masonic Association to build a building on that corner (University and Jefferson) for the Masonic Lodge for African Americans. Objections arose from the neighbors who did not want African Americans at this site in any form and went so far as to pressure the City to change the zoning. The City Council did not approve the zoning change, but the construction stopped and the lot sat vacant for twenty-four years until the current commercial building was constructed in 1947.
At the Landmarks Preservation Commission, Commissioner Finacom asked for a plaque to be at the site to commemorate the history, but was met with pushback and objections from the Landmarks Preservation Commissioners including Chair Enchill. Encill’s statement that there is nothing particularly unique about the history of 1652 – 1658 University seems to be all the more reason to memorialize how racism ended building a Masonic Lodge for African Americans at the corner of University and Jefferson. How many other stories need to be told and memorialized?
ZAB member O’Keefe thanked me for sharing the history and said that the developer didn’t need approval to include the history at the site.
November 26, 2023
The last meeting of Thanksgiving week ended at 12:02 pm Tuesday.
After calls for a cease-fire brought the November 14 council meeting to an abrupt end
the entire consent and action calendar from the November 14, 2023 city council meeting was moved to 9 am on November 21. Most people missed the rescheduling announcement (it was in the Activist’s Calendar), but not a group calling for a cease-fire that showed up at the unusual meeting hour.
The calls for action on a cease-fire began within minutes of the start of the meeting and could be heard in the background while Mayor Arreguin ran through the early votes. Russell Bates was the loudest. Arreguin responded stating disruption would not be tolerated, disruptive persons would be removed and council would reconvene at another location and gaveled for a ten-minute recess.
Unlike the demonstration that ended the November 14th council meeting, this time a camera was turned into the room and Bates was loud enough to be heard on ZOOM. Arreguin attempted to resume the meeting in the BUSD Boardroom. When the public calls for action continued, Arreguin announced that due to the disruption the council meeting would continue without the public present and resumed in another room.
When the meeting resumed the main agenda item rezoning the Southside Rezoning was up for discussion and vote. The Southside rezoning is a major overhaul with bigger, taller buildings covering the lots with little to no space in between buildings. As with all zoning changes the path to approval goes through the Planning Commission first and then on to City Council.
Besides bigger taller buildings, the amount of usable open space went on the chopping block. Open space is normally defined as open to the sky and air for passive or active use. For the time being that still defines open space in the rest of the city and 50% of that condition can be satisfied with balconies that have a minimum length and width of 6 feet.
In the new Southside zoning code 50% of the usable open space can be satisfied with a pet washing room, a multi-purpose room or a gym/health club/fitness studio. The calculation of how much open space is required changed from a per unit basis to per 1000 square feet of gross residential area.
The new maximum height in the R-SMU (residential – southside multi-unit) increased to 85 feet / 8-stories from a former 4 stories (5 stories with a use permit). While the new standard does not allow more height with a use permit, it comes with the possibility of density bonuses. Justin Horner, Associate Planner stated in his presentation to the council that with density bonuses the height could increase up to 100%. Since the amount of the density bonus is based on the percentage of below market units and developers have been using the minimum number of units to qualify for the bonus, 10 to 12 story buildings are the most likely result.
The C-T (commercial on Telegraph) is also 85 feet. The R-S (residential high-density Southside) is set at 55 feet / 5 stories and R-3 (residential medium density) is set at 45 feet / 4-stories.
The Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone (VHFHSZ) runs through the Southside east of College Avenue. The very highest risk fire zone in the entire city Panoramic Hill backs up to the Southside on the eastern border and comes with the zoning code ES-R (environmental safety-residential). Other VHFHSZ areas of Berkeley (the hills) are in what is called the Hillside Overly and have a H added to the zoning code.
The Hayward fault runs through Panoramic Hill and the Southside with upper Bancroft, Channing and Dwight all sitting in the Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation. https://maps.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/EQZApp/app/
It is unclear from the discussion and the documents if the height limit in the hillside overlay will be 3 or 4 stories. Either one with a density bonus has the potential to crossover to high-rise definition for the purpose of how firefighters would respond. The H that should be added to designate the hillside overly was included in earlier documents for the Planning Commission, but absent in the documents for council.
A high-rise is defined as above seven stories though the transition to high-rise response begins above five stories according the Fire Chief Sprague. Response to a high-rise fire means calling more fire fighters and equipment. The example given to the Budget Committee by the fire chief was a response to a fire in a low-rise building would need around 30 firefighters. Though fires in high-rises are infrequent, when they happen they are “high risk”. In rough numbers, 50 - 100 fire fighters might be needed for such a fire and if it is more than a couple of rooms then significantly more firefighters would be needed. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-05-08/article/50289?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-week-ending-April-30--Kelly-Hammargren
The Planning and Development Department has been insistent that all this increased density will neatly fit into the EIR (Environmental Impact Report) Update with no need for any adjustment other than for the Council to approve the addendum stating the conclusion, “[B]ased on substantial evidence, that the proposed project would not result in new or substantially more severe significant environmental impacts beyond those identified in the 2023 EIR due to substantial changes in the previously approved project…”
The EIR declared that the Southside is underbuilt and since the new buildings will be built to higher fire safety standards that will improve Fire Department efficiency. That conclusion ignores the fact that the population in the Southside will easily double, could triple and college students do stupid stuff, get themselves in trouble and need emergency services. Some of that stupid stuff is forgetting about their e-scooters or e-skateboards with lithium ion batteries that are plugged in, overcharging and overheating and occasionally catching on fire.
Fire Chief Sprague presented the Fire Department Facilities Master Plan to the City Council on May 16, 2023 with a thorough description of the upgrades and new facilities needed to serve Berkeley now and in the future. That looks like a long-forgotten memory from those who attended the presentation, Bartlett, Hahn, Wengraf, Robinson, Humbert and Arreguin. Kesarwani, Taplin and Harrison were absent. The City Council has yet to hear the presentation from Fire Chief Sprague on the Dispatch Needs Assessment (911 calls).
I’ve heard both presentations and read the documents. We, the Council, the City need to pay attention.
Two Supplementals were submitted for the Southside rezoning. A Supplemental is best thought of as an alternative or addition to the initial proposal. In this case that was the staff report.
Councilmember Hahn, who was on the Zoning Adjustment Board for years reviewing large multi-unit projects, had a much different perspective on the upzoning of the Southside than Rigel Robinson who I have never seen at a Zoning Adjustment Board meeting since I started attending in November 2014. Robinson’s perspective with no visible experience included in his supplemental and initial motion that any project, citywide, that meets SB 35 with 10% low-income housing on-site and prevailing wage should be eligible for ministerial approval (by right – a simple signing at the counter without Design Review Committee, Zoning Adjustment Board or public review).
Hahn said this, “Zoning is not just about how you use your own parcel, but how the use of your parcel impacts other parcels and the public realm”. Translated, wall to wall 8-story multi-unit buildings that could go up to 12 maybe even 16 stories with density bonuses is dramatically going to change the Southside and the micro-climate (heat island effect).
Hahn’s supplemental included green roofs to combat heat island effect, windows in bedrooms, widening sidewalks, study and landmark historical and cultural buildings and sites, incorporate affordable housing for low income students. In the substitute motion that was supported only by Hahn and Harrison removed the pet washing room as satisfying the open space requirement.
In the final motion that was approved by all the councilmembers except Wengraf who was absent, recommendations from Hahn landed as a referral to the city manager. It is hard to know how soon any of Hahn’s recommendations will see the light of day. The Bird Safe Glass ordinance took five years.
The part of the final motion on the prevailing wage and ministerial approval citywide of SB 35 projects with 10% affordable housing will get fast tracked to meet the implementation date of March 1, 2024.
Not much happened at the only other City meeting I attended during Thanksgiving week.
At the Agenda Committee UC Berkeley students lined up to request that Harrison’s Resolution: Opposition to Police Brutality and Use of Force on Nonviolent Protesters stay on the agenda for December 5. They lost, of course. The Agenda Committee sent the resolution to the Public Safety Committee. Taplin’s item to name the planned new pier after Nancy Skinner is on the December 5 agenda as a referral to the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission.
Carol Marasovic reported the Commission on Status of Women had to meet outside as North Berkeley Senior Center was closed and Peter Radu did not have the authority to direct staff to open the building for the scheduled meeting.
Last, I did receive the 2023 bicycle count performed by Bryce Nesbitt and volunteers. The Bicycle counts were done midweek in the fall from 4 pm to 6 pm to duplicate the conditions from four previous bicycle counts in 2010, 2015, 2018, 2022 performed by the City.
I have been in a string of emails regarding the bicycle counts and bicycle riding. Here are some of the thoughtful responses and points to consider for further research.
The decline of bicycle riding as documented by the bicycle counts matches observations by bicycle riders in the email string, my own observations and other studies.
There is nothing from current observations and counts the supports Rigel Robinson’s glorious declarations in his Berkeleyside op-ed that automobile traffic is on the decline and bicycle riding is increasing or that Berkeley is fourth in the nation in bicycle riders. https://www.berkeleyside.org/2019/12/17/opinion-the-future-of-telegraph-avenue-is-a-shared-street
Fourth in the nation was 2014. Berkeley did better in the number of bicycle riders in 2015 than 2023. The bicycle plan was approved in 2017.
UC Berkeley student population increased from 35,833 in 2010 to 45,307 in 2022. The bicycle count at Bowditch and Channing (Southside near campus) in 2010 was 305. In 2023 it was 181. The 2023 count also included scooters 160 and pedestrians 600.
The intersection of Channing a designated bicycle boulevard and Milvia with a protected bike lane the count in 2010 was 510 and in 2023 was 450. Milvia and Hearst did increase from 402 in 2010 to 443 in 2023.
What was notable is lots of people walk and scooters are increasingly popular. One person wrote, “What’s going on? Shouldn’t we try to find out? If Berkeley had a 10-year plan to build new tennis courts, but the world had switched to pickle-ball wouldn’t we want to change the plan?
After the presentation of the bicycle count to the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission, the majority response was to make excuses and move on without a deeper look, which strikes me as a “don’t confuse me with the facts when I have already made up my mind.”
The bottom line is there does need to be a deep look into why bicycle riding is declining and going in the opposite direction of the City’s plan. And, any street that is being considered as a bicycle street without protective bicycle lane curbing or a street with protected bicycle lanes needs to have multiple bicycle and traffic counts before embarking re-engineering planning and after any modifications or improvements.
The Telraam sensor that I wrote about in the November 19 Activist’s Diary looks like a great way to collect what modes of transportation people are actually using and how that may or may not change with street modifications and improvements. Bryce Nesbitt noted in his presentation of the bicycle counts to the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission documentation of vehicle traffic speeding up after repaving. Telraam continuously monitors motorized vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians and more according to the company website.
https://telraam.net/en/what-is-telraam
There is a $900,000 budget referral on the December 5 city council agenda from Harrison co-sponsored by Taplin to calm traffic with $100,000 of it designated in the vicinity of Derby.
Will preconceived notions dominate the response to the child struck by a hit-and-run driver on Halloween after sunset (6:11 pm) around 6:25 pm? According, to the Berkeley Scanner, the child ran out into the street between two parked cars on Derby near Mabel. The car sped away westward on Derby. https://tinyurl.com/56p2ynxh
Mabel is not a through street. The intersection at Mabel and Derby diverts southbound traffic on Mabel onto Derby in a westerly direction, which might indicate the traffic diversion contributed to the accident. There is no marked crosswalk at this intersection that I saw when I walked around the area.
As I looked for traffic and crossed at the corner, I tried to reimagine the incident from reading the Berkeley Scanner report and listening to the story the child’s mother told to the Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment and Sustainability Committee (FITES).
We’ll never know the full story as the driver sped off. But what we do know is bad things can happen quickly when we’re in a hurry, not paying attention and not thinking safety first.
The last meeting of Thanksgiving week ended at 12:02 pm Tuesday.
After calls for a cease-fire brought the November 14 council meeting to an abrupt end
the entire consent and action calendar from the November 14, 2023 city council meeting was moved to 9 am on November 21. Most people missed the rescheduling announcement (it was in the Activist’s Calendar), but not a group calling for a cease-fire that showed up at the unusual meeting hour.
The calls for action on a cease-fire began within minutes of the start of the meeting and could be heard in the background while Mayor Arreguin ran through the early votes. Russell Bates was the loudest. Arreguin responded stating disruption would not be tolerated, disruptive persons would be removed and council would reconvene at another location and gaveled for a ten-minute recess.
Unlike the demonstration that ended the November 14th council meeting, this time a camera was turned into the room and Bates was loud enough to be heard on ZOOM. Arreguin attempted to resume the meeting in the BUSD Boardroom. When the public calls for action continued, Arreguin announced that due to the disruption the council meeting would continue without the public present and resumed in another room.
When the meeting resumed the main agenda item rezoning the Southside Rezoning was up for discussion and vote. The Southside rezoning is a major overhaul with bigger, taller buildings covering the lots with little to no space in between buildings. As with all zoning changes the path to approval goes through the Planning Commission first and then on to City Council.
Besides bigger taller buildings, the amount of usable open space went on the chopping block. Open space is normally defined as open to the sky and air for passive or active use. For the time being that still defines open space in the rest of the city and 50% of that condition can be satisfied with balconies that have a minimum length and width of 6 feet.
In the new Southside zoning code 50% of the usable open space can be satisfied with a pet washing room, a multi-purpose room or a gym/health club/fitness studio. The calculation of how much open space is required changed from a per unit basis to per 1000 square feet of gross residential area.
The new maximum height in the R-SMU (residential – southside multi-unit) increased to 85 feet / 8-stories from a former 4 stories (5 stories with a use permit). While the new standard does not allow more height with a use permit, it comes with the possibility of density bonuses. Justin Horner, Associate Planner stated in his presentation to the council that with density bonuses the height could increase up to 100%. Since the amount of the density bonus is based on the percentage of below market units and developers have been using the minimum number of units to qualify for the bonus, 10 to 12 story buildings are the most likely result.
The C-T (commercial on Telegraph) is also 85 feet. The R-S (residential high-density Southside) is set at 55 feet / 5 stories and R-3 (residential medium density) is set at 45 feet / 4-stories.
The Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone (VHFHSZ) runs through the Southside east of College Avenue. The very highest risk fire zone in the entire city Panoramic Hill backs up to the Southside on the eastern border and comes with the zoning code ES-R (environmental safety-residential). Other VHFHSZ areas of Berkeley (the hills) are in what is called the Hillside Overly and have a H added to the zoning code.
The Hayward fault runs through Panoramic Hill and the Southside with upper Bancroft, Channing and Dwight all sitting in the Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation. https://maps.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/EQZApp/app/
It is unclear from the discussion and the documents if the height limit in the hillside overlay will be 3 or 4 stories. Either one with a density bonus has the potential to crossover to high-rise definition for the purpose of how firefighters would respond. The H that should be added to designate the hillside overly was included in earlier documents for the Planning Commission, but absent in the documents for council.
A high-rise is defined as above seven stories though the transition to high-rise response begins above five stories according the Fire Chief Sprague. Response to a high-rise fire means calling more fire fighters and equipment. The example given to the Budget Committee by the fire chief was a response to a fire in a low-rise building would need around 30 firefighters. Though fires in high-rises are infrequent, when they happen they are “high risk”. In rough numbers, 50 - 100 fire fighters might be needed for such a fire and if it is more than a couple of rooms then significantly more firefighters would be needed. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-05-08/article/50289?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-week-ending-April-30--Kelly-Hammargren
The Planning and Development Department has been insistent that all this increased density will neatly fit into the EIR (Environmental Impact Report) Update with no need for any adjustment other than for the Council to approve the addendum stating the conclusion, “[B]ased on substantial evidence, that the proposed project would not result in new or substantially more severe significant environmental impacts beyond those identified in the 2023 EIR due to substantial changes in the previously approved project…”
The EIR declared that the Southside is underbuilt and since the new buildings will be built to higher fire safety standards that will improve Fire Department efficiency. That conclusion ignores the fact that the population in the Southside will easily double, could triple and college students do stupid stuff, get themselves in trouble and need emergency services. Some of that stupid stuff is forgetting about their e-scooters or e-skateboards with lithium ion batteries that are plugged in, overcharging and overheating and occasionally catching on fire.
Fire Chief Sprague presented the Fire Department Facilities Master Plan to the City Council on May 16, 2023 with a thorough description of the upgrades and new facilities needed to serve Berkeley now and in the future. That looks like a long-forgotten memory from those who attended the presentation, Bartlett, Hahn, Wengraf, Robinson, Humbert and Arreguin. Kesarwani, Taplin and Harrison were absent. The City Council has yet to hear the presentation from Fire Chief Sprague on the Dispatch Needs Assessment (911 calls).
I’ve heard both presentations and read the documents. We, the Council, the City need to pay attention.
Two Supplementals were submitted for the Southside rezoning. A Supplemental is best thought of as an alternative or addition to the initial proposal. In this case that was the staff report.
Councilmember Hahn, who was on the Zoning Adjustment Board for years reviewing large multi-unit projects, had a much different perspective on the upzoning of the Southside than Rigel Robinson who I have never seen at a Zoning Adjustment Board meeting since I started attending in November 2014. Robinson’s perspective with no visible experience included in his supplemental and initial motion that any project, citywide, that meets SB 35 with 10% low-income housing on-site and prevailing wage should be eligible for ministerial approval (by right – a simple signing at the counter without Design Review Committee, Zoning Adjustment Board or public review).
Hahn said this, “Zoning is not just about how you use your own parcel, but how the use of your parcel impacts other parcels and the public realm”. Translated, wall to wall 8-story multi-unit buildings that could go up to 12 maybe even 16 stories with density bonuses is dramatically going to change the Southside and the micro-climate (heat island effect).
Hahn’s supplemental included green roofs to combat heat island effect, windows in bedrooms, widening sidewalks, study and landmark historical and cultural buildings and sites, incorporate affordable housing for low income students. In the substitute motion that was supported only by Hahn and Harrison removed the pet washing room as satisfying the open space requirement.
In the final motion that was approved by all the councilmembers except Wengraf who was absent, recommendations from Hahn landed as a referral to the city manager. It is hard to know how soon any of Hahn’s recommendations will see the light of day. The Bird Safe Glass ordinance took five years.
The part of the final motion on the prevailing wage and ministerial approval citywide of SB 35 projects with 10% affordable housing will get fast tracked to meet the implementation date of March 1, 2024.
Not much happened at the only other City meeting I attended during Thanksgiving week.
At the Agenda Committee UC Berkeley students lined up to request that Harrison’s Resolution: Opposition to Police Brutality and Use of Force on Nonviolent Protesters stay on the agenda for December 5. They lost, of course. The Agenda Committee sent the resolution to the Public Safety Committee. Taplin’s item to name the planned new pier after Nancy Skinner is on the December 5 agenda as a referral to the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission.
Carol Marasovic reported the Commission on Status of Women had to meet outside as North Berkeley Senior Center was closed and Peter Radu did not have the authority to direct staff to open the building for the scheduled meeting.
Last, I did receive the 2023 bicycle count performed by Bryce Nesbitt and volunteers. The Bicycle counts were done midweek in the fall from 4 pm to 6 pm to duplicate the conditions from four previous bicycle counts in 2010, 2015, 2018, 2022 performed by the City.
I have been in a string of emails regarding the bicycle counts and bicycle riding. Here are some of the thoughtful responses and points to consider for further research.
The decline of bicycle riding as documented by the bicycle counts matches observations by bicycle riders in the email string, my own observations and other studies.
There is nothing from current observations and counts the supports Rigel Robinson’s glorious declarations in his Berkeleyside op-ed that automobile traffic is on the decline and bicycle riding is increasing or that Berkeley is fourth in the nation in bicycle riders. https://www.berkeleyside.org/2019/12/17/opinion-the-future-of-telegraph-avenue-is-a-shared-street
Fourth in the nation was 2014. Berkeley did better in the number of bicycle riders in 2015 than 2023. The bicycle plan was approved in 2017.
UC Berkeley student population increased from 35,833 in 2010 to 45,307 in 2022. The bicycle count at Bowditch and Channing (Southside near campus) in 2010 was 305. In 2023 it was 181. The 2023 count also included scooters 160 and pedestrians 600.
The intersection of Channing a designated bicycle boulevard and Milvia with a protected bike lane the count in 2010 was 510 and in 2023 was 450. Milvia and Hearst did increase from 402 in 2010 to 443 in 2023.
What was notable is lots of people walk and scooters are increasingly popular. One person wrote, “What’s going on? Shouldn’t we try to find out? If Berkeley had a 10-year plan to build new tennis courts, but the world had switched to pickle-ball wouldn’t we want to change the plan?
After the presentation of the bicycle count to the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission, the majority response was to make excuses and move on without a deeper look, which strikes me as a “don’t confuse me with the facts when I have already made up my mind.”
The bottom line is there does need to be a deep look into why bicycle riding is declining and going in the opposite direction of the City’s plan. And, any street that is being considered as a bicycle street without protective bicycle lane curbing or a street with protected bicycle lanes needs to have multiple bicycle and traffic counts before embarking re-engineering planning and after any modifications or improvements.
The Telraam sensor that I wrote about in the November 19 Activist’s Diary looks like a great way to collect what modes of transportation people are actually using and how that may or may not change with street modifications and improvements. Bryce Nesbitt noted in his presentation of the bicycle counts to the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission documentation of vehicle traffic speeding up after repaving. Telraam continuously monitors motorized vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians and more according to the company website.
https://telraam.net/en/what-is-telraam
There is a $900,000 budget referral on the December 5 city council agenda from Harrison co-sponsored by Taplin to calm traffic with $100,000 of it designated in the vicinity of Derby.
Will preconceived notions dominate the response to the child struck by a hit-and-run driver on Halloween after sunset (6:11 pm) around 6:25 pm? According, to the Berkeley Scanner, the child ran out into the street between two parked cars on Derby near Mabel. The car sped away westward on Derby. https://tinyurl.com/56p2ynxh
Mabel is not a through street. The intersection at Mabel and Derby diverts southbound traffic on Mabel onto Derby in a westerly direction, which might indicate the traffic diversion contributed to the accident. There is no marked crosswalk at this intersection that I saw when I walked around the area.
As I looked for traffic and crossed at the corner, I tried to reimagine the incident from reading the Berkeley Scanner report and listening to the story the child’s mother told to the Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment and Sustainability Committee (FITES).
We’ll never know the full story as the driver sped off. But what we do know is bad things can happen quickly when we’re in a hurry, not paying attention and not thinking safety first.
November 19, 2023
As I begin this week’s Activist Diary, the Los Angeles Times editorial board called for a “Cease-fire now. The killing of civilians in Gaza must stop.” The editorial close states this, “Remaining mindful of America’s mistakes, it is incumbent upon the Biden administration now to avoid complicity with Israel’s.”
Trump and Netanyahu both share a common thread: using power to escape charges of fraud and criminal punishment. If you haven’t read Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present this would be a good time to pick it up.
Here is an excerpt of Ben-Ghiat’s early analysis from her substack on Netanyahu and the horror we are watching unfold:
“In December 2022, Netanyahu thought he had won the autocrat’s lottery, having been reelected despite charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, and a corruption trial ongoing He promptly initiated a ‘judicial reform’ that would limit the Israeli Supreme Court’s authority and clear the way for him to realize the strongman dream: becoming personally untouchable by the law.
Instead, this authoritarian overreach led to the largest protests in Israeli history – protests that united grassroots activists and elites and included refusals by Army and Air Force personnel to perform military service. But Netanyahu did not back down. Propelled by a desire for self-preservation, and unencumbered by any moral code, strongmen with legal troubles that threaten their power become laser-focused on making those troubles go away for good. Netanyahu fits this model.”
Ben Ghiat’s full analysis at: https://lucid.substack.com/p/what-will-be-the-destiny-of-netanyahu
Trump’s promises of retribution if elected, along with Project 2025, a sweeping remake of the executive branch of the U.S. federal government, fit the same mold of making troubles go away with a giant power grab. Loyalists are already being screened and lined up so Trump won’t have gatekeepers the next time around to rein in his worst instincts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
Unless something changes soon, it looks like in the coming election of 2024 President Biden will be running against himself and third-party candidates as much as he will be running against Trump and the ideologues of the Republican Party, the GOP disrupters and the theocracy of the right with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson at its congressional head.
Councilmember Harrison attempted to put the Tenants Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) back on the City Council regular meeting agenda for a vote on November 28, 2023. It was pulled from the draft agenda at the Agenda and Rules Committee and moved to the Council’s Land Use Policy Committee an action initiated by Councilmember Wengraf and supported by Councilmember Hahn.
It is now over three years since TOPA appeared on the Land Use Committee agenda on March 5, 2020 and disappeared from further action after a January 27, 2022 City Council special meeting where discussion was held, 78 people spoke and no action was taken.
In the piles of documents, I sifted through I found a memo dated March 10, 2020 from Mayor Arreguin to City Council that I can’t attach to any meeting agenda. TOPA gives tenants the first right to purchase the building when it goes up for sale. The Chamber of Commerce, the real estate industry and investors oppose TOPA.
Whenever I have the choice of attending a City meeting online instead of in-person, I choose online. This week that meant I totally missed the demonstration at the council regular meeting on Tuesday evening calling for a cease-fire. Online all we got was pauses with Council exiting the dais, not the scene in the room.
Nineteen of twenty speaker cards pulled on non-agenda items were from people calling for a cease-fire. Nearly all the speakers were Palestinian American. One of the few speaking on a cease-fire who was not Palestinian American was Steve Martinot who seemed to confuse the vote on the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant release of radioactive contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean with the issue at hand.
As a close observer of City Council, I could not count five (the number needed for a majority vote) who would support a cease-fire. I’m not sure there is any amount of demonstrating or number of Palestinian children’s deaths that would change hardened positions or fear of taking a position, but we try.
I still recall the uproar in June 2018 when former councilmember Cheryl Davila selected Hatem Bazian as her emergency standby officer. Hatem Bazian is an outspoken advocate for Palestinians and lecturer on Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. The City Council finally confirmed Bazian as Davila’s standby officer, but it was months later. The date I found was December 3, 2019 when he was appointed with 21 others.
Before public comment on the cease-fire and the council meeting abruptly ended with no votes taken on the evening agenda, Ryan Lau and Carissa Lee presented the AC Transit Realign draft of bus route changes and schedules to council. The same presentation to the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission on Thursday evening was so much better with a more robust discussion between the AC Transit presenters and the commissioners and attendees.
The presentation started with AC Transit At-a-Glance of rider demographics: 65% are low income, 75% are people of color, 29% have limited English proficiency, 27% are traveling to work and there are 30,000 student trips to and from school every school day.
The transbay bus serves riders who are mostly in the $100,000 to $150,000 income bracket. With remote work the transbay ridership is about 20% of the pre-pandemic level.
A key limiting factor for providing bus service is bus drivers. Even before the pandemic, the average age of a bus driver was near retirement age.
While the question was asked if there were any plans for driverless buses, there was no discussion of how much bus drivers earn. An internet search turned up that the average wage starts around $50,000 for fulltime employment with the generous benefit package that could be expected with a union job. As for self-driving/driverless buses, the AC Transit representatives said there were no such plans.
AC Transit is up to 72% of pre-pandemic levels and looking away from serving commuters to serving those who need bus service the most for daytime trips, evenings and weekends. The proposed realignment drops the transbay route and the Grizzly Peak route. The plan to expand service on Cedar needs to first work through an existing agreement that limits bus service on Cedar.
Though not discussed, the new BART cars have 50 seats and can hold up to 200 passengers in a “crush” load which makes BART the most efficient mode of transit for longer distance commuters. An eight-car-BART-train under the Bay in one trip can carry up to 1600 riders.
The AC Transit Realign plan is proposed to be implemented in April. You can find routes, public meeting announcements and directions for feedback at Actransit.org/realign: https://www.actransit.org/realign
You can also email [email protected]
The last presentation of the evening at the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission was Bryce Nesbitt’s Informational Briefing on Community-led Traffic Counts. The presentation is promised to be available on the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission webpage, but it is not posted as of this writing and I do not have a copy so I am working from notes and memory. The report was fascinating and should definitely receive much broader distribution and attention.
The hand traffic counts used the same locations and times of day as a City study done many years earlier. During the intervening years Berkeley’s population increased by 16% and the City has embarked on a bicycle plan to increase ridership. The results of the community count show declining bicycle ridership and increases in pedestrians. Nesbitt said that when a count was repeated by a different person the results were similar, countering questions of counting errors.
The results of declining ridership mirrored studies from other sources with similar results of declining bicycle ridership, including a national survey that commuting by bicycle was declining before the pandemic.
This is all very interesting. One commissioner in particular did not seem to want to accept the findings and kept throwing out excuses. Commissioner Rick Raffanti, appointed by Councilmember Harrison, made the most sense, suggesting there should be a deeper look.
It was a bit of a shock, but not surprising that commissioners committed to expanding bicycle infrastructure weren’t interested in pursuing why ridership is in decline rather than increasing.
The bicycle plan established in 2017 following a community survey that included asking residents if they were active bike riders, not interested in bicycle riding or not bicycle riders, but interested in bicycle riding as a means of transportation and what conditions would persuade them to change their minds. Safety was a key factor.
I believe it was Nesbitt who compared the wish of bicycle riding to asking someone if they wanted to go to the gym three times a week. Yes, sounds nice in an answer, but that doesn’t mean someone will go to the gym three times a week, once a week or at all.
Yet, this city and many others are redesigning infrastructure to support the small percentage of the population that are avid bicycle riders with the belief that all these changes will convince the hesitant possibly interested person to take up bicycle riding to combat climate change.
Curbs on bicycle lanes are supposed to make the hesitant feel safer. My friends who are regular bicycle riders avoid bicycle lanes with curbs. They see them as dangerous, because they are trapped in the lane with no way out if there is a hazard in front of them.
Members of bicycling groups and organizations like Walk, Bike Berkeley seem to have an inside track with City staff with regularly scheduled meetings to promote bicycling and bicycling infrastructure. That is what I saw in my public records request on the Hopkins Corridor.
Nesbitt also included the interesting results from the use of a Telraam device mounted in a 2nd story window on Camelia monitoring traffic speed before and after repaying. Telraan documented what we should know, traffic speeds up after repaving.
The Telraam sensor is in some ways similar to PurpleAir. Both are available to the public for purchase and to collect data. PurpleAir monitors air quality. Telraam continuously monitors motorized vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians and more according to the company website. https://telraam.net/en/what-is-telraam
The City Council voted unanimously at the special 4 pm meeting on Tuesday to approve the San Pablo Avenue Multimodal Corridor Program: Safety Enhancements and Parallel Bike Improvement projects using the Supplemental 3 from Councilmembers Taplin, Kesarwani and Humbert which adds to advance traffic calming improvements especially at intersections. https://berkeleyca.gov/city-council-special-meeting-eagenda-november-14-2023
While the project leaders touted comprehensive community outreach, there were still businesses and nearby residents impacted by the removal of 174 parking spaces and other changes who were unaware of the project. What struck me the most about the entire meeting was how Councilmember Robinson carried on about how many meetings he had attended and how he still wanted to see the bike lanes on San Pablo Avenue at a future date. That left me wondering when there are major regional projects, why don’t councilmembers representing the city at these regional committees give a one-minute update to the rest of the Council and the public.
The owner of Lavender Bakery and Cafe on the southeast corner of San Pablo at Addison, said he was not notified of the plan and will be losing eight parking spaces near his business. He spoke to the impact this will have on his business especially the loss of parking for loading and unloading.
It is not clear how many of the 174 parking spaces are lost due to AB 413, which was signed into law on October 10, 2023. AB 413, often referred to as “Daylighting”, prohibits vehicles from parking, standing or stopping within 20 feet of a crosswalk whether marked or unmarked or 15 feet from any crosswalk where a curb extension (bulb-out) is present.
In the informational briefing to the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission, Hamid Mostowfi, Transportation Division Manager, noted the bill does not require public notification in advance. Meeting the conditions of the law is not debatable or negotiable. The safety zone can be marked by a sign or red paint on the curb. With just a little bit of humor he suggested red paint might be a good investment which got a chuckle as there is going to be a lot of red paint being applied to curbs all over not just Berkeley, but the entire state.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB413
The outcry of opposition from members of the community and especially commissioners from the Commission on Disability and the Commission on Aging to Rigel Robinson’s proposal to allow bicycles on sidewalks was swift and loud. The proposal before the Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment and Sustainability Committee (FITES) titled “Modernizing and updating outdated & unnecessary language in the BMC related to transportation” was item 2 on the agenda and yet attendees had to sit through a meeting that started at 2 pm until 3:35 pm to hear Robinson say that he had rewritten the proposal and removed allowing riding bicycles on sidewalks.
Sitting through the endless discussion, we learned Robinson has little regard for policies. It was an eye-opener when Robinson said he knows he is in violation when he rides his bike through Strawberry Park after council meetings when the park is closed. Councilmember Taplin responded saying that he always rides down Browning after council meetings to Channing the bicycle boulevard. He said he would never ride through the park after closing out of respect for his constituents and the park.
Attendees had to wait until 4:10 pm to comment. Rena Fischer, Chair of the Commission on Disability, was controlled and blunt that she had just wasted half a day to hear that the contentious item,“bicycles on sidewalks”, had been removed. She stated it was illogical that when people are obviously attending to express their concerns that the attendees could not be notified at the beginning of the meeting.
Robinson’s proposal was continued and will be listed under unscheduled items.
I had less patience than most while listening the mother who was given as much time as she wanted at the beginning of the meeting to describe a traffic accident. She started with saying her child died from being hit by a car and then later explained her child didn’t die, but suffered a broken leg from being hit by a car as he ran into the street after his friends on Halloween. It was frightening and traumatic for the parent and child, but the child’s leg will heal according to his mother. He will be fine.
While listening, I couldn’t stop thinking about how Gaza has turned into a graveyard for children. More than 5,000 are dead. The number of wounded children whose entire families have been killed from the endless bombing has a new acronym, WCNSF: wounded child no surviving family. Some will grow up not knowing their name, their true age, their birthday. They won’t have pictures of their parents and siblings. Where they lived is rubble. There is not enough food and water to feed them. And, this city and our national government, our President can’t call for a cease-fire and an end to this horror. We should hang our heads in shame.
As I begin this week’s Activist Diary, the Los Angeles Times editorial board called for a “Cease-fire now. The killing of civilians in Gaza must stop.” The editorial close states this, “Remaining mindful of America’s mistakes, it is incumbent upon the Biden administration now to avoid complicity with Israel’s.”
Trump and Netanyahu both share a common thread: using power to escape charges of fraud and criminal punishment. If you haven’t read Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present this would be a good time to pick it up.
Here is an excerpt of Ben-Ghiat’s early analysis from her substack on Netanyahu and the horror we are watching unfold:
“In December 2022, Netanyahu thought he had won the autocrat’s lottery, having been reelected despite charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, and a corruption trial ongoing He promptly initiated a ‘judicial reform’ that would limit the Israeli Supreme Court’s authority and clear the way for him to realize the strongman dream: becoming personally untouchable by the law.
Instead, this authoritarian overreach led to the largest protests in Israeli history – protests that united grassroots activists and elites and included refusals by Army and Air Force personnel to perform military service. But Netanyahu did not back down. Propelled by a desire for self-preservation, and unencumbered by any moral code, strongmen with legal troubles that threaten their power become laser-focused on making those troubles go away for good. Netanyahu fits this model.”
Ben Ghiat’s full analysis at: https://lucid.substack.com/p/what-will-be-the-destiny-of-netanyahu
Trump’s promises of retribution if elected, along with Project 2025, a sweeping remake of the executive branch of the U.S. federal government, fit the same mold of making troubles go away with a giant power grab. Loyalists are already being screened and lined up so Trump won’t have gatekeepers the next time around to rein in his worst instincts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
Unless something changes soon, it looks like in the coming election of 2024 President Biden will be running against himself and third-party candidates as much as he will be running against Trump and the ideologues of the Republican Party, the GOP disrupters and the theocracy of the right with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson at its congressional head.
Councilmember Harrison attempted to put the Tenants Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) back on the City Council regular meeting agenda for a vote on November 28, 2023. It was pulled from the draft agenda at the Agenda and Rules Committee and moved to the Council’s Land Use Policy Committee an action initiated by Councilmember Wengraf and supported by Councilmember Hahn.
It is now over three years since TOPA appeared on the Land Use Committee agenda on March 5, 2020 and disappeared from further action after a January 27, 2022 City Council special meeting where discussion was held, 78 people spoke and no action was taken.
In the piles of documents, I sifted through I found a memo dated March 10, 2020 from Mayor Arreguin to City Council that I can’t attach to any meeting agenda. TOPA gives tenants the first right to purchase the building when it goes up for sale. The Chamber of Commerce, the real estate industry and investors oppose TOPA.
Whenever I have the choice of attending a City meeting online instead of in-person, I choose online. This week that meant I totally missed the demonstration at the council regular meeting on Tuesday evening calling for a cease-fire. Online all we got was pauses with Council exiting the dais, not the scene in the room.
Nineteen of twenty speaker cards pulled on non-agenda items were from people calling for a cease-fire. Nearly all the speakers were Palestinian American. One of the few speaking on a cease-fire who was not Palestinian American was Steve Martinot who seemed to confuse the vote on the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant release of radioactive contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean with the issue at hand.
As a close observer of City Council, I could not count five (the number needed for a majority vote) who would support a cease-fire. I’m not sure there is any amount of demonstrating or number of Palestinian children’s deaths that would change hardened positions or fear of taking a position, but we try.
I still recall the uproar in June 2018 when former councilmember Cheryl Davila selected Hatem Bazian as her emergency standby officer. Hatem Bazian is an outspoken advocate for Palestinians and lecturer on Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. The City Council finally confirmed Bazian as Davila’s standby officer, but it was months later. The date I found was December 3, 2019 when he was appointed with 21 others.
Before public comment on the cease-fire and the council meeting abruptly ended with no votes taken on the evening agenda, Ryan Lau and Carissa Lee presented the AC Transit Realign draft of bus route changes and schedules to council. The same presentation to the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission on Thursday evening was so much better with a more robust discussion between the AC Transit presenters and the commissioners and attendees.
The presentation started with AC Transit At-a-Glance of rider demographics: 65% are low income, 75% are people of color, 29% have limited English proficiency, 27% are traveling to work and there are 30,000 student trips to and from school every school day.
The transbay bus serves riders who are mostly in the $100,000 to $150,000 income bracket. With remote work the transbay ridership is about 20% of the pre-pandemic level.
A key limiting factor for providing bus service is bus drivers. Even before the pandemic, the average age of a bus driver was near retirement age.
While the question was asked if there were any plans for driverless buses, there was no discussion of how much bus drivers earn. An internet search turned up that the average wage starts around $50,000 for fulltime employment with the generous benefit package that could be expected with a union job. As for self-driving/driverless buses, the AC Transit representatives said there were no such plans.
AC Transit is up to 72% of pre-pandemic levels and looking away from serving commuters to serving those who need bus service the most for daytime trips, evenings and weekends. The proposed realignment drops the transbay route and the Grizzly Peak route. The plan to expand service on Cedar needs to first work through an existing agreement that limits bus service on Cedar.
Though not discussed, the new BART cars have 50 seats and can hold up to 200 passengers in a “crush” load which makes BART the most efficient mode of transit for longer distance commuters. An eight-car-BART-train under the Bay in one trip can carry up to 1600 riders.
The AC Transit Realign plan is proposed to be implemented in April. You can find routes, public meeting announcements and directions for feedback at Actransit.org/realign: https://www.actransit.org/realign
You can also email [email protected]
The last presentation of the evening at the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission was Bryce Nesbitt’s Informational Briefing on Community-led Traffic Counts. The presentation is promised to be available on the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission webpage, but it is not posted as of this writing and I do not have a copy so I am working from notes and memory. The report was fascinating and should definitely receive much broader distribution and attention.
The hand traffic counts used the same locations and times of day as a City study done many years earlier. During the intervening years Berkeley’s population increased by 16% and the City has embarked on a bicycle plan to increase ridership. The results of the community count show declining bicycle ridership and increases in pedestrians. Nesbitt said that when a count was repeated by a different person the results were similar, countering questions of counting errors.
The results of declining ridership mirrored studies from other sources with similar results of declining bicycle ridership, including a national survey that commuting by bicycle was declining before the pandemic.
This is all very interesting. One commissioner in particular did not seem to want to accept the findings and kept throwing out excuses. Commissioner Rick Raffanti, appointed by Councilmember Harrison, made the most sense, suggesting there should be a deeper look.
It was a bit of a shock, but not surprising that commissioners committed to expanding bicycle infrastructure weren’t interested in pursuing why ridership is in decline rather than increasing.
The bicycle plan established in 2017 following a community survey that included asking residents if they were active bike riders, not interested in bicycle riding or not bicycle riders, but interested in bicycle riding as a means of transportation and what conditions would persuade them to change their minds. Safety was a key factor.
I believe it was Nesbitt who compared the wish of bicycle riding to asking someone if they wanted to go to the gym three times a week. Yes, sounds nice in an answer, but that doesn’t mean someone will go to the gym three times a week, once a week or at all.
Yet, this city and many others are redesigning infrastructure to support the small percentage of the population that are avid bicycle riders with the belief that all these changes will convince the hesitant possibly interested person to take up bicycle riding to combat climate change.
Curbs on bicycle lanes are supposed to make the hesitant feel safer. My friends who are regular bicycle riders avoid bicycle lanes with curbs. They see them as dangerous, because they are trapped in the lane with no way out if there is a hazard in front of them.
Members of bicycling groups and organizations like Walk, Bike Berkeley seem to have an inside track with City staff with regularly scheduled meetings to promote bicycling and bicycling infrastructure. That is what I saw in my public records request on the Hopkins Corridor.
Nesbitt also included the interesting results from the use of a Telraam device mounted in a 2nd story window on Camelia monitoring traffic speed before and after repaying. Telraan documented what we should know, traffic speeds up after repaving.
The Telraam sensor is in some ways similar to PurpleAir. Both are available to the public for purchase and to collect data. PurpleAir monitors air quality. Telraam continuously monitors motorized vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians and more according to the company website. https://telraam.net/en/what-is-telraam
The City Council voted unanimously at the special 4 pm meeting on Tuesday to approve the San Pablo Avenue Multimodal Corridor Program: Safety Enhancements and Parallel Bike Improvement projects using the Supplemental 3 from Councilmembers Taplin, Kesarwani and Humbert which adds to advance traffic calming improvements especially at intersections. https://berkeleyca.gov/city-council-special-meeting-eagenda-november-14-2023
While the project leaders touted comprehensive community outreach, there were still businesses and nearby residents impacted by the removal of 174 parking spaces and other changes who were unaware of the project. What struck me the most about the entire meeting was how Councilmember Robinson carried on about how many meetings he had attended and how he still wanted to see the bike lanes on San Pablo Avenue at a future date. That left me wondering when there are major regional projects, why don’t councilmembers representing the city at these regional committees give a one-minute update to the rest of the Council and the public.
The owner of Lavender Bakery and Cafe on the southeast corner of San Pablo at Addison, said he was not notified of the plan and will be losing eight parking spaces near his business. He spoke to the impact this will have on his business especially the loss of parking for loading and unloading.
It is not clear how many of the 174 parking spaces are lost due to AB 413, which was signed into law on October 10, 2023. AB 413, often referred to as “Daylighting”, prohibits vehicles from parking, standing or stopping within 20 feet of a crosswalk whether marked or unmarked or 15 feet from any crosswalk where a curb extension (bulb-out) is present.
In the informational briefing to the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission, Hamid Mostowfi, Transportation Division Manager, noted the bill does not require public notification in advance. Meeting the conditions of the law is not debatable or negotiable. The safety zone can be marked by a sign or red paint on the curb. With just a little bit of humor he suggested red paint might be a good investment which got a chuckle as there is going to be a lot of red paint being applied to curbs all over not just Berkeley, but the entire state.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB413
The outcry of opposition from members of the community and especially commissioners from the Commission on Disability and the Commission on Aging to Rigel Robinson’s proposal to allow bicycles on sidewalks was swift and loud. The proposal before the Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment and Sustainability Committee (FITES) titled “Modernizing and updating outdated & unnecessary language in the BMC related to transportation” was item 2 on the agenda and yet attendees had to sit through a meeting that started at 2 pm until 3:35 pm to hear Robinson say that he had rewritten the proposal and removed allowing riding bicycles on sidewalks.
Sitting through the endless discussion, we learned Robinson has little regard for policies. It was an eye-opener when Robinson said he knows he is in violation when he rides his bike through Strawberry Park after council meetings when the park is closed. Councilmember Taplin responded saying that he always rides down Browning after council meetings to Channing the bicycle boulevard. He said he would never ride through the park after closing out of respect for his constituents and the park.
Attendees had to wait until 4:10 pm to comment. Rena Fischer, Chair of the Commission on Disability, was controlled and blunt that she had just wasted half a day to hear that the contentious item,“bicycles on sidewalks”, had been removed. She stated it was illogical that when people are obviously attending to express their concerns that the attendees could not be notified at the beginning of the meeting.
Robinson’s proposal was continued and will be listed under unscheduled items.
I had less patience than most while listening the mother who was given as much time as she wanted at the beginning of the meeting to describe a traffic accident. She started with saying her child died from being hit by a car and then later explained her child didn’t die, but suffered a broken leg from being hit by a car as he ran into the street after his friends on Halloween. It was frightening and traumatic for the parent and child, but the child’s leg will heal according to his mother. He will be fine.
While listening, I couldn’t stop thinking about how Gaza has turned into a graveyard for children. More than 5,000 are dead. The number of wounded children whose entire families have been killed from the endless bombing has a new acronym, WCNSF: wounded child no surviving family. Some will grow up not knowing their name, their true age, their birthday. They won’t have pictures of their parents and siblings. Where they lived is rubble. There is not enough food and water to feed them. And, this city and our national government, our President can’t call for a cease-fire and an end to this horror. We should hang our heads in shame.
October 29, 2023
I often think I should approach writing the Activist’s Diary like plein air painting by picking a point in time and stopping, but the world and the City keep moving on while I write.
I finished Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger just two weeks before the Hamas attack on Israel. Doppelganger starts with Klein describing her double with whom she is often confused Naomi Wolf who has taken a hard right turn. In the book Klein recounts her trip to Gaza and compares the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel to the displacement and genocide of the American Indigenous People in the United States.
At the beginning of the week the death toll in Gaza was 5,791 of whom 2,360 were children. After President Joe Biden placed doubt on the number of deaths, the Gaza Health Ministry published on October 26, 2023 a 212 page list of over 6700 dead Palestinians by name, age, gender and ID number. 2665 were children. The list does not contain the names of 281 who could not be identified. As I write there is more bombing and more names to be added. https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/27/headlines/gaza_health_ministry_publishes_names_of_nearly_7_000_palestinians_killed_in_israeli_strikes
The residents of Gaza are running out of food, water, medicine and fuel and now Israel has shut off power and communications. The few aid convoys into Gaza before this latest siege were wholly inadequate for what is needed for 2.2 million people. Twenty-nine journalists are confirmed dead, 24 Palestinian, 1 Lebanese, and 4 Israeli. Eight journalists were reported injured and 9 were reported missing or detained. Last night I heard the injured at the hospital in Gaza City numbered 19,000.
Will all the Israeli retaliation under the banner of turning Hamas to dust end terrorism? I doubt it. The horror raining down on Gaza, the massive destruction by Israel, the thousands dead and injured brings only more terror. It is not war crimes it is war is the crime. I believe it was Howard Zinn who said that first.
In some parts of the country, calling for a ceasefire, ending the blockade to Palestine has meant being doxed, fired, nasty emails, posts, being called anti-Semitic and death threats. But now the pictures and reports coming out of Gaza look like a genocide of the Palestinians and the demonstrations calling for a cease-fire are growing around the world and here too. And, yes I sent off my ceasefire contact letters to the President, U.S. Senators and Barbara Lee.
Tuesday was book club. We chose The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 - 2017 by Rashid Khalidi for January.
The new speaker of the House Mike Johnson is a self-described Evangelical Christian in the Southern Baptist tradition who said “My faith informs everything I do.” Johnson previously worked as senior attorney and spokesperson for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) a Southern Poverty Law Center designated hate group.
When I downloaded Robert P. Jones’ book White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, I never expected that the new speaker of the House would be coming out of the tradition of which Jones writes (religion, politics and culture including the Evangelical Christian in the Southern Baptist tradition). The book covers how deeply white supremacy is embedded in white Christianity especially the Southern Baptist and Evangelical churches in the South. Jones goes into detail in how the Daughters of the Confederacy embedded teaching children in the “Lost Cause” mirroring religious studies at church and Sunday school with lessons, holidays and celebrations of the Confederacy.
The book is fascinating. I never knew the National Cathedral had four stained-glass windows honoring the Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson (1953-2017) donated by the Daughters of the Confederacy. Those windows were replaced in 2017 (before my first visit) with racial justice themed stained-glass windows.
My copy of the book was from the Contra Costa County Library. There are four people in line for the one copy at the San Francisco Library and no copies that I could find in Berkeley.
If you are not up for a book or already in overload, Katelyn Fossett’s October 27, 2023 interview with Kristin Kobes Du Mez (author of Jesus and John Wayne) on Mike Johnson will give you a peak into what is ahead. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/27/mike-johnson-christian-nationalist-ideas-qa-00123882
On to the week in Berkeley.
Monday afternoon four of us attending the Agenda and Rules Committee spoke to our concerns regarding item 22 in the draft agenda for November 7, 2023.
“22. Modernizing and updating outdated & unnecessary language in the BMC related to transportation
From: Councilmember Rigel Robinson
Recommendation: Adopt first reading of an Ordinance amending BMC Chapters 6.32, 1432 and 14.68 to: 1. Rescind outdated or unnecessary regulations pertaining to jaywalking, skateboarding, bicycle licenses and bicycle establishment requirements, 2. Allow 24/7 use of public paths by pedestrians and cyclists for the purpose of transportation; 3. Allow bicyclists on non-electric bicycles to ride on the sidewalk while exercising due care and yielding right-of-way to pedestrians when no Class I, Class II, or Class IV bicycle facility is available; 4. Align the penalty for bicycle violations with other moving violations by amending it from a misdemeanor to an infraction; 5. Update definitions of bicycles and scooters to align with definitions in the California Vehicle Code.” [emphasis added]
There was not one peep out of Mayor Arreguin and Councilmember Sophie Hahn who were up first in making comments on the draft agenda. When it was finally Councilmember Wengraf’s turn to speak she suggested that Robinson’s item 22 go to a policy committee before it went to the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission. The policy committee suggested was Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment and Sustainability (FITES) with Councilmembers Harrison as chair with Robinson and Taplin and Humbert as the alternate.
After Wengraf started the discussion of pulling the item 22 from the November 7 agenda and sending it to committee, then Hahn and Arreguin joined in suggesting that the item should go to the Commission on Aging and the Commission on Disability. The final motion by Hahn was “to recommend to the author [Robinson] that they amend the item to include a referral to the Disability, Aging and Transportation and Infrastructure Commissions.” The annotated agenda listed only commissions and not those specifically named in the motion.
The special City Council meeting on the Waterfront Specific Plan on November 2 was still on the schedule, but it was cancelled later with a new proposed date of January 23, 2024.
Monday evening the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council sponsored the presentation by Kristina Hill on “Contaminated Sites and Sea Level Rise – Preparing for Change.” Hill explained (with diagrams) how groundwater sits on top of the denser salty sea water and seeps into capped contaminated sites with sea level rise. Levees will not stop the groundwater rise.
In the Q & A, one person asked about the flooding at the Coliseum Connections Housing Project in East Oakland. Hill said she warned that the project would sit on a dry creek bed, a disaster waiting to happen.
Right now, Berkeley is in the middle of rezoning the low-lying West Berkeley contaminated Steel Casting site for a large biolab campus. The environmental impact report (EIR) is underway. The plan as of this week is still to cap the contaminated site.
You can pick up the link for the webinar from the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council home page at https://berkeleyneighborhoodscouncil.com/
or go directly to the webinar at https://tinyurl.com/2s4uuzbf
The 4 x 4 Committee met on the demolition ordinance. The subject of the ordinance is protections for the renters who are displaced by the demolition of the unit they are renting or the loss of a rental unit through elimination or conversion of a unit within a building. The protections include moving and relocation location assistance, first right of refusal when new building is completed, rental differential assistance in specified circumstances for example when household income falls below 50% of the AMI (area median income).
The definition of the dwelling units covered includes just about everything even non-permitted dwellings as long as they are registered with the Rent Board, also ADUs and JADUs. The exceptions are group living accommodations in a University recognized sorority or fraternity and a single-family house.
The plan for the demolition ordinance passed by the 4 x 4 Committee on October 24, 2023 is to go to the Planning Commission, Housing Advisory Commissions and City Council before the
Middle Housing Ordinance reaches the City Council.
The discussion of the proposal for Middle Housing is before the Planning Commission on November 1. The goal of Middle Housing which includes duplexes, triplexes fourplexes and small buildings is to increase density in all areas of Berkeley (R-1, R-2, R-2A, MU-R) except the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones. The theory is that Middle Housing besides being “middle in size” will be naturally affordable.
The proposal includes things like by right demolition of single-family houses, removal of the minimum size restrictions of units, reducing the amount of open space. The proposed ordinance was presented to the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council on October 14. You can see that recording at: https://berkeleyneighborhoodscouncil.com/
Fire Chief Sprague presented the Fiscal Year 2023 in Review and the Fiscal Year 2024 Goals to the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission on Wednesday.
I caught up with my neighbor who was also at the meeting the next day to compare notes. We were both totally impressed by Sprague’s one hour and twenty-minute presentation and shuddered every time he mentioned succession and leadership planning. We wondered how long Berkeley would be able to keep someone this qualified.
The thrust of the presentation is that Berkeley is no longer a suburban city. Berkeley is the second most dense city of the 51 most populated cities in California. San Francisco is number one. The Fire Department resources in staff, fire fighters, equipment and facilities are not equipped for the dense city we have become with high-rises replacing single family housing, one and two-story commercial buildings and low-rise multi-unit buildings. Plus the very high fire hazard severity zones are densely populated.
Sprague’s goal of returning wildland to native vegetation, made this attendee very happy.
Sprague expects that when the evacuation emergency access study is completed next year more areas will be designated as the very highest fire risk, what we now call Fire Zone 3 or ES-R (Environmental Safety-Residential District) like Panoramic Hill. Sprague also said if Panoramic Hill is being evacuated from an oncoming fire, then we have failed. Panoramic Hill residents need to evacuate in advance.x
When Mayor Arreguin states his vision of adding 15,000 units to Berkeley which if filled would add around 30,000 to 40,000 people never have I heard that accompanied with that to have adequate services and response times Berkeley needs to upgrade and properly staff the dispatch center (think 911), add ambulances, firefighters, EMTs, replace four fire stations with new facilities and renovate three. Nor do those statements that are so appealing to the endorsements he is courting inform that the needed investment of renovating three fire stations, replacing four stations, new headquarters and the training center comes with a $330,000,000 - $372,000,000 price tag. This does not include the dispatch center.
The presentation starts on page 15 in the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission packet for the October 25, 2023 meeting. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/boards-commissions/disaster-and-fire-safety-commission
No votes were taken on the AAO#! (Annual Appropriations Ordinance aka Fall Budget Adjustment) at the Budget Committee, however, before any more budget referrals are added, the spending requests total $38,805,924 and the available funds are $13,945,878.
The Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) was the last City meeting I attended for the week. Nature lost in the 600 Addison Street biolab building appeal. The appeal of the sign approved by the Design Review Committee (DRC) to the Zoning Adjustment Board was that the height and lighting of the signage was in conflict with the City Sign Ordinance. The DRC Secretary Anne Burns confessed to incorrectly informing the DRC members that the sign was in compliance with the Sign Ordinance when it wasn’t.
The developer gave their song and dance of how the signage wasn’t really advertising, that the lights would be shut off from 10 pm to 5 am and would meet the Dark Skies Initiative ignoring that unnecessary night light is in conflict with the Dark Skies Initiative and detrimental to nature. The vote was 7 to 2 in favor of the sign. The ZAB was more moved by the DRC secretary confessing to providing incorrect direction to committee members, than that the sign was in conflict with the ordinance.
The last project was to request five additional parking spaces for the 2403-2407 San Pablo multi-unit project. There was a back and forth until finally the five spaces were approved in a 7 to 2 vote. It is quite amazing how the Berkeley elected and appointed are quick to prohibit parking at large multi-unit housing projects and perfectly willing to approve 943 parking spaces for 600 Addison and large parking lots for other biolab buildings.
The San Pablo project will be condominiums. Maybe the Panoramic Hill resident who commented at the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission meeting that he absolutely must have [street] parking for his car or he couldn’t live on Panoramic Hill. Maybe he should take a look at the condominiums on San Pablo. It’s a nice project and not in ES-r/Fire Zone 3.
It is impossible to attend every meeting. I missed the Rent board, Loan Administration Board, Solano Business Improvement District, the Zero Waste Commission, the Civic arts Commission, the Police Accountability Board, the Community Forum on the Berkeley Marina and the Community Health Commission.
I did make it to the forum with State Senate Candidate Dan Kalb on Saturday. That was the third and final planned forum with State Senate Candidates sponsored by East Bay Community for Action. The great thing about each of these forums was we had just one candidate at a time with ample time to ask a wide variety of unscreened, unfiltered questions. I took pages and pages of notes at each forum and will send a summary in the next Activist’s Diary. The other two forums were with the candidates Kathryn Lybarger and Jovanka Beckles.
I often think I should approach writing the Activist’s Diary like plein air painting by picking a point in time and stopping, but the world and the City keep moving on while I write.
I finished Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger just two weeks before the Hamas attack on Israel. Doppelganger starts with Klein describing her double with whom she is often confused Naomi Wolf who has taken a hard right turn. In the book Klein recounts her trip to Gaza and compares the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel to the displacement and genocide of the American Indigenous People in the United States.
At the beginning of the week the death toll in Gaza was 5,791 of whom 2,360 were children. After President Joe Biden placed doubt on the number of deaths, the Gaza Health Ministry published on October 26, 2023 a 212 page list of over 6700 dead Palestinians by name, age, gender and ID number. 2665 were children. The list does not contain the names of 281 who could not be identified. As I write there is more bombing and more names to be added. https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/27/headlines/gaza_health_ministry_publishes_names_of_nearly_7_000_palestinians_killed_in_israeli_strikes
The residents of Gaza are running out of food, water, medicine and fuel and now Israel has shut off power and communications. The few aid convoys into Gaza before this latest siege were wholly inadequate for what is needed for 2.2 million people. Twenty-nine journalists are confirmed dead, 24 Palestinian, 1 Lebanese, and 4 Israeli. Eight journalists were reported injured and 9 were reported missing or detained. Last night I heard the injured at the hospital in Gaza City numbered 19,000.
Will all the Israeli retaliation under the banner of turning Hamas to dust end terrorism? I doubt it. The horror raining down on Gaza, the massive destruction by Israel, the thousands dead and injured brings only more terror. It is not war crimes it is war is the crime. I believe it was Howard Zinn who said that first.
In some parts of the country, calling for a ceasefire, ending the blockade to Palestine has meant being doxed, fired, nasty emails, posts, being called anti-Semitic and death threats. But now the pictures and reports coming out of Gaza look like a genocide of the Palestinians and the demonstrations calling for a cease-fire are growing around the world and here too. And, yes I sent off my ceasefire contact letters to the President, U.S. Senators and Barbara Lee.
Tuesday was book club. We chose The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 - 2017 by Rashid Khalidi for January.
The new speaker of the House Mike Johnson is a self-described Evangelical Christian in the Southern Baptist tradition who said “My faith informs everything I do.” Johnson previously worked as senior attorney and spokesperson for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) a Southern Poverty Law Center designated hate group.
When I downloaded Robert P. Jones’ book White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, I never expected that the new speaker of the House would be coming out of the tradition of which Jones writes (religion, politics and culture including the Evangelical Christian in the Southern Baptist tradition). The book covers how deeply white supremacy is embedded in white Christianity especially the Southern Baptist and Evangelical churches in the South. Jones goes into detail in how the Daughters of the Confederacy embedded teaching children in the “Lost Cause” mirroring religious studies at church and Sunday school with lessons, holidays and celebrations of the Confederacy.
The book is fascinating. I never knew the National Cathedral had four stained-glass windows honoring the Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson (1953-2017) donated by the Daughters of the Confederacy. Those windows were replaced in 2017 (before my first visit) with racial justice themed stained-glass windows.
My copy of the book was from the Contra Costa County Library. There are four people in line for the one copy at the San Francisco Library and no copies that I could find in Berkeley.
If you are not up for a book or already in overload, Katelyn Fossett’s October 27, 2023 interview with Kristin Kobes Du Mez (author of Jesus and John Wayne) on Mike Johnson will give you a peak into what is ahead. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/27/mike-johnson-christian-nationalist-ideas-qa-00123882
On to the week in Berkeley.
Monday afternoon four of us attending the Agenda and Rules Committee spoke to our concerns regarding item 22 in the draft agenda for November 7, 2023.
“22. Modernizing and updating outdated & unnecessary language in the BMC related to transportation
From: Councilmember Rigel Robinson
Recommendation: Adopt first reading of an Ordinance amending BMC Chapters 6.32, 1432 and 14.68 to: 1. Rescind outdated or unnecessary regulations pertaining to jaywalking, skateboarding, bicycle licenses and bicycle establishment requirements, 2. Allow 24/7 use of public paths by pedestrians and cyclists for the purpose of transportation; 3. Allow bicyclists on non-electric bicycles to ride on the sidewalk while exercising due care and yielding right-of-way to pedestrians when no Class I, Class II, or Class IV bicycle facility is available; 4. Align the penalty for bicycle violations with other moving violations by amending it from a misdemeanor to an infraction; 5. Update definitions of bicycles and scooters to align with definitions in the California Vehicle Code.” [emphasis added]
There was not one peep out of Mayor Arreguin and Councilmember Sophie Hahn who were up first in making comments on the draft agenda. When it was finally Councilmember Wengraf’s turn to speak she suggested that Robinson’s item 22 go to a policy committee before it went to the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission. The policy committee suggested was Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment and Sustainability (FITES) with Councilmembers Harrison as chair with Robinson and Taplin and Humbert as the alternate.
After Wengraf started the discussion of pulling the item 22 from the November 7 agenda and sending it to committee, then Hahn and Arreguin joined in suggesting that the item should go to the Commission on Aging and the Commission on Disability. The final motion by Hahn was “to recommend to the author [Robinson] that they amend the item to include a referral to the Disability, Aging and Transportation and Infrastructure Commissions.” The annotated agenda listed only commissions and not those specifically named in the motion.
The special City Council meeting on the Waterfront Specific Plan on November 2 was still on the schedule, but it was cancelled later with a new proposed date of January 23, 2024.
Monday evening the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council sponsored the presentation by Kristina Hill on “Contaminated Sites and Sea Level Rise – Preparing for Change.” Hill explained (with diagrams) how groundwater sits on top of the denser salty sea water and seeps into capped contaminated sites with sea level rise. Levees will not stop the groundwater rise.
In the Q & A, one person asked about the flooding at the Coliseum Connections Housing Project in East Oakland. Hill said she warned that the project would sit on a dry creek bed, a disaster waiting to happen.
Right now, Berkeley is in the middle of rezoning the low-lying West Berkeley contaminated Steel Casting site for a large biolab campus. The environmental impact report (EIR) is underway. The plan as of this week is still to cap the contaminated site.
You can pick up the link for the webinar from the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council home page at https://berkeleyneighborhoodscouncil.com/
or go directly to the webinar at https://tinyurl.com/2s4uuzbf
The 4 x 4 Committee met on the demolition ordinance. The subject of the ordinance is protections for the renters who are displaced by the demolition of the unit they are renting or the loss of a rental unit through elimination or conversion of a unit within a building. The protections include moving and relocation location assistance, first right of refusal when new building is completed, rental differential assistance in specified circumstances for example when household income falls below 50% of the AMI (area median income).
The definition of the dwelling units covered includes just about everything even non-permitted dwellings as long as they are registered with the Rent Board, also ADUs and JADUs. The exceptions are group living accommodations in a University recognized sorority or fraternity and a single-family house.
The plan for the demolition ordinance passed by the 4 x 4 Committee on October 24, 2023 is to go to the Planning Commission, Housing Advisory Commissions and City Council before the
Middle Housing Ordinance reaches the City Council.
The discussion of the proposal for Middle Housing is before the Planning Commission on November 1. The goal of Middle Housing which includes duplexes, triplexes fourplexes and small buildings is to increase density in all areas of Berkeley (R-1, R-2, R-2A, MU-R) except the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones. The theory is that Middle Housing besides being “middle in size” will be naturally affordable.
The proposal includes things like by right demolition of single-family houses, removal of the minimum size restrictions of units, reducing the amount of open space. The proposed ordinance was presented to the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council on October 14. You can see that recording at: https://berkeleyneighborhoodscouncil.com/
Fire Chief Sprague presented the Fiscal Year 2023 in Review and the Fiscal Year 2024 Goals to the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission on Wednesday.
I caught up with my neighbor who was also at the meeting the next day to compare notes. We were both totally impressed by Sprague’s one hour and twenty-minute presentation and shuddered every time he mentioned succession and leadership planning. We wondered how long Berkeley would be able to keep someone this qualified.
The thrust of the presentation is that Berkeley is no longer a suburban city. Berkeley is the second most dense city of the 51 most populated cities in California. San Francisco is number one. The Fire Department resources in staff, fire fighters, equipment and facilities are not equipped for the dense city we have become with high-rises replacing single family housing, one and two-story commercial buildings and low-rise multi-unit buildings. Plus the very high fire hazard severity zones are densely populated.
Sprague’s goal of returning wildland to native vegetation, made this attendee very happy.
Sprague expects that when the evacuation emergency access study is completed next year more areas will be designated as the very highest fire risk, what we now call Fire Zone 3 or ES-R (Environmental Safety-Residential District) like Panoramic Hill. Sprague also said if Panoramic Hill is being evacuated from an oncoming fire, then we have failed. Panoramic Hill residents need to evacuate in advance.x
When Mayor Arreguin states his vision of adding 15,000 units to Berkeley which if filled would add around 30,000 to 40,000 people never have I heard that accompanied with that to have adequate services and response times Berkeley needs to upgrade and properly staff the dispatch center (think 911), add ambulances, firefighters, EMTs, replace four fire stations with new facilities and renovate three. Nor do those statements that are so appealing to the endorsements he is courting inform that the needed investment of renovating three fire stations, replacing four stations, new headquarters and the training center comes with a $330,000,000 - $372,000,000 price tag. This does not include the dispatch center.
The presentation starts on page 15 in the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission packet for the October 25, 2023 meeting. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/boards-commissions/disaster-and-fire-safety-commission
No votes were taken on the AAO#! (Annual Appropriations Ordinance aka Fall Budget Adjustment) at the Budget Committee, however, before any more budget referrals are added, the spending requests total $38,805,924 and the available funds are $13,945,878.
The Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) was the last City meeting I attended for the week. Nature lost in the 600 Addison Street biolab building appeal. The appeal of the sign approved by the Design Review Committee (DRC) to the Zoning Adjustment Board was that the height and lighting of the signage was in conflict with the City Sign Ordinance. The DRC Secretary Anne Burns confessed to incorrectly informing the DRC members that the sign was in compliance with the Sign Ordinance when it wasn’t.
The developer gave their song and dance of how the signage wasn’t really advertising, that the lights would be shut off from 10 pm to 5 am and would meet the Dark Skies Initiative ignoring that unnecessary night light is in conflict with the Dark Skies Initiative and detrimental to nature. The vote was 7 to 2 in favor of the sign. The ZAB was more moved by the DRC secretary confessing to providing incorrect direction to committee members, than that the sign was in conflict with the ordinance.
The last project was to request five additional parking spaces for the 2403-2407 San Pablo multi-unit project. There was a back and forth until finally the five spaces were approved in a 7 to 2 vote. It is quite amazing how the Berkeley elected and appointed are quick to prohibit parking at large multi-unit housing projects and perfectly willing to approve 943 parking spaces for 600 Addison and large parking lots for other biolab buildings.
The San Pablo project will be condominiums. Maybe the Panoramic Hill resident who commented at the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission meeting that he absolutely must have [street] parking for his car or he couldn’t live on Panoramic Hill. Maybe he should take a look at the condominiums on San Pablo. It’s a nice project and not in ES-r/Fire Zone 3.
It is impossible to attend every meeting. I missed the Rent board, Loan Administration Board, Solano Business Improvement District, the Zero Waste Commission, the Civic arts Commission, the Police Accountability Board, the Community Forum on the Berkeley Marina and the Community Health Commission.
I did make it to the forum with State Senate Candidate Dan Kalb on Saturday. That was the third and final planned forum with State Senate Candidates sponsored by East Bay Community for Action. The great thing about each of these forums was we had just one candidate at a time with ample time to ask a wide variety of unscreened, unfiltered questions. I took pages and pages of notes at each forum and will send a summary in the next Activist’s Diary. The other two forums were with the candidates Kathryn Lybarger and Jovanka Beckles.
October 1 & 7 the rest of what happened, Part II
The local heat wave officially ended Saturday at 11 pm. Nearly 9000 lost power in San Francisco Friday evening. The power wasn’t out for long, hours not days, but it left me wondering how the UC Berkeley students will fair in the future in their rooms with no windows when the power goes out.
Cities and buildings in warm climates used to be designed around air flow and breezes to moderate temperatures, but with air conditioning that design and planning ended. Power failures in heat waves turn buildings with few options for ventilation into furnaces.
I pay a lot more attention to these things after reading Jeff Goodell’s book The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. The book starts with rather startling statistics too many to list here, but there were several things that stuck. The recorded high temperature in Portland, Oregon during that June 2021 heat dome was 116°, but Vivek Shandas who studies urban heat islands drove around Portland measuring air temperature. In the poorest areas with few trees and lots of concrete the temperature was 124°. That is called urban heat island effect.
Over 650 people in Oregon, Washington and Canada died from the June 2021 Northwest heat wave.
We actually change the micro climate when we cut down trees and cover the land with buildings, concrete and asphalt. And, that is exactly what we are doing in this endless pursuit of adding housing without thought to building cities for a heating future and making space and place for nature to survive and cooling trees with large canopies.
Nearly every mixed-use housing tower being approved in Berkeley is a state density project with 90% of the units at market rate (luxury priced) when what is needed is around 40% of the units to be affordable.
Declining population in California and erasure of the earlier projections of explosive population growth hasn’t swayed Mayor Arreguin. He declared again at the State of the City that his intention is the goal of adding 15,000 new units across all districts in Berkeley. All districts, sounds like we can see more housing in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, Landslide Zones, on the Fault Line and liquefaction zones.
If all those units fill which is questionable, Berkeley could count on somewhere between 30,000 to 40,000 new residents most of whom would be opting for apartments designed for students and needing to earn above the area medium income to pay the rent.
I’m not sure it matters much whether the units are filled, since it is the high-rise building and the land which is being bought and sold as the investment.
Be assured the state of the city is fine. You can watch the State of the City speech including the removal of chairs for the crowd that didn’t appear on Arreguin’s YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlQWFe-CUr4
Wednesday evening, I opted to attend the Homeless Services Panel of Experts (HSPE) instead of the Planning Commission which usually grabs my attention.
The meeting was held in the Berkeley Repertory Theater Mercer-Golden Rehearsal Hall at 999 Harrison. The building number wasn’t obvious so I made a couple of trips by the encampments (they are so depressing) on Harrison before seeing the number and landing at the building parking lot. I learned when I got inside the location was chosen to enable the homeless to attend.
Peter Radu, Assistant to the City Manager, introduced the main topic of the evening item 6 on the agenda Development of Good Neighbor Guidelines and Encampment Policy by saying “unsheltered homelessness is our new normal.” That was quite a statement.
Radu went through his presentation labeled as a draft with guidelines consisting of please throw away trash and old food, keep belongings out of the road, do not build structures that can create a fire hazard or injury risk, stay to one sidewalk side of the street and be fire safe. The policy that followed defined what made an encampment the lowest priority, medium priority or highest priority for interventions and actions. You can read the policy and accompanying letters for the October 4, 2023 HSPE meeting at: https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/boards-commissions/homeless-services-panel-experts
Radu was asking the HSPE to forward the draft policy to the full council to be turned over to a council policy committee to finish. His suggestion was the Health, Life Enrichment, Equity & Community Policy Committee.
The recent meetings of the Council Agenda and Rules Committee have been on a process to make council committees more effective and the process to get major legislation through city council and on to implementation. The word process is repeated deliberately, because the “process” for improving council function is spelled out complete with presentation documents, explanations, a matrix table, check lists, flow charts, rules, forms and a timeline in the 138 page packet for the October 10 City Council 4 pm special meeting.
Mayor Arreguin made it plain at the September 26 Agenda and Rules Committee (members Arreguin, Wengraf and Hahn) in the discussion that the process Councilmember Hahn has been instrumental in developing with the city manager, city clerk and others did not have his blessing. The process is the “Systems Alignment Proposal.”
The included documents in the proposal point to redesigning council work dating back several years. Some of us may recall it was former councilmember Droste who dropped the BERIPE (Bureaucratic Effectiveness and Referral Improvement and Prioritization Effort) on limiting major legislation as her parting gesture in the last days before leaving office in December 2022. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-01-08/article/50141?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-week-ending-January-8--Kelly-Hammargren
Since I regularly attend these meetings, I was asked to submit my opinion which I did. It amounted to I don’t think charts, checklists and rules will make the desired change.
I have often called the council policy committees a detour on the way to getting things done and I said as much when my turn arrived to speak to the members of HSPE and city staff.
I suggested that the HSPE should do the work not a council committee. There were quite a few other speakers who spoke to lack of trust, destruction of property, the need for bathrooms and trash pickup. Osha Neumann commented that conditions do not correspond to the reality and Sabyl Landrum from the East Bay Community Law Center stated there was no commitment to services. Jacquie McCormick from the Mayor’s office, who said she was speaking as an individual praised Radu for his empathy and caring.
The members of the HSPE after a long discussion, voted to establish a subcommittee to work with the homeless on guidelines and policies. They set the target to complete their work to bring it back to the full HSPE for a vote in January. The HSPE rejected Radu’s ask to approve the draft guidelines and policy that evening as written and send them on to council with a referral to a policy committee to finish.
While the HSPE should have the greatest potential for working with the homeless, I continue to worry what council will do once this reaches their hands. Council’s actions show little respect for commission work except when it seems to fit something the city manager, mayor and councilmembers have already decided.
Night lights and lots of glass at the McCormick Place Lakeside Center in Chicago drew migrating birds off course into deadly bird-glass collisions Wednesday night. Volunteers and scientists found the bodies of 961 migrating birds Thursday morning October 5, 2023. It is a truly shocking number of birds dying in one night at one building. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/08/us/birds-dead-chicago-building.html
In the chapter on big data in the book A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds, Scott Weidensaul writes about how tiny GPS devices on the backs of migrating birds document how night lights pull birds off their migration course into cities. Berkeley is in the Pacific flyway and like Chicago we have thousands of birds flying over us in the fall and spring migration.
Had Berkeley City Council passed the Bird Safe Ordinance last June without change as brought to them by the Planning Commission and Councilmember Harrison in her supplemental, Berkeley would have the best Bird Safe Ordinance in the nation. But, Council dismissed the scientists’ letters of support, community experts, and the teenagers who spoke passionately about their future and instead chose to gut it filling in exemptions so there is little to share with other cities.
A Dark Skies Initiative accompanied the Bird Safe Ordinance in the March 2, 2022 Planning Department Staff presentation to the Planning Commission, but then it disappeared as the months moved on and the Bird Safe Ordinance moved forward.
Andy Katz revived the Dark Skies Initiative at the Community Health Commission as a health initiative and it passed. Artificial light pollution at night is hazardous to our own health disrupting sleep and with links to breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity. Maybe this time looking out for our own health “Dark Skies” will spillover to benefit nocturnal wildlife and biodiversity.
City Council heard the appeals from neighbors on 705 Euclid and 1598 University at a special meeting on September 26.
The neighbors appealed the Zoning Adjustment Board approval of 705 Euclid a 4,528 square foot 3-story single family dwelling with two parking spaces and associated retaining walls. The appeal was based on the excessive height of the project, impact on views, light and air. Between the time the appeal was filed and the council hearing, the architect modified the plan and lowered the height.
At the appeal hearing the property owners for the proposed house described themselves as civil engineers. That is probably a good thing since this house in the benign sounding Hillside Overly is in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone 2 and the site is a designated landslide area according to the Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation map https://maps.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/EQZApp/app/
If this project had been across the street at 700 Euclid or 708 Euclid, a search of the Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation map would have come with the warning “All or a portion of this parcel LIES WITHIN an Earthquake Fault Zone.”
There was no mention of the warning that I could find in the staff reports that noted in the same Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation map the property site came with this warning “All or a portion of this parcel LIES WITHIN a Landslide Zone.” In fact, the Geotechnical report by California Engineering Co. included in the administrative record for the appeal on page 13 states, “The site is stable, has very low liquefaction susceptibility, is not in a slide area, has no recent history of seismic activity and outside the Alquist-Priolo Special Studies Zone.”
No one seems to be calling for a moratorium or asking if there should be more housing in these hazardous zones except the Fire Chief. I found suggested locations for building ADUs right on top of the Hayward Fault in the Housing Element Update.
Council approved the 8-story state density project at 1598 University. There were a few gains by the neighbors over the months before the appeal in creating more of a stepdown into the neighborhood and three small gains the night of the appeal. The applicant/developer shall relocate the utility box at the corner with approvals from the city and utility providers, the loading zone will be moved further away from the corner and the landscape must be maintained for the life of the building. Nothing changes that this will be a big building for the neighbors backed up next to the project. This is the future.
We are going to see more high-rise buildings along main traffic corridors. We should just hope the Fire Department Master Plan is approved so we have the services to support the residents in these buildings.
I still feeling guilty about not attending the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) Thursday evening with the California movie theater at 2113 Kittredge on the agenda. In its place will be an 18-story tower with a live performance stage on the commercial ground floor. I usually attend every possible public City meeting on projects, but I decided to skip the last meeting of the week on my list.
Friends are fighting to save the last film theater in the downtown. Over the recent years Berkeley lost 20 film theaters, Shattuck Cinemas, United Artists and the California. All that remains is the Elmwood and the Pacific Film Archive.
I miss going to film on the big screen and the incredible independent and foreign films that were offered at the Shattuck Cinemas, the California and Landmark Theaters throughout the area. The pandemic really killed movie theaters. Barbie and Oppenheimer might offer new life, but holding on to one theater in a shrinking chain doesn’t look like enough to save it.
In the drive I took to check out the condition of Keeler the subject of a number of speakers at the Transportation Commission, Keeler wasn’t any worse than many of the streets in the flats including in my own neighborhood. When it came my turn to speak that evening, on the five-year paving plan, I said I didn’t expect to be the contrarian, but rough streets slowed down traffic. The street in front of my house near the high school feels less like a speedway now that the condition is deteriorating.
I heard my comment repeated by commissioner Liza Lutzker. Even as she spoke movingly about her child suffering an injury on her bicycle from a deteriorating street she said she was more afraid of speeding traffic on repaved streets.
The local heat wave officially ended Saturday at 11 pm. Nearly 9000 lost power in San Francisco Friday evening. The power wasn’t out for long, hours not days, but it left me wondering how the UC Berkeley students will fair in the future in their rooms with no windows when the power goes out.
Cities and buildings in warm climates used to be designed around air flow and breezes to moderate temperatures, but with air conditioning that design and planning ended. Power failures in heat waves turn buildings with few options for ventilation into furnaces.
I pay a lot more attention to these things after reading Jeff Goodell’s book The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. The book starts with rather startling statistics too many to list here, but there were several things that stuck. The recorded high temperature in Portland, Oregon during that June 2021 heat dome was 116°, but Vivek Shandas who studies urban heat islands drove around Portland measuring air temperature. In the poorest areas with few trees and lots of concrete the temperature was 124°. That is called urban heat island effect.
Over 650 people in Oregon, Washington and Canada died from the June 2021 Northwest heat wave.
We actually change the micro climate when we cut down trees and cover the land with buildings, concrete and asphalt. And, that is exactly what we are doing in this endless pursuit of adding housing without thought to building cities for a heating future and making space and place for nature to survive and cooling trees with large canopies.
Nearly every mixed-use housing tower being approved in Berkeley is a state density project with 90% of the units at market rate (luxury priced) when what is needed is around 40% of the units to be affordable.
Declining population in California and erasure of the earlier projections of explosive population growth hasn’t swayed Mayor Arreguin. He declared again at the State of the City that his intention is the goal of adding 15,000 new units across all districts in Berkeley. All districts, sounds like we can see more housing in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, Landslide Zones, on the Fault Line and liquefaction zones.
If all those units fill which is questionable, Berkeley could count on somewhere between 30,000 to 40,000 new residents most of whom would be opting for apartments designed for students and needing to earn above the area medium income to pay the rent.
I’m not sure it matters much whether the units are filled, since it is the high-rise building and the land which is being bought and sold as the investment.
Be assured the state of the city is fine. You can watch the State of the City speech including the removal of chairs for the crowd that didn’t appear on Arreguin’s YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlQWFe-CUr4
Wednesday evening, I opted to attend the Homeless Services Panel of Experts (HSPE) instead of the Planning Commission which usually grabs my attention.
The meeting was held in the Berkeley Repertory Theater Mercer-Golden Rehearsal Hall at 999 Harrison. The building number wasn’t obvious so I made a couple of trips by the encampments (they are so depressing) on Harrison before seeing the number and landing at the building parking lot. I learned when I got inside the location was chosen to enable the homeless to attend.
Peter Radu, Assistant to the City Manager, introduced the main topic of the evening item 6 on the agenda Development of Good Neighbor Guidelines and Encampment Policy by saying “unsheltered homelessness is our new normal.” That was quite a statement.
Radu went through his presentation labeled as a draft with guidelines consisting of please throw away trash and old food, keep belongings out of the road, do not build structures that can create a fire hazard or injury risk, stay to one sidewalk side of the street and be fire safe. The policy that followed defined what made an encampment the lowest priority, medium priority or highest priority for interventions and actions. You can read the policy and accompanying letters for the October 4, 2023 HSPE meeting at: https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/boards-commissions/homeless-services-panel-experts
Radu was asking the HSPE to forward the draft policy to the full council to be turned over to a council policy committee to finish. His suggestion was the Health, Life Enrichment, Equity & Community Policy Committee.
The recent meetings of the Council Agenda and Rules Committee have been on a process to make council committees more effective and the process to get major legislation through city council and on to implementation. The word process is repeated deliberately, because the “process” for improving council function is spelled out complete with presentation documents, explanations, a matrix table, check lists, flow charts, rules, forms and a timeline in the 138 page packet for the October 10 City Council 4 pm special meeting.
Mayor Arreguin made it plain at the September 26 Agenda and Rules Committee (members Arreguin, Wengraf and Hahn) in the discussion that the process Councilmember Hahn has been instrumental in developing with the city manager, city clerk and others did not have his blessing. The process is the “Systems Alignment Proposal.”
The included documents in the proposal point to redesigning council work dating back several years. Some of us may recall it was former councilmember Droste who dropped the BERIPE (Bureaucratic Effectiveness and Referral Improvement and Prioritization Effort) on limiting major legislation as her parting gesture in the last days before leaving office in December 2022. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-01-08/article/50141?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-week-ending-January-8--Kelly-Hammargren
Since I regularly attend these meetings, I was asked to submit my opinion which I did. It amounted to I don’t think charts, checklists and rules will make the desired change.
I have often called the council policy committees a detour on the way to getting things done and I said as much when my turn arrived to speak to the members of HSPE and city staff.
I suggested that the HSPE should do the work not a council committee. There were quite a few other speakers who spoke to lack of trust, destruction of property, the need for bathrooms and trash pickup. Osha Neumann commented that conditions do not correspond to the reality and Sabyl Landrum from the East Bay Community Law Center stated there was no commitment to services. Jacquie McCormick from the Mayor’s office, who said she was speaking as an individual praised Radu for his empathy and caring.
The members of the HSPE after a long discussion, voted to establish a subcommittee to work with the homeless on guidelines and policies. They set the target to complete their work to bring it back to the full HSPE for a vote in January. The HSPE rejected Radu’s ask to approve the draft guidelines and policy that evening as written and send them on to council with a referral to a policy committee to finish.
While the HSPE should have the greatest potential for working with the homeless, I continue to worry what council will do once this reaches their hands. Council’s actions show little respect for commission work except when it seems to fit something the city manager, mayor and councilmembers have already decided.
Night lights and lots of glass at the McCormick Place Lakeside Center in Chicago drew migrating birds off course into deadly bird-glass collisions Wednesday night. Volunteers and scientists found the bodies of 961 migrating birds Thursday morning October 5, 2023. It is a truly shocking number of birds dying in one night at one building. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/08/us/birds-dead-chicago-building.html
In the chapter on big data in the book A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds, Scott Weidensaul writes about how tiny GPS devices on the backs of migrating birds document how night lights pull birds off their migration course into cities. Berkeley is in the Pacific flyway and like Chicago we have thousands of birds flying over us in the fall and spring migration.
Had Berkeley City Council passed the Bird Safe Ordinance last June without change as brought to them by the Planning Commission and Councilmember Harrison in her supplemental, Berkeley would have the best Bird Safe Ordinance in the nation. But, Council dismissed the scientists’ letters of support, community experts, and the teenagers who spoke passionately about their future and instead chose to gut it filling in exemptions so there is little to share with other cities.
A Dark Skies Initiative accompanied the Bird Safe Ordinance in the March 2, 2022 Planning Department Staff presentation to the Planning Commission, but then it disappeared as the months moved on and the Bird Safe Ordinance moved forward.
Andy Katz revived the Dark Skies Initiative at the Community Health Commission as a health initiative and it passed. Artificial light pollution at night is hazardous to our own health disrupting sleep and with links to breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity. Maybe this time looking out for our own health “Dark Skies” will spillover to benefit nocturnal wildlife and biodiversity.
City Council heard the appeals from neighbors on 705 Euclid and 1598 University at a special meeting on September 26.
The neighbors appealed the Zoning Adjustment Board approval of 705 Euclid a 4,528 square foot 3-story single family dwelling with two parking spaces and associated retaining walls. The appeal was based on the excessive height of the project, impact on views, light and air. Between the time the appeal was filed and the council hearing, the architect modified the plan and lowered the height.
At the appeal hearing the property owners for the proposed house described themselves as civil engineers. That is probably a good thing since this house in the benign sounding Hillside Overly is in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone 2 and the site is a designated landslide area according to the Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation map https://maps.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/EQZApp/app/
If this project had been across the street at 700 Euclid or 708 Euclid, a search of the Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation map would have come with the warning “All or a portion of this parcel LIES WITHIN an Earthquake Fault Zone.”
There was no mention of the warning that I could find in the staff reports that noted in the same Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation map the property site came with this warning “All or a portion of this parcel LIES WITHIN a Landslide Zone.” In fact, the Geotechnical report by California Engineering Co. included in the administrative record for the appeal on page 13 states, “The site is stable, has very low liquefaction susceptibility, is not in a slide area, has no recent history of seismic activity and outside the Alquist-Priolo Special Studies Zone.”
No one seems to be calling for a moratorium or asking if there should be more housing in these hazardous zones except the Fire Chief. I found suggested locations for building ADUs right on top of the Hayward Fault in the Housing Element Update.
Council approved the 8-story state density project at 1598 University. There were a few gains by the neighbors over the months before the appeal in creating more of a stepdown into the neighborhood and three small gains the night of the appeal. The applicant/developer shall relocate the utility box at the corner with approvals from the city and utility providers, the loading zone will be moved further away from the corner and the landscape must be maintained for the life of the building. Nothing changes that this will be a big building for the neighbors backed up next to the project. This is the future.
We are going to see more high-rise buildings along main traffic corridors. We should just hope the Fire Department Master Plan is approved so we have the services to support the residents in these buildings.
I still feeling guilty about not attending the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) Thursday evening with the California movie theater at 2113 Kittredge on the agenda. In its place will be an 18-story tower with a live performance stage on the commercial ground floor. I usually attend every possible public City meeting on projects, but I decided to skip the last meeting of the week on my list.
Friends are fighting to save the last film theater in the downtown. Over the recent years Berkeley lost 20 film theaters, Shattuck Cinemas, United Artists and the California. All that remains is the Elmwood and the Pacific Film Archive.
I miss going to film on the big screen and the incredible independent and foreign films that were offered at the Shattuck Cinemas, the California and Landmark Theaters throughout the area. The pandemic really killed movie theaters. Barbie and Oppenheimer might offer new life, but holding on to one theater in a shrinking chain doesn’t look like enough to save it.
In the drive I took to check out the condition of Keeler the subject of a number of speakers at the Transportation Commission, Keeler wasn’t any worse than many of the streets in the flats including in my own neighborhood. When it came my turn to speak that evening, on the five-year paving plan, I said I didn’t expect to be the contrarian, but rough streets slowed down traffic. The street in front of my house near the high school feels less like a speedway now that the condition is deteriorating.
I heard my comment repeated by commissioner Liza Lutzker. Even as she spoke movingly about her child suffering an injury on her bicycle from a deteriorating street she said she was more afraid of speeding traffic on repaved streets.
Activist's Diary October 1 & 7, Part I
Last weekend in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota) where in October high temperatures are normally in the 60s, marathon officials looked at high humidity, cloudless skies, expected temperatures in the 90s and canceled the Sunday, October 1, 2023 marathon and 10-mile races. Later in the day, the temperature reached a record setting 92°. In the New York City Triathlon, a second run was substituted for the swim in the Hudson River over concerns of water contamination following flooding from Friday’s record-breaking rain of over 8 inches in one day.
Berkeley is entering its own mini-heat wave, but it doesn’t look like we’ll dip deep into fire weather or any local records will be set even with Bay Area temperatures averaging 14° above normal. Berkeley should coast with ease through this little autumn heat dome weather event that is predicted to last only a few days. But, the bigger message is the same. 2023 looks to be the hottest year ever recorded and the planet is heating faster than expected.
Monday night I received a how could I support parking in the hills call, didn’t I know that would increase the value of the property and just make traffic in an evacuation worse. I signed off to join the Sierra Club Conservation Committee meeting, but not before I said Council hasn’t studied the Fire Department Master Plan, the Dispatch Center Report and the Fire Department Evacuation Study won’t be complete until next year. There should be a moratorium on adding any density to the hills. Of course, that isn’t what happened Tuesday evening.
I’ve been a Sierra Club member for thirty years, but until I attended the Conservation Committee with Glenn Philips, Director Golden Gate Bird Alliance (formerly Golden Gate Audubon), Erin Diehm and Alfred Twu to request the Sierra Club to support the Berkeley Bird Safe Ordinance, I had always left the committee work to others. The Sierra Club endorsed the Bird Safe Ordinance.
I stayed on for the rest of the meeting listening to the discussions for over two hours until finally I couldn’t stay quiet any longer and asked, “[T]his is supposed to be conservation and where do we fit in ecosystems and nature and habitat and how do we fit that in with housing, because if we only look at climate change that’s not going to save the planet and that’s not going to save us? We also have to figure out how to fit in that [ecosystems, nature] with what we’re doing. Urban habitat is really important.”
The Sierra Club Conservation Committee is now on my already long list of meetings to attend.
If you want to vote in the fall election on who decides what the Sierra Club does or doesn’t support, join or renew your membership now. https://tinyurl.com/4mzmjhpz
The tongue-in-cheek editorial by Robert M. Smith in the October 4, 2023 Chronicle of the Department of Public Works doggedly pursuing the removal of a small bookcase for a free book exchange in front of a pet store in San Francisco’s Cole Valley seems like the perfect introduction to the October 3 Berkeley city council meeting.
At least in the removal of the small bookcase no one suffered physical injury in contrast to what was described as the punishing end to the Berkeley Chess Club on Telegraph Avenue.
Eighteen speakers stepped to the podium in the non-agenda comment period to describe their amazing experience of meeting people whose paths they would never cross without the cultural hub of the Chess Club. They spoke to Chess Club welcoming beginners to International Masters in a “beautiful mix of cultures that encapsulates Berkeley,” with the founder Jesse Sheehan keeping the Club running from dawn to dusk.
As more speakers stepped forward, they filled out the story with a business owner that had given permission for the club to meet on the plaza of the closed book store to a business owner fined $79,000 by the City of Berkeley for code violations. Their description of the torturous manhandling of Jesse Sheehan founder of the Chess Club being handcuffed with his arms behind his back and lifted by his wrists into a Berkeley Police vehicle, disappeared for hours and then dumped at an area hospital was backed up by the 12 second video of the arrest posted on the Cop Watch website. https://www.berkeleycopwatch.org/single-post/video-brutal-arrest-of-chess-club-organizer
It would take more time than I have now to find the city council meeting when councilmember Hahn extolled the culture of other cities like Paris and New York City with parks being the center of gatherings like playing chess. I commented that evening people played chess on Telegraph.
The Chess Club pointed to councilmember Robinson and gentrification at the center of this.
City Administration responded that the location of the Chess Club was the subject of code violation and the property owner came in compliance with the terms of use by the removal of the items at 2454 Telegraph (Telegraph and Haste). There were no incidents and Berkeley Police were on standby.
Robinson followed with there was a misunderstanding, the arrest of the Jesse Sheehan the founder which happened later (after the clearing of the plaza) was unrelated. The Chess Club needed to coexist with neighbors and find better locations than with this property owner. Hahn suggested parklets, Harrison offered District 4 and Bartlett offered to help them form a nonprofit.
All this, oh we care so much was punctuated by Hahn’s “…I whole heartedly share your vision for enlivened street for community gathering…”
It seems it was the make up of the people playing chess not being preppy enough that was at the core of the take down.
Not being a chess player myself, I never stopped to linger when I’ve walked up to Telegraph, but I loved seeing the pairs of people seated at the tables out on the plaza in front of a closed storefront concentrating on their next chess move. It was so Berkeley.
Council moved on to the consent calendar which included approving the appointment by Robinson to fill a vacant seat on the Police Accountability Board (PAB). More speakers stepped forward, this time representing the ASUC AAVP (Associated Students of the University of California Academic Affairs Vice President) and the Cal Berkeley Democrats asking the PAB to investigate the police brutality caught on video and reminding council of the leaked racist texts from Berkeley Police officers. Chess Club was a diverse mix of people.
It was after 8 pm when council moved on to the ADU Ordinance. Councilmember Kesarwani could be seen grinning on zoom as Mayor Arreguin took to forming a final motion around Kesarwani’s Supplemental (draft conditions).
Council brushed aside the comments from Wengraf that even on a normal day without fire and evacuations, delivery trucks and parked cars on the narrow winding roads block access. In Wengraf’s moving plea, she said this is a problem now stating “We have lost lives by emergency vehicles not being able to get through. People have died because first responders can’t get through. The focus on evacuation modeling is a mistake…”
Councilmember Humbert, District 8 had little to say during the entire evening except to praise city staff and Kesarwani, to suggest removing excess vegetation, figure out red curbing and consider building separation. It is not surprising, but should be that he had so little to say when Panoramic Hill, Fire Zone 3, the Highest Risk Fire Hazard Severity Zone in the entire city sits in his district.
At the September 27, 2023 Disaster and Fire Safety Commission, Janice Thomas returned with copies of the Panoramic Patter from July 1952 showing that discussion with the City of Berkeley for a secondary access road to Panoramic Hill has been going off and on (mostly off) for over seventy years.
It was commissioner Harrison Raine (appointed by Robinson District 7) who placed the State Fire Marshall’s June 2023 report recommendation for a secondary access road to Panoramic Hill on the August 2, 2023 commission meeting agenda for discussion.
At the September meeting, it was former mayor and commissioner Shirley Dean who brought the agenda item recommending that the commission forward Thomas’s letter with a cover letter to council. Unable to reach agreement on the content of a cover letter, the commission postponed action to the next meeting.
During the lengthy Panoramic Hill discussion that ensued, Raine stated there should be a focus on home hardening and sheltering in place not evacuation.
When I heard sheltering in place, all I could think of was my drive to Hiller-Highlands after the Oakland - Berkeley Hills fire in 1991. The reality of it sunk in as I looked over the devastation with little left other than foundations and chimneys.
Of course, no one knows whether their home hardening actually works until a fire reaches them.
In pictures from the August Lahaina fire, the recently remodeled Millikin home with a commercial grade steel roof and five feet of river stones around the house stood as the only surviving intact house surrounded by burned to the ground structures. Fire experts credit the river rock as giving the landing embers nothing to burn.
Even a casual look at Berkeley shows a city of wildfire fuel, wood fences, decks and balconies, patio furniture, invasive vegetation and buildings closely packed in next to each other. Whether rain gutters are free from debris, vents are protected against floating embers and roofs are rated for fire zones is another question.
When past fires show flying embers driven by wind jumping six lanes of freeway into Coffey Park in the Tubbs fire and eight lanes in the Oakland – Berkeley Hills Fire, no part of Berkeley is safe from a rapidly moving wind driven fire starting in the hills.
Councilmember Harrison’s issues revolved around off-street parking should not be required and accessory buildings (garages, garden sheds, etc.) need to have the same Structure Separation Distance (SSD) setbacks and standards as ADUs. She urged the council to pushback against HCD where it conflicts with safety. Harrison referred to Paradise as the example of more cars making it more difficult to evacuate and for fire trucks to get in. In her assessment, off street parking would just add more cars in an evacuation.
The investigative reporting by Paige St. John, Joseph Serna and Rong-Gong Lin II would disagree with the notion that it was too many cars. https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-camp-fire-deathtrap-20181230-story.html
Their December 30, 2018 “Must Reads: Here’s how Paradise ignored warnings and became a deathtrap” tells the story of a city council ignoring warnings and choosing to reduce pedestrian car injuries by narrowing the road:
“Paradise officials repeatedly told The Times they never envisioned a firestorm reaching the town. But the 2005 state fire management plan for the ridge, developed in consultation with some of those same Paradise planners, warned that canyon winds posed a ‘serious threat’ to Paradise.
The ‘greatest risk’ was an ‘east wind’ fire, the document said, ‘the same type of fire that impacted the Oakland Berkeley Hills during the Oct. 20, 1991 firestorm’ that killed 25 people. [emphasis added]
The plan also warned of ‘a high potential for large damaging fires and loss of life and property’ in the Concow Basin beside Paradise. Heavy fuel loads, steep terrain, poor access and light flashy fuels create sever fire hazards. The increased population in this area creates a high potential for catastrophic life and property loss…’
Town recordings show a lone voice of concern at the 2014 council meeting giving final approval to the road narrowing. ‘The main thing is fire danger,’ said Mildred Eselin, 88. ‘If the council is searching for a way to diminish the population of Paradise, this would be the way to do it.’” [emphasis added] https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-camp-fire-deathtrap-20181230-story.html
Former Berkeley Mayor and current Disaster and Fire Safety Commissioner Shirley Dean who is in her eighties but not yet as old as not as old as Mildred Eselin was in 2014 was finally allowed to speak at 10:31 pm and said this to Berkeley’s mayor and council:
“Tonight, I am speaking as an individual. I am deeply disappointed in many of the comments that I heard tonight from various councilmembers. I suggest that Berkeley should challenge HCD’s ill-founded contention that Berkeley allow both an ADU and a JADU on each parcel in high fire risk zones 2 and 3. Of the 51 largest California cities, Berkeley ranks #2. We are denser than Los Angeles and San Diego. and within our little land area we uniquely have an Earthquake fault Zone and officially designated landslide and liquefaction areas. You can’t escape the fact that we already have a huge fire safety and evacuation problem.
You are also being asked to consider what to do about parking within a half mile of public transportation but remember that much of the public transportation in the hills lies within the designated Earthquake Fault. Even though for years, cars in the hills park on our narrow winding streets and today those streets can’t function for both firefighting going up and residents fleeing going down.
The Disaster and Fire Safety Commission has asked time and time again for enforcement of existing parking restrictions and have been ignored. You need to enact a moratorium on all new detached structures in Fire Zones 2 and 3 at least until the Evacuation Study is completed and it is determined what the appropriate separation distance should be between structures. Building separation is a key factor in reducing the spread of a fire and will improve fire safety and evacuation for everyone.
Please listen to your Fire Department who are your staff that understands the issues and what to do about them for the greatest safety for all of us.”
Standards for accessory buildings turned into a referral to the City Manager “to consider changes to development standards with specific consideration for setbacks, height, and building separation for accessory buildings and structures to promote fire safety citywide.”
I wouldn’t hold my breath while waiting for the City to come up with any requirements for accessory structures which can at any time be converted to an ADU by right without regard to building separation, setbacks or height as long as the same footprint is used.
When someone brags about how much they’ve done or how this or that was passed by council, check if that action was a referral to the City Manager. If it was a referral, you may be waiting a very very long time or never see it again. It took almost five years from start to finish to get the Bird Safe Ordinance passed.
On October 10 we’ll see if Hahn and Wengraf stand their ground and abstain while the other seven vote yes again at the second reading of the ADU ordinance.
The City of Oakland took a different path with a very strong stand against HCD.
Last weekend in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota) where in October high temperatures are normally in the 60s, marathon officials looked at high humidity, cloudless skies, expected temperatures in the 90s and canceled the Sunday, October 1, 2023 marathon and 10-mile races. Later in the day, the temperature reached a record setting 92°. In the New York City Triathlon, a second run was substituted for the swim in the Hudson River over concerns of water contamination following flooding from Friday’s record-breaking rain of over 8 inches in one day.
Berkeley is entering its own mini-heat wave, but it doesn’t look like we’ll dip deep into fire weather or any local records will be set even with Bay Area temperatures averaging 14° above normal. Berkeley should coast with ease through this little autumn heat dome weather event that is predicted to last only a few days. But, the bigger message is the same. 2023 looks to be the hottest year ever recorded and the planet is heating faster than expected.
Monday night I received a how could I support parking in the hills call, didn’t I know that would increase the value of the property and just make traffic in an evacuation worse. I signed off to join the Sierra Club Conservation Committee meeting, but not before I said Council hasn’t studied the Fire Department Master Plan, the Dispatch Center Report and the Fire Department Evacuation Study won’t be complete until next year. There should be a moratorium on adding any density to the hills. Of course, that isn’t what happened Tuesday evening.
I’ve been a Sierra Club member for thirty years, but until I attended the Conservation Committee with Glenn Philips, Director Golden Gate Bird Alliance (formerly Golden Gate Audubon), Erin Diehm and Alfred Twu to request the Sierra Club to support the Berkeley Bird Safe Ordinance, I had always left the committee work to others. The Sierra Club endorsed the Bird Safe Ordinance.
I stayed on for the rest of the meeting listening to the discussions for over two hours until finally I couldn’t stay quiet any longer and asked, “[T]his is supposed to be conservation and where do we fit in ecosystems and nature and habitat and how do we fit that in with housing, because if we only look at climate change that’s not going to save the planet and that’s not going to save us? We also have to figure out how to fit in that [ecosystems, nature] with what we’re doing. Urban habitat is really important.”
The Sierra Club Conservation Committee is now on my already long list of meetings to attend.
If you want to vote in the fall election on who decides what the Sierra Club does or doesn’t support, join or renew your membership now. https://tinyurl.com/4mzmjhpz
The tongue-in-cheek editorial by Robert M. Smith in the October 4, 2023 Chronicle of the Department of Public Works doggedly pursuing the removal of a small bookcase for a free book exchange in front of a pet store in San Francisco’s Cole Valley seems like the perfect introduction to the October 3 Berkeley city council meeting.
At least in the removal of the small bookcase no one suffered physical injury in contrast to what was described as the punishing end to the Berkeley Chess Club on Telegraph Avenue.
Eighteen speakers stepped to the podium in the non-agenda comment period to describe their amazing experience of meeting people whose paths they would never cross without the cultural hub of the Chess Club. They spoke to Chess Club welcoming beginners to International Masters in a “beautiful mix of cultures that encapsulates Berkeley,” with the founder Jesse Sheehan keeping the Club running from dawn to dusk.
As more speakers stepped forward, they filled out the story with a business owner that had given permission for the club to meet on the plaza of the closed book store to a business owner fined $79,000 by the City of Berkeley for code violations. Their description of the torturous manhandling of Jesse Sheehan founder of the Chess Club being handcuffed with his arms behind his back and lifted by his wrists into a Berkeley Police vehicle, disappeared for hours and then dumped at an area hospital was backed up by the 12 second video of the arrest posted on the Cop Watch website. https://www.berkeleycopwatch.org/single-post/video-brutal-arrest-of-chess-club-organizer
It would take more time than I have now to find the city council meeting when councilmember Hahn extolled the culture of other cities like Paris and New York City with parks being the center of gatherings like playing chess. I commented that evening people played chess on Telegraph.
The Chess Club pointed to councilmember Robinson and gentrification at the center of this.
City Administration responded that the location of the Chess Club was the subject of code violation and the property owner came in compliance with the terms of use by the removal of the items at 2454 Telegraph (Telegraph and Haste). There were no incidents and Berkeley Police were on standby.
Robinson followed with there was a misunderstanding, the arrest of the Jesse Sheehan the founder which happened later (after the clearing of the plaza) was unrelated. The Chess Club needed to coexist with neighbors and find better locations than with this property owner. Hahn suggested parklets, Harrison offered District 4 and Bartlett offered to help them form a nonprofit.
All this, oh we care so much was punctuated by Hahn’s “…I whole heartedly share your vision for enlivened street for community gathering…”
It seems it was the make up of the people playing chess not being preppy enough that was at the core of the take down.
Not being a chess player myself, I never stopped to linger when I’ve walked up to Telegraph, but I loved seeing the pairs of people seated at the tables out on the plaza in front of a closed storefront concentrating on their next chess move. It was so Berkeley.
Council moved on to the consent calendar which included approving the appointment by Robinson to fill a vacant seat on the Police Accountability Board (PAB). More speakers stepped forward, this time representing the ASUC AAVP (Associated Students of the University of California Academic Affairs Vice President) and the Cal Berkeley Democrats asking the PAB to investigate the police brutality caught on video and reminding council of the leaked racist texts from Berkeley Police officers. Chess Club was a diverse mix of people.
It was after 8 pm when council moved on to the ADU Ordinance. Councilmember Kesarwani could be seen grinning on zoom as Mayor Arreguin took to forming a final motion around Kesarwani’s Supplemental (draft conditions).
Council brushed aside the comments from Wengraf that even on a normal day without fire and evacuations, delivery trucks and parked cars on the narrow winding roads block access. In Wengraf’s moving plea, she said this is a problem now stating “We have lost lives by emergency vehicles not being able to get through. People have died because first responders can’t get through. The focus on evacuation modeling is a mistake…”
Councilmember Humbert, District 8 had little to say during the entire evening except to praise city staff and Kesarwani, to suggest removing excess vegetation, figure out red curbing and consider building separation. It is not surprising, but should be that he had so little to say when Panoramic Hill, Fire Zone 3, the Highest Risk Fire Hazard Severity Zone in the entire city sits in his district.
At the September 27, 2023 Disaster and Fire Safety Commission, Janice Thomas returned with copies of the Panoramic Patter from July 1952 showing that discussion with the City of Berkeley for a secondary access road to Panoramic Hill has been going off and on (mostly off) for over seventy years.
It was commissioner Harrison Raine (appointed by Robinson District 7) who placed the State Fire Marshall’s June 2023 report recommendation for a secondary access road to Panoramic Hill on the August 2, 2023 commission meeting agenda for discussion.
At the September meeting, it was former mayor and commissioner Shirley Dean who brought the agenda item recommending that the commission forward Thomas’s letter with a cover letter to council. Unable to reach agreement on the content of a cover letter, the commission postponed action to the next meeting.
During the lengthy Panoramic Hill discussion that ensued, Raine stated there should be a focus on home hardening and sheltering in place not evacuation.
When I heard sheltering in place, all I could think of was my drive to Hiller-Highlands after the Oakland - Berkeley Hills fire in 1991. The reality of it sunk in as I looked over the devastation with little left other than foundations and chimneys.
Of course, no one knows whether their home hardening actually works until a fire reaches them.
In pictures from the August Lahaina fire, the recently remodeled Millikin home with a commercial grade steel roof and five feet of river stones around the house stood as the only surviving intact house surrounded by burned to the ground structures. Fire experts credit the river rock as giving the landing embers nothing to burn.
Even a casual look at Berkeley shows a city of wildfire fuel, wood fences, decks and balconies, patio furniture, invasive vegetation and buildings closely packed in next to each other. Whether rain gutters are free from debris, vents are protected against floating embers and roofs are rated for fire zones is another question.
When past fires show flying embers driven by wind jumping six lanes of freeway into Coffey Park in the Tubbs fire and eight lanes in the Oakland – Berkeley Hills Fire, no part of Berkeley is safe from a rapidly moving wind driven fire starting in the hills.
Councilmember Harrison’s issues revolved around off-street parking should not be required and accessory buildings (garages, garden sheds, etc.) need to have the same Structure Separation Distance (SSD) setbacks and standards as ADUs. She urged the council to pushback against HCD where it conflicts with safety. Harrison referred to Paradise as the example of more cars making it more difficult to evacuate and for fire trucks to get in. In her assessment, off street parking would just add more cars in an evacuation.
The investigative reporting by Paige St. John, Joseph Serna and Rong-Gong Lin II would disagree with the notion that it was too many cars. https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-camp-fire-deathtrap-20181230-story.html
Their December 30, 2018 “Must Reads: Here’s how Paradise ignored warnings and became a deathtrap” tells the story of a city council ignoring warnings and choosing to reduce pedestrian car injuries by narrowing the road:
“Paradise officials repeatedly told The Times they never envisioned a firestorm reaching the town. But the 2005 state fire management plan for the ridge, developed in consultation with some of those same Paradise planners, warned that canyon winds posed a ‘serious threat’ to Paradise.
The ‘greatest risk’ was an ‘east wind’ fire, the document said, ‘the same type of fire that impacted the Oakland Berkeley Hills during the Oct. 20, 1991 firestorm’ that killed 25 people. [emphasis added]
The plan also warned of ‘a high potential for large damaging fires and loss of life and property’ in the Concow Basin beside Paradise. Heavy fuel loads, steep terrain, poor access and light flashy fuels create sever fire hazards. The increased population in this area creates a high potential for catastrophic life and property loss…’
Town recordings show a lone voice of concern at the 2014 council meeting giving final approval to the road narrowing. ‘The main thing is fire danger,’ said Mildred Eselin, 88. ‘If the council is searching for a way to diminish the population of Paradise, this would be the way to do it.’” [emphasis added] https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-camp-fire-deathtrap-20181230-story.html
Former Berkeley Mayor and current Disaster and Fire Safety Commissioner Shirley Dean who is in her eighties but not yet as old as not as old as Mildred Eselin was in 2014 was finally allowed to speak at 10:31 pm and said this to Berkeley’s mayor and council:
“Tonight, I am speaking as an individual. I am deeply disappointed in many of the comments that I heard tonight from various councilmembers. I suggest that Berkeley should challenge HCD’s ill-founded contention that Berkeley allow both an ADU and a JADU on each parcel in high fire risk zones 2 and 3. Of the 51 largest California cities, Berkeley ranks #2. We are denser than Los Angeles and San Diego. and within our little land area we uniquely have an Earthquake fault Zone and officially designated landslide and liquefaction areas. You can’t escape the fact that we already have a huge fire safety and evacuation problem.
You are also being asked to consider what to do about parking within a half mile of public transportation but remember that much of the public transportation in the hills lies within the designated Earthquake Fault. Even though for years, cars in the hills park on our narrow winding streets and today those streets can’t function for both firefighting going up and residents fleeing going down.
The Disaster and Fire Safety Commission has asked time and time again for enforcement of existing parking restrictions and have been ignored. You need to enact a moratorium on all new detached structures in Fire Zones 2 and 3 at least until the Evacuation Study is completed and it is determined what the appropriate separation distance should be between structures. Building separation is a key factor in reducing the spread of a fire and will improve fire safety and evacuation for everyone.
Please listen to your Fire Department who are your staff that understands the issues and what to do about them for the greatest safety for all of us.”
Standards for accessory buildings turned into a referral to the City Manager “to consider changes to development standards with specific consideration for setbacks, height, and building separation for accessory buildings and structures to promote fire safety citywide.”
I wouldn’t hold my breath while waiting for the City to come up with any requirements for accessory structures which can at any time be converted to an ADU by right without regard to building separation, setbacks or height as long as the same footprint is used.
When someone brags about how much they’ve done or how this or that was passed by council, check if that action was a referral to the City Manager. If it was a referral, you may be waiting a very very long time or never see it again. It took almost five years from start to finish to get the Bird Safe Ordinance passed.
On October 10 we’ll see if Hahn and Wengraf stand their ground and abstain while the other seven vote yes again at the second reading of the ADU ordinance.
The City of Oakland took a different path with a very strong stand against HCD.
Activist's Diary September 24, 2023
After neighbors on Keeler showed up at the Transportation Commission on Thursday complaining about the condition of their street in the hills, I decided it was time for another drive into the Berkeley hills. Keeler wasn’t the only reason, I was curious after hearing Councilmember Wengraf say during the City Council debate on the ADU Ordinance Tuesday evening, that property owners in the hills didn’t know where to put their fences as the hills were moving and property lines weren’t clear.
Adding to the urgency, nothing was settled Tuesday evening. City Council ended in a split vote (4 to 4) on the Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) Ordinance in the Hillside Overly, the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones (VHFHSZ) and will take up the ADU Ordinance again on October 3, 2023. It is item 10 on the agenda. https://berkeleyca.gov/city-council-regular-meeting-eagenda-october-3-2023
Writing about adding ADUs aka granny flats in the Berkeley Hills is a constantly moving target.
The more I read, the more I dig the messier it gets. Just this morning J.K. Dineen wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle about multiple vacant multi-unit buildings in San Francisco. That was a contrast to the stories with the usual splashes about not building new housing.
I’ve always wondered how many vacant housing units there are in Berkeley with the “for lease” signs that never seem to go away. We’re supposed to get that answer with the vacancy tax?
Before leaving, I studied the online Berkeley street map and the Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation showing the fault lines and landslide areas in the North Berkeley Hills. Most of Keeler is in designated landslide areas and all of Keeler is in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone.
This is the link to the Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation map I checked. https://maps.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/EQZApp/app/
The map opens to the entire state of California. Typing Berkeley into the box with the magnifier will center it over Berkeley. By clicking on the + symbol the map can be enlarged to the point where the street address is visible. From there you can click on an address and learn if the parcel is in a Fault Zone, Liquefaction Zone or Landslide Zone. The fault lines are broken black lines, areas of required investigation before building are yellow, landslide areas are in blue and yellow and liquefaction is green.
I didn’t stop to check if the map of the fault line and landslide areas was included with the open houses for sale I drove by, maybe next time.
I’ve driven Marin and Spruce many times, but never into the bowels of the North Berkeley Hills. This time I drove up and down the narrow winding roads filled with canyons and hills that are better suited to deer and wildlife than the houses I saw packed in closely next to each other hanging over cliffs or perched on hillsides. I didn’t count the number of times I crossed the Hayward Fault or meandered in and out of the earthquake zones of required investigation.
There is no way to get a sense of the topography by looking at a google map. Even the 3D map versions are of little help in giving a true sense of the terrain. Nearly all of what I drove was designated as landslide zones.
It is no wonder that Wengraf is so concerned about wildland urban fire. The evidence of the foolishness of adding density to an area that should have remained wildland instead of turning it into a densely packed urban area was everywhere.
Tuesday, September 19, 2023 was the first time I can remember a split vote with Council unable to reach a majority vote and continuing the agenda item to the next meeting (October 3, 2024). The presentations, public comment and debate on ADUs started after the evening break at 8 pm and ended at 11:15 pm with Hahn, Wengraf, Robinson and Arreguin on one side and Kesarwani, Taplin, Barlett and Humbert on the other. Councilmember Harrison was away representing the City.
While Mayor Arreguin voted with Wengraf, Hahn and Robinson on the 19th, he was back at the podium in the State of the City last night talking about his aspiration to exceed the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) of the assigned 8934 new housing units in Berkeley. Instead Arreguin set his sights on adding 15,000 housing units in Berkeley and spreading them across all districts. That should keep the real estate and building industries and unions happy that have lined up behind Arreguin with their endorsements in his run for State Senate Seat District 7.
Fire Chief Sprague in his presentation on the 19th laid out the real Berkeley fire risk and concluded with “The scientific data presented in the supplemental, coupled with the region’s cyclic relationship with significant fire events, are the reason Berkeley Fire Department strongly believes that a moratorium should be considered on any development within the Fire Zones that: increases HU/ac (housing units per acre), reduces existing non-conforming SSD (Structure Separation Distance – puts buildings closer together), increases population or increases the number of vehicles that will use the roadway during a wildfire.”
ADUs and JADUs are supposed to be naturally affordable, because they are added on existing lots or to existing housing stock. An ADU is a completely independent living unit and can be detached or attached to a single-family home. A JADU (Junior ADU) is built completely within an existing home by converting/renovating an underutilized part of the house.
HCD Accessory Handbook https://www.hcd.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2022-07/ADUHandbookUpdate.pdf
There is pressure to build enormous amounts of housing when population in California is in decline. The latest update from the Department of Finance projects population to continue in decline for the next several years and then slowly grow until it peaks in 2044 with a population increase of 635,426 over 2020 to 40,155,497. Then population falls into slow decline until by 2060 there are fewer people in California in 2060 than 2020. Document P-1A Total Population for California gives the revised year by year projections. https://dof.ca.gov/forecasting/demographics/projections/
It might be easier to follow by watching Marc Verville’s presentation to Livable California on September 23, 2023. It is posted on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtVEkLx3-Qs
You can turn the YouTube video instantaneously into a transcript by pasting the link into YouTube Transcript. It’s not perfect, but close. https://youtubetranscript.com/
The process to get to the 8,934 new housing units assigned to Berkeley to build starts with the California Department of Finance. The California Department of Finance creates the projections of population growth. This is turned over to the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) which turns the population projections into new housing needs to be built over an eight-year cycle. Then HCD breaks down housing needs by region and assigns the housing needs known as the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) to the Council of Governments (COG) which breaks it down further to cities and counties which must develop a plan called the Housing Element of where all this new housing can go to meet the assigned allotment in the eight-year cycle currently 2023 – 2031.
Our regional COG is the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) of which Mayor Jesse Arreguin is the President.
Finding places to build means cities and counties with a shortage of vacant lots and “underutilized” buildings to demolish for new housing are pushed into upzoning, which is changing zoning to put more housing, more people on a lot, which adds more density, increases the value of the land and gives incentive to demolish whatever happens to exist on a lot.
ADUs and JADUs aren’t counted like houses and multi-family units so they increase building structures decreasing the SSD and add population density all while slipping under the radar except for the RHNA count.
The cities and counties aren’t actually building the housing (at least usually), that goes into the hands of developers/builders. When cities and counties fail to meet their target allocation of building new housing midway through the eight year RHNA/Housing Element cycle, there is something called “Builder’s Remedy” which basically lets builder’s bypass zoning and approval processes as long as 20% of dwellings/units are for low-income households (up to $112,150 annual income for a household of 4 in Alameda County) or when 100% of the units are for moderate income households (up to $177,500 annual income for a household of 4 in Alameda County).
You can read the entire chart of income levels by category by county starting on page 6. https://www.hcd.ca.gov/sites/default/files/docs/grants-and-funding/income-limits-2023.pdf
The only problem with all of this is it seems the California Department of Finance made a little(?) error in their overly ambitious projections of population growth moving into the current RHNA cycle. Instead of fantastical future growth, the population in California is actually in decline. The Department of Finance press release of May 1, 2023 laid the ground that population projections had been overly optimistic. https://dof.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/352/Forecasting/Demographics/Documents/E-1_2023PressRelease.pdf
The new updated population projections made public in July 2023 set the total California population gain for 2031, the year this Housing Element cycle ends as only 11,957 more people than 2020.
In January 2021 ten months into the pandemic when California population was in decline, ABAG under the leadership of Arreguin as President in its ABAG Plan Bay Area 2050 their plan for the future used the fantastical growth for the Bay Area of 51% since 2015. The Plan Bay Area 2050 projected population growth of 1,367,000 for just the Bay Area. https://www.planbayarea.org/digital-library/plan-bay-area-2050-final-blueprint-growth-pattern
Back to the RHNA assignment to Berkeley to build 8934 new housing units. It is based on old fantastical growth projections not the Department of Finance July 2023 revision. The Housing Element for Berkeley and every entity in California is built on population growth that the Department of Finance no longer supports.
HCD is still operating on and holding cities to building housing for fantastical population growth predictions. Other cities are resisting with some suing over the RHNA assignments, but not Berkeley.
In 2022, Berkeley ranked as 84th in density in the U.S. When the ranking is narrowed to cities between 100,000 and 150,000, Berkeley is the second densest city in the nation. Listening to Arreguin, it sounds like his intention is to overtake that second in density rating. The agreement Arreguin negotiated with UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ appears to put student population growth on the accelerator. That agreement which can fill an entire Planet issue is a subject for another day.
On to the ordinance to add ADUs in the benign sounding “Hillside Overlay.” That title encompasses all of the hazards which are layered on top of each other, the Hayward Fault, the designated landslide areas and the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone and Wildland Urban Interface.
After multiple stops and starts, City Council separated the ADU Ordinance into two Ordinances. The first ADU Ordinance covering all of Berkeley except the Hillside Overlay passed in a unanimous vote on January 18, 2022. It was modeled on Councilmember Kesarwani’s Supplemental encouraging adding ADUs.
The ADU Ordinance for the Hillside Overlay based on the Hahn-Wengraf revised material for fire safety requirements using the public safety exception was passed on January 25, 2022. While allowing ADUs, it included firm setback requirements for building separation at property lines, prohibited intrusion into the setbacks and rooftop decks and included off-street parking requirements
There were memorable points in that January 2022 evening. While there was overwhelming public comment in support for the Hahn-Wengraf supplemental there were a few outliers like Todd Andrew who commented that evacuation in a fire would not be a problem as people would be driving down Marin.
When Wengraf took the floor after public comment closed, she shared the video of people evacuating in the 1991 Oakland-Berkeley Hills fire where 25 people died. It was pretty raw. Wengraf said this as she commented on the video, “this is what an evacuation looks like. There is no such thing as an orderly peaceful choreographed evacuation. It’s chaotic, it’s driven by fear and panic and everybody is racing for their lives.”
What I remember most about January 2022 evening was not the end of the evening with seconds running out in a 5 to 4 vote when Councilmember Bartlett said he thought he voted the wrong way and asked for reconsideration to change his vote. In the 5 to 4 revote, Bartlett sided with the motion based on the Hahn-Wengraf Supplemental.
The memory that stood out the most that evening was Councilmember Kesarwani’s long winded comment on the simmering resentment of perceived inequity between the North Berkeley Hills and the “flats,” South and West Berkeley. An excerpt of her comments is included here:
“…I do have to say that those stone pillars that mark the areas of the city that were designed to exclude people of color…you know that does sting, that stings for me as a woman of color and that stings for my constituents and I just want to share with you my perspective that when you put forward limits that are very much different from what the rest of the flats are doing are going to be part of the housing solution that does rub some of us the wrong way and I’m trying to see your perspective and spend a lot of time driving around the hills on those narrow winding streets and I do want to say that it is unsafe up there. There are real concerns. But I do think we also have to figure out how can we do, how can we affirmatively further housing. You know that’s fair to the whole city, but that also mitigates wildfire risk and that it is my view that we follow the minimum requirements of state law and as it relates to ADUs.”
While Kesarwani acknowledged the real fire danger, more important to her was fulfilling equity, that the hills did not have exceptions and were under the same conditions as the flats for adding ADUs. That stand lost to public safety in January 2022.
The perception of privilege and the impacts of redlining lingers. The demographic chart of the Berkeley City Council Districts by race and home ownership tells the difference. In addition, the hills create a natural barrier to the homeless encampments that settle in the flats mostly in Districts 1, 2, and 3 with smaller encampments in District 4.
On October 17, 2022 HCD sent a letter to Jordan Klein, Director of Planning and Development Department stating that Berkeley’s ADU Ordinances did not comply with State Law.
Now we are back at this again, with a split City Council on what to do about adding ADUs in the Hillside overlay with its many dangers, the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones, the Hayward Fault, and designated Landslides Zones.
Last January were the landslides. Significant fires cycle about every 20 years. The last major fire was 32 years ago, 1991. Berkeley is overdue. In 1868 the ground on the Hayward Fault line shifted six feet. A major earthquake on the Hayward Fault is overdue too.
There is limited egress and ingress to the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones.
How will thousands of residents in the Berkeley Hills evacuate while the Fire Department tries to make it in? All we really have are Marin and Spruce. Grizzly Peak through the very high fire zone really isn’t a way out.
Chief Sprague has a lot more worry than the thousands of residents in the Berkeley Hills. He has the department firefighters. Adding to all of this is climate change, the dangerous winds where fires create their own weather patterns. Fires can go up or down the hills and canyons. Embers can float in the wind and start new fires including in places not expected to burn like Coffey Park in the Tubbs fire.
Will City Council ignore the warnings from Fire Chief Sprague and acquiesce to HCD or will City Council heed the warnings and put forth the case to attend to public safety first? Will the simmering resentment over perceived privilege put the entire city at risk? These are open questions. Wengraf called City Council to challenge HCD. There are strong arguments to be made.
After neighbors on Keeler showed up at the Transportation Commission on Thursday complaining about the condition of their street in the hills, I decided it was time for another drive into the Berkeley hills. Keeler wasn’t the only reason, I was curious after hearing Councilmember Wengraf say during the City Council debate on the ADU Ordinance Tuesday evening, that property owners in the hills didn’t know where to put their fences as the hills were moving and property lines weren’t clear.
Adding to the urgency, nothing was settled Tuesday evening. City Council ended in a split vote (4 to 4) on the Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) Ordinance in the Hillside Overly, the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones (VHFHSZ) and will take up the ADU Ordinance again on October 3, 2023. It is item 10 on the agenda. https://berkeleyca.gov/city-council-regular-meeting-eagenda-october-3-2023
Writing about adding ADUs aka granny flats in the Berkeley Hills is a constantly moving target.
The more I read, the more I dig the messier it gets. Just this morning J.K. Dineen wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle about multiple vacant multi-unit buildings in San Francisco. That was a contrast to the stories with the usual splashes about not building new housing.
I’ve always wondered how many vacant housing units there are in Berkeley with the “for lease” signs that never seem to go away. We’re supposed to get that answer with the vacancy tax?
Before leaving, I studied the online Berkeley street map and the Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation showing the fault lines and landslide areas in the North Berkeley Hills. Most of Keeler is in designated landslide areas and all of Keeler is in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone.
This is the link to the Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation map I checked. https://maps.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/EQZApp/app/
The map opens to the entire state of California. Typing Berkeley into the box with the magnifier will center it over Berkeley. By clicking on the + symbol the map can be enlarged to the point where the street address is visible. From there you can click on an address and learn if the parcel is in a Fault Zone, Liquefaction Zone or Landslide Zone. The fault lines are broken black lines, areas of required investigation before building are yellow, landslide areas are in blue and yellow and liquefaction is green.
I didn’t stop to check if the map of the fault line and landslide areas was included with the open houses for sale I drove by, maybe next time.
I’ve driven Marin and Spruce many times, but never into the bowels of the North Berkeley Hills. This time I drove up and down the narrow winding roads filled with canyons and hills that are better suited to deer and wildlife than the houses I saw packed in closely next to each other hanging over cliffs or perched on hillsides. I didn’t count the number of times I crossed the Hayward Fault or meandered in and out of the earthquake zones of required investigation.
There is no way to get a sense of the topography by looking at a google map. Even the 3D map versions are of little help in giving a true sense of the terrain. Nearly all of what I drove was designated as landslide zones.
It is no wonder that Wengraf is so concerned about wildland urban fire. The evidence of the foolishness of adding density to an area that should have remained wildland instead of turning it into a densely packed urban area was everywhere.
Tuesday, September 19, 2023 was the first time I can remember a split vote with Council unable to reach a majority vote and continuing the agenda item to the next meeting (October 3, 2024). The presentations, public comment and debate on ADUs started after the evening break at 8 pm and ended at 11:15 pm with Hahn, Wengraf, Robinson and Arreguin on one side and Kesarwani, Taplin, Barlett and Humbert on the other. Councilmember Harrison was away representing the City.
While Mayor Arreguin voted with Wengraf, Hahn and Robinson on the 19th, he was back at the podium in the State of the City last night talking about his aspiration to exceed the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) of the assigned 8934 new housing units in Berkeley. Instead Arreguin set his sights on adding 15,000 housing units in Berkeley and spreading them across all districts. That should keep the real estate and building industries and unions happy that have lined up behind Arreguin with their endorsements in his run for State Senate Seat District 7.
Fire Chief Sprague in his presentation on the 19th laid out the real Berkeley fire risk and concluded with “The scientific data presented in the supplemental, coupled with the region’s cyclic relationship with significant fire events, are the reason Berkeley Fire Department strongly believes that a moratorium should be considered on any development within the Fire Zones that: increases HU/ac (housing units per acre), reduces existing non-conforming SSD (Structure Separation Distance – puts buildings closer together), increases population or increases the number of vehicles that will use the roadway during a wildfire.”
ADUs and JADUs are supposed to be naturally affordable, because they are added on existing lots or to existing housing stock. An ADU is a completely independent living unit and can be detached or attached to a single-family home. A JADU (Junior ADU) is built completely within an existing home by converting/renovating an underutilized part of the house.
HCD Accessory Handbook https://www.hcd.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2022-07/ADUHandbookUpdate.pdf
There is pressure to build enormous amounts of housing when population in California is in decline. The latest update from the Department of Finance projects population to continue in decline for the next several years and then slowly grow until it peaks in 2044 with a population increase of 635,426 over 2020 to 40,155,497. Then population falls into slow decline until by 2060 there are fewer people in California in 2060 than 2020. Document P-1A Total Population for California gives the revised year by year projections. https://dof.ca.gov/forecasting/demographics/projections/
It might be easier to follow by watching Marc Verville’s presentation to Livable California on September 23, 2023. It is posted on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtVEkLx3-Qs
You can turn the YouTube video instantaneously into a transcript by pasting the link into YouTube Transcript. It’s not perfect, but close. https://youtubetranscript.com/
The process to get to the 8,934 new housing units assigned to Berkeley to build starts with the California Department of Finance. The California Department of Finance creates the projections of population growth. This is turned over to the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) which turns the population projections into new housing needs to be built over an eight-year cycle. Then HCD breaks down housing needs by region and assigns the housing needs known as the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) to the Council of Governments (COG) which breaks it down further to cities and counties which must develop a plan called the Housing Element of where all this new housing can go to meet the assigned allotment in the eight-year cycle currently 2023 – 2031.
Our regional COG is the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) of which Mayor Jesse Arreguin is the President.
Finding places to build means cities and counties with a shortage of vacant lots and “underutilized” buildings to demolish for new housing are pushed into upzoning, which is changing zoning to put more housing, more people on a lot, which adds more density, increases the value of the land and gives incentive to demolish whatever happens to exist on a lot.
ADUs and JADUs aren’t counted like houses and multi-family units so they increase building structures decreasing the SSD and add population density all while slipping under the radar except for the RHNA count.
The cities and counties aren’t actually building the housing (at least usually), that goes into the hands of developers/builders. When cities and counties fail to meet their target allocation of building new housing midway through the eight year RHNA/Housing Element cycle, there is something called “Builder’s Remedy” which basically lets builder’s bypass zoning and approval processes as long as 20% of dwellings/units are for low-income households (up to $112,150 annual income for a household of 4 in Alameda County) or when 100% of the units are for moderate income households (up to $177,500 annual income for a household of 4 in Alameda County).
You can read the entire chart of income levels by category by county starting on page 6. https://www.hcd.ca.gov/sites/default/files/docs/grants-and-funding/income-limits-2023.pdf
The only problem with all of this is it seems the California Department of Finance made a little(?) error in their overly ambitious projections of population growth moving into the current RHNA cycle. Instead of fantastical future growth, the population in California is actually in decline. The Department of Finance press release of May 1, 2023 laid the ground that population projections had been overly optimistic. https://dof.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/352/Forecasting/Demographics/Documents/E-1_2023PressRelease.pdf
The new updated population projections made public in July 2023 set the total California population gain for 2031, the year this Housing Element cycle ends as only 11,957 more people than 2020.
In January 2021 ten months into the pandemic when California population was in decline, ABAG under the leadership of Arreguin as President in its ABAG Plan Bay Area 2050 their plan for the future used the fantastical growth for the Bay Area of 51% since 2015. The Plan Bay Area 2050 projected population growth of 1,367,000 for just the Bay Area. https://www.planbayarea.org/digital-library/plan-bay-area-2050-final-blueprint-growth-pattern
Back to the RHNA assignment to Berkeley to build 8934 new housing units. It is based on old fantastical growth projections not the Department of Finance July 2023 revision. The Housing Element for Berkeley and every entity in California is built on population growth that the Department of Finance no longer supports.
HCD is still operating on and holding cities to building housing for fantastical population growth predictions. Other cities are resisting with some suing over the RHNA assignments, but not Berkeley.
In 2022, Berkeley ranked as 84th in density in the U.S. When the ranking is narrowed to cities between 100,000 and 150,000, Berkeley is the second densest city in the nation. Listening to Arreguin, it sounds like his intention is to overtake that second in density rating. The agreement Arreguin negotiated with UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ appears to put student population growth on the accelerator. That agreement which can fill an entire Planet issue is a subject for another day.
On to the ordinance to add ADUs in the benign sounding “Hillside Overlay.” That title encompasses all of the hazards which are layered on top of each other, the Hayward Fault, the designated landslide areas and the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone and Wildland Urban Interface.
After multiple stops and starts, City Council separated the ADU Ordinance into two Ordinances. The first ADU Ordinance covering all of Berkeley except the Hillside Overlay passed in a unanimous vote on January 18, 2022. It was modeled on Councilmember Kesarwani’s Supplemental encouraging adding ADUs.
The ADU Ordinance for the Hillside Overlay based on the Hahn-Wengraf revised material for fire safety requirements using the public safety exception was passed on January 25, 2022. While allowing ADUs, it included firm setback requirements for building separation at property lines, prohibited intrusion into the setbacks and rooftop decks and included off-street parking requirements
There were memorable points in that January 2022 evening. While there was overwhelming public comment in support for the Hahn-Wengraf supplemental there were a few outliers like Todd Andrew who commented that evacuation in a fire would not be a problem as people would be driving down Marin.
When Wengraf took the floor after public comment closed, she shared the video of people evacuating in the 1991 Oakland-Berkeley Hills fire where 25 people died. It was pretty raw. Wengraf said this as she commented on the video, “this is what an evacuation looks like. There is no such thing as an orderly peaceful choreographed evacuation. It’s chaotic, it’s driven by fear and panic and everybody is racing for their lives.”
What I remember most about January 2022 evening was not the end of the evening with seconds running out in a 5 to 4 vote when Councilmember Bartlett said he thought he voted the wrong way and asked for reconsideration to change his vote. In the 5 to 4 revote, Bartlett sided with the motion based on the Hahn-Wengraf Supplemental.
The memory that stood out the most that evening was Councilmember Kesarwani’s long winded comment on the simmering resentment of perceived inequity between the North Berkeley Hills and the “flats,” South and West Berkeley. An excerpt of her comments is included here:
“…I do have to say that those stone pillars that mark the areas of the city that were designed to exclude people of color…you know that does sting, that stings for me as a woman of color and that stings for my constituents and I just want to share with you my perspective that when you put forward limits that are very much different from what the rest of the flats are doing are going to be part of the housing solution that does rub some of us the wrong way and I’m trying to see your perspective and spend a lot of time driving around the hills on those narrow winding streets and I do want to say that it is unsafe up there. There are real concerns. But I do think we also have to figure out how can we do, how can we affirmatively further housing. You know that’s fair to the whole city, but that also mitigates wildfire risk and that it is my view that we follow the minimum requirements of state law and as it relates to ADUs.”
While Kesarwani acknowledged the real fire danger, more important to her was fulfilling equity, that the hills did not have exceptions and were under the same conditions as the flats for adding ADUs. That stand lost to public safety in January 2022.
The perception of privilege and the impacts of redlining lingers. The demographic chart of the Berkeley City Council Districts by race and home ownership tells the difference. In addition, the hills create a natural barrier to the homeless encampments that settle in the flats mostly in Districts 1, 2, and 3 with smaller encampments in District 4.
On October 17, 2022 HCD sent a letter to Jordan Klein, Director of Planning and Development Department stating that Berkeley’s ADU Ordinances did not comply with State Law.
Now we are back at this again, with a split City Council on what to do about adding ADUs in the Hillside overlay with its many dangers, the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones, the Hayward Fault, and designated Landslides Zones.
Last January were the landslides. Significant fires cycle about every 20 years. The last major fire was 32 years ago, 1991. Berkeley is overdue. In 1868 the ground on the Hayward Fault line shifted six feet. A major earthquake on the Hayward Fault is overdue too.
There is limited egress and ingress to the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones.
How will thousands of residents in the Berkeley Hills evacuate while the Fire Department tries to make it in? All we really have are Marin and Spruce. Grizzly Peak through the very high fire zone really isn’t a way out.
Chief Sprague has a lot more worry than the thousands of residents in the Berkeley Hills. He has the department firefighters. Adding to all of this is climate change, the dangerous winds where fires create their own weather patterns. Fires can go up or down the hills and canyons. Embers can float in the wind and start new fires including in places not expected to burn like Coffey Park in the Tubbs fire.
Will City Council ignore the warnings from Fire Chief Sprague and acquiesce to HCD or will City Council heed the warnings and put forth the case to attend to public safety first? Will the simmering resentment over perceived privilege put the entire city at risk? These are open questions. Wengraf called City Council to challenge HCD. There are strong arguments to be made.
The September Fire Ready Festival and the September 6, 2023 City Meetings of the Planning Commission and Disaster and Fire Safety Commission
Sunday, September 17 was the 100th anniversary of the 1923 Berkeley Fire that destroyed a 50-block area burning more that 600 homes to the ground. The anniversary was marked with the Fire Ready Festival at Live Oak Park, tented tables with city police, firefighters ready to talk about safety, vendors with fire prevention and safety products, sparkling fire trucks and children running around in their firefighter hats, playing games and generally enjoying the day.
There have been many California fires with greater devastation than Berkeley’s 1923 fire. There was the 1991 Oakland-Berkeley Hills fire with 25 lives lost and 3,469 homes, apartments and condominiums burned, the 2017 Tubbs fire with 6,957 structures burned of which 1,422 were homes in Coffey Park where 23 people lost their lives. There was the Camps Fire in 2018 were 85 people in Paradise lost their lives and nearly 19,000 structures burned to the ground.
There is a common thread in all of these, the rapidity with which the fires moved and how quickly they engulfed residential neighborhoods. Coffey Park wasn’t even designated as a hazardous high fire risk area and yet it succumbed to flying embers blown over the six lane 101 freeway.
Peter Hartlaub in the Sunday, San Francisco Chronicle described the advancing 1923 fire from Wildcat Canyon into North Berkeley this way, “The fast moving wall of flames descended like an ambush, reaching residential streets with little warning less than two hours later.”
In 1923 the winds shifted from the east in the late afternoon to come in from the bay. That is what stopped the advancing fire from crossing Shattuck and stopping near Berkeley Way.
I am reminded of a conversation I had with the former Fire Chief Brannigan. I heard 3rd hand that the fire chief for Kensington had said a wildland – urban fire could burn Kensington to the ground in around eight minutes. I asked then Chief Brannigan what he thought about that statement. His answer was, “that sounds about right, Berkeley could burn to the ground in about an hour.”
Startled, I absorbed that news thinking about where I live in the flats. Several weeks later, I asked my question about Berkeley a little differently. Did he mean Berkeley could burn to Sacramento or San Pablo in an hour? Brannigan answered to the bay describing how strong winds from the east could carry embers spreading the fire.
At the Fire Ready Festival, I caught up with Fire Chief David Sprague who cordially answered my many questions. When I asked the same questions of Chief Sprague he said he didn’t want to put a time on how fast Berkeley could burn to the ground in highest risk fire conditions. We went on to talk about the evacuation study that is currently in process, the Master Plan for facilities, decontamination areas in facilities, adding density in the hills and curb redlining (the redlining to prohibit parking).
Sprague didn’t want to paint the picture of current readiness too harshly, but reading the Master Facilities Plan presented to the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission on September 6, 2023 the study of Standards of Coverage (SOC) by Citygate which compares Berkeley Fire Department response times to accepted standards states this:
“…the Department is organized only to accomplish ‘yesterday’s mission’ and is struggling to meet current demand, much less the future growth of the City and University…The ongoing intensification of land uses, building heights, and population density will make several sections of the City very urban – typical of the largest metropolitan cities for building fire and rescue/EMS challenges…The City’s fire and ambulance programs must evolve to those suitable for a major urban fire department in staffing, unit types and facility locations…”
Over the last twenty years, Berkeley has transitioned from a mostly single story, single-family residential community, with low-rise multi-unit buildings of two, three and four stories to a dense urban, vertically oriented community.
The State density bonus allowing a 50% increase in height over zoning limits for the paltry designation of 10% of the units of the “base project” for very low-income households. This means that six, eight and ten story buildings seem to be popping up everywhere in the flats. Soon there will be 26 story buildings. In the end the 10% of very low-income units is calculated on only that portion of the building that could be approved without the state density bonus, meaning the number of units set aside for very low-income households is less than 10% when looking at the entire project including the bonus.
We’ve heard from Fire Chief Sprague previously, what vertical density, adding height means to firefighters. Sprague said buildings above seven stories are designated as a high-rise though the transition comes with anything above fives floors. The example he gave to Budget and Finance Committee last April was that a fire on a ground floor could be handled with around 30 firefighters, but when that same kind of fire is in a high-rise the number of firefighters needed goes up to 50 to 100 and if it is anything more than a couple of rooms then it is several hundred firefighters.
At the Fire Ready festival, I struck up a conversation at the firefighters’ booth, asking about their new air breathing equipment and how that worked going into a high-rise fire. Firefighter Jesse told me they don’t turn on their “air” until they hit the fire/smoke. That answered my question about how they could run up all those stairs with fifty plus pounds of equipment in a high-rise and still have any air in their breathing equipment left when they reached the fire.
The health risks to firefighters from exposure to smoke and inhaled toxins was covered in the Sunday, September 3, 2023 San Francisco Chronicle article “Smoke poisoning state’s firefighters agencies accused of decades of failure to protect wildland workers.”
The significant higher incidence of cancer and heart disease firefighters face is also included in Berkeley Fire Department Master Plan. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/legislative-body-meeting-agendas/DFSC%20Agenda%20Packet%2023-09-06%20-%20Special%20Meeting.pdf
As Chief Sprague and I spoke, I directed the conversation to the apparent disconnect of the Planning Department proposals to densify Berkeley from the impact on the Fire Department to service bigger taller buildings and the residents in them.
September 6 was an interesting evening as City meetings go with just that contrast. There was the very well attended hearing at the Planning Commission on the Southside Zoning Modification Project at the North Berkeley Senior Center and less than a handful of attendees at the Fire Department Training Center to hear Fire Chief Sprague present the Fire Department Master Plan to the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission.
While the Planning Commission listened to the City of Berkeley Planning staff describe the plan for upzoning the Southside and the public comment that followed, Fire Chief David Sprague was presenting that the Fire Department facilities are not equipped to handle the current Berkeley population and current high-rise buildings.
It didn’t seem to cross anyone’s mind in the City Planning Department presenting the case for upzoning, intensifying the Southside with bigger taller buildings that cover more land and more buildings on a parcel (a lot) with more people would add a burden to an already overtaxed Fire Department.
A number of speakers at the Southside Zoning Modification hearing complained of not having adequate notice and that the 269-page meeting packet and the agenda did not drop until just before the beginning of the long holiday Labor Day weekend.
As for the complaints that the Southside Zoning Plan was new and there was no public notification or meetings, rezoning the Southside has been in the City’s sights for years, really since 2016. It has been in the Planning Commission Workplan. The Planning Commission met on the Southisde Zoning Modification Project on April 19, 2023 and that meeting was followed with a presentation at the Design Review Committee May 18 and June 15, 2023.
However, the earlier presentations did not include the environmental impact report or diagrams of the fault lines and landslide areas. The presentations covered the changes to the zoning code and very little else.
Digging through the Planning Commission 269-page agenda packet, buried in the Addendum to the 2023-2031 Housing Element Update Final Environmental Impact Report (HEU) on pages 172 – 173 under Services, concludes that adding up to 1652 new units will reduce the demand for fire protection as the the probable 4,130 new residents will be in new buildings with more stringent regulations. Additionally, increased call volumes, emergency medical, disaster preparedness, future facility remodeling, 911 dispatch upgrades, etc. could all be covered by the 2020 Measure FF. Measure FF was estimated to generate $8,500,000 annually.
The diagrams on pages 140 and 141 show the eastern edge of the Southside sitting in an earthquake-induced landslide area with the Hayward fault running through it.
The agenda packet HEU section on Wildfire is contained in pages 182 – 186. This section starts out describing increased development would be located in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones (VHFHSZ), “…that construction and operation…could introduce potential sources of wildfire ignition…” and that the impact of building out the plan was “…found to be significant and unavoidable…” but since there are no significant changes there doesn’t need to be any revision in the analysis or plan.
While City staff did mention that the border of the Hillside overly runs through the Southside, it was never stated that the Hillside overlay defines entrance into the very high fire hazard severity zone. Nor was it ever noted in the Southside Zoning Modification Project that these new eight story buildings (twelve stories with the State Density Bonus) filled with students would be just four blocks from Panoramic Hill the highest fire risk area in the entire city for a wildland-urban fire.
Nowhere in the environmental impact report (HEU) is the history of wildfire nor as recently noted by Fire Chief Sprague is there the information that Berkeley experiences a major fire about every 20 years. Berkeley is now at 32 years since the last fire, the Oakland-Berkeley Hills fire.
At the Planning Commission hearing there was the usual parade of UC students declaring their support for the plan reiterating there is a housing crisis.
The neighbors expressed their concern of the impact on city services and the potential of UC taking over the new developments with master leases giving them tax exempt status and thereby removing them from contributing through property taxes to the cost of services these added thousands of students will demand.
Mayor Arreguin would probably say that the agreement he negotiated with UC covers the financial impact of UC on the City budget though Dean Metzger and David Wilson soundly disagree as they wrote in the Berkeley Daily Planet, September 15, 2021. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2021-09-03/article/49400?headline=Opinion-Berkeley-vs.-UC-Settlement-or-surrender-Part-1--Dean-Metzger-David-Wilson
There were comments on classifying a pet washing room, meeting room and gyms as open space, land value capture with upzoning and wildfire risk and the impact on evacuation.
Land value capture relates to the increased value of the land on which the new buildings will sit. Land value is why putting bigger denser buildings and more buildings on a plot of land does not bring the expected lower rent outcome. The new high value of the land is incorporated into the cost of the housing.
There were two substitute commissioners, Tim Frank (appointed by Mayor Arreguin), who I know better as a representative (lobbyist?) for the building trades and Brandon Yung (appointed by Councilmember Robinson), who sits on the Zoning Adjustment Board.
Tim Frank expressed concern that prevailing wage should be included in the plan. Emily Marthinsen appointed by Councilmember Wengraf stated her support for the designation of inside spaces as open space as the campus provides plenty of outdoor open space.
Brandon Yung said he was, “super stocked” by the progress of the plan and then went on to push for smaller setbacks with more density. Brandon’s suggestions to rewrite setbacks and conditions were finally stopped when staff stepped in to say that such changes would unravel the project. The Southside Zoning Modification Project passed as presented and moves on to approval by City Council.
Meanwhile across town, Fire Chief Sprague explained how becoming a YIMBY driven city, fire conditions, science and the emergency services provided by the Fire Department in addition to fire response all fold into the Master Plan. The Fire Department provides emergency medical services (EMS), paramedics, transport, disaster response, dispatch, rescue to name a few.
Firefighters face significant risk to their health and life through work exposure to smoke and toxins. They do not have facilities for decontamination of themselves and equipment that are properly separated from their work and living spaces while on duty.
The Master Plan covers the specific needs and deficiencies station by station. Four of the seven fire stations need to be replaced. Those are Fire Stations 1, 2, 4, and 5. A new site needs to be found for West Berkeley Station 1. Stations 3, 6 and 7 can be expanded and renovated at their current sites. Fire headquarters and the ambulance deployment center need to be relocated to a larger space. The needed new training facility and relocation is progressing through a partnership approach with other local municipalities. All this comes with a big price tag estimated as $330,000,000 to $372,000,000.
This is a lot to swallow.
Sunday, September 17 was the 100th anniversary of the 1923 Berkeley Fire that destroyed a 50-block area burning more that 600 homes to the ground. The anniversary was marked with the Fire Ready Festival at Live Oak Park, tented tables with city police, firefighters ready to talk about safety, vendors with fire prevention and safety products, sparkling fire trucks and children running around in their firefighter hats, playing games and generally enjoying the day.
There have been many California fires with greater devastation than Berkeley’s 1923 fire. There was the 1991 Oakland-Berkeley Hills fire with 25 lives lost and 3,469 homes, apartments and condominiums burned, the 2017 Tubbs fire with 6,957 structures burned of which 1,422 were homes in Coffey Park where 23 people lost their lives. There was the Camps Fire in 2018 were 85 people in Paradise lost their lives and nearly 19,000 structures burned to the ground.
There is a common thread in all of these, the rapidity with which the fires moved and how quickly they engulfed residential neighborhoods. Coffey Park wasn’t even designated as a hazardous high fire risk area and yet it succumbed to flying embers blown over the six lane 101 freeway.
Peter Hartlaub in the Sunday, San Francisco Chronicle described the advancing 1923 fire from Wildcat Canyon into North Berkeley this way, “The fast moving wall of flames descended like an ambush, reaching residential streets with little warning less than two hours later.”
In 1923 the winds shifted from the east in the late afternoon to come in from the bay. That is what stopped the advancing fire from crossing Shattuck and stopping near Berkeley Way.
I am reminded of a conversation I had with the former Fire Chief Brannigan. I heard 3rd hand that the fire chief for Kensington had said a wildland – urban fire could burn Kensington to the ground in around eight minutes. I asked then Chief Brannigan what he thought about that statement. His answer was, “that sounds about right, Berkeley could burn to the ground in about an hour.”
Startled, I absorbed that news thinking about where I live in the flats. Several weeks later, I asked my question about Berkeley a little differently. Did he mean Berkeley could burn to Sacramento or San Pablo in an hour? Brannigan answered to the bay describing how strong winds from the east could carry embers spreading the fire.
At the Fire Ready Festival, I caught up with Fire Chief David Sprague who cordially answered my many questions. When I asked the same questions of Chief Sprague he said he didn’t want to put a time on how fast Berkeley could burn to the ground in highest risk fire conditions. We went on to talk about the evacuation study that is currently in process, the Master Plan for facilities, decontamination areas in facilities, adding density in the hills and curb redlining (the redlining to prohibit parking).
Sprague didn’t want to paint the picture of current readiness too harshly, but reading the Master Facilities Plan presented to the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission on September 6, 2023 the study of Standards of Coverage (SOC) by Citygate which compares Berkeley Fire Department response times to accepted standards states this:
“…the Department is organized only to accomplish ‘yesterday’s mission’ and is struggling to meet current demand, much less the future growth of the City and University…The ongoing intensification of land uses, building heights, and population density will make several sections of the City very urban – typical of the largest metropolitan cities for building fire and rescue/EMS challenges…The City’s fire and ambulance programs must evolve to those suitable for a major urban fire department in staffing, unit types and facility locations…”
Over the last twenty years, Berkeley has transitioned from a mostly single story, single-family residential community, with low-rise multi-unit buildings of two, three and four stories to a dense urban, vertically oriented community.
The State density bonus allowing a 50% increase in height over zoning limits for the paltry designation of 10% of the units of the “base project” for very low-income households. This means that six, eight and ten story buildings seem to be popping up everywhere in the flats. Soon there will be 26 story buildings. In the end the 10% of very low-income units is calculated on only that portion of the building that could be approved without the state density bonus, meaning the number of units set aside for very low-income households is less than 10% when looking at the entire project including the bonus.
We’ve heard from Fire Chief Sprague previously, what vertical density, adding height means to firefighters. Sprague said buildings above seven stories are designated as a high-rise though the transition comes with anything above fives floors. The example he gave to Budget and Finance Committee last April was that a fire on a ground floor could be handled with around 30 firefighters, but when that same kind of fire is in a high-rise the number of firefighters needed goes up to 50 to 100 and if it is anything more than a couple of rooms then it is several hundred firefighters.
At the Fire Ready festival, I struck up a conversation at the firefighters’ booth, asking about their new air breathing equipment and how that worked going into a high-rise fire. Firefighter Jesse told me they don’t turn on their “air” until they hit the fire/smoke. That answered my question about how they could run up all those stairs with fifty plus pounds of equipment in a high-rise and still have any air in their breathing equipment left when they reached the fire.
The health risks to firefighters from exposure to smoke and inhaled toxins was covered in the Sunday, September 3, 2023 San Francisco Chronicle article “Smoke poisoning state’s firefighters agencies accused of decades of failure to protect wildland workers.”
The significant higher incidence of cancer and heart disease firefighters face is also included in Berkeley Fire Department Master Plan. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/legislative-body-meeting-agendas/DFSC%20Agenda%20Packet%2023-09-06%20-%20Special%20Meeting.pdf
As Chief Sprague and I spoke, I directed the conversation to the apparent disconnect of the Planning Department proposals to densify Berkeley from the impact on the Fire Department to service bigger taller buildings and the residents in them.
September 6 was an interesting evening as City meetings go with just that contrast. There was the very well attended hearing at the Planning Commission on the Southside Zoning Modification Project at the North Berkeley Senior Center and less than a handful of attendees at the Fire Department Training Center to hear Fire Chief Sprague present the Fire Department Master Plan to the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission.
While the Planning Commission listened to the City of Berkeley Planning staff describe the plan for upzoning the Southside and the public comment that followed, Fire Chief David Sprague was presenting that the Fire Department facilities are not equipped to handle the current Berkeley population and current high-rise buildings.
It didn’t seem to cross anyone’s mind in the City Planning Department presenting the case for upzoning, intensifying the Southside with bigger taller buildings that cover more land and more buildings on a parcel (a lot) with more people would add a burden to an already overtaxed Fire Department.
A number of speakers at the Southside Zoning Modification hearing complained of not having adequate notice and that the 269-page meeting packet and the agenda did not drop until just before the beginning of the long holiday Labor Day weekend.
As for the complaints that the Southside Zoning Plan was new and there was no public notification or meetings, rezoning the Southside has been in the City’s sights for years, really since 2016. It has been in the Planning Commission Workplan. The Planning Commission met on the Southisde Zoning Modification Project on April 19, 2023 and that meeting was followed with a presentation at the Design Review Committee May 18 and June 15, 2023.
However, the earlier presentations did not include the environmental impact report or diagrams of the fault lines and landslide areas. The presentations covered the changes to the zoning code and very little else.
Digging through the Planning Commission 269-page agenda packet, buried in the Addendum to the 2023-2031 Housing Element Update Final Environmental Impact Report (HEU) on pages 172 – 173 under Services, concludes that adding up to 1652 new units will reduce the demand for fire protection as the the probable 4,130 new residents will be in new buildings with more stringent regulations. Additionally, increased call volumes, emergency medical, disaster preparedness, future facility remodeling, 911 dispatch upgrades, etc. could all be covered by the 2020 Measure FF. Measure FF was estimated to generate $8,500,000 annually.
The diagrams on pages 140 and 141 show the eastern edge of the Southside sitting in an earthquake-induced landslide area with the Hayward fault running through it.
The agenda packet HEU section on Wildfire is contained in pages 182 – 186. This section starts out describing increased development would be located in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones (VHFHSZ), “…that construction and operation…could introduce potential sources of wildfire ignition…” and that the impact of building out the plan was “…found to be significant and unavoidable…” but since there are no significant changes there doesn’t need to be any revision in the analysis or plan.
While City staff did mention that the border of the Hillside overly runs through the Southside, it was never stated that the Hillside overlay defines entrance into the very high fire hazard severity zone. Nor was it ever noted in the Southside Zoning Modification Project that these new eight story buildings (twelve stories with the State Density Bonus) filled with students would be just four blocks from Panoramic Hill the highest fire risk area in the entire city for a wildland-urban fire.
Nowhere in the environmental impact report (HEU) is the history of wildfire nor as recently noted by Fire Chief Sprague is there the information that Berkeley experiences a major fire about every 20 years. Berkeley is now at 32 years since the last fire, the Oakland-Berkeley Hills fire.
At the Planning Commission hearing there was the usual parade of UC students declaring their support for the plan reiterating there is a housing crisis.
The neighbors expressed their concern of the impact on city services and the potential of UC taking over the new developments with master leases giving them tax exempt status and thereby removing them from contributing through property taxes to the cost of services these added thousands of students will demand.
Mayor Arreguin would probably say that the agreement he negotiated with UC covers the financial impact of UC on the City budget though Dean Metzger and David Wilson soundly disagree as they wrote in the Berkeley Daily Planet, September 15, 2021. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2021-09-03/article/49400?headline=Opinion-Berkeley-vs.-UC-Settlement-or-surrender-Part-1--Dean-Metzger-David-Wilson
There were comments on classifying a pet washing room, meeting room and gyms as open space, land value capture with upzoning and wildfire risk and the impact on evacuation.
Land value capture relates to the increased value of the land on which the new buildings will sit. Land value is why putting bigger denser buildings and more buildings on a plot of land does not bring the expected lower rent outcome. The new high value of the land is incorporated into the cost of the housing.
There were two substitute commissioners, Tim Frank (appointed by Mayor Arreguin), who I know better as a representative (lobbyist?) for the building trades and Brandon Yung (appointed by Councilmember Robinson), who sits on the Zoning Adjustment Board.
Tim Frank expressed concern that prevailing wage should be included in the plan. Emily Marthinsen appointed by Councilmember Wengraf stated her support for the designation of inside spaces as open space as the campus provides plenty of outdoor open space.
Brandon Yung said he was, “super stocked” by the progress of the plan and then went on to push for smaller setbacks with more density. Brandon’s suggestions to rewrite setbacks and conditions were finally stopped when staff stepped in to say that such changes would unravel the project. The Southside Zoning Modification Project passed as presented and moves on to approval by City Council.
Meanwhile across town, Fire Chief Sprague explained how becoming a YIMBY driven city, fire conditions, science and the emergency services provided by the Fire Department in addition to fire response all fold into the Master Plan. The Fire Department provides emergency medical services (EMS), paramedics, transport, disaster response, dispatch, rescue to name a few.
Firefighters face significant risk to their health and life through work exposure to smoke and toxins. They do not have facilities for decontamination of themselves and equipment that are properly separated from their work and living spaces while on duty.
The Master Plan covers the specific needs and deficiencies station by station. Four of the seven fire stations need to be replaced. Those are Fire Stations 1, 2, 4, and 5. A new site needs to be found for West Berkeley Station 1. Stations 3, 6 and 7 can be expanded and renovated at their current sites. Fire headquarters and the ambulance deployment center need to be relocated to a larger space. The needed new training facility and relocation is progressing through a partnership approach with other local municipalities. All this comes with a big price tag estimated as $330,000,000 to $372,000,000.
This is a lot to swallow.
August 6 and 13, 2023 Combined
The first week of August was a perfect kind of week. City Council was on summer recess and so were most of the boards and commissions. Trump was finally indicted for his attempted coup culminating on January 6 and I managed to fit in Oppenheimer, Barbie and finish Thomas E. Ricks’ Churchill and Orwell.
As you might expect, I’ve read both of Jack Smith’s indictments of Trump and suggest you read them too. I doubt that the MAGA crowd/MAGA cult who according to polls believe these are just made up charges and Trump won the 2020 election would change their minds, but it would be a good idea for them too. Nonetheless, there is a reason Trump is sweating, but remember he is a media master.
DC indictment for Jan 6: (45 pages) - https://www.justice.gov/storage/US_v_Trump_23_cr_257.pdf
Florida Documents Case: For those of us who are not lawyers, we do not have to find the June 8 indictment and then the July 27 superseding indictment. The July 27, 2023 superseding indictment contains the original June 8 indictment with the new charges added making it one document (60 pages). - https://www.justice.gov/storage/US-v-Trump-Nauta-De-Oliveira-23-80101.pdf
It is official now July 2023 was the hottest month recorded, with July 4th as the hottest day. The planet crossed the 1.5°C of temperature rise at least temporarily. I added Phoenix to the cities I track.
While Berkeley basked in afternoons of the gentle 70s those living in Phoenix got a taste of what 1.5°C of temperature rise feels like with 31 days of temperatures over 110°F. People who were so unfortunate as to fall on Phoenix streets and sidewalks suffered 2nd and 3rd burns.
The heat wave finally broke on July 31, 2023 when the peak temperature dropped to 108°.
Burns from contact with scorching pavement and sidewalks or heat stroke are not the only worries from excessive heat waves. Chronic Kidney Disease of nontraditional or unknown cause CKDnT is being added to the list. CKDnT aka kidney failure has been showing up in medical journals and articles linking CKDnT to outdoor laborers working under extreme heat conditions. This week CKDnT made it into Time in “Chronic Kidney Disease Is Poised to Become the Black Lung of Climate Change.” https://time.com/6303020/chronic-kidney-disease-climate-change/
Andrew Needlam wrote in his August 4 article in the Atlantic “The Problem With ‘Why Do People Live in Phoenix?’” that, “America’s hottest city is still booming…the horror stories of life in 115 degrees is hardly guaranteed to blunt Phoenix’s explosive growth. There are currently building permits for 80,000 new homes in the Phoenix metro area that have not yet commenced construction – homes that will require more water, more AC, and more energy.”
People are still moving to places that will be unlivable part or much of the year in a future that Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described as “[T]he era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived…” This is insane.
As I was getting ready for this Diary final clean-up, I joined the monthly zoom meeting with my college classmates. While we were on, the news banner flashed across my screen that the youth who sued that Montana violated their right to a “clean and healthful environment” WON.
After I shared the announcement, I asked my classmate living in Texas how people felt about climate change, did they think it was real? She said yes they believed climate change was real and we should get off fossil fuels. She confessed to liking her gas stove and since electricity was created by burning coal, she didn’t feel compelled to get rid of it.
As the discussion continued, she spoke about how young people are depressed and then followed with observing every generation has their challenges, “they just need to put their big boy pants on.” I was stunned. Is this really how we feel? Children just need to suck it up, put on their big boy pants and deal with the mess we’ve left. I guess this is why I never felt any connection to my college classmates and rarely join the monthly zoom. We have completely different perceptions of the world then and now.
Lahaina is in the news everywhere. The number of deaths has now eclipsed Paradise, California, making Lahaina the deadliest fire in over 100 years. As people sort through their losses and trauma, they say what we always hear, they will rebuild.
Rebuilding after a disaster may replace destroyed buildings with new, but what happens to community is the subject of Jake Bittle’s book The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. Bittle takes us into the personal stories of how people’s lives are impacted and changed from the Four Horsemen of the Anthropocene, fire, heat, drought and flood. The book is worth reading. Paradise is in it.
The investigations into the causes and the responses to the fire that engulfed Lahaina has barely started, but already there are similarities to Paradise and the Oakland Berkeley Hills fires.
There was a small fire earlier in the day that was thought to be out and within several hours it exploded into a conflagration. Evacuation notices were delayed and when sent were on systems that were down/no longer working. There were few evacuation/escape routes. People hesitated to leave, then found themselves trapped by fire and abandoned cars and fled on foot for their lives.
The Maui siren warning system was not activated. The Lahaina fire moved at a mile a minute.
Berkeley’s installation of a siren warning system is nearly complete according to the Deputy Fire Chief Kenneth May.
At the one Berkeley Commission I did attend the first week in August, Janice Thomas from Panoramic Hill said at the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission, she was more afraid of the commission than – I thought she said living on Panoramic Hill, but it could have been the Fire Marshall’s report or something else, I couldn’t be sure. It is so much easier to catch full phrases on zoom especially when live transcription is activated.
There is not much reason to be afraid of commissions after watching what City Council does with commission recommendations. They don’t seem to hold much sway unless the recommendation is something Council is already is favor of doing.
The entire discussion and comments from Thomas started, because Commissioner Raine appointed by District 7 Rigel Robinson put the California Office of the State Fire Marshall’s review of the Panoramic Hill neighborhood on the agenda.
The State Fire Marshall report rates Panoramic Hill as very high fire risk and recommends to create a secondary access, install reflective signage, limit street parking, require locked private gates to remain unlocked during red flag warnings or high fire danger conditions, conduct community-wide evacuation drills and install reflective markings to indicate road edges during periods of low visibility (think smoke). Many edges of the roads drop off steeply into canyons.
It seemed like several members of the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission were unfamiliar with the designation of Panoramic Hill as a Fire Zone 3 area, meaning it is at the highest risk in Berkeley of a wildland-urban fire even though Panoramic Hill managed to escape both the 1923 fire that stopped just short of Shattuck and a block from University and the Berkeley Oakland Hills fire of 1991.
Escape is the key word, the same word that describes why Point Molate should never be a housing development site, one way in and out.
The roads in Panoramic Hill were built in the 1880s according to Thomas.
I was glad I no longer had my Saab with a clutch when I drove them Saturday in my little Prius just to see how bad they really are. When I met a car coming down as I was going up, one of us had to pull over to let the other pass. The passage is too narrow for two cars side by side and definitely too narrow for a wide-bodied fire engine and car to pass side by side.
With all the sharp turns and cars parked on the edges, if a wildfire hits this area it is hard to imagine people getting out or a fire truck coming in, though Commissioner Shirley Dean (Berkeley Mayor from 1994 – 2002) related during the meeting discussion that she once rode in an open cab fire truck up Panoramic Hill to understand the full difficulty of navigating a fire response to the area.
My annoyance with the commissioners that they didn’t seem to have a full grasp of the City of Berkeley Fire Zones ended when I went looking for Berkeley’s Fire Zone Map. Finding that map in the new revised city website was definitely a challenge. The map is only a gross picture containing no street names for the borders. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/2022-04/Berkeley-Fire-Zone-Map.pdf
At one time according to Dean (decades ago) there were plans for a second road route out. Thomas said she still had those records. The item was continued to the next meeting.
Dean’s agenda item to look into development fees for hi-rise buildings met with pushback from Commissioner Theo Gordon appointed by District 8 Councilmember Humbert. Gordon stated property owners in the hills should be paying higher fees not the developers of hi-rises as the new hi-rises are more fire resistant and have lower rents. Panoramic Hill sits in District 8.
I wasn’t quite sure where Gordon gets his information that the new mixed-use buildings are cheaper to rent than older existing buildings. Councilmember Harrison has stated at council meetings, our most affordable housing is our existing housing.
When I related Gordon’s comments that new hi-rises are cheaper to rent to people who follow the cost of rentals in Berkeley, they called the comment laughable and asked was Gordon a paid YIMBY staffer or a true believer? California YIMBY is the land-use lobbying group for Big Tech and developers that celebrates big mixed use projects.
A light search on google and Gordon’s twitter handle lists him as the Lead of East Bay YIMBY. Gordon isn’t listed as staff on the California YIMBY website, but the average annual YIMBY Action Salary for Lead is approximately $175,423 according to Salary.Com. https://www.salary.com/
As for the new hi-rise units being cheaper to rent, the 10% very low income units calculated on the “base project” hardly make the other market rate 90% affordable to people who do not have a job earning greater than the area median income (AMI) in Alameda County currently at $147,900 for a four person household. Rentals for under $1000 listed in the various online rental apps are by the “bed” not by unit.
Setting aside 10% of the units for very low income households using the “base project” for calculation is how developers access the California State Density Bonus to increase a project size by 50% more than what would be allowed under existing zoning code. This is how 2190 Shattuck can provide 32 very low income units out of 326 and go from 18 floors to 25 or 1598 University (appeal date 10/3/23) with 21 very low income units out of 207 went from 4 stories to 8.
Dean’s item on a developer’s fee stems from Fire Chief Sprague’s comments at the April 27, 2023 Budget and Finance Committee regarding how many firefighters are needed for a hi-rise building which is any building above 7 floors. Sprague stated the change really comes at above 5 floors. Thirty firefighters would be needed for a residential fire, but 50 – 100 for an elevated fire. Any fire in a hi-rise that is more than a couple of rooms would need several 100 firefighters. Sprague’s statement is quoted in the April 30 Activist’s Diary. https://berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-05-08/article/50289?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-week-ending-April-30--Kelly-Hammargren
I skipped the Landmarks Preservation Commission. There were two demolition items which could be guaranteed to be approved and another on the color of paint for a historical building.
The Community for a Cultural Civic Center (CCCC) met for a debrief after the City Council vote to approve the Civic Center Plan Phase II including a full evaluation of daylighting Strawberry Creek. The Strawberry Creek culvert runs underneath the Maudelle Shirek Building. The group promoting daylighting the creek has already been invited to submit a full grant application for funding. Just how the rest of the project will be financed is up in the air.
Moving on, the takeaway from the Police Accountability Board Fair and Impartial Policing Subcommittee on August 7 is that the three-pronged approach to traffic stop policing which places the focus on Vision Zero (zero severe injury and fatal accidents) is not making the expected difference in reducing/eliminating disparate treatment of Black and Brown persons. Implicit bias appears to continue with a need for further review of community service calls and suspicious vehicle stops.
Only three members of the Commission on Disability attended the August 9 meeting. There are four commission vacancies and four of the five current commissioners were appointed in April and May of this year. Commissioners Sun and Walsh (the only member with several years on the commission) were absent. Thomas Gregory the Commission Secretary is also new with only 4 months as a City of Berkeley employee.
A letter from a Berkeley resident to former Councilmember Droste and the commission was in the meeting packet calling out Droste for using accessibility and ADA compliance as an issue for supporting the new Willard Park Clubhouse plans and involving other city commissions, but not the Commission on Disability.
The new commissioners were not involved and likely did not know that at the Agenda Committee meetings starting on June 15, 2020 when the Agenda Committee referred to itself the Commission Reorganization authored by Droste and co-sponsored by Councilmembers Kesarwani and Robinson (Mayor Arreguin joined later) that the proposed plan was to continue with only those commissions and boards required by law, charter, city ordinance and/or ballot initiatives. That would have eliminated the Commission on Disability.
With Droste as the author of the reorganization, it is no surprise that the Commission on Disability was not consulted. Additionally, since the Willard Park Community Center is planned around children and later discussions on commission mergers suggested combing the Commissions on Aging and Disability into one, it further dismisses these commissions from contributing to the planning even though there are children with disabilities and their parents, grandparents or caregivers may have disabilities.
It was finally decided in 2021 and 2022 as the commission mergers and eliminations moved forward not to merge Aging and Disability in the first commission reorganization round, but to come back to further reductions later. Councilmember Hahn Agenda Committee member was a vocal contributor to the slicing and dicing of commissions.
Much is made of making streets and intersections safe for pedestrians and persons with disabilities with little thought to engaging the Commission on Disability. That might be about to change. The new Commission Secretary is working on bringing project presentations to the Commission before they are set in cement. Then we could hear from the Commission on Disability on things like whether persons in wheelchairs really find it safe and want to ride in a bike lane in the street as suggested by a Transportation and Infrastructure Commissioner on January 19, 2023.
It didn’t look like The Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) would vote for Board member Tregub’s substitute motion on the approval of 2147 San Pablo to include cleaning up the approval language to specify that monthly transit passes were for each bedroom and to recommend bird-safe glass, native plantings and compliance with the Hard Hat Ordinance. 2147 San Pablo is a SB 330 State Density Bonus which means, the project complies only with whatever ordinances were in effect when the application was filed.
There is no native plantings requirement, the Bird-Safe Ordinance went into effect after application and the Hard Hat Ordinance is still up in the air. ZAB member Brandon Yung liked the virtual signaling, but others vocalized their objections to making recommendations. In the end it passed 5 to 2. Kathleen Crandall who was subbing for the evening abstained and Debra Sanderson voted no.
The other surprise of the evening was that after extended discussion, ZAB continued 1515 Derby which adds a 3-story single family residence behind the current single family home. While only the house was before ZAB for approval, the plans included adding an ADU later. The discussion (and neighborhood objections) revolved around decreasing the impact to neighbors by swapping the placement of the house and the ADU.
All for now.
This Activist's Diary has been corrected. Commissioner Raine was appointed by Councilmember Robinson District 7 not by Wengraf District 6,
The first week of August was a perfect kind of week. City Council was on summer recess and so were most of the boards and commissions. Trump was finally indicted for his attempted coup culminating on January 6 and I managed to fit in Oppenheimer, Barbie and finish Thomas E. Ricks’ Churchill and Orwell.
As you might expect, I’ve read both of Jack Smith’s indictments of Trump and suggest you read them too. I doubt that the MAGA crowd/MAGA cult who according to polls believe these are just made up charges and Trump won the 2020 election would change their minds, but it would be a good idea for them too. Nonetheless, there is a reason Trump is sweating, but remember he is a media master.
DC indictment for Jan 6: (45 pages) - https://www.justice.gov/storage/US_v_Trump_23_cr_257.pdf
Florida Documents Case: For those of us who are not lawyers, we do not have to find the June 8 indictment and then the July 27 superseding indictment. The July 27, 2023 superseding indictment contains the original June 8 indictment with the new charges added making it one document (60 pages). - https://www.justice.gov/storage/US-v-Trump-Nauta-De-Oliveira-23-80101.pdf
It is official now July 2023 was the hottest month recorded, with July 4th as the hottest day. The planet crossed the 1.5°C of temperature rise at least temporarily. I added Phoenix to the cities I track.
While Berkeley basked in afternoons of the gentle 70s those living in Phoenix got a taste of what 1.5°C of temperature rise feels like with 31 days of temperatures over 110°F. People who were so unfortunate as to fall on Phoenix streets and sidewalks suffered 2nd and 3rd burns.
The heat wave finally broke on July 31, 2023 when the peak temperature dropped to 108°.
Burns from contact with scorching pavement and sidewalks or heat stroke are not the only worries from excessive heat waves. Chronic Kidney Disease of nontraditional or unknown cause CKDnT is being added to the list. CKDnT aka kidney failure has been showing up in medical journals and articles linking CKDnT to outdoor laborers working under extreme heat conditions. This week CKDnT made it into Time in “Chronic Kidney Disease Is Poised to Become the Black Lung of Climate Change.” https://time.com/6303020/chronic-kidney-disease-climate-change/
Andrew Needlam wrote in his August 4 article in the Atlantic “The Problem With ‘Why Do People Live in Phoenix?’” that, “America’s hottest city is still booming…the horror stories of life in 115 degrees is hardly guaranteed to blunt Phoenix’s explosive growth. There are currently building permits for 80,000 new homes in the Phoenix metro area that have not yet commenced construction – homes that will require more water, more AC, and more energy.”
People are still moving to places that will be unlivable part or much of the year in a future that Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described as “[T]he era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived…” This is insane.
As I was getting ready for this Diary final clean-up, I joined the monthly zoom meeting with my college classmates. While we were on, the news banner flashed across my screen that the youth who sued that Montana violated their right to a “clean and healthful environment” WON.
After I shared the announcement, I asked my classmate living in Texas how people felt about climate change, did they think it was real? She said yes they believed climate change was real and we should get off fossil fuels. She confessed to liking her gas stove and since electricity was created by burning coal, she didn’t feel compelled to get rid of it.
As the discussion continued, she spoke about how young people are depressed and then followed with observing every generation has their challenges, “they just need to put their big boy pants on.” I was stunned. Is this really how we feel? Children just need to suck it up, put on their big boy pants and deal with the mess we’ve left. I guess this is why I never felt any connection to my college classmates and rarely join the monthly zoom. We have completely different perceptions of the world then and now.
Lahaina is in the news everywhere. The number of deaths has now eclipsed Paradise, California, making Lahaina the deadliest fire in over 100 years. As people sort through their losses and trauma, they say what we always hear, they will rebuild.
Rebuilding after a disaster may replace destroyed buildings with new, but what happens to community is the subject of Jake Bittle’s book The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. Bittle takes us into the personal stories of how people’s lives are impacted and changed from the Four Horsemen of the Anthropocene, fire, heat, drought and flood. The book is worth reading. Paradise is in it.
The investigations into the causes and the responses to the fire that engulfed Lahaina has barely started, but already there are similarities to Paradise and the Oakland Berkeley Hills fires.
There was a small fire earlier in the day that was thought to be out and within several hours it exploded into a conflagration. Evacuation notices were delayed and when sent were on systems that were down/no longer working. There were few evacuation/escape routes. People hesitated to leave, then found themselves trapped by fire and abandoned cars and fled on foot for their lives.
The Maui siren warning system was not activated. The Lahaina fire moved at a mile a minute.
Berkeley’s installation of a siren warning system is nearly complete according to the Deputy Fire Chief Kenneth May.
At the one Berkeley Commission I did attend the first week in August, Janice Thomas from Panoramic Hill said at the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission, she was more afraid of the commission than – I thought she said living on Panoramic Hill, but it could have been the Fire Marshall’s report or something else, I couldn’t be sure. It is so much easier to catch full phrases on zoom especially when live transcription is activated.
There is not much reason to be afraid of commissions after watching what City Council does with commission recommendations. They don’t seem to hold much sway unless the recommendation is something Council is already is favor of doing.
The entire discussion and comments from Thomas started, because Commissioner Raine appointed by District 7 Rigel Robinson put the California Office of the State Fire Marshall’s review of the Panoramic Hill neighborhood on the agenda.
The State Fire Marshall report rates Panoramic Hill as very high fire risk and recommends to create a secondary access, install reflective signage, limit street parking, require locked private gates to remain unlocked during red flag warnings or high fire danger conditions, conduct community-wide evacuation drills and install reflective markings to indicate road edges during periods of low visibility (think smoke). Many edges of the roads drop off steeply into canyons.
It seemed like several members of the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission were unfamiliar with the designation of Panoramic Hill as a Fire Zone 3 area, meaning it is at the highest risk in Berkeley of a wildland-urban fire even though Panoramic Hill managed to escape both the 1923 fire that stopped just short of Shattuck and a block from University and the Berkeley Oakland Hills fire of 1991.
Escape is the key word, the same word that describes why Point Molate should never be a housing development site, one way in and out.
The roads in Panoramic Hill were built in the 1880s according to Thomas.
I was glad I no longer had my Saab with a clutch when I drove them Saturday in my little Prius just to see how bad they really are. When I met a car coming down as I was going up, one of us had to pull over to let the other pass. The passage is too narrow for two cars side by side and definitely too narrow for a wide-bodied fire engine and car to pass side by side.
With all the sharp turns and cars parked on the edges, if a wildfire hits this area it is hard to imagine people getting out or a fire truck coming in, though Commissioner Shirley Dean (Berkeley Mayor from 1994 – 2002) related during the meeting discussion that she once rode in an open cab fire truck up Panoramic Hill to understand the full difficulty of navigating a fire response to the area.
My annoyance with the commissioners that they didn’t seem to have a full grasp of the City of Berkeley Fire Zones ended when I went looking for Berkeley’s Fire Zone Map. Finding that map in the new revised city website was definitely a challenge. The map is only a gross picture containing no street names for the borders. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/2022-04/Berkeley-Fire-Zone-Map.pdf
At one time according to Dean (decades ago) there were plans for a second road route out. Thomas said she still had those records. The item was continued to the next meeting.
Dean’s agenda item to look into development fees for hi-rise buildings met with pushback from Commissioner Theo Gordon appointed by District 8 Councilmember Humbert. Gordon stated property owners in the hills should be paying higher fees not the developers of hi-rises as the new hi-rises are more fire resistant and have lower rents. Panoramic Hill sits in District 8.
I wasn’t quite sure where Gordon gets his information that the new mixed-use buildings are cheaper to rent than older existing buildings. Councilmember Harrison has stated at council meetings, our most affordable housing is our existing housing.
When I related Gordon’s comments that new hi-rises are cheaper to rent to people who follow the cost of rentals in Berkeley, they called the comment laughable and asked was Gordon a paid YIMBY staffer or a true believer? California YIMBY is the land-use lobbying group for Big Tech and developers that celebrates big mixed use projects.
A light search on google and Gordon’s twitter handle lists him as the Lead of East Bay YIMBY. Gordon isn’t listed as staff on the California YIMBY website, but the average annual YIMBY Action Salary for Lead is approximately $175,423 according to Salary.Com. https://www.salary.com/
As for the new hi-rise units being cheaper to rent, the 10% very low income units calculated on the “base project” hardly make the other market rate 90% affordable to people who do not have a job earning greater than the area median income (AMI) in Alameda County currently at $147,900 for a four person household. Rentals for under $1000 listed in the various online rental apps are by the “bed” not by unit.
Setting aside 10% of the units for very low income households using the “base project” for calculation is how developers access the California State Density Bonus to increase a project size by 50% more than what would be allowed under existing zoning code. This is how 2190 Shattuck can provide 32 very low income units out of 326 and go from 18 floors to 25 or 1598 University (appeal date 10/3/23) with 21 very low income units out of 207 went from 4 stories to 8.
Dean’s item on a developer’s fee stems from Fire Chief Sprague’s comments at the April 27, 2023 Budget and Finance Committee regarding how many firefighters are needed for a hi-rise building which is any building above 7 floors. Sprague stated the change really comes at above 5 floors. Thirty firefighters would be needed for a residential fire, but 50 – 100 for an elevated fire. Any fire in a hi-rise that is more than a couple of rooms would need several 100 firefighters. Sprague’s statement is quoted in the April 30 Activist’s Diary. https://berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-05-08/article/50289?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-week-ending-April-30--Kelly-Hammargren
I skipped the Landmarks Preservation Commission. There were two demolition items which could be guaranteed to be approved and another on the color of paint for a historical building.
The Community for a Cultural Civic Center (CCCC) met for a debrief after the City Council vote to approve the Civic Center Plan Phase II including a full evaluation of daylighting Strawberry Creek. The Strawberry Creek culvert runs underneath the Maudelle Shirek Building. The group promoting daylighting the creek has already been invited to submit a full grant application for funding. Just how the rest of the project will be financed is up in the air.
Moving on, the takeaway from the Police Accountability Board Fair and Impartial Policing Subcommittee on August 7 is that the three-pronged approach to traffic stop policing which places the focus on Vision Zero (zero severe injury and fatal accidents) is not making the expected difference in reducing/eliminating disparate treatment of Black and Brown persons. Implicit bias appears to continue with a need for further review of community service calls and suspicious vehicle stops.
Only three members of the Commission on Disability attended the August 9 meeting. There are four commission vacancies and four of the five current commissioners were appointed in April and May of this year. Commissioners Sun and Walsh (the only member with several years on the commission) were absent. Thomas Gregory the Commission Secretary is also new with only 4 months as a City of Berkeley employee.
A letter from a Berkeley resident to former Councilmember Droste and the commission was in the meeting packet calling out Droste for using accessibility and ADA compliance as an issue for supporting the new Willard Park Clubhouse plans and involving other city commissions, but not the Commission on Disability.
The new commissioners were not involved and likely did not know that at the Agenda Committee meetings starting on June 15, 2020 when the Agenda Committee referred to itself the Commission Reorganization authored by Droste and co-sponsored by Councilmembers Kesarwani and Robinson (Mayor Arreguin joined later) that the proposed plan was to continue with only those commissions and boards required by law, charter, city ordinance and/or ballot initiatives. That would have eliminated the Commission on Disability.
With Droste as the author of the reorganization, it is no surprise that the Commission on Disability was not consulted. Additionally, since the Willard Park Community Center is planned around children and later discussions on commission mergers suggested combing the Commissions on Aging and Disability into one, it further dismisses these commissions from contributing to the planning even though there are children with disabilities and their parents, grandparents or caregivers may have disabilities.
It was finally decided in 2021 and 2022 as the commission mergers and eliminations moved forward not to merge Aging and Disability in the first commission reorganization round, but to come back to further reductions later. Councilmember Hahn Agenda Committee member was a vocal contributor to the slicing and dicing of commissions.
Much is made of making streets and intersections safe for pedestrians and persons with disabilities with little thought to engaging the Commission on Disability. That might be about to change. The new Commission Secretary is working on bringing project presentations to the Commission before they are set in cement. Then we could hear from the Commission on Disability on things like whether persons in wheelchairs really find it safe and want to ride in a bike lane in the street as suggested by a Transportation and Infrastructure Commissioner on January 19, 2023.
It didn’t look like The Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) would vote for Board member Tregub’s substitute motion on the approval of 2147 San Pablo to include cleaning up the approval language to specify that monthly transit passes were for each bedroom and to recommend bird-safe glass, native plantings and compliance with the Hard Hat Ordinance. 2147 San Pablo is a SB 330 State Density Bonus which means, the project complies only with whatever ordinances were in effect when the application was filed.
There is no native plantings requirement, the Bird-Safe Ordinance went into effect after application and the Hard Hat Ordinance is still up in the air. ZAB member Brandon Yung liked the virtual signaling, but others vocalized their objections to making recommendations. In the end it passed 5 to 2. Kathleen Crandall who was subbing for the evening abstained and Debra Sanderson voted no.
The other surprise of the evening was that after extended discussion, ZAB continued 1515 Derby which adds a 3-story single family residence behind the current single family home. While only the house was before ZAB for approval, the plans included adding an ADU later. The discussion (and neighborhood objections) revolved around decreasing the impact to neighbors by swapping the placement of the house and the ADU.
All for now.
This Activist's Diary has been corrected. Commissioner Raine was appointed by Councilmember Robinson District 7 not by Wengraf District 6,
July 23 and July 30, 2023 Combined
It’s been another comfortable week in Berkeley with temperatures in the 70s while heat domes threaten life across large swathes of the planet. Even the Saguaro Cactus in Arizona is collapsing in the extreme heat. As I pick my way through the news I feel like an observer in a world that is unraveling. And there has been local unraveling too.
I received a text and then a request to call back with the phone number of where to get help in Berkeley for someone who was in a mental health crisis. I did not have the answer on Tuesday, but I do now. The number for the Mobile Crisis Team is (510) 981-5900, and press 6 in the telephone tree or ask for Mental Health. That is if the situation is not life-threatening and the crisis occurs between 11:30 am and 10 pm on a Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. All other hours, and on Tuesday and Saturday, the choices are to call 911 for the police, take the person to a hospital or clinic or wait it out until the crisis team is available. https://berkeleyca.gov/safety-health/mental-health/crisis-services
Berkeley’s implementation of a Special Care Unit (SCU) for persons in a mental health crisis is still weeks away, with the end of August as a planned opening.
Maybe someone with real expertise will respond with better alternatives.
The Resolution from the Mental Health Commission to Adopt a City-Wide “Care First, Jails Last” Policy, item 31 on the July 25, 2023 City Council Consent Calendar was passed that evening by the Berkeley City Council, but not without Councilmember Humbert throwing a wrench in it first. Humbert asked to refer item 31 to the Council’s Health, Life, Enrichment, Equity & Community Policy Committee (Humbert is a member) for “vetting.” Wengraf agreed, no councilmember objected, and the item was moved as a referral to the committee in the preliminary council discussion before Public Comment and the vote on the consent calendar.
From my observation of how council committees function, referrals to committees are often just a detour on the road, slowing down the process of getting something done with little to show for all those months in committee, or even the path to killing an agenda item council doesn’t want to pass.
When Public Comment opened, the Mental Health Commissioners were at the podium, explaining to the Council that the Alameda County Board of Directors passed a resolution on May 25, 2021, and that Berkeley as a separate jurisdiction has been an outlier by not adopting a similar policy. There was considerable detail provided by the Commissioners on their extensive process of research in preparing the resolution, how the resolution gave direction to the Berkeley Police, and how the resolution fit with the SCU and continuum of care. Finally, Mayor Arreguin stepped in to move the item back to consent (for passage without a committee referral), with a minor change in the frequency of reporting, which Humbert accepted, cancelling the referral.
The big agenda item of the July 25th night was the Fixed Automated License Plate Readers, but before getting to that there was the non-agenda public comment at the beginning of the meeting. A maximum of ten speakers are allowed one minute each.
I recognized the four Japanese American women turning in their names for non-agenda comment as the same women who attended the Open Government Commission (OGC) on July 20th. At that meeting they were asking how it could be that the resolution to oppose Japan’s Planned Discharge of Wastewater from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant could lose without the mayor and councilmembers even giving a reason for their actions.
They said publicly at OGC what I had heard but not confirmed, that the Japanese Consulate called councilmembers asking them to oppose the resolution, leaving Berkeley in the position of essentially supporting the discharge of wastewater through taking no action.
These women were not giving up. They wanted the resolution back on the agenda and they wanted to hear the reasons from the mayor and councilmember. The discussion at the OGC was quite involved over the council process, how agenda items on consent imply approval, and yet five voted against the measure through abstention.
Mayor Arreguin and Councilmembers Kesarwani, Robinson, Wengraf and Humbert all abstained from supporting the resolution on July 11, sinking it.
Two speakers were at council to comment on the Berkeley Police Downtown Bike Team Texting Scandal and the results of the investigation by Swanson & McNamara. As reported by Alex N Gecan on the Berkeleyside site, the investigation found, according to Matthai Chakko, “[t]he department does not have a practice of racial bias, the department does not have any arrest quotas…”
The first non-agenda speaker handed printouts of the texts to the clerk, and then spoke describing the texts as extremely racist, anti-homeless and questioned how the city manager’s office found no wrong doing. He said that a transparent investigation was needed, and invited any councilmember to read the texts.
During the consent calendar. Councilmember Bartlett read from officer Darren Kacalek’s texts:
“Did you realize that all 5 people you arrested had something in common. All of the same heritage. I’m selling my white privilege card. It’s 48 years old and it hasn’t done a damn thing for me. No welfare checks, No inheritance, No free college, No free food, No free housing, etc. I may even be willing to do an even trade for a race card. Those seem to be way more useful and more widely accepted. Interested? Contact me on my non Obama cell phone that I have to pay for every month…’81 arrests. We can do 19 by Friday” [from Kacalek’s texts]
Bartlett followed the text reading with his personal comments:
“This sounds like Boss Hog of Dukes of Hazard. It’s not. It’s in Berkeley, the most enlightened city in America. It’s two steps forward, two steps back… On the one hand, we have all these amazing initiatives, the Specialized Care Unit, etc., great training, great new protocols, a very diverse force, largely beneficial to the community and I’ve interacted with them a lot. A lot of nice people doing their best. But, again, when you have this, these comments, it kind of throws everything out.
“It would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous and frightening. And so to all of us here, I know it’s easy to forget that these are weaponized words. What I mean: people with weapons saying it. They may not be saying it to you, but they are saying it to a lot of us. And, it’s scary and it’s wrong and we have a duty to stop it. I’m curious to see the results of the investigation as well. I am an attorney. I have done some investigations. I’m really curious how they came to the conclusions they did, ’81 arrests. We can do 19 by Friday for sure’ [from Kacalek’s text] that’s from the Duke boys.” [emphasis added]
The investigation report is confidential. Not even the City Council has seen it. The person who sent those racist texts is Sergeant Darren Kacalek. Kacalek was put on leave when the scandal broke and stepped down from his position as president of the Berkeley Police Association (police union). Kacalek will now be returning to active duty in the Berkeley Police Department (BPD), just not on the downtown bike team.
Later in the evening Deputy City Manager LaTanya Bellow described the Chakko statements as unfortunate and outside the scope of the investigation and reiterated that the report on the police was confidential.
Those who attended the November 2022 meeting when the appointment of Jennifer Louis as Chief of Police was delayed amidst the Police Department scandal may recall the promise from City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley that a full investigation would be done to ensure public trust before the appointment of the new Police Chief. Jennifer Louis was appointed by City Council as Police Chief on May 9, 2023, before the investigation was complete and the investigation results, described by Chakko as no problem, are confidential.
****************************************
On to the Automated License Plate Reader Surveillance Ordinance (ALPRs). At the June 20, 2023 City Council Public Safety Committee meeting, Councilmember Wengraf pushed for approval of the ALPR Surveillance Ordinance with a qualified positive recommendation so it could be placed on the July 25 council agenda for a vote before council left on summer recess.
Usually a “qualified recommendation” means that a referral to a committee was modified before being sent on for the full council vote. In this case, Wengraf, Robinson and Taplin all voted to forward the surveillance ordinance to council knowing that revisions and amendments were needed and that in the rush to make the July 25 agenda, they would leave it to the BPD and not review it as would be the normal process.
When it was Councilmember Hahn’s turn to comment on the ALPRs, she pointed out the policy inconsistencies and asked that during the two year trial period the city attorney would rewrite the policy. Hahn abstained from voting for ALPR ordinance.
Wengraf gave her full support to the ALPRs referencing 150 letters in favor. It should be noted that Wengraf sent an email to her constituents with a model letter to copy and requested they email council in support of ALPRs.
Bartlett asked who would determine where cameras would be placed and received an answer that it would be determined in collaboration with the vendor. Bartlet followed with, “What if officer Hate is the one that places the cameras?” Bartlett said he loved technology and low touch criminal enforcement policies, but that he would not support endorsing the ALPR technology for a problematic department.
The community in their public comment was divided. Many in opposition voiced concern about privacy and the sharing of information. Those in favor looked to ALPRs as reducing crime.
The Police Accountability Board (PAB) opposed both the acquisition of the ALPR surveillance technology and the draft policy. The PAB identified inconsistencies and omissions in the policy and the potential for bias in selection of sites for camera placement. The PAB provided an in-depth analysis of the effectiveness of ALPRs. The deeper the look, the murkier the results, with proclamations of success fading over time.
While council dismissed much of the work of the PAB, council did accept the PAB’s broad outline of metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the ALPRs. Missing in the motion was using those metrics to establish a baseline before installing the ALPRs for comparison at the end of the trial period.
Kesarwani, Taplin, Wengraf, Robinson, Humbert and Arreguin all voted for the ALPR Surveillance Ordinance. Harrison was on an excused absence (sick leave ).
On to the other council meetings.
The July 18th Council Worksession on the Ashby BART station revolved around the Traction Power Substation (TPSS). BART had been planning to place a new TPSS in the west Ashby parking lot for a year or more but never informed the City of Berkeley. The TPSS space needs about 40 feet wide into the parking lot and 300 feet long with a ten foot tall wall along the Adeline plaza/sidewalk.
City Council was none too happy. No decisions were made. BART was left with exploring other options like another location or undergrounding. The loss of parking with building housing in the BART parking lot was not discussed. https://berkeleyca.gov/city-council-special-meeting-eagenda-july-18-2023
At the July 24, 2023 special meeting, City Council voted to reject the Willard Neighbors’ appeal and approved replacing the Willard Park 565 square foot clubhouse with a new 3,301 square foot community center. The Willard Neighbors supported renovating/replacing the clubhouse, but with a smaller footprint than a 3,301 square foot community center and making the new center available to the community.
City Council voted in the special meeting at 4 pm on July 25, 2023 to approve the Civic Center Phase II Design. The group supporting daylighting Strawberry Creek was happy as the final language included exploring both a full and partial creek restoration. Directions also included keeping the farmers market in the civic center and exploring building out additional spaces at the Veterans’ Building. The renovation plans for the Maudelle Shirek Building (old City Hall) include new city council chambers with around 349 seats. With ZOOM and hybrid meetings, 50 attendees is a big night. The catch for all of this is the cost estimate of somewhere between $125,276,000 and $157,892,000.
The cigty has other needs, like upgrades to the fire stations so fire fighters can safely decontaminate themselves and equipment, plus being adequately resourced for population growth and hi-rises. The emergency dispatch center is also under resourced.
Council is set on a ferry service. When I attend Water Emergency Transportation Authority (WETA) meetings, WETA is looking to Berkeley pick up a chunk of that cost and when I hear from Berkeley, it is WETA that will be picking up the tab.
And there are the groups that want the streets repaved and aging infrastructure repaired.
On July 20th I left the in-person OGC meeting, the discussion of Fukushima and council meeting procedures to comment at the Design Review Committee (DRC) on 1752 Shattuck a 7-story 72-unit mixed use building with 38 bedrooms which have no windows.
I’ve been asking the DRC to look at the interior floor plans for the livability of the units not just the exterior design and colors. An interesting discussion followed at DRC and it spilled over to the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) on July 27 when I brought up windowless bedrooms again.
The California Building code no longer requires bedroom egress (escape) windows in multi-unit buildings with fire-safety features and ventilation. These buildings are considered safer. Bedroom escape windows are only required in wood frame buildings for the first three floors
This means multi-unit buildings are regularly before DRC and ZAB with interior bedrooms with “borrowed light.” This means instead of a solid door, a door with glass is used to “borrow” light for the windowless bedroom. Since students often rent by “bed” not by “unit” the windowless bedrooms rent for less attracting students anxious to save living expenses.
I remain concerned about the mental health of students.
What about the energy demands of buildings? How will that work when there are power failures or we are asked to shut down to save the grid as we were in September 2022. What happens when the e-skateboard catches on fire?
Phoenix’s daytime high has been over 110 every day in July and it looks like that will hold until July 30. When I checked at midnight the temperature was over 100. The current count of wildfires in Canada is over 700 with 233 listed as out of control. Ocean temperatures off Florida reached 101.1°F on Tuesday, July 25. Wildfires are spreading in Italy, France, Portugal, Algeria, Croatia, France, Spain and then there is Greece where the news described the evacuation from Rhodes as the largest ever.
Adding to the grim climate and weather news in the peer reviewed article in Nature Communications, Peter Ditlevsen and Susanne Ditlevsen (scientists, brother and sister, from Copenhagen, Denmark) estimate the collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) to occur around mid-century with the outside projections as early as 2025 or as late as 2095. This is very bad news.
And we keep charging ahead as if everything is fine.
“It’s as if the human race has received a terminal medical diagnosis and knows there is a cure, but has consciously decided not to save itself.” Prof Lesley Hughes, distinguished professor of biology at Macquarie University, former federal climate commissioner and former lead author in the IPCC’s 4th and 5th assessment report.
Berkeley is in such an incredible position to lead, please let’s stop squandering it.
It’s been another comfortable week in Berkeley with temperatures in the 70s while heat domes threaten life across large swathes of the planet. Even the Saguaro Cactus in Arizona is collapsing in the extreme heat. As I pick my way through the news I feel like an observer in a world that is unraveling. And there has been local unraveling too.
I received a text and then a request to call back with the phone number of where to get help in Berkeley for someone who was in a mental health crisis. I did not have the answer on Tuesday, but I do now. The number for the Mobile Crisis Team is (510) 981-5900, and press 6 in the telephone tree or ask for Mental Health. That is if the situation is not life-threatening and the crisis occurs between 11:30 am and 10 pm on a Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. All other hours, and on Tuesday and Saturday, the choices are to call 911 for the police, take the person to a hospital or clinic or wait it out until the crisis team is available. https://berkeleyca.gov/safety-health/mental-health/crisis-services
Berkeley’s implementation of a Special Care Unit (SCU) for persons in a mental health crisis is still weeks away, with the end of August as a planned opening.
Maybe someone with real expertise will respond with better alternatives.
The Resolution from the Mental Health Commission to Adopt a City-Wide “Care First, Jails Last” Policy, item 31 on the July 25, 2023 City Council Consent Calendar was passed that evening by the Berkeley City Council, but not without Councilmember Humbert throwing a wrench in it first. Humbert asked to refer item 31 to the Council’s Health, Life, Enrichment, Equity & Community Policy Committee (Humbert is a member) for “vetting.” Wengraf agreed, no councilmember objected, and the item was moved as a referral to the committee in the preliminary council discussion before Public Comment and the vote on the consent calendar.
From my observation of how council committees function, referrals to committees are often just a detour on the road, slowing down the process of getting something done with little to show for all those months in committee, or even the path to killing an agenda item council doesn’t want to pass.
When Public Comment opened, the Mental Health Commissioners were at the podium, explaining to the Council that the Alameda County Board of Directors passed a resolution on May 25, 2021, and that Berkeley as a separate jurisdiction has been an outlier by not adopting a similar policy. There was considerable detail provided by the Commissioners on their extensive process of research in preparing the resolution, how the resolution gave direction to the Berkeley Police, and how the resolution fit with the SCU and continuum of care. Finally, Mayor Arreguin stepped in to move the item back to consent (for passage without a committee referral), with a minor change in the frequency of reporting, which Humbert accepted, cancelling the referral.
The big agenda item of the July 25th night was the Fixed Automated License Plate Readers, but before getting to that there was the non-agenda public comment at the beginning of the meeting. A maximum of ten speakers are allowed one minute each.
I recognized the four Japanese American women turning in their names for non-agenda comment as the same women who attended the Open Government Commission (OGC) on July 20th. At that meeting they were asking how it could be that the resolution to oppose Japan’s Planned Discharge of Wastewater from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant could lose without the mayor and councilmembers even giving a reason for their actions.
They said publicly at OGC what I had heard but not confirmed, that the Japanese Consulate called councilmembers asking them to oppose the resolution, leaving Berkeley in the position of essentially supporting the discharge of wastewater through taking no action.
These women were not giving up. They wanted the resolution back on the agenda and they wanted to hear the reasons from the mayor and councilmember. The discussion at the OGC was quite involved over the council process, how agenda items on consent imply approval, and yet five voted against the measure through abstention.
Mayor Arreguin and Councilmembers Kesarwani, Robinson, Wengraf and Humbert all abstained from supporting the resolution on July 11, sinking it.
Two speakers were at council to comment on the Berkeley Police Downtown Bike Team Texting Scandal and the results of the investigation by Swanson & McNamara. As reported by Alex N Gecan on the Berkeleyside site, the investigation found, according to Matthai Chakko, “[t]he department does not have a practice of racial bias, the department does not have any arrest quotas…”
The first non-agenda speaker handed printouts of the texts to the clerk, and then spoke describing the texts as extremely racist, anti-homeless and questioned how the city manager’s office found no wrong doing. He said that a transparent investigation was needed, and invited any councilmember to read the texts.
During the consent calendar. Councilmember Bartlett read from officer Darren Kacalek’s texts:
“Did you realize that all 5 people you arrested had something in common. All of the same heritage. I’m selling my white privilege card. It’s 48 years old and it hasn’t done a damn thing for me. No welfare checks, No inheritance, No free college, No free food, No free housing, etc. I may even be willing to do an even trade for a race card. Those seem to be way more useful and more widely accepted. Interested? Contact me on my non Obama cell phone that I have to pay for every month…’81 arrests. We can do 19 by Friday” [from Kacalek’s texts]
Bartlett followed the text reading with his personal comments:
“This sounds like Boss Hog of Dukes of Hazard. It’s not. It’s in Berkeley, the most enlightened city in America. It’s two steps forward, two steps back… On the one hand, we have all these amazing initiatives, the Specialized Care Unit, etc., great training, great new protocols, a very diverse force, largely beneficial to the community and I’ve interacted with them a lot. A lot of nice people doing their best. But, again, when you have this, these comments, it kind of throws everything out.
“It would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous and frightening. And so to all of us here, I know it’s easy to forget that these are weaponized words. What I mean: people with weapons saying it. They may not be saying it to you, but they are saying it to a lot of us. And, it’s scary and it’s wrong and we have a duty to stop it. I’m curious to see the results of the investigation as well. I am an attorney. I have done some investigations. I’m really curious how they came to the conclusions they did, ’81 arrests. We can do 19 by Friday for sure’ [from Kacalek’s text] that’s from the Duke boys.” [emphasis added]
The investigation report is confidential. Not even the City Council has seen it. The person who sent those racist texts is Sergeant Darren Kacalek. Kacalek was put on leave when the scandal broke and stepped down from his position as president of the Berkeley Police Association (police union). Kacalek will now be returning to active duty in the Berkeley Police Department (BPD), just not on the downtown bike team.
Later in the evening Deputy City Manager LaTanya Bellow described the Chakko statements as unfortunate and outside the scope of the investigation and reiterated that the report on the police was confidential.
Those who attended the November 2022 meeting when the appointment of Jennifer Louis as Chief of Police was delayed amidst the Police Department scandal may recall the promise from City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley that a full investigation would be done to ensure public trust before the appointment of the new Police Chief. Jennifer Louis was appointed by City Council as Police Chief on May 9, 2023, before the investigation was complete and the investigation results, described by Chakko as no problem, are confidential.
****************************************
On to the Automated License Plate Reader Surveillance Ordinance (ALPRs). At the June 20, 2023 City Council Public Safety Committee meeting, Councilmember Wengraf pushed for approval of the ALPR Surveillance Ordinance with a qualified positive recommendation so it could be placed on the July 25 council agenda for a vote before council left on summer recess.
Usually a “qualified recommendation” means that a referral to a committee was modified before being sent on for the full council vote. In this case, Wengraf, Robinson and Taplin all voted to forward the surveillance ordinance to council knowing that revisions and amendments were needed and that in the rush to make the July 25 agenda, they would leave it to the BPD and not review it as would be the normal process.
When it was Councilmember Hahn’s turn to comment on the ALPRs, she pointed out the policy inconsistencies and asked that during the two year trial period the city attorney would rewrite the policy. Hahn abstained from voting for ALPR ordinance.
Wengraf gave her full support to the ALPRs referencing 150 letters in favor. It should be noted that Wengraf sent an email to her constituents with a model letter to copy and requested they email council in support of ALPRs.
Bartlett asked who would determine where cameras would be placed and received an answer that it would be determined in collaboration with the vendor. Bartlet followed with, “What if officer Hate is the one that places the cameras?” Bartlett said he loved technology and low touch criminal enforcement policies, but that he would not support endorsing the ALPR technology for a problematic department.
The community in their public comment was divided. Many in opposition voiced concern about privacy and the sharing of information. Those in favor looked to ALPRs as reducing crime.
The Police Accountability Board (PAB) opposed both the acquisition of the ALPR surveillance technology and the draft policy. The PAB identified inconsistencies and omissions in the policy and the potential for bias in selection of sites for camera placement. The PAB provided an in-depth analysis of the effectiveness of ALPRs. The deeper the look, the murkier the results, with proclamations of success fading over time.
While council dismissed much of the work of the PAB, council did accept the PAB’s broad outline of metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the ALPRs. Missing in the motion was using those metrics to establish a baseline before installing the ALPRs for comparison at the end of the trial period.
Kesarwani, Taplin, Wengraf, Robinson, Humbert and Arreguin all voted for the ALPR Surveillance Ordinance. Harrison was on an excused absence (sick leave ).
On to the other council meetings.
The July 18th Council Worksession on the Ashby BART station revolved around the Traction Power Substation (TPSS). BART had been planning to place a new TPSS in the west Ashby parking lot for a year or more but never informed the City of Berkeley. The TPSS space needs about 40 feet wide into the parking lot and 300 feet long with a ten foot tall wall along the Adeline plaza/sidewalk.
City Council was none too happy. No decisions were made. BART was left with exploring other options like another location or undergrounding. The loss of parking with building housing in the BART parking lot was not discussed. https://berkeleyca.gov/city-council-special-meeting-eagenda-july-18-2023
At the July 24, 2023 special meeting, City Council voted to reject the Willard Neighbors’ appeal and approved replacing the Willard Park 565 square foot clubhouse with a new 3,301 square foot community center. The Willard Neighbors supported renovating/replacing the clubhouse, but with a smaller footprint than a 3,301 square foot community center and making the new center available to the community.
City Council voted in the special meeting at 4 pm on July 25, 2023 to approve the Civic Center Phase II Design. The group supporting daylighting Strawberry Creek was happy as the final language included exploring both a full and partial creek restoration. Directions also included keeping the farmers market in the civic center and exploring building out additional spaces at the Veterans’ Building. The renovation plans for the Maudelle Shirek Building (old City Hall) include new city council chambers with around 349 seats. With ZOOM and hybrid meetings, 50 attendees is a big night. The catch for all of this is the cost estimate of somewhere between $125,276,000 and $157,892,000.
The cigty has other needs, like upgrades to the fire stations so fire fighters can safely decontaminate themselves and equipment, plus being adequately resourced for population growth and hi-rises. The emergency dispatch center is also under resourced.
Council is set on a ferry service. When I attend Water Emergency Transportation Authority (WETA) meetings, WETA is looking to Berkeley pick up a chunk of that cost and when I hear from Berkeley, it is WETA that will be picking up the tab.
And there are the groups that want the streets repaved and aging infrastructure repaired.
On July 20th I left the in-person OGC meeting, the discussion of Fukushima and council meeting procedures to comment at the Design Review Committee (DRC) on 1752 Shattuck a 7-story 72-unit mixed use building with 38 bedrooms which have no windows.
I’ve been asking the DRC to look at the interior floor plans for the livability of the units not just the exterior design and colors. An interesting discussion followed at DRC and it spilled over to the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) on July 27 when I brought up windowless bedrooms again.
The California Building code no longer requires bedroom egress (escape) windows in multi-unit buildings with fire-safety features and ventilation. These buildings are considered safer. Bedroom escape windows are only required in wood frame buildings for the first three floors
This means multi-unit buildings are regularly before DRC and ZAB with interior bedrooms with “borrowed light.” This means instead of a solid door, a door with glass is used to “borrow” light for the windowless bedroom. Since students often rent by “bed” not by “unit” the windowless bedrooms rent for less attracting students anxious to save living expenses.
I remain concerned about the mental health of students.
What about the energy demands of buildings? How will that work when there are power failures or we are asked to shut down to save the grid as we were in September 2022. What happens when the e-skateboard catches on fire?
Phoenix’s daytime high has been over 110 every day in July and it looks like that will hold until July 30. When I checked at midnight the temperature was over 100. The current count of wildfires in Canada is over 700 with 233 listed as out of control. Ocean temperatures off Florida reached 101.1°F on Tuesday, July 25. Wildfires are spreading in Italy, France, Portugal, Algeria, Croatia, France, Spain and then there is Greece where the news described the evacuation from Rhodes as the largest ever.
Adding to the grim climate and weather news in the peer reviewed article in Nature Communications, Peter Ditlevsen and Susanne Ditlevsen (scientists, brother and sister, from Copenhagen, Denmark) estimate the collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) to occur around mid-century with the outside projections as early as 2025 or as late as 2095. This is very bad news.
And we keep charging ahead as if everything is fine.
“It’s as if the human race has received a terminal medical diagnosis and knows there is a cure, but has consciously decided not to save itself.” Prof Lesley Hughes, distinguished professor of biology at Macquarie University, former federal climate commissioner and former lead author in the IPCC’s 4th and 5th assessment report.
Berkeley is in such an incredible position to lead, please let’s stop squandering it.
July 16, 2023
While we’re sitting in Berkeley with temperatures in the comfortable 70’s, it’s been big news the last couple of weeks that the planet just finished the hottest June ever recorded and July 4th was the hottest recorded day on earth.
As I write the heat domes in the U.S. South including Texas are moving into California, New York City and the surrounding area are under flood warnings (this is not the floods in Vermont and the Hudson Valley that started the week), the Minneapolis air quality index is in the unhealthy zone greater than 150 from Canadian wildfires now numbering somewhere around 900, the ocean temperature off Florida reached 98.1° and Farmers Insurance pulled out of Florida. Iowa meteorologist Chris Gloninger made the news after quitting his job in Des Moines, Iowa, over death threats for his coverage of climate change in the weather reports, and Ari Melber on his MSNBC show The Beat asked Bill Nye the Science Guy if this is the new normal.
Bill Nye gave Melber the same answer Michael Mann gave Thom Hartmann some weeks ago. There is no normal. Normal implies stability.
On a heating planet there is no new normal except that it is going to get worse.
Gaia Vince in her book Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World called fire, heat, drought and flood the “Four Horsemen of the Anthropocene”, the driving forces of the future. Before diving into climate migration, Vince described that we are on track to hit 3 - 4°C of warming by 2100 (with mitigation. It could be worse without) and what that will bring. We are at 1.2°C of warming now and will likely blow by 1.5°C by 2030. Her description is pretty bleak , with food shortages, crop failures, large swathes of the planet as unlivable all or much of the year, including the tropics, Europe, much of Australia, South America, Africa, Asia and the U.S. That leaves as livable areas Patagonia, Canada, Siberia and northern Scandinavia.
I couldn’t help but think about Councilmember Bartlett’s measure on the June 27th consent calendar, Berkeley Food Utility and Access Resilience Measure (FARM). FARM was written to protect Berkeley’s food supply and prepare for future food shortages. Part of the discussion at the Health, Life Enrichment, Equity, & Community Committee was how Emeryville is getting the jump on Berkeley with lab grown meats and synthesized foods. I kept wondering how all these lab grown foods will affect the gut biome, and then how soon the crisis will arrive. FARM passed as a referral to the City Manager.
Vince compares our damage to the planet in the span of just the recent 20 years to the asteroid that crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years, yago killing off plants, animals and non-avian dinosaurs. Birds survived.
We (our species) have done so much damage to the planet in such a short period of time that there has been no opportunity for the other species to evolve, except maybe the viruses, bacteria and fungi which have evolved to evade medical treatments like antibiotics and antivirals. Birds may have survived the asteroid from space, but I’m not sure they will survive us.
While I was reading the last chapter of Nomad Century with the glowing benefits migrants bring, I glanced at the news banner on my phone, “The Dutch government collapsed after the parties in the ruling coalition failed to resolve a dispute about how to handle migration.” That was July 7. The Prime Minister Mark Rutte resigned though he will stay on as a “caretaker government” until a new administration is elected.
Jeff Goodell author of The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet said this in a Democracy Now interview, “We have not at all come close to grasping the scale and scope of the crisis we are facing.”
Berkeley, which still has a place of influence, is operating as if it is 1990.
Moving on to Berkeley, just exactly what has our City government been up to since I last wrote besides supporting the release 1.3 million tons of nuclear waste water from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant meltdown into the Pacific Ocean where it will wash up onto our shores? Ben Bartlett called it, “a sin against nature.” Sophie Hahn said nothing, but maintained support for the resolution.
Kate Harrison wrote the Resolution for the July 11, 2023 City Council meeting: to oppose Japan’s Planned Discharge of Wastewater from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean, with the action to send copies of the resolution to oppose the release of nuclear waste water to Secretary Blinken, Senator Feinstein, Senator Padilla and Representative Lee.
It was close to 9 pm when the vote on the consent calendar was taken. Terry Taplin said that after public comment, he changed his mind and would support the resolution. That was not enough. Mayor Arreguin, and Councilmembers Rashi Kesarwani, Susan Wengraf, Rigel Robinson, and Mark Humbert all abstained from supporting the resolution, which meant the resolution lost, leaving Berkeley as essentially supporting dumping nuclear waste water into the Pacific Ocean.
Before the other big item of the evening, the Auditor’s report on hiring and retention of City staff, the Council had to get through the discussion of Sophie Hahn’s Resolution on dedicating time at council meetings for the City of Berkeley unions to make comments. Mark Humbert blocked moving the item to consent. Humbert’s issue: If unions had a block of time then so should students.
I am often surprised by people who should know better, like council members and council appointees, of how little they know about the public face of our city government, how things work or what decisions / actions have been taken or are up for a vote.
I shouldn’t be surprised. Both Arreguin and Wengraf have confessed of late as to not reading the documents for the Agenda and Rules Committee on which they sit. They also have failed to demand that the City Manager submit reports in time for publication in the Agenda and Rules packet.
The news media who showed up with their video cameras for the July 11 council meeting were there for the vote on entheogenic/psychedelic plants and fungi for personal use. They missed what should have been the stories, the vote on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and the City Manager’s response to the audit on staff hiring and retention.
The resolution to de-prioritize enforcement on entheogenic/psychedelic plants and fungi for personal use was moved from action to consent and passed with little fanfare.
Humbert received a polite smackdown for insisting that if City unions have time so should students. There is a City/UC/Student Relations Committee (four council members, two UC members, two undergraduate and two graduate students) which has existed for seven years. Robinson also described what Humbert suggested as “othering” of students. Harrison described the importance of line staff and a place for comment. Kesarwani and Wengraf as usual needed clarification/explanations. Humbert withdrew his objection and the resolution passed.
It took until 9:50 pm to get to the Auditor’s Report on “Staff Shortages: City Services Constrained by Staff Retention Challenges and Delayed Hiring.” Translation, more people are leaving Berkeley jobs than are being hired. Over half of the employees surveyed reported looking for another job in the previous year and the hiring process is now at 7.7 months.
Berkeley’s vacancy rate at 19% is second to Vallejo’s at 28%. San Francisco’s is 9%. Berkeley’s Human Resources Department (HR) had the highest vacancy rate at 45%. Not mentioned was that the former manager of HR, LaTanya Bellow, was promoted to Deputy City Manager.
The full report (60 pages), the auditor’s presentation and the City Manager’s response are under item 31 in the July 11 city council agenda. https://berkeleyca.gov/city-council-regular-meeting-eagenda-july-11-2023
The Employer of Choice Initiative mentioned in the blistering response to the audit from union representative Andrea Mullarkey, was covered in the Activist’s Diary for the week ending March 5, published March 12, 2023. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-03-12/article/50212?headline=A-Berkeley-Activist-s-Diary-Week-Ending-March-5 :
“I am Andrea Mullarkey, a member leader with SEIU. I’m also a librarian. I’m here first to acknowledge the work that went into this audit and to appreciate the elevation of worker voice and how clearly the audit report delineates the problems…already we can hear the City Manager and administration downplaying the findings and making excuses for the circumstances we’re in and blaming others for the problems me and my coworkers were experiencing.
I also hear we are hyping up our Employer of Choice Initiative and I can tell you from my first-hand experience these problems existed before the pandemic...they were not caused by it and have not been resolved since...I can also tell you from first-hand experience that any suggestion of the amount of legislation you all are taking is a problem, that is a distraction…The City Manager has already taken steps to limit the amount of progressive work you do and I have no doubt she’ll seize on this one piece of the audit finding to drive her agenda further, and I’m here to say it’s not appropriate.
As members in a progressive union, we are not interested in seeing you slow down the work you’re doing to advance racial equity, economic equity, and more progressive advances within Berkeley. The other thing I can tell you is that rather than dealing with the structural problems at the crux of this audit, the City Manager has invested in an expensive Employer of Choice initiative. No amount of free food or motivational speakers are going to solve the kind of alienation workers are experiencing.
City Managers refuse to confer with us, or bargain in bad faith with us about our pay and benefits, or when they contract out our work and refused to address the gaping holes and broken structure in our HR Departments, all of which led to grievances which pile up one upon the other. I have literally filed three grievances this week about people not getting paid…And, instead of spending $1,000,000 on the Employers of Choice Initiative, this should be invested through programs and workers that provide them. It’s insulting to workers who could’ve provided this information all along and we have been voicing these concerns in every available menu.
If nothing else is clear from this audit, surely you can see that workers are dissatisfied…A pervasive belief that management doesn’t care about our well-being and we’re thinking about leaving should ring alarm bells for you. When lack of transparency is an alarm bell we repeat, the answer is not lack of consultants…We are the workers who deliver the services and we’re overworked and excluded from the decision…It is increasing clear that we can’t survive in our jobs and you deserve better…I thank the auditor for this truth telling work for workers and with workers on behalf of the public we serve, and now it’s your opportunity and responsibility to address the mismanagement that led to it.”
At 10:41 pm after Mullarkey and other city employees commented on the audit and before the City Manager gave her response, the mayor announced council would not take up the adoption of the Civic Center Phase II Design Concept.
Someone came by handing out a printout of the City Manager’s response ,which was soon on the BUSD room video screens with the City Manager talking through it. One comment to me was, “What was that?” And, that really describes the City Manager’s defensive posturing.
I missed the entire community meeting on the African American Holistic Center (AAHC), however, even though the meeting was officially over, the meeting room was still full when I arrived for the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission. The AAHC will be 6000 square feet as the community requested and a completely new building on the Alcatraz site. There will be more meetings with at least one in August.
The Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission (PRW) passed the “Parks, Recreation & Waterfront Commission Report & Recommendation to City Council Regarding Berkeley Waterfront Area Specific Plan.” The Commission Report calls the Keyser Marston study (the consultants hired by the City) a “marketing plan” for “revenue” and that as such should not be used for waterfront area planning.
The Commission recommendations are certainly an improvement over the consultants hired with a price tag of over $1,000,000, but as someone who worries about the impact of our species and our pets on biodiversity, I would have liked the presence of stronger language with specific areas of habitat protections.
If Berkeley is going to operate like the environment, biodiversity, and climate actually matter, then everything picked up must realign to specific protections and planning around nature rather than profit.
Item 9 on the PRW agenda and item 19 on the July 25 City Council agenda are the authorization to amend the existing repayment of the State Division of Boating and Waterways loan of $5,500,000 for the D and E Dock Replacement Project with an internal loan to the Marina Fund from the Worker’s Compensation Fund and to charge the Marina Fund interest for the internal loan. Charging one city entity/cost center (the Marina) to shift city funds from another entity/cost center (worker’s comp funds) smacks of one more way to break the Marina/Waterfront and insist all that marketing and revenue generation is necessary leaving trampling over open space and nature with development as just the cost of doing business.
Before the extended 4th of July holiday the Mayor and Council voted on all the tax increases and the update to the Fiscal Year 2024 Budget
All of us who own property are going to be paying more to get our garbage, recyclables and compostables (green bin) picked up. The new fees will increase every year for the next five years though Harrison inserted the language (approved unanimously by Council) to review rates and alternatives in two years.
If you want to save money on garbage pickup, switch to a smaller size container (20 gallons is the smallest). There is nothing we can do to alleviate the increases on the other fees like the clean stormwater fee and street lighting assessment. The results of all the increases will appear on the property tax statements when they arrive this fall.
Berkeley is on a biennial budget, which means the 2024 budget is tweaking and adjusting what was passed last June in 2022. Streets, street signals, consultants for a street parcel tax, a study on fees for development in the southside, adding a Police Accountability Board Investigator for police misconduct investigations, early intervention in police misconduct, and a study of Universal Income Pilot were all funded.
The 2020 Reparations Now street mural on Ellis which was painted over following a complaint was restored with Councilmember Bartlett initiating the measure with a $1000 contribution from his office funds. Councilmembers Harrison, Robinson, Hahn, Kesarwani and Humbert all contributed. The three who did not contribute were Arreguin, Taplin and Wengraf.
Berkeley’s Health Officer, Dr. Hernandez resigned to take a job in Santa Cruz.
While we’re sitting in Berkeley with temperatures in the comfortable 70’s, it’s been big news the last couple of weeks that the planet just finished the hottest June ever recorded and July 4th was the hottest recorded day on earth.
As I write the heat domes in the U.S. South including Texas are moving into California, New York City and the surrounding area are under flood warnings (this is not the floods in Vermont and the Hudson Valley that started the week), the Minneapolis air quality index is in the unhealthy zone greater than 150 from Canadian wildfires now numbering somewhere around 900, the ocean temperature off Florida reached 98.1° and Farmers Insurance pulled out of Florida. Iowa meteorologist Chris Gloninger made the news after quitting his job in Des Moines, Iowa, over death threats for his coverage of climate change in the weather reports, and Ari Melber on his MSNBC show The Beat asked Bill Nye the Science Guy if this is the new normal.
Bill Nye gave Melber the same answer Michael Mann gave Thom Hartmann some weeks ago. There is no normal. Normal implies stability.
On a heating planet there is no new normal except that it is going to get worse.
Gaia Vince in her book Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World called fire, heat, drought and flood the “Four Horsemen of the Anthropocene”, the driving forces of the future. Before diving into climate migration, Vince described that we are on track to hit 3 - 4°C of warming by 2100 (with mitigation. It could be worse without) and what that will bring. We are at 1.2°C of warming now and will likely blow by 1.5°C by 2030. Her description is pretty bleak , with food shortages, crop failures, large swathes of the planet as unlivable all or much of the year, including the tropics, Europe, much of Australia, South America, Africa, Asia and the U.S. That leaves as livable areas Patagonia, Canada, Siberia and northern Scandinavia.
I couldn’t help but think about Councilmember Bartlett’s measure on the June 27th consent calendar, Berkeley Food Utility and Access Resilience Measure (FARM). FARM was written to protect Berkeley’s food supply and prepare for future food shortages. Part of the discussion at the Health, Life Enrichment, Equity, & Community Committee was how Emeryville is getting the jump on Berkeley with lab grown meats and synthesized foods. I kept wondering how all these lab grown foods will affect the gut biome, and then how soon the crisis will arrive. FARM passed as a referral to the City Manager.
Vince compares our damage to the planet in the span of just the recent 20 years to the asteroid that crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years, yago killing off plants, animals and non-avian dinosaurs. Birds survived.
We (our species) have done so much damage to the planet in such a short period of time that there has been no opportunity for the other species to evolve, except maybe the viruses, bacteria and fungi which have evolved to evade medical treatments like antibiotics and antivirals. Birds may have survived the asteroid from space, but I’m not sure they will survive us.
While I was reading the last chapter of Nomad Century with the glowing benefits migrants bring, I glanced at the news banner on my phone, “The Dutch government collapsed after the parties in the ruling coalition failed to resolve a dispute about how to handle migration.” That was July 7. The Prime Minister Mark Rutte resigned though he will stay on as a “caretaker government” until a new administration is elected.
Jeff Goodell author of The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet said this in a Democracy Now interview, “We have not at all come close to grasping the scale and scope of the crisis we are facing.”
Berkeley, which still has a place of influence, is operating as if it is 1990.
Moving on to Berkeley, just exactly what has our City government been up to since I last wrote besides supporting the release 1.3 million tons of nuclear waste water from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant meltdown into the Pacific Ocean where it will wash up onto our shores? Ben Bartlett called it, “a sin against nature.” Sophie Hahn said nothing, but maintained support for the resolution.
Kate Harrison wrote the Resolution for the July 11, 2023 City Council meeting: to oppose Japan’s Planned Discharge of Wastewater from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean, with the action to send copies of the resolution to oppose the release of nuclear waste water to Secretary Blinken, Senator Feinstein, Senator Padilla and Representative Lee.
It was close to 9 pm when the vote on the consent calendar was taken. Terry Taplin said that after public comment, he changed his mind and would support the resolution. That was not enough. Mayor Arreguin, and Councilmembers Rashi Kesarwani, Susan Wengraf, Rigel Robinson, and Mark Humbert all abstained from supporting the resolution, which meant the resolution lost, leaving Berkeley as essentially supporting dumping nuclear waste water into the Pacific Ocean.
Before the other big item of the evening, the Auditor’s report on hiring and retention of City staff, the Council had to get through the discussion of Sophie Hahn’s Resolution on dedicating time at council meetings for the City of Berkeley unions to make comments. Mark Humbert blocked moving the item to consent. Humbert’s issue: If unions had a block of time then so should students.
I am often surprised by people who should know better, like council members and council appointees, of how little they know about the public face of our city government, how things work or what decisions / actions have been taken or are up for a vote.
I shouldn’t be surprised. Both Arreguin and Wengraf have confessed of late as to not reading the documents for the Agenda and Rules Committee on which they sit. They also have failed to demand that the City Manager submit reports in time for publication in the Agenda and Rules packet.
The news media who showed up with their video cameras for the July 11 council meeting were there for the vote on entheogenic/psychedelic plants and fungi for personal use. They missed what should have been the stories, the vote on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and the City Manager’s response to the audit on staff hiring and retention.
The resolution to de-prioritize enforcement on entheogenic/psychedelic plants and fungi for personal use was moved from action to consent and passed with little fanfare.
Humbert received a polite smackdown for insisting that if City unions have time so should students. There is a City/UC/Student Relations Committee (four council members, two UC members, two undergraduate and two graduate students) which has existed for seven years. Robinson also described what Humbert suggested as “othering” of students. Harrison described the importance of line staff and a place for comment. Kesarwani and Wengraf as usual needed clarification/explanations. Humbert withdrew his objection and the resolution passed.
It took until 9:50 pm to get to the Auditor’s Report on “Staff Shortages: City Services Constrained by Staff Retention Challenges and Delayed Hiring.” Translation, more people are leaving Berkeley jobs than are being hired. Over half of the employees surveyed reported looking for another job in the previous year and the hiring process is now at 7.7 months.
Berkeley’s vacancy rate at 19% is second to Vallejo’s at 28%. San Francisco’s is 9%. Berkeley’s Human Resources Department (HR) had the highest vacancy rate at 45%. Not mentioned was that the former manager of HR, LaTanya Bellow, was promoted to Deputy City Manager.
The full report (60 pages), the auditor’s presentation and the City Manager’s response are under item 31 in the July 11 city council agenda. https://berkeleyca.gov/city-council-regular-meeting-eagenda-july-11-2023
The Employer of Choice Initiative mentioned in the blistering response to the audit from union representative Andrea Mullarkey, was covered in the Activist’s Diary for the week ending March 5, published March 12, 2023. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-03-12/article/50212?headline=A-Berkeley-Activist-s-Diary-Week-Ending-March-5 :
“I am Andrea Mullarkey, a member leader with SEIU. I’m also a librarian. I’m here first to acknowledge the work that went into this audit and to appreciate the elevation of worker voice and how clearly the audit report delineates the problems…already we can hear the City Manager and administration downplaying the findings and making excuses for the circumstances we’re in and blaming others for the problems me and my coworkers were experiencing.
I also hear we are hyping up our Employer of Choice Initiative and I can tell you from my first-hand experience these problems existed before the pandemic...they were not caused by it and have not been resolved since...I can also tell you from first-hand experience that any suggestion of the amount of legislation you all are taking is a problem, that is a distraction…The City Manager has already taken steps to limit the amount of progressive work you do and I have no doubt she’ll seize on this one piece of the audit finding to drive her agenda further, and I’m here to say it’s not appropriate.
As members in a progressive union, we are not interested in seeing you slow down the work you’re doing to advance racial equity, economic equity, and more progressive advances within Berkeley. The other thing I can tell you is that rather than dealing with the structural problems at the crux of this audit, the City Manager has invested in an expensive Employer of Choice initiative. No amount of free food or motivational speakers are going to solve the kind of alienation workers are experiencing.
City Managers refuse to confer with us, or bargain in bad faith with us about our pay and benefits, or when they contract out our work and refused to address the gaping holes and broken structure in our HR Departments, all of which led to grievances which pile up one upon the other. I have literally filed three grievances this week about people not getting paid…And, instead of spending $1,000,000 on the Employers of Choice Initiative, this should be invested through programs and workers that provide them. It’s insulting to workers who could’ve provided this information all along and we have been voicing these concerns in every available menu.
If nothing else is clear from this audit, surely you can see that workers are dissatisfied…A pervasive belief that management doesn’t care about our well-being and we’re thinking about leaving should ring alarm bells for you. When lack of transparency is an alarm bell we repeat, the answer is not lack of consultants…We are the workers who deliver the services and we’re overworked and excluded from the decision…It is increasing clear that we can’t survive in our jobs and you deserve better…I thank the auditor for this truth telling work for workers and with workers on behalf of the public we serve, and now it’s your opportunity and responsibility to address the mismanagement that led to it.”
At 10:41 pm after Mullarkey and other city employees commented on the audit and before the City Manager gave her response, the mayor announced council would not take up the adoption of the Civic Center Phase II Design Concept.
Someone came by handing out a printout of the City Manager’s response ,which was soon on the BUSD room video screens with the City Manager talking through it. One comment to me was, “What was that?” And, that really describes the City Manager’s defensive posturing.
I missed the entire community meeting on the African American Holistic Center (AAHC), however, even though the meeting was officially over, the meeting room was still full when I arrived for the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission. The AAHC will be 6000 square feet as the community requested and a completely new building on the Alcatraz site. There will be more meetings with at least one in August.
The Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission (PRW) passed the “Parks, Recreation & Waterfront Commission Report & Recommendation to City Council Regarding Berkeley Waterfront Area Specific Plan.” The Commission Report calls the Keyser Marston study (the consultants hired by the City) a “marketing plan” for “revenue” and that as such should not be used for waterfront area planning.
The Commission recommendations are certainly an improvement over the consultants hired with a price tag of over $1,000,000, but as someone who worries about the impact of our species and our pets on biodiversity, I would have liked the presence of stronger language with specific areas of habitat protections.
If Berkeley is going to operate like the environment, biodiversity, and climate actually matter, then everything picked up must realign to specific protections and planning around nature rather than profit.
Item 9 on the PRW agenda and item 19 on the July 25 City Council agenda are the authorization to amend the existing repayment of the State Division of Boating and Waterways loan of $5,500,000 for the D and E Dock Replacement Project with an internal loan to the Marina Fund from the Worker’s Compensation Fund and to charge the Marina Fund interest for the internal loan. Charging one city entity/cost center (the Marina) to shift city funds from another entity/cost center (worker’s comp funds) smacks of one more way to break the Marina/Waterfront and insist all that marketing and revenue generation is necessary leaving trampling over open space and nature with development as just the cost of doing business.
Before the extended 4th of July holiday the Mayor and Council voted on all the tax increases and the update to the Fiscal Year 2024 Budget
All of us who own property are going to be paying more to get our garbage, recyclables and compostables (green bin) picked up. The new fees will increase every year for the next five years though Harrison inserted the language (approved unanimously by Council) to review rates and alternatives in two years.
If you want to save money on garbage pickup, switch to a smaller size container (20 gallons is the smallest). There is nothing we can do to alleviate the increases on the other fees like the clean stormwater fee and street lighting assessment. The results of all the increases will appear on the property tax statements when they arrive this fall.
Berkeley is on a biennial budget, which means the 2024 budget is tweaking and adjusting what was passed last June in 2022. Streets, street signals, consultants for a street parcel tax, a study on fees for development in the southside, adding a Police Accountability Board Investigator for police misconduct investigations, early intervention in police misconduct, and a study of Universal Income Pilot were all funded.
The 2020 Reparations Now street mural on Ellis which was painted over following a complaint was restored with Councilmember Bartlett initiating the measure with a $1000 contribution from his office funds. Councilmembers Harrison, Robinson, Hahn, Kesarwani and Humbert all contributed. The three who did not contribute were Arreguin, Taplin and Wengraf.
Berkeley’s Health Officer, Dr. Hernandez resigned to take a job in Santa Cruz.
June 25, 2023
Two meetings last week focused on mass transit. One was the update to the City Council on the Climate Action Plan and Resilience. The other was Councilmember Taplin’s proposal, at the Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment and Transportation Committee (FITES), to reconfigure University from 6th Street to Shattuck and Shattuck to Durant to create dedicated bus lanes, transit-signal-priority elevated platforms for AC Transport’s 51B, and dedicated bike lanes from 6th to Oxford and Oxford to Durant.
When I can’t walk to where I want to go, I mostly drive unless BART will get me there. I admit my bias.
Saturday, I volunteered to assist with the Point Molate Park Now! Photography Exhibit at the Point Richmond Gallery, 145 West Richmond Avenue, Point Richmond. The photography exhibit of birds and wildlife at Point Molate was fabulous. As for volunteering, it was so well organized I definitely was not needed.
I drove to Point Richmond (9 miles) and even with driving (heavy traffic), parking (several blocks away) and walking from the street parking space, the entire trip took under 20 minutes.
What would that trip look like if I took mass transit instead? The map program gives that trip with a combination of BART, bus and walking, 1 hour and 9 minutes, and there was an alert: “Canceled AC transit bus may affect route.”
Getting us out of our cars requires reliable, efficient (rapid) and frequent mass transit. Then there is mass transit getting us to where we want to go, and feeling safe while we’re getting there. The alternate of bicycling this route, if you’re able, would be 55 minutes.
Today, I watched one of those double body buses turn onto University from Sacramento. I counted eight passengers. Usually, the bus I see is the one that goes north on MLK and turns west on University by Trader Joe’s. Whenever I see that bus it has only one or two passengers.
The question that I am left with is, “Will spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on bus lanes and platforms entice people to get out of their personal cars or Uber and Lyft to switch to the bus?”
Is it enough, if we haven’t solved the requirements of being reliable, efficient, frequent, safe and most of all getting us to where we want to go?
Taplin’s proposal for the 51B comes with a $600,000 funding request for the “studies” for the “Complete Street Corridor” project. Taplin split the project into two studies of $300,000 each.
All the enthusiasm for the project likely comes from turning University Avenue into a corridor of eight and ten story mixed-use buildings of student housing like the proposal for 1598 University, which is under appeal to City Council on October 3, 2023.
The June 21 article “These S.F. Muni lines are more popular than they were pre-pandemic” in the SF Chronicle credits the express lane and boarding platforms as making the difference for the two successful Muni lines, the 22-Fillmore and 49-Van Ness/Mission, but there is more to the story. The buses don’t go to the downtown San Francisco which has vacant office buildings (now at 31.8%), and the 22 and 49 run every six minutes. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/muni-bus-public-transit-18157146.php
The report to the City Council on climate action declared that Berkeley made significant progress, though there is still work to do to become a Fossil Free City. The report is based on the 2020 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Inventory, which places transportation as 46% of GHG emissions and touts a 31% decline from the year 2000 baseline. The report does acknowledge 2020 was the year most of us stayed home.
It is hard not to put a damper on the whole thing. Councilmember Harrison got it right when speaking on the Bird Safe Ordinance. She said “There's a cost to doing the right thing in the environment. Everyone wants to solve the climate and diversity problem. They want to solve with other people sacrificing. We are the problem…”
I’ve picked up the book Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape our World by Gaia Vince. I’ll have more to report next week when I’ve finished it. The book opens painting a picture of what the future looks like with a warming planet of 4°C. It is not a pretty sight, with drought, super storms, heat making large swaths of the earth uninhabitable, and food shortages, all of which will force migration. There is more of course, but the reality of what is coming hasn’t really sunk in, at least not enough to make any significant change in our behavior. We are still acting as if what we do is tweaks here and there, and maybe if we have enough Teslas, which seem to be everywhere in Berkeley, we’ve done our part.
While we sat comfortably in somewhat chilly Berkeley (a heat wave was promised), the South was cooking under a heat dome affecting 69 million people, and in the Midwest and East, 87 million people in 17 states were living in a blanket of unhealthy air from the fires in Canada. This present mess is a taste of the future. Vince warns in Nomad Century that if we aren’t the ones migrating, we will be on the migrant-receiving end. Maybe that is what the developers are hanging on to in case they run out of UC students to fill the multitude of projects that are about to open in Berkeley.
So far Vince has barely touched on biodiversity and nature. If I hadn’t watched Fareed Zakaria’s interview on CNN of French President Emmanuel Macron, who organized and led the summit of world leaders in Paris that just closed, I would not have known that the thrust of the summit was poverty, biodiversity and climate. The big press, (the NY Times, Washington Post) listed it as a climate conference; biodiversity was not even mentioned.
Biodiversity is also missing in another group, the local chapter of the Sierra Club Conservation Committee. I attended my first Sierra Club Conservation Committee meeting with others in order to request support for the Berkeley Bird Safe ordinance and then stayed on as a regular attendee. I’m not sure how housing took center stage. While I agree that we can’t survive as a nation or on this planet if we continue to cover land with housing, I keep going back to Christopher Ketcham’s article “Addressing Climate Change Will Not Save the Planet.” Biodiversity and habitat need to be written into the plan; it is not an either/or. In fact, in planning cities, including this city, just as we have maps of city streets, there should be maps of corridors connecting habitat for wildlife.
We would be in a better spot in supporting biodiversity if Mayor Arreguin hadn’t referred the “rights of nature” to the Peace and Justice Commission back in 2021 where with lots of misdirection and a little help from his appointee. It would be sure to die, and it did.
The Climate Action Plan did include sea level rise and groundwater rise, but left out the part about rising groundwater and toxins seeping into living and work spaces. Tree Canopy earned three paragraphs, with the mention of grants and selecting species which fit into sidewalk growing spaces.
I’m not sure we would have any native trees planted without continued pressure from the community. Native trees are going into the parks, according to Scott Ferris, Director of Parks, Recreation and Waterfront, but street trees so far are non-native, a lost opportunity, which means for decades to come they won’t support local biodiversity.
Biodiversity is not taking imported plants from different parts of the planet and sticking them in the ground in Berkeley or some other place. Supporting biodiversity comes from recognizing the inter-relationship of species.
The “host plant relationship” with native species is lost on so many people. Monarch butterflies don’t exist without native milkweed for caterpillars. I didn’t understand it myself until I started taking walks with Erin Diehm and she pointed out yard after yard filled with imported exotics, which are essentially dead spaces for birds and insects. Diehm is responsible for the pollinator gardens which earned a paragraph in the Climate Action Update.
There were two other items on the FITES agenda. Harrison recommends updating the Climate Action Plan to include short-term and long-term costs, e.g. raw materials, manufacturing, production, use, clean-up, acquisition, disposal cost and short-term environmental and health impacts along with alternatives. It is a big bite, when the Climate Action Plan Update at this point for that 46% of GHG attributed to transportation comes from a google app:
https://insights.sustainability.google/
As Harrison pointed out at the Climate Action Plan presentation to City Council, the Office of Energy & Sustainable Development runs on a shoestring.
It often feels like Sustainability is the unwanted stepchild. The money maker for the Department of Planning and Development is development. If the mayor and more councilmembers were reading the stuff I’m reading, I doubt climate and biodiversity would be pushed off in a corner except when the Climate Action Plan update comes due. As for biodiversity that barely got a whiff of attention in the paragraph on Pollinator Gardens.
The other Harrison item at FITES was Deconstruction and Construction Materials Management. Councilmember Robinson had never heard of deconstruction. A number of years ago the Zero Waste Commission showed a film on deconstruction. I couldn’t find that video (there has been a complete turnover of staff and commissioners and then there is the deconstruction and reconstruction of the City website), but here are two.
The Unbuilders at a little over 12 minutes gives the most detail. If you do your own search be sure to include “building” with deconstruction or you will get lead down other bizarre paths. https://www.google.com/search?q=building+deconstruction&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS706US707&oq=building+deconstruction&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDY0NTJqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:098f2efc,vid:SLvYRKw4HHw
Here is a shorter 4 minute version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ejjd6E_7SsQ
I think of all the beautiful hardwood floors from Hinks Department Store that are being demolished for 2065 Kittredge. Do we ever think about the forests that are being denuded to give that wood finish in new buildings?
I was told how back in 2018 when the news got out that the developer United Commonwealth Business Holdings destroyed three redwoods, that were supposed to be saved with the construction of 1698 University, Mike Hudson offered to mill the Redwood trees into usable lumber. According to the story, the developer couldn’t slow down for three days for the redwood trees to be milled, so instead they were ground up. That building is still unfinished five years later. As for the continuing removal of trees and grinding them up into mulch instead of usable lumber, that is something contractors seem to do under the auspices of the City, supposedly to reduce fire risk and make way for construction.
Of course, there is always the discussion of cost and whether deconstruction slow down construction of housing. The cost is really short-term profit versus the long-term cost of destruction that is occurring elsewhere, like deforestation. Watching the 12 minute video in the link above addresses both costs.
The Economic Dashboard Update to Council touted the success of weathering the pandemic and recovering. Retail was down, which would be expected with what feels like a steady stream of Amazon Prime trucks in our neighborhoods. The report is worth a scan. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2023-06-20%20WS%20Item%2001%20Berkeley%20Economic%20Dashboards%20Update.pdf
Thursday, I attended an hour-long webinar on the program Bird City that started in Wisconsin in 2009. The young speakers from North and South America bubbled over with enthusiasm. Becoming a Bird City requires local government buy-in and support and addressing each of the four categories of best practices, 1) Create, protect and restore bird habitat, 2) Address threats to birds, 3) Engage people in birding and conservation and 4) Encourage sustainable practices. https://birdcity.org/
Berkeley has no chance of becoming a Bird City without turnover of the mayor and the majority of the City Council. On June 6, the evening of the Bird Safe Ordinance, Mayor Arreguin lowered the required height of bird safe glass from 100 feet to 75 feet, when there was no apparent citizen pressure to do so. Even the near-useless supplemental from Councilmembers Kesarwani and Wengraf left the requirement for bird safe glass at ground to 100 feet. Let’s keep in mind, even 100 feet is a compromise.
By the time Arreguin and the City Council finished gutting the Bird Safe Ordinance only about 40% of it was left. The other reminder from that evening was from Wengraf, stating that bird safe glass would impact the quality of life of her constituents. Consideration of the quality of life of the youth who came to speak and future generations never entered her comments. For them the collapse of nature is real and their answer to the view was, “go outside.”
Why does this matter so much? It goes back to the Audubon moto, “Protect Birds & We Protect the Earth.”
Thursday, the Zoning Adjustment Board met and finished in an hour. There were no big projects on the agenda; it was all alterations to single family housing, including one appeal on an outside deck on a house in the hills, 1524 Campus Drive. The appeal was denied and everything else was approved.
I missed two meetings I wanted attend, the Environment and Climate Commission and the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission, so I can’t give a report. There are just too many meetings running simultaneously.
At least the presentation to City Council and their vote on the Waterfront Plan is moved to the fall. I expect there will be development dollars written all over it. After all, the City has been busy with shifting funds around for years to break the Marina so development can move in and fantasy projects can take hold.
The Civic Center presentation and vote will come on July 11 with a price tag of somewhere between $125,000,000 and $158,000,000. Then comes how the Mayor and Council plan to sell us into paying for it , including building new council chambers for them. These things always cost more than estimates.
Daylighting Strawberry Creek is up against stiff opposition from the consultants. Anyone who doubts the delightful impact of freeing creeks from culverts should spend a little time at Strawberry Creek Park. Every time I’ve gone to the park, there are always children exploring the creek. It is lovely. At least daylighting the creek comes with State grants.
Two meetings last week focused on mass transit. One was the update to the City Council on the Climate Action Plan and Resilience. The other was Councilmember Taplin’s proposal, at the Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment and Transportation Committee (FITES), to reconfigure University from 6th Street to Shattuck and Shattuck to Durant to create dedicated bus lanes, transit-signal-priority elevated platforms for AC Transport’s 51B, and dedicated bike lanes from 6th to Oxford and Oxford to Durant.
When I can’t walk to where I want to go, I mostly drive unless BART will get me there. I admit my bias.
Saturday, I volunteered to assist with the Point Molate Park Now! Photography Exhibit at the Point Richmond Gallery, 145 West Richmond Avenue, Point Richmond. The photography exhibit of birds and wildlife at Point Molate was fabulous. As for volunteering, it was so well organized I definitely was not needed.
I drove to Point Richmond (9 miles) and even with driving (heavy traffic), parking (several blocks away) and walking from the street parking space, the entire trip took under 20 minutes.
What would that trip look like if I took mass transit instead? The map program gives that trip with a combination of BART, bus and walking, 1 hour and 9 minutes, and there was an alert: “Canceled AC transit bus may affect route.”
Getting us out of our cars requires reliable, efficient (rapid) and frequent mass transit. Then there is mass transit getting us to where we want to go, and feeling safe while we’re getting there. The alternate of bicycling this route, if you’re able, would be 55 minutes.
Today, I watched one of those double body buses turn onto University from Sacramento. I counted eight passengers. Usually, the bus I see is the one that goes north on MLK and turns west on University by Trader Joe’s. Whenever I see that bus it has only one or two passengers.
The question that I am left with is, “Will spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on bus lanes and platforms entice people to get out of their personal cars or Uber and Lyft to switch to the bus?”
Is it enough, if we haven’t solved the requirements of being reliable, efficient, frequent, safe and most of all getting us to where we want to go?
Taplin’s proposal for the 51B comes with a $600,000 funding request for the “studies” for the “Complete Street Corridor” project. Taplin split the project into two studies of $300,000 each.
All the enthusiasm for the project likely comes from turning University Avenue into a corridor of eight and ten story mixed-use buildings of student housing like the proposal for 1598 University, which is under appeal to City Council on October 3, 2023.
The June 21 article “These S.F. Muni lines are more popular than they were pre-pandemic” in the SF Chronicle credits the express lane and boarding platforms as making the difference for the two successful Muni lines, the 22-Fillmore and 49-Van Ness/Mission, but there is more to the story. The buses don’t go to the downtown San Francisco which has vacant office buildings (now at 31.8%), and the 22 and 49 run every six minutes. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/muni-bus-public-transit-18157146.php
The report to the City Council on climate action declared that Berkeley made significant progress, though there is still work to do to become a Fossil Free City. The report is based on the 2020 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Inventory, which places transportation as 46% of GHG emissions and touts a 31% decline from the year 2000 baseline. The report does acknowledge 2020 was the year most of us stayed home.
It is hard not to put a damper on the whole thing. Councilmember Harrison got it right when speaking on the Bird Safe Ordinance. She said “There's a cost to doing the right thing in the environment. Everyone wants to solve the climate and diversity problem. They want to solve with other people sacrificing. We are the problem…”
I’ve picked up the book Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape our World by Gaia Vince. I’ll have more to report next week when I’ve finished it. The book opens painting a picture of what the future looks like with a warming planet of 4°C. It is not a pretty sight, with drought, super storms, heat making large swaths of the earth uninhabitable, and food shortages, all of which will force migration. There is more of course, but the reality of what is coming hasn’t really sunk in, at least not enough to make any significant change in our behavior. We are still acting as if what we do is tweaks here and there, and maybe if we have enough Teslas, which seem to be everywhere in Berkeley, we’ve done our part.
While we sat comfortably in somewhat chilly Berkeley (a heat wave was promised), the South was cooking under a heat dome affecting 69 million people, and in the Midwest and East, 87 million people in 17 states were living in a blanket of unhealthy air from the fires in Canada. This present mess is a taste of the future. Vince warns in Nomad Century that if we aren’t the ones migrating, we will be on the migrant-receiving end. Maybe that is what the developers are hanging on to in case they run out of UC students to fill the multitude of projects that are about to open in Berkeley.
So far Vince has barely touched on biodiversity and nature. If I hadn’t watched Fareed Zakaria’s interview on CNN of French President Emmanuel Macron, who organized and led the summit of world leaders in Paris that just closed, I would not have known that the thrust of the summit was poverty, biodiversity and climate. The big press, (the NY Times, Washington Post) listed it as a climate conference; biodiversity was not even mentioned.
Biodiversity is also missing in another group, the local chapter of the Sierra Club Conservation Committee. I attended my first Sierra Club Conservation Committee meeting with others in order to request support for the Berkeley Bird Safe ordinance and then stayed on as a regular attendee. I’m not sure how housing took center stage. While I agree that we can’t survive as a nation or on this planet if we continue to cover land with housing, I keep going back to Christopher Ketcham’s article “Addressing Climate Change Will Not Save the Planet.” Biodiversity and habitat need to be written into the plan; it is not an either/or. In fact, in planning cities, including this city, just as we have maps of city streets, there should be maps of corridors connecting habitat for wildlife.
We would be in a better spot in supporting biodiversity if Mayor Arreguin hadn’t referred the “rights of nature” to the Peace and Justice Commission back in 2021 where with lots of misdirection and a little help from his appointee. It would be sure to die, and it did.
The Climate Action Plan did include sea level rise and groundwater rise, but left out the part about rising groundwater and toxins seeping into living and work spaces. Tree Canopy earned three paragraphs, with the mention of grants and selecting species which fit into sidewalk growing spaces.
I’m not sure we would have any native trees planted without continued pressure from the community. Native trees are going into the parks, according to Scott Ferris, Director of Parks, Recreation and Waterfront, but street trees so far are non-native, a lost opportunity, which means for decades to come they won’t support local biodiversity.
Biodiversity is not taking imported plants from different parts of the planet and sticking them in the ground in Berkeley or some other place. Supporting biodiversity comes from recognizing the inter-relationship of species.
The “host plant relationship” with native species is lost on so many people. Monarch butterflies don’t exist without native milkweed for caterpillars. I didn’t understand it myself until I started taking walks with Erin Diehm and she pointed out yard after yard filled with imported exotics, which are essentially dead spaces for birds and insects. Diehm is responsible for the pollinator gardens which earned a paragraph in the Climate Action Update.
There were two other items on the FITES agenda. Harrison recommends updating the Climate Action Plan to include short-term and long-term costs, e.g. raw materials, manufacturing, production, use, clean-up, acquisition, disposal cost and short-term environmental and health impacts along with alternatives. It is a big bite, when the Climate Action Plan Update at this point for that 46% of GHG attributed to transportation comes from a google app:
https://insights.sustainability.google/
As Harrison pointed out at the Climate Action Plan presentation to City Council, the Office of Energy & Sustainable Development runs on a shoestring.
It often feels like Sustainability is the unwanted stepchild. The money maker for the Department of Planning and Development is development. If the mayor and more councilmembers were reading the stuff I’m reading, I doubt climate and biodiversity would be pushed off in a corner except when the Climate Action Plan update comes due. As for biodiversity that barely got a whiff of attention in the paragraph on Pollinator Gardens.
The other Harrison item at FITES was Deconstruction and Construction Materials Management. Councilmember Robinson had never heard of deconstruction. A number of years ago the Zero Waste Commission showed a film on deconstruction. I couldn’t find that video (there has been a complete turnover of staff and commissioners and then there is the deconstruction and reconstruction of the City website), but here are two.
The Unbuilders at a little over 12 minutes gives the most detail. If you do your own search be sure to include “building” with deconstruction or you will get lead down other bizarre paths. https://www.google.com/search?q=building+deconstruction&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS706US707&oq=building+deconstruction&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDY0NTJqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:098f2efc,vid:SLvYRKw4HHw
Here is a shorter 4 minute version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ejjd6E_7SsQ
I think of all the beautiful hardwood floors from Hinks Department Store that are being demolished for 2065 Kittredge. Do we ever think about the forests that are being denuded to give that wood finish in new buildings?
I was told how back in 2018 when the news got out that the developer United Commonwealth Business Holdings destroyed three redwoods, that were supposed to be saved with the construction of 1698 University, Mike Hudson offered to mill the Redwood trees into usable lumber. According to the story, the developer couldn’t slow down for three days for the redwood trees to be milled, so instead they were ground up. That building is still unfinished five years later. As for the continuing removal of trees and grinding them up into mulch instead of usable lumber, that is something contractors seem to do under the auspices of the City, supposedly to reduce fire risk and make way for construction.
Of course, there is always the discussion of cost and whether deconstruction slow down construction of housing. The cost is really short-term profit versus the long-term cost of destruction that is occurring elsewhere, like deforestation. Watching the 12 minute video in the link above addresses both costs.
The Economic Dashboard Update to Council touted the success of weathering the pandemic and recovering. Retail was down, which would be expected with what feels like a steady stream of Amazon Prime trucks in our neighborhoods. The report is worth a scan. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2023-06-20%20WS%20Item%2001%20Berkeley%20Economic%20Dashboards%20Update.pdf
Thursday, I attended an hour-long webinar on the program Bird City that started in Wisconsin in 2009. The young speakers from North and South America bubbled over with enthusiasm. Becoming a Bird City requires local government buy-in and support and addressing each of the four categories of best practices, 1) Create, protect and restore bird habitat, 2) Address threats to birds, 3) Engage people in birding and conservation and 4) Encourage sustainable practices. https://birdcity.org/
Berkeley has no chance of becoming a Bird City without turnover of the mayor and the majority of the City Council. On June 6, the evening of the Bird Safe Ordinance, Mayor Arreguin lowered the required height of bird safe glass from 100 feet to 75 feet, when there was no apparent citizen pressure to do so. Even the near-useless supplemental from Councilmembers Kesarwani and Wengraf left the requirement for bird safe glass at ground to 100 feet. Let’s keep in mind, even 100 feet is a compromise.
By the time Arreguin and the City Council finished gutting the Bird Safe Ordinance only about 40% of it was left. The other reminder from that evening was from Wengraf, stating that bird safe glass would impact the quality of life of her constituents. Consideration of the quality of life of the youth who came to speak and future generations never entered her comments. For them the collapse of nature is real and their answer to the view was, “go outside.”
Why does this matter so much? It goes back to the Audubon moto, “Protect Birds & We Protect the Earth.”
Thursday, the Zoning Adjustment Board met and finished in an hour. There were no big projects on the agenda; it was all alterations to single family housing, including one appeal on an outside deck on a house in the hills, 1524 Campus Drive. The appeal was denied and everything else was approved.
I missed two meetings I wanted attend, the Environment and Climate Commission and the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission, so I can’t give a report. There are just too many meetings running simultaneously.
At least the presentation to City Council and their vote on the Waterfront Plan is moved to the fall. I expect there will be development dollars written all over it. After all, the City has been busy with shifting funds around for years to break the Marina so development can move in and fantasy projects can take hold.
The Civic Center presentation and vote will come on July 11 with a price tag of somewhere between $125,000,000 and $158,000,000. Then comes how the Mayor and Council plan to sell us into paying for it , including building new council chambers for them. These things always cost more than estimates.
Daylighting Strawberry Creek is up against stiff opposition from the consultants. Anyone who doubts the delightful impact of freeing creeks from culverts should spend a little time at Strawberry Creek Park. Every time I’ve gone to the park, there are always children exploring the creek. It is lovely. At least daylighting the creek comes with State grants.
June 18, 2023
Berkeley holds a special place, deserved or not, as a city of liberal / progressive ideas and politics.
I’ve read every letter/email sent to the Berkeley City Council before its June 6 meeting that I could find (total 193) in “records online” and only two out of that stack were in opposition to the draft of the Bird Safe Ordinance as passed by the Berkeley Planning Commission with a revision submitted by Councilmember Harrison.
On May 19, 2023, when the draft of the Bird Safe Ordinance still included residential buildings on a phase-in schedule, and before Councilmembers Kesarwani and Wengraf submitted their alternate proposal as Supplemental 2 to exempt residential properties and glass under 12 square feet in area, Dr. Scott Loss, author of the scientific paper referenced and quoted by the Planning Department, and later in the alternate ordinance from Kesarwani and Wengraf, wrote:
“[M]y lab has studied the bird-window collision issue and solutions to address it, for the last decade. In 2014, I published a highly cited and publicized paper estimating that up to 1 billion birds annually die from bird-window collisions in the U.S. alone, making this one of the top threats affecting our native bird populations. In fact, bird-window collisions are such a major threat to our birds that making buildings and window safe for birds was identified in 2019 as #1 in a list of 7 simple actions to help birds and halt and reverse the decline of North America’s bird populations. [underlining by Dr. Loss]
“Individual property owners can make a difference in addressing the bird-window collision issue by treating their glass windows with commercial products (e.g. films and markers placed over glass and do-it-yourself solutions). However, making major inroads to broadly address this issue requires political buy-in and policies that provide guidelines for making buildings more bird-friendly, thus addressing this issue at a meaningful scale that greatly benefits declining bird populations. Policies such as the Bird Safe Berkeley Ordinance are absolutely crucial for reducing bird collisions, and voting to pass this ordinance would immediately make Berkeley a global leader and beacon for environmental action, and a role model for other cities around the U.S. and worldwide.”
The June 6, 2023, email from Peter Saenger, Acopian Ornithological Specialist at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, sent to Council at 11:16 am is best described as a slap down of Kesarwani and Wengraf.
“Dear Council
It has come to my attention that there are two major misstatements being pushed by some of your members.
Saenger named two west coast articles “Preventing Bird-Window Collisions – Seattle Audubon” and the NIH published paper “Bird-Window Collisions at a West-Coast Urban Park Museum: Analyses of Bird Biology and Window Attributes from Golden Gate Park, San Francisco” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26731417/
The most interesting finding in the article Saenger attached is that Acopian blinds, the DIY inexpensive project of parachute cord (researchers used olive colored) hung 3.5 inches apart the full length of the window is an incredibly effective treatment (95% effective) to deter bird-window collisions.
After two bird-glass collisions, Erin Diehm (and spouse) made an Acopian blind for $18 to successfully end bird strikes on the window looking into their native plant garden (see photo). https://www.birdsavers.com
Glenn Philips, Executive Director of Golden Gate Audubon, countered the claim that there are no options for single family houses and residential buildings and cost assumptions with the information that most standard and single and double-hung windows would be compliant with the ordinance since they include a full external screen and add no additional cost and that bird safe glass adds about 8% to the total cost of the window.
The total responses to the question about the proposed Bird Safe Glass Ordinance on the Berkeley Considers web site were 462. “Yes” were 85.1% (393), with 12.8% no (58) and 2.4% (11) other. The opposition cited cost, quoted disinformation that bird safe glass is not energy efficient, railed against regulations, called the ordinance green-washing and nimbyism, called for attention to homelessness and crime and said that cats kill more birds than bird-glass collisions (Aurora, Illinois has an ordinance on that cat problem).
The first commenters on the Bird Safe Ordinance at the Berkeley City Council meeting were Niko, aged five and August, 6.
When six-year old August was lifted to the microphone by his mother to speak on saving birds, what came out was “I’m scared, I’m really scared.” He had what probably felt like an eternity for his fear to build. It was almost three hours of waiting to speak in a room full of strangers with a looming City Council looking down on him from the elevated dais. He had every reason to be afraid.
As a young child his fear was in the moment, without a sense of how the earth is changing, really quite sick according to Joyeeta Gupta, co-chair of the report referenced by Steve Newman in the Chronicle on Sunday, June 4, 2023. Steve Newman started Earthweek: a diary of a planet with “Ailing Earth A report says Earth has exceeded seven out of eight key ecological stability limits pushing it into the ‘danger’ zone.’”
The report in the journal Nature in the article Earthweek, a “Safe and just Earth system boundaries”, is dense with explanations, charts and a world map of hotspots with a part of California along the coast and into the valley in deep red (a hotspot). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06083-8
The easier to read summary in Common Dreams lists the eight boundaries; 1) earth surface temperature (climate), 2) natural ecosystem (biosphere), 3) functional integrity (biosphere), 4) surface water (water), 5) groundwater (water), 6) nitrogen (nutrient cycles), 7) Phosphorus (nutrient cycles) and 8) aerosol loading (atmosphere). https://www.commondreams.org/news/planetary-health-failing-7-of-8-earth-system-boundaries-crossed
The boundary that wasn’t breached was aerosol loading/atmosphere, though New York might disagree on that assessment with smoke turning the sky orange from hundreds of wildfires burning out of control in Canada. https://www.commondreams.org/news/planetary-health-failing-7-of-8-earth-system-boundaries-crossed
There was more bad news on June 6, the day of the council vote on the Bird Safe Ordinance. Another climate milestone could come in the 2030s, about a decade sooner than anticipated: ice free Arctic summers. This is very bad news, as ice reflects the heat of the sun but a dark open ocean absorbs the heat, creating a feedback loop (amplification) speeding up global warming. The Arctic is already reported to be warming two to seven times faster than the rest of the planet, depending on the day and which study or article one picks up.
The Arctic Ice cap for thousands of years acted to keep the world’s climate in balance. With losing that moderating force the jet stream has slipped off the top of the planet. This week the jet stream is drooping down to Mexico, bringing cold weather south that should have stayed in the Arctic. It’s June and some of my friends say they are still using their heaters.
The staff presentation at the council meeting on the Bird Safe Ordinance followed the children.
After a brief presentation from Justin Horner, Associate Planner, City of Berkeley Planning Department, Mayor Arreguin immediately turned to the remaining Public Comment speakers, leaving them to guess what kind of watering down grand compromise Arreguin would propose after they spoke. Representatives from the City of Berkeley Planning Commission were not invited to the table to present.
Jordon Klein, Director of Planning and Development, said the Planning Department would work with whatever was decided.
Glenn Philips, Executive Director of the Audubon Society was able to speak for 4 minutes by asking volunteers to give him their minute.
After public comment closed, Arreguin kicked off his comments asserting the city’s need to build 15,000 units of housing in Berkeley (the actual number in the Housing Element is 8,934).
Councilmember Harrison spoke to her Revision, then she said “There's a cost for doing the right thing in the environment. Everyone wants to solve the climate and diversity problem: they want to solve with other people sacrificing. We are the problem. We use too much plastic, as Councilmember Hahn tried to deal with. We drive too much. We eat too much meat. We are the problem. When this thing comes up, it is kind of hard. It is harder when our planet dies and our children can't live.”
It was evident that Councilmembers Kesarwani and Wengraf had not read the letters from the scientists, or if they read them, they chose to ignore the information.
Wengraf finally got around to her priority at 10:29 pm. “I have to say I was disappointed to find out the Planning Commission did not discuss the impact on views when they discussed the bird safe ordinance. Many of my constituents live in homes with views, and most of the options for bird safe glass would impact the human experience of looking through that glass. They're patterns or etched. The tape would interfere with the view; the film would interfere with the view. The only option that might not interfere with the view is the most expensive option which is UV glass. I feel like that is a very important thing that was not discussed at the Planning Commission and it is important to me as someone who represents constituents who have properties with views and those views are worth a lot of money. And imposing an ordinance that would impact them would have financial implications and also quality of life implications.” [Emphasis added]
The high school and college students who came to speak in favor of the Bird Safe Ordinance as it came from the Planning Commission and Councilmember Harrison who stayed for the final vote are angry and they should be. They are left with the mess, an overheated planet, collapsing biodiversity and a Mayor and City Council that are more concerned about views than the quality of life for their generation and the next generations.
The evening ended with the last comment from Zev Massey, a graduating high school senior.
“My name is Zev…I want to thank you all for coming here and agreeing on a resolution. This is not related to birds. It’s related to youth and our role in politics…A lot of the kids here, it is their first time giving public comment. And, when you go home and think about tonight, I’d like you to think about the lasting impression that you left on these kids, and whether you give them hope that local politics is doing what the citizens and the future generation that will inhabit this earth want from our representatives, or whether a different taste was left in their mouth.”
The Bird Safe Ordinance second reading is June 27, 2023. It will go into effect 30 days later.
While the final version included exemptions for Residential or Mixed Use buildings under 35 feet in height and less than 10,000 square feet, designated historical buildings (landmarked and/or structure of merit), and affordable housing, and Arreguin lowered the height requirement from 100 feet to 75 feet, this makes the final outcome about 40% of what we would have had if in fact the Mayor and City Council had voted for the draft of Bird Safe Ordinance passed unanimously by the Planning Commission and the Revision submitted by Councilmember Harrison. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2023-06-06%20Item%2018%20Bird%20Safe%20Harrison%20Rev2%281%29.pdf
Considering the dreadfully awful and ineffective version of Bird Safe Requirements offered by Kesarwani and Wengraf in Supplemental 2 with only eight councilmembers present to vote (Councilmember Bartlett was absent), there were still positive outcomes.
Arreguin started with Harrison’s revision. The exemption for transparent materials under 12 square feet was eliminated, as was the use of a certified biologist. The key provision of Patterned Glazing Treatment as detailed by Harrison in her revision made it into the final version. The ordinance applies to the large mixed use projects of 10,000 square feet or greater. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2023-06-27%20Item%2001%20Ordinance%207864.pdf
SB 330 projects comply with the conditions in place at the time of application. For all other projects, no matter when entitled, the ordinance applies when a building permit is needed.
This version of the ordinance puts Berkeley a step forward, but certainly not a leader.
Those of us following the City closely continually place blame on the City Manager. Watching so much unfold in Berkeley lately, I often think we ought to be looking up the other branch of the tree, the one reflecting ambition to climb the political ladder.
I have two books to recommend, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle and Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City by Ben Wilson.
The Great Displacement follows the personal stories of people displaced by climate fueled disasters, hurricanes, wildfires and drought, FEMA buyouts and thoughts about what living in and buying properties in high risk areas means for the future.
Those houses with views Wengraf is so anxious to protect over the quality of life for present and next generations of youth sit in the high fire hazard zone, within feet of the Hayward Fault, in a hillside slide area. When disaster happens, as it eventually will, will retreat be an option on the table? Should further construction in these areas be allowed at all even now?
Will McCarthy poses the question of construction in earthquake zones in the East Bay Times article “Why the Hayward Fault is the epicenter of debate over housing goals vs. earthquake risk.” https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2023/06/13/why-the-hayward-fault-is-the-epicenter-of-debate-over-housing-goals-vs-earthquake-risk/
The second book, Urban Jungle, is a fascinating history of domestic and wild animals in cities that challenges us to plan the inclusion of nature within cities.
Both books speak to how cities filled with hardscape, buildings, pavements, roads and no place for nature leave us unprepared for the upheaval we can expect from global warming and climate fueled disasters.
Those of us who are concerned about the future of the children and teenagers who showed up for the Bird Safe Ordinance and future generations have a full plate of work in front of us.
Berkeley holds a special place, deserved or not, as a city of liberal / progressive ideas and politics.
I’ve read every letter/email sent to the Berkeley City Council before its June 6 meeting that I could find (total 193) in “records online” and only two out of that stack were in opposition to the draft of the Bird Safe Ordinance as passed by the Berkeley Planning Commission with a revision submitted by Councilmember Harrison.
On May 19, 2023, when the draft of the Bird Safe Ordinance still included residential buildings on a phase-in schedule, and before Councilmembers Kesarwani and Wengraf submitted their alternate proposal as Supplemental 2 to exempt residential properties and glass under 12 square feet in area, Dr. Scott Loss, author of the scientific paper referenced and quoted by the Planning Department, and later in the alternate ordinance from Kesarwani and Wengraf, wrote:
“[M]y lab has studied the bird-window collision issue and solutions to address it, for the last decade. In 2014, I published a highly cited and publicized paper estimating that up to 1 billion birds annually die from bird-window collisions in the U.S. alone, making this one of the top threats affecting our native bird populations. In fact, bird-window collisions are such a major threat to our birds that making buildings and window safe for birds was identified in 2019 as #1 in a list of 7 simple actions to help birds and halt and reverse the decline of North America’s bird populations. [underlining by Dr. Loss]
“Individual property owners can make a difference in addressing the bird-window collision issue by treating their glass windows with commercial products (e.g. films and markers placed over glass and do-it-yourself solutions). However, making major inroads to broadly address this issue requires political buy-in and policies that provide guidelines for making buildings more bird-friendly, thus addressing this issue at a meaningful scale that greatly benefits declining bird populations. Policies such as the Bird Safe Berkeley Ordinance are absolutely crucial for reducing bird collisions, and voting to pass this ordinance would immediately make Berkeley a global leader and beacon for environmental action, and a role model for other cities around the U.S. and worldwide.”
The June 6, 2023, email from Peter Saenger, Acopian Ornithological Specialist at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, sent to Council at 11:16 am is best described as a slap down of Kesarwani and Wengraf.
“Dear Council
It has come to my attention that there are two major misstatements being pushed by some of your members.
- “Research to date has not determined what bird-safe measures are effective for low-rise residential structures.”
- “Data on the Efficacy of Bird-Safe Glass is Not Based on Western U.S. Bird Species.” And “may have created a bias in the effectiveness of recommended mitigations measures.”
Saenger named two west coast articles “Preventing Bird-Window Collisions – Seattle Audubon” and the NIH published paper “Bird-Window Collisions at a West-Coast Urban Park Museum: Analyses of Bird Biology and Window Attributes from Golden Gate Park, San Francisco” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26731417/
The most interesting finding in the article Saenger attached is that Acopian blinds, the DIY inexpensive project of parachute cord (researchers used olive colored) hung 3.5 inches apart the full length of the window is an incredibly effective treatment (95% effective) to deter bird-window collisions.
After two bird-glass collisions, Erin Diehm (and spouse) made an Acopian blind for $18 to successfully end bird strikes on the window looking into their native plant garden (see photo). https://www.birdsavers.com
Glenn Philips, Executive Director of Golden Gate Audubon, countered the claim that there are no options for single family houses and residential buildings and cost assumptions with the information that most standard and single and double-hung windows would be compliant with the ordinance since they include a full external screen and add no additional cost and that bird safe glass adds about 8% to the total cost of the window.
The total responses to the question about the proposed Bird Safe Glass Ordinance on the Berkeley Considers web site were 462. “Yes” were 85.1% (393), with 12.8% no (58) and 2.4% (11) other. The opposition cited cost, quoted disinformation that bird safe glass is not energy efficient, railed against regulations, called the ordinance green-washing and nimbyism, called for attention to homelessness and crime and said that cats kill more birds than bird-glass collisions (Aurora, Illinois has an ordinance on that cat problem).
The first commenters on the Bird Safe Ordinance at the Berkeley City Council meeting were Niko, aged five and August, 6.
When six-year old August was lifted to the microphone by his mother to speak on saving birds, what came out was “I’m scared, I’m really scared.” He had what probably felt like an eternity for his fear to build. It was almost three hours of waiting to speak in a room full of strangers with a looming City Council looking down on him from the elevated dais. He had every reason to be afraid.
As a young child his fear was in the moment, without a sense of how the earth is changing, really quite sick according to Joyeeta Gupta, co-chair of the report referenced by Steve Newman in the Chronicle on Sunday, June 4, 2023. Steve Newman started Earthweek: a diary of a planet with “Ailing Earth A report says Earth has exceeded seven out of eight key ecological stability limits pushing it into the ‘danger’ zone.’”
The report in the journal Nature in the article Earthweek, a “Safe and just Earth system boundaries”, is dense with explanations, charts and a world map of hotspots with a part of California along the coast and into the valley in deep red (a hotspot). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06083-8
The easier to read summary in Common Dreams lists the eight boundaries; 1) earth surface temperature (climate), 2) natural ecosystem (biosphere), 3) functional integrity (biosphere), 4) surface water (water), 5) groundwater (water), 6) nitrogen (nutrient cycles), 7) Phosphorus (nutrient cycles) and 8) aerosol loading (atmosphere). https://www.commondreams.org/news/planetary-health-failing-7-of-8-earth-system-boundaries-crossed
The boundary that wasn’t breached was aerosol loading/atmosphere, though New York might disagree on that assessment with smoke turning the sky orange from hundreds of wildfires burning out of control in Canada. https://www.commondreams.org/news/planetary-health-failing-7-of-8-earth-system-boundaries-crossed
There was more bad news on June 6, the day of the council vote on the Bird Safe Ordinance. Another climate milestone could come in the 2030s, about a decade sooner than anticipated: ice free Arctic summers. This is very bad news, as ice reflects the heat of the sun but a dark open ocean absorbs the heat, creating a feedback loop (amplification) speeding up global warming. The Arctic is already reported to be warming two to seven times faster than the rest of the planet, depending on the day and which study or article one picks up.
The Arctic Ice cap for thousands of years acted to keep the world’s climate in balance. With losing that moderating force the jet stream has slipped off the top of the planet. This week the jet stream is drooping down to Mexico, bringing cold weather south that should have stayed in the Arctic. It’s June and some of my friends say they are still using their heaters.
The staff presentation at the council meeting on the Bird Safe Ordinance followed the children.
After a brief presentation from Justin Horner, Associate Planner, City of Berkeley Planning Department, Mayor Arreguin immediately turned to the remaining Public Comment speakers, leaving them to guess what kind of watering down grand compromise Arreguin would propose after they spoke. Representatives from the City of Berkeley Planning Commission were not invited to the table to present.
Jordon Klein, Director of Planning and Development, said the Planning Department would work with whatever was decided.
Glenn Philips, Executive Director of the Audubon Society was able to speak for 4 minutes by asking volunteers to give him their minute.
After public comment closed, Arreguin kicked off his comments asserting the city’s need to build 15,000 units of housing in Berkeley (the actual number in the Housing Element is 8,934).
Councilmember Harrison spoke to her Revision, then she said “There's a cost for doing the right thing in the environment. Everyone wants to solve the climate and diversity problem: they want to solve with other people sacrificing. We are the problem. We use too much plastic, as Councilmember Hahn tried to deal with. We drive too much. We eat too much meat. We are the problem. When this thing comes up, it is kind of hard. It is harder when our planet dies and our children can't live.”
It was evident that Councilmembers Kesarwani and Wengraf had not read the letters from the scientists, or if they read them, they chose to ignore the information.
Wengraf finally got around to her priority at 10:29 pm. “I have to say I was disappointed to find out the Planning Commission did not discuss the impact on views when they discussed the bird safe ordinance. Many of my constituents live in homes with views, and most of the options for bird safe glass would impact the human experience of looking through that glass. They're patterns or etched. The tape would interfere with the view; the film would interfere with the view. The only option that might not interfere with the view is the most expensive option which is UV glass. I feel like that is a very important thing that was not discussed at the Planning Commission and it is important to me as someone who represents constituents who have properties with views and those views are worth a lot of money. And imposing an ordinance that would impact them would have financial implications and also quality of life implications.” [Emphasis added]
The high school and college students who came to speak in favor of the Bird Safe Ordinance as it came from the Planning Commission and Councilmember Harrison who stayed for the final vote are angry and they should be. They are left with the mess, an overheated planet, collapsing biodiversity and a Mayor and City Council that are more concerned about views than the quality of life for their generation and the next generations.
The evening ended with the last comment from Zev Massey, a graduating high school senior.
“My name is Zev…I want to thank you all for coming here and agreeing on a resolution. This is not related to birds. It’s related to youth and our role in politics…A lot of the kids here, it is their first time giving public comment. And, when you go home and think about tonight, I’d like you to think about the lasting impression that you left on these kids, and whether you give them hope that local politics is doing what the citizens and the future generation that will inhabit this earth want from our representatives, or whether a different taste was left in their mouth.”
The Bird Safe Ordinance second reading is June 27, 2023. It will go into effect 30 days later.
While the final version included exemptions for Residential or Mixed Use buildings under 35 feet in height and less than 10,000 square feet, designated historical buildings (landmarked and/or structure of merit), and affordable housing, and Arreguin lowered the height requirement from 100 feet to 75 feet, this makes the final outcome about 40% of what we would have had if in fact the Mayor and City Council had voted for the draft of Bird Safe Ordinance passed unanimously by the Planning Commission and the Revision submitted by Councilmember Harrison. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2023-06-06%20Item%2018%20Bird%20Safe%20Harrison%20Rev2%281%29.pdf
Considering the dreadfully awful and ineffective version of Bird Safe Requirements offered by Kesarwani and Wengraf in Supplemental 2 with only eight councilmembers present to vote (Councilmember Bartlett was absent), there were still positive outcomes.
Arreguin started with Harrison’s revision. The exemption for transparent materials under 12 square feet was eliminated, as was the use of a certified biologist. The key provision of Patterned Glazing Treatment as detailed by Harrison in her revision made it into the final version. The ordinance applies to the large mixed use projects of 10,000 square feet or greater. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2023-06-27%20Item%2001%20Ordinance%207864.pdf
SB 330 projects comply with the conditions in place at the time of application. For all other projects, no matter when entitled, the ordinance applies when a building permit is needed.
This version of the ordinance puts Berkeley a step forward, but certainly not a leader.
Those of us following the City closely continually place blame on the City Manager. Watching so much unfold in Berkeley lately, I often think we ought to be looking up the other branch of the tree, the one reflecting ambition to climb the political ladder.
I have two books to recommend, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle and Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City by Ben Wilson.
The Great Displacement follows the personal stories of people displaced by climate fueled disasters, hurricanes, wildfires and drought, FEMA buyouts and thoughts about what living in and buying properties in high risk areas means for the future.
Those houses with views Wengraf is so anxious to protect over the quality of life for present and next generations of youth sit in the high fire hazard zone, within feet of the Hayward Fault, in a hillside slide area. When disaster happens, as it eventually will, will retreat be an option on the table? Should further construction in these areas be allowed at all even now?
Will McCarthy poses the question of construction in earthquake zones in the East Bay Times article “Why the Hayward Fault is the epicenter of debate over housing goals vs. earthquake risk.” https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2023/06/13/why-the-hayward-fault-is-the-epicenter-of-debate-over-housing-goals-vs-earthquake-risk/
The second book, Urban Jungle, is a fascinating history of domestic and wild animals in cities that challenges us to plan the inclusion of nature within cities.
Both books speak to how cities filled with hardscape, buildings, pavements, roads and no place for nature leave us unprepared for the upheaval we can expect from global warming and climate fueled disasters.
Those of us who are concerned about the future of the children and teenagers who showed up for the Bird Safe Ordinance and future generations have a full plate of work in front of us.
June 11, 2023
Berkeley holds a special place deserved or not as a city of liberal / progressive ideas and politics.
I’ve read every letter/email sent to City Council that I could find (total 193) in “records online” and only two out of that stack were in opposition to Bird Safe Ordinance passed by the Planning Commission and the Revision submitted by Councilmember Harrison.
On May 19, 2023 when the Bird Safe Ordinance still included residential on a phase-in schedule and before Councilmembers Kesarwani and Wengraf submitted their alternate proposal as Supplemental 2 to exempt residential properties and glass under 12 square feet in area, Dr. Scott Loss author of the scientific paper referenced and quoted by the Planning Department and later in the alternate ordinance from Kesarwani and Wengraf) wrote:
“[M]y lab has studied the bird-window collision issue and solutions to address it, for the last decade. In 2014, I published a highly cited and publicized paper estimating that up to 1 billion birds annually die from bird-window collisions in the U.S. alone, making this one of the top threats affecting our native bird populations. In fact, bird-window collisions are such a major threat to our birds that making buildings and window safe for birds was identified in 2019 as #1 in a list of 7 simple actions to help birds and halt and reverse the decline of North America’s bird populations. [underlining by Dr. Loss]
Individual property owners can make a difference in addressing the bird-window collision issue by treating their glass windows with commercial products (e.g. films and markers placed over glass and do-it-yourself solutions). However, making major inroads to broadly address this issue requires political buy-in and policies that provide guidelines for making buildings more bird-friendly, thus addressing this issue at a meaningful scale that greatly benefits declining bird populations. Policies such as the Bird Safe Berkeley Ordinance are absolutely crucial for reducing bird collisions, and voting to pass this ordinance would immediately make Berkeley a global leader and beacon for environmental action, and a role model for other cities around the U.S. and worldwide.”
The June 6, 2023 email from Peter Saenger, Acopian Ornithological Specialist at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania sent to Council at 11:16 am is best described as a slap down of Kesarwani and Wengraf.
“Dear Council
It has come to my attention that there are two major misstatements being pushed by some of your members.
1)“Research to date has not determined what bird-safe measures are effective for low-rise residential structures.”
[Response] How to effectively mitigate bird-wind collisions anywhere, especially low-rise and residential buildings have been scientifically tested and proven for decades. A simple search of the web for “the 2 x 4 rule” or reading one of the countless per-reviewed papers on what works and what does not will show this is true. A short example on this topic is attached. [email and article in records online Supplemental Communications 3]
2)“Data on the Efficacy of Bird-Safe Glass is Not Based on Western U.S. Bird Species.” And “may have created a bias in the effectiveness of recommended mitigations measures.”
[Response] Again, someone is not doing their homework. There are peer-reviewed, published studies on bird-window collisions from every continent, other than antarctica. Collisions do vary between different species, but this is a world-wide issue and what works to mitigate collisions in the eastern US, also works in the Western US, England, Australia, China, Korea, etc. Again, a search of the web will find studies done along the west coast.”
Saenger named two west coast articles “Preventing Bird-Window Collisions – Seattle Audubon” and the NIH published paper “Bird-Window Collisions at a West-Coast Urban Park Museum: Analyses of Bird Biology and Window Attributes from Golden Gate Park, San Francisco” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26731417/
The most interesting finding in the article Saenger attached is that Acopian Blinds, the DIY inexpensive project of parachute cord (researchers use olive colored) hung 3.5 inches apart the full length of the window is an incredibly effective treatment (95% effective) to deter bird-window collisions. Erin Diehm uses this method on the window where she had a bird strike.
Glenn Philips, Executive Director Golden Gate Audubon countered that there are no options for single family houses and residential buildings and cost assumptions with, most standard and single and double-hung windows include a full external screen and add no additional cost (these are compliant with the ordinance) and that bird safe glass adds about 8% to the total cost of the window.
The total responses to Berkeley Considers on the Bird Safe Glass Ordinance were 462, 85.1% yes (393), 12.8% no (58) and 2.4% (11) other. The opposition cited cost, quoted disinformation that bird safe glass is not energy efficient, regaled against regulations, called the ordinance, green washing, nimbyism, called for attention to homelessness and crime and that cats kill more birds than bird-glass collisions (Aurora, Illinois has an ordinance on that cat problem).
The first commenters on the Bird Safe Ordinance were Niko age five and August.
When six-year old August was lifted to the microphone by his mother to speak on saving birds, what came out was “I’m scared, I’m really scared.” He had what probably felt like an eternity for his fear to build. It was almost three hours of waiting to speak in a room full of strangers with a City Council looming in front of him on the elevated dais looking down. He had every reason to be afraid.
As a young child his fear was in the moment without the sense of how the earth is changing and really quite sick according to Joyeeta Gupta co-chair of the report referenced by Steve Newman in the Chronicle on the Sunday, June 4, 2023. Steve Newman started Earthweek: a diary of a planet with “Ailing Earth A report says Earth has exceeded seven out of eight key ecological stability limits pushing it into the ‘danger’ zone.’”
The report in the journal Nature in Earthweek a “Safe and just Earth system boundaries” is dense with explanations, charts and a world map of hotspots with a part of California along the coast and into the valley in deep red (a hotspot). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06083-8
The easier to read summary in Common Dreams lists the eight boundaries; 1) earth surface temperature (climate), 2) natural ecosystem (biosphere), 3) functional integrity (biosphere), 4) surface water (water), 5) groundwater (water), 6) nitrogen (nutrient cycles), 7) Phosphorus (nutrient cycles) and 8) aerosol loading (atmosphere). https://www.commondreams.org/news/planetary-health-failing-7-of-8-earth-system-boundaries-crossed
The boundary that wasn’t breached was aerosol loading/atmosphere, though New York might disagree on that assessment with smoke turning the sky orange from hundreds of wildfires burning out of control in Canada. https://www.commondreams.org/news/planetary-health-failing-7-of-8-earth-system-boundaries-crossed
There was more bad news on June 6, the day of the council vote on the Bird Safe Ordinance. Another climate milestone could come in the 2030s about a decade sooner than anticipated, ice free Arctic summers. This is very bad news as ice reflects the heat of the sun, a dark open ocean absorbs the heat creating a feedback loop (amplification) speeding up global warming. The Arctic is already warming two to seven times faster than the rest of the planet depending on the day and which study or article one picks up.
The Arctic Ice cap for thousands of years acted to keep the world’s climate in balance. With losing that moderating force the jet stream has slipped off the top of the planet. This week the jet stream is drooping down to Mexico bringing cold weather south that should have stayed in the Arctic. It’s June and some of my friends say they are still using their heaters.
The staff presentation followed the children.
Mayor Arreguin immediately turned to public comment after the brief presentation from Justin Horner, Associate Planner, Planning Department leaving speakers to guess what kind of watering down grand compromise Arreguin would propose. Representatives from the Planning Commission were not invited to the table to present.
Jordon Klein, Director of Planning and Development, said the Planning Department would work with whatever was decided.
Glenn Philips, Executive Director of the Audubon Society was able to speak for 4 minutes by gathering volunteers to give him their minute.
After public comment closed Arreguin kicked off his comments with the need to build 15,000 units of housing in Berkeley (the actual number in the Housing Element is 8,934).
Councilmember Harrison spoke to her Revision, then she said “There's a cost by doing the right thing in the environment. Everyone wants to solve the climate and diversity problem. They want to solve with other people sacrificing. We are the problem. We use too much plastic. As Councilmember Hahn tried to deal with. We drive too much. We eat too much meat. We are the problem. When this thing comes up, it is kind of hard. It is harder when our planet dies and our children can't live.”
It was evident that Councilmembers Kesarwani and Wengraf did not read the letters from the scientists or if they read them, they chose to ignore the information.
Wengraf finally got around to her priority at 10:29 pm. “I have to say I was disappointed to find out the Planning Commission did not discuss the impact of views when they discussed the bird safe ordinance. Many of my constituents live in homes with views and most of the options for bird safe glass would impact the human experience of looking through that glass. They're patterns or etched, the tape would interfere with the view, the film would interfere with the view. The only option that might not interfere with the view is the most expensive option which is UV glass. I feel like that is a very important thing that was not discussed at the Planning Commission and it is important to me as someone who represents constituents who have properties with views and those views are worth a lot of money. And imposing an ordinance that would impact them would have financial implications and also quality of life implications.” [Emphasis added]
The high school and college students who came to speak in favor of the Bird Safe Ordinance from the Planning Commission and Councilmember Harrison and stayed for the final vote are angry and they should be. They are left with the mess, an overheated planet, collapsing biodiversity and a Mayor and City Council that are more concerned about views than the quality of life for their generation and the next generations.
The evening ended with the last comment from Zev Massey, a graduating high school senior.
“My name is Zev…I want to thank you all for coming here and agreeing on a resolution. This is not related to birds it’s related to youth and our role in politics…A lot of the kids here, it is their first time giving public comment. And, when you go home and think about tonight, I’d like you to think about the lasting impression that you left on these kids and whether you give them and restored their hope that local politics is doing what the citizens and what the future generation that will inhabit this earth and what we want from our representatives or whether a different taste was left in their mouth.”
The Bird Safe Ordinance second reading is June 27, 2023. It will go into effect 30 days later.
While the final version included exemptions for Residential or Mixed Use buildings under 35 feet in height and less than 10,000 square feet, designated historical buildings (landmarked and/or structure of merit), and affordable housing and Arreguin lowered the height requirement from 100 feet to 75 feet, this makes the final outcome about 40% of what we would have had if in fact the Mayor and City Council had voted for Bird Safe Ordinance passed unanimously by the Planning Commission and the Revision submitted by Councilmember Harrison. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2023-06-06%20Item%2018%20Bird%20Safe%20Harrison%20Rev2%281%29.pdf
Considering the dreadfully awful and ineffective version of Bird Safe Requirements from Kesarwani and Wengraf in Supplemental 2 and only eight councilmembers present to vote (Councilmember Bartlett was absent), there were still positive outcomes.
Arreguin started with Harrison’s Revision. The exemption for transparent materials under 12 square feet was eliminated as was the use of a certified biologist. The Key provision of Patterned Glazing Treatment as detailed by Harrison in her Revision made it into the final version. The ordinance applies to the large mixed use projects of 10,000 square feet or greater. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2023-06-27%20Item%2001%20Ordinance%207864.pdf
SB 330 projects abide by the conditions in place at the time of application. For all other projects no matter when entitled, the ordinance applies when the building permit is exercised.
This places Berkeley as making a stride forward, but certainly not a leader.
Those of us following the City closely continually place blame on the City Manager. Watching so much unfold in Berkeley, I often think we ought to be looking up the other branch of the tree, the one filled with ambition to climb the political ladder.
I have two books to recommend, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle and Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City by Ben Wilson.
The Great Displacement follows the personal stories of people displaced by climate fueled disasters, hurricanes, wildfires and drought, FEMA buyouts and thoughts about what living in and buying properties in high risk areas means for the future.
Those houses with views Wengraf is so anxious to protect over the quality of life for the present and next generations of youth, will eventually succumb to fire, earthquake or mudslides. When that happens will retreat be an option on the table? Or, should further construction in these areas be allowed at all even now?
Will McCarthy poses the question of construction in earthquake zones in the East Bay Times article “Why the Hayward Fault is the epicenter of debate over housing goals vs. earthquake risk.” https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2023/06/13/why-the-hayward-fault-is-the-epicenter-of-debate-over-housing-goals-vs-earthquake-risk/
The other book, Urban Jungle is a fascinating history of domestic and wild animals in cities that challenges us to plan the inclusion of nature within cities.
Both books speak to how cities filled with hardscape, buildings, pavements, roads and no place for nature leave us unprepared for the upheaval we can expect from global warming and climate fueled disasters.
Those of us who are concerned about the future of the children and teenagers who showed up for the Bird Safe Ordinance and future generations have a full plate of work in front of us.
Berkeley holds a special place deserved or not as a city of liberal / progressive ideas and politics.
I’ve read every letter/email sent to City Council that I could find (total 193) in “records online” and only two out of that stack were in opposition to Bird Safe Ordinance passed by the Planning Commission and the Revision submitted by Councilmember Harrison.
On May 19, 2023 when the Bird Safe Ordinance still included residential on a phase-in schedule and before Councilmembers Kesarwani and Wengraf submitted their alternate proposal as Supplemental 2 to exempt residential properties and glass under 12 square feet in area, Dr. Scott Loss author of the scientific paper referenced and quoted by the Planning Department and later in the alternate ordinance from Kesarwani and Wengraf) wrote:
“[M]y lab has studied the bird-window collision issue and solutions to address it, for the last decade. In 2014, I published a highly cited and publicized paper estimating that up to 1 billion birds annually die from bird-window collisions in the U.S. alone, making this one of the top threats affecting our native bird populations. In fact, bird-window collisions are such a major threat to our birds that making buildings and window safe for birds was identified in 2019 as #1 in a list of 7 simple actions to help birds and halt and reverse the decline of North America’s bird populations. [underlining by Dr. Loss]
Individual property owners can make a difference in addressing the bird-window collision issue by treating their glass windows with commercial products (e.g. films and markers placed over glass and do-it-yourself solutions). However, making major inroads to broadly address this issue requires political buy-in and policies that provide guidelines for making buildings more bird-friendly, thus addressing this issue at a meaningful scale that greatly benefits declining bird populations. Policies such as the Bird Safe Berkeley Ordinance are absolutely crucial for reducing bird collisions, and voting to pass this ordinance would immediately make Berkeley a global leader and beacon for environmental action, and a role model for other cities around the U.S. and worldwide.”
The June 6, 2023 email from Peter Saenger, Acopian Ornithological Specialist at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania sent to Council at 11:16 am is best described as a slap down of Kesarwani and Wengraf.
“Dear Council
It has come to my attention that there are two major misstatements being pushed by some of your members.
1)“Research to date has not determined what bird-safe measures are effective for low-rise residential structures.”
[Response] How to effectively mitigate bird-wind collisions anywhere, especially low-rise and residential buildings have been scientifically tested and proven for decades. A simple search of the web for “the 2 x 4 rule” or reading one of the countless per-reviewed papers on what works and what does not will show this is true. A short example on this topic is attached. [email and article in records online Supplemental Communications 3]
2)“Data on the Efficacy of Bird-Safe Glass is Not Based on Western U.S. Bird Species.” And “may have created a bias in the effectiveness of recommended mitigations measures.”
[Response] Again, someone is not doing their homework. There are peer-reviewed, published studies on bird-window collisions from every continent, other than antarctica. Collisions do vary between different species, but this is a world-wide issue and what works to mitigate collisions in the eastern US, also works in the Western US, England, Australia, China, Korea, etc. Again, a search of the web will find studies done along the west coast.”
Saenger named two west coast articles “Preventing Bird-Window Collisions – Seattle Audubon” and the NIH published paper “Bird-Window Collisions at a West-Coast Urban Park Museum: Analyses of Bird Biology and Window Attributes from Golden Gate Park, San Francisco” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26731417/
The most interesting finding in the article Saenger attached is that Acopian Blinds, the DIY inexpensive project of parachute cord (researchers use olive colored) hung 3.5 inches apart the full length of the window is an incredibly effective treatment (95% effective) to deter bird-window collisions. Erin Diehm uses this method on the window where she had a bird strike.
Glenn Philips, Executive Director Golden Gate Audubon countered that there are no options for single family houses and residential buildings and cost assumptions with, most standard and single and double-hung windows include a full external screen and add no additional cost (these are compliant with the ordinance) and that bird safe glass adds about 8% to the total cost of the window.
The total responses to Berkeley Considers on the Bird Safe Glass Ordinance were 462, 85.1% yes (393), 12.8% no (58) and 2.4% (11) other. The opposition cited cost, quoted disinformation that bird safe glass is not energy efficient, regaled against regulations, called the ordinance, green washing, nimbyism, called for attention to homelessness and crime and that cats kill more birds than bird-glass collisions (Aurora, Illinois has an ordinance on that cat problem).
The first commenters on the Bird Safe Ordinance were Niko age five and August.
When six-year old August was lifted to the microphone by his mother to speak on saving birds, what came out was “I’m scared, I’m really scared.” He had what probably felt like an eternity for his fear to build. It was almost three hours of waiting to speak in a room full of strangers with a City Council looming in front of him on the elevated dais looking down. He had every reason to be afraid.
As a young child his fear was in the moment without the sense of how the earth is changing and really quite sick according to Joyeeta Gupta co-chair of the report referenced by Steve Newman in the Chronicle on the Sunday, June 4, 2023. Steve Newman started Earthweek: a diary of a planet with “Ailing Earth A report says Earth has exceeded seven out of eight key ecological stability limits pushing it into the ‘danger’ zone.’”
The report in the journal Nature in Earthweek a “Safe and just Earth system boundaries” is dense with explanations, charts and a world map of hotspots with a part of California along the coast and into the valley in deep red (a hotspot). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06083-8
The easier to read summary in Common Dreams lists the eight boundaries; 1) earth surface temperature (climate), 2) natural ecosystem (biosphere), 3) functional integrity (biosphere), 4) surface water (water), 5) groundwater (water), 6) nitrogen (nutrient cycles), 7) Phosphorus (nutrient cycles) and 8) aerosol loading (atmosphere). https://www.commondreams.org/news/planetary-health-failing-7-of-8-earth-system-boundaries-crossed
The boundary that wasn’t breached was aerosol loading/atmosphere, though New York might disagree on that assessment with smoke turning the sky orange from hundreds of wildfires burning out of control in Canada. https://www.commondreams.org/news/planetary-health-failing-7-of-8-earth-system-boundaries-crossed
There was more bad news on June 6, the day of the council vote on the Bird Safe Ordinance. Another climate milestone could come in the 2030s about a decade sooner than anticipated, ice free Arctic summers. This is very bad news as ice reflects the heat of the sun, a dark open ocean absorbs the heat creating a feedback loop (amplification) speeding up global warming. The Arctic is already warming two to seven times faster than the rest of the planet depending on the day and which study or article one picks up.
The Arctic Ice cap for thousands of years acted to keep the world’s climate in balance. With losing that moderating force the jet stream has slipped off the top of the planet. This week the jet stream is drooping down to Mexico bringing cold weather south that should have stayed in the Arctic. It’s June and some of my friends say they are still using their heaters.
The staff presentation followed the children.
Mayor Arreguin immediately turned to public comment after the brief presentation from Justin Horner, Associate Planner, Planning Department leaving speakers to guess what kind of watering down grand compromise Arreguin would propose. Representatives from the Planning Commission were not invited to the table to present.
Jordon Klein, Director of Planning and Development, said the Planning Department would work with whatever was decided.
Glenn Philips, Executive Director of the Audubon Society was able to speak for 4 minutes by gathering volunteers to give him their minute.
After public comment closed Arreguin kicked off his comments with the need to build 15,000 units of housing in Berkeley (the actual number in the Housing Element is 8,934).
Councilmember Harrison spoke to her Revision, then she said “There's a cost by doing the right thing in the environment. Everyone wants to solve the climate and diversity problem. They want to solve with other people sacrificing. We are the problem. We use too much plastic. As Councilmember Hahn tried to deal with. We drive too much. We eat too much meat. We are the problem. When this thing comes up, it is kind of hard. It is harder when our planet dies and our children can't live.”
It was evident that Councilmembers Kesarwani and Wengraf did not read the letters from the scientists or if they read them, they chose to ignore the information.
Wengraf finally got around to her priority at 10:29 pm. “I have to say I was disappointed to find out the Planning Commission did not discuss the impact of views when they discussed the bird safe ordinance. Many of my constituents live in homes with views and most of the options for bird safe glass would impact the human experience of looking through that glass. They're patterns or etched, the tape would interfere with the view, the film would interfere with the view. The only option that might not interfere with the view is the most expensive option which is UV glass. I feel like that is a very important thing that was not discussed at the Planning Commission and it is important to me as someone who represents constituents who have properties with views and those views are worth a lot of money. And imposing an ordinance that would impact them would have financial implications and also quality of life implications.” [Emphasis added]
The high school and college students who came to speak in favor of the Bird Safe Ordinance from the Planning Commission and Councilmember Harrison and stayed for the final vote are angry and they should be. They are left with the mess, an overheated planet, collapsing biodiversity and a Mayor and City Council that are more concerned about views than the quality of life for their generation and the next generations.
The evening ended with the last comment from Zev Massey, a graduating high school senior.
“My name is Zev…I want to thank you all for coming here and agreeing on a resolution. This is not related to birds it’s related to youth and our role in politics…A lot of the kids here, it is their first time giving public comment. And, when you go home and think about tonight, I’d like you to think about the lasting impression that you left on these kids and whether you give them and restored their hope that local politics is doing what the citizens and what the future generation that will inhabit this earth and what we want from our representatives or whether a different taste was left in their mouth.”
The Bird Safe Ordinance second reading is June 27, 2023. It will go into effect 30 days later.
While the final version included exemptions for Residential or Mixed Use buildings under 35 feet in height and less than 10,000 square feet, designated historical buildings (landmarked and/or structure of merit), and affordable housing and Arreguin lowered the height requirement from 100 feet to 75 feet, this makes the final outcome about 40% of what we would have had if in fact the Mayor and City Council had voted for Bird Safe Ordinance passed unanimously by the Planning Commission and the Revision submitted by Councilmember Harrison. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2023-06-06%20Item%2018%20Bird%20Safe%20Harrison%20Rev2%281%29.pdf
Considering the dreadfully awful and ineffective version of Bird Safe Requirements from Kesarwani and Wengraf in Supplemental 2 and only eight councilmembers present to vote (Councilmember Bartlett was absent), there were still positive outcomes.
Arreguin started with Harrison’s Revision. The exemption for transparent materials under 12 square feet was eliminated as was the use of a certified biologist. The Key provision of Patterned Glazing Treatment as detailed by Harrison in her Revision made it into the final version. The ordinance applies to the large mixed use projects of 10,000 square feet or greater. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2023-06-27%20Item%2001%20Ordinance%207864.pdf
SB 330 projects abide by the conditions in place at the time of application. For all other projects no matter when entitled, the ordinance applies when the building permit is exercised.
This places Berkeley as making a stride forward, but certainly not a leader.
Those of us following the City closely continually place blame on the City Manager. Watching so much unfold in Berkeley, I often think we ought to be looking up the other branch of the tree, the one filled with ambition to climb the political ladder.
I have two books to recommend, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle and Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City by Ben Wilson.
The Great Displacement follows the personal stories of people displaced by climate fueled disasters, hurricanes, wildfires and drought, FEMA buyouts and thoughts about what living in and buying properties in high risk areas means for the future.
Those houses with views Wengraf is so anxious to protect over the quality of life for the present and next generations of youth, will eventually succumb to fire, earthquake or mudslides. When that happens will retreat be an option on the table? Or, should further construction in these areas be allowed at all even now?
Will McCarthy poses the question of construction in earthquake zones in the East Bay Times article “Why the Hayward Fault is the epicenter of debate over housing goals vs. earthquake risk.” https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2023/06/13/why-the-hayward-fault-is-the-epicenter-of-debate-over-housing-goals-vs-earthquake-risk/
The other book, Urban Jungle is a fascinating history of domestic and wild animals in cities that challenges us to plan the inclusion of nature within cities.
Both books speak to how cities filled with hardscape, buildings, pavements, roads and no place for nature leave us unprepared for the upheaval we can expect from global warming and climate fueled disasters.
Those of us who are concerned about the future of the children and teenagers who showed up for the Bird Safe Ordinance and future generations have a full plate of work in front of us.
January 12, 2023
It has begun. The race for the California State Senate seat is on. Mayor Arreguin will be filling out his dance card in his run for State Senate. Nancy Skinner is termed out. https://cal-access.sos.ca.gov/Campaign/Candidates/list.aspx?view=intention&electNav=124
Some rumors have State Senator Nancy Skinner coming back to Berkeley to run for mayor with the rumored reason being her retirement income isn’t enough. The other rumor is that Skinner and Arreguin will be endorsing each other to change places. I hear second hand Sophie Hahn also has her eyes on running for mayor.
Barbara Lee seems to be falling for the lure to run for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat, we can expect a feeding frenzy for Lee’s House seat. I hope Lee comes to her senses and finishes out her career in the House rather than going down with a loss in a statewide race and leaving us with a list of unsatisfactory choices to fill her shoes in Congress. Nancy Pelosi endorsed Adam Schiff, but I am hearing from friends they are supporting Katie Porter. Even my out of state sister wanted to talk this week about how great Katie Porter would be as a California Senator.
Age keeps coming into the picture with President Biden who is now 80. (I do support a second Biden term though after reading Amy Klobucher’s book Antitrust I wish she was VP). Barbara Lee is 76. Adam Schiff is 62. Katie Porter is 49.
This is going to be an interesting year of musical chairs as we move to the March 2024 California primary.
I have long speculated that Arreguin’s actions revolved around his next career move. Since the holders of the money to fill the dance card weigh heavily in the real estate industry (including developers/builders/construction), should we expect more compromising sounding language from the dais that does nothing so as not to offend those campaign contributors?
There was a lot of writing from the dais by Arreguin on the appeal of 2065 Kittredge by the union workers at the last City Council meeting. In the end all that language, all those flowery sounding amendments for working and hiring conditions got them nothing. The project developer Bill Shrader with owner CA Student Living Berkeley, LLC of the international Student-Living – CA Ventures walked away with a requirement of only to turn in an affidavit when the building is done of how many union worker’s and local workers within 10 miles actually worked at the job site.
Arreguin’s Hard Hat ordinance of conditions and protections for worker’s, the center of the worker appeal was a referral to the city manager. A lot of what happens at council are referrals that leave the public believing something was actually accomplished, when it is another line on someone’s or some commission’s referral list.
The first test for Arreguin now that the intent to run for State Senate is in the open will be Tuesday evening, February 14 at the regular City Council meeting on Item-13 Citywide Affordable Housing Requirements. The vote from January 17 on affordable housing has to be redone to correct the language. Will Arreguin go for the Taplin-Humbert proposal that gives even bigger discounts through expanded exemptions to the developers than the first round on the affordable housing in lieu mitigation fee or will Arreguin stand with Councilmember Harrison’s 13b. Revised Material and look out for Berkeley’s best interests, eliminating discounts and limiting exemptions?
If you missed or forgot what happened with the first go around on changing the in lieu to being calculated by square feet instead of counted by units, that was summarized in the January 22 Activist’s Diary https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-01-22/article/50158?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-week-ending-Jan.-22-2023--Kelly-Hammargren
In case you need a brush up on housing terms, “Housing Buzz Words Explained” can be found here: https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-01-22/article/50157?headline=Housing-Buzz-Words-Explained--Kelly-Hammargren
At the Monday Community for a Cultural Civic Center (CCCC) meeting Councilmember Kate Harrison informed the group that the results of the Civic Center survey the three top priorities for the Civic Center Park were biodiversity, daylighting the creek (restoring the creek to its natural state) and seating in the park.
Thursday was the Civic Center update to the super commission subcommittee (Arts, Parks, Landmarks and Infrastructure). As all to usual for city meetings, the presentation and slides were not available to the commissioners in advance of the meeting, but they are posted now. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Berkeley-Civic-Center-presentation-design-concepts-Feb2023_0.pdf
The consultants have given up the promenade through the center of the park, but they are still holding on to bulb outs and other narrowing alterations to MLK Jr Way at the Civic Center. So far, they are ignoring that MLK Jr Way is an evacuation route. The consultants were weakly open to daylighting the creek and said they would save existing trees and develop a tree succession plan.
Landmarks Commissioner Finacom’s long list of comments on the Maudelle Shirek Building included that a new single use council chamber was deadly to gaining public support. Instead it should be a flexible multi-purpose room used by council and for other purposes. And, that with so many city and community activities needing meeting space, creating a public policy center as a new program with space should be a flat no. He also suggested adding a kitchen to make the building usable for events.
Parks Commissioner Diehm supported Finacom’s comments and added that she understood that an application for a grant on exploring daylighting the creek had already been submitted. Commissioner Cox nixed the consultants’ suggestion of food trucks and said the city should be supporting local merchants. And while he liked the idea of an amphitheater, the topography is the opposite of a natural grade for an amphitheater.
John Caner pushed a performance center with stage in the park. Wyndy KnoxCarr had questioned how the buildings would be managed. She was also glad to see that the playgrounds for children for younger and older children were together no longer separated.
When it came to my turn, I expressed my disappointment that there is not more of a connection of the Civic Center to the downtown and expanding the potential for festival space into the downtown. I also commented that so often consultants have a misconception of biodiversity and think that bringing in plants from China and the Mediterranean make it a diverse setting when what is needed to create and restore intact ecosystems is at least 70% native plants. I was surprised by the number of commenters who followed me on native plants.
Lawrence Abbott challenged the consultants to reach out to the California Native Plant Society, stating that everything starts with the plants and if nonnative plants are used they might as well be plastic because insects can’t eat the nonnative plants and the entire ecosystem collapses.
At the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission on Wednesday, Director Ferris reported that the T1 funds were short $7 million to $8 million to complete the already approved projects. I asked what happened in the intervening eight days, when Ferris reported to City Council at the special 4 pm meeting on January 31, that the T1 funding gap was $3.2 million to $4.5 million. Ferris said rebuilding the African American Holistic Center made the difference. At the Council meeting Ferris reported that the cost of rebuilding would be maybe $1 million more than a remodel.
There were many commenters at the T1 special Council meeting that the City was not engaging with the African American community. It certainly appears that with a plan to tear down and rebuild this should be revisited. With this major change in the cost estimate of constructing rather than reuse remodeling, the African American Holistic Center faces more postponements.
How the 2018 ballot Measure P funds for homeless services, are used was the subject of questioning at the Budget and Finance Committee by Harrison. She started with how does a sprinkler system in old City Hall (Maudelle Shirek Building) fit into Measure P funds when the homeless are sheltered there for a very limited time of the year. Councilmember Kesarwani asked if there was a strategic plan (there isn’t) and what it costs to shelter a person and get a person into permanent housing.
Everyone can feel better now that the Here There homeless encampment on Adeline is closed. We don’t have to face the failures of our society as we drive by and it looks better for the musical chairs mentioned earlier, but the real problem exposed at the Budget and Finance Committee is that no one representing the City of Berkeley administration present at the Budget meeting including Dee Williams-Ridley, City Manager, Peter Radu, Assistant City Manager, Lisa Warhuus, Director of Health Housing and Community Services and Joshua Jacobs from Health, Housing and Community Services seemed to have any idea of how many people are served with Measure P funds.
The projected expenditures for FY 2023 Measure P funds are $25,482,864. As I called around to check if I was on the right track that there were no reports of persons placed and for how long, I learned that one of the first things approved by the Homeless Services Panel of Experts and approved by Council was spending P funds for housing families and children and that the program was never implemented.
The other piece missing is when homeless people are housed, how many end up back on the street without shelter and how soon does that happen?
Reading meeting agendas as I do for the Activist’s Calendar and attending as many city meetings as I can to report back to you, the Homeless Services Panel of Experts which is supposed to oversee Measure P funds seems to be a pass through for how the city administration has decided to allocate the funds. What I think we should all know is how many individuals were helped by the various programs, how many were moved off the street, how many were placed in housing and how many of those placed are still in housing at six months, one year, two years and five years. And when it comes to children, being homeless as a child is the path to being homeless as an adult.
The Zoning Adjustment Board had only three items on the agenda, no big projects. They all passed on consent and the meeting ended at 7:41 pm. The big multi-unit projects including 2190 Shattuck, the 25 story project at the Walgreens site come this week at the Design Review Committee.
The book finished this week was The Complete Guide to MEMORY: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind by Richard Restak, MD. It was filled with memory exercises and the recitation of brain science that didn’t strike my interest. I almost sent it back to the library unfinished, but kept reading in the hope that the book would get better and it did.
In the last two chapters Restak veered off course from memory exercises into politics and the use of disinformation, misinformation and the corrosive effects of falsifications on individual and collective memory even quoting George Orwell, “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.”
Restak followed Orwell with comments on Russia and China and the drive to create a common vision of the past and future, to suppress alternative points of view and then moved on to the U.S. South, how history taught in school, the reported in the media and how this embeds as true in memory.
This brings us to what is going on right now in Florida to shutter access to books and classes on Black history.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders dipped into the buzz words to stoke right/conservative fears and anxieties in her rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union address. She infused her speech with “critical race theory,” “WOKE fantasies,” “indoctrination,” “radical left,” and references to transgender persons with Democrats “can’t define a woman is” all while touting Republicans stand for freedom and normalcy against crazy. Crazy seemed to be a better definition of her own view and speech. Banning books, censuring classes, and taking away the right of women to control their own bodies doesn’t sound like freedom to me.
My father used to quote Tip O’Neil, always tell the truth, then you don’t have to remember what you said yesterday. Telling the truth doesn’t seem to matter much anymore as new lies replace the old ones. The memory from yesterday is erased and filled with a new version today.
Restak did not get into how the constant lying and replacing one story with another from “the former guy” fits into memory, but for improving memory he likened it to exercise. Stop depending on our devices and focus. His advice on alcohol is if you are still imbibing at 65 stop which he followed with citing studies on the impact of alcohol on heart rate, irregular heart rhythms and blood pressure and finished with alcohol is toxic to the brain.
It has begun. The race for the California State Senate seat is on. Mayor Arreguin will be filling out his dance card in his run for State Senate. Nancy Skinner is termed out. https://cal-access.sos.ca.gov/Campaign/Candidates/list.aspx?view=intention&electNav=124
Some rumors have State Senator Nancy Skinner coming back to Berkeley to run for mayor with the rumored reason being her retirement income isn’t enough. The other rumor is that Skinner and Arreguin will be endorsing each other to change places. I hear second hand Sophie Hahn also has her eyes on running for mayor.
Barbara Lee seems to be falling for the lure to run for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat, we can expect a feeding frenzy for Lee’s House seat. I hope Lee comes to her senses and finishes out her career in the House rather than going down with a loss in a statewide race and leaving us with a list of unsatisfactory choices to fill her shoes in Congress. Nancy Pelosi endorsed Adam Schiff, but I am hearing from friends they are supporting Katie Porter. Even my out of state sister wanted to talk this week about how great Katie Porter would be as a California Senator.
Age keeps coming into the picture with President Biden who is now 80. (I do support a second Biden term though after reading Amy Klobucher’s book Antitrust I wish she was VP). Barbara Lee is 76. Adam Schiff is 62. Katie Porter is 49.
This is going to be an interesting year of musical chairs as we move to the March 2024 California primary.
I have long speculated that Arreguin’s actions revolved around his next career move. Since the holders of the money to fill the dance card weigh heavily in the real estate industry (including developers/builders/construction), should we expect more compromising sounding language from the dais that does nothing so as not to offend those campaign contributors?
There was a lot of writing from the dais by Arreguin on the appeal of 2065 Kittredge by the union workers at the last City Council meeting. In the end all that language, all those flowery sounding amendments for working and hiring conditions got them nothing. The project developer Bill Shrader with owner CA Student Living Berkeley, LLC of the international Student-Living – CA Ventures walked away with a requirement of only to turn in an affidavit when the building is done of how many union worker’s and local workers within 10 miles actually worked at the job site.
Arreguin’s Hard Hat ordinance of conditions and protections for worker’s, the center of the worker appeal was a referral to the city manager. A lot of what happens at council are referrals that leave the public believing something was actually accomplished, when it is another line on someone’s or some commission’s referral list.
The first test for Arreguin now that the intent to run for State Senate is in the open will be Tuesday evening, February 14 at the regular City Council meeting on Item-13 Citywide Affordable Housing Requirements. The vote from January 17 on affordable housing has to be redone to correct the language. Will Arreguin go for the Taplin-Humbert proposal that gives even bigger discounts through expanded exemptions to the developers than the first round on the affordable housing in lieu mitigation fee or will Arreguin stand with Councilmember Harrison’s 13b. Revised Material and look out for Berkeley’s best interests, eliminating discounts and limiting exemptions?
If you missed or forgot what happened with the first go around on changing the in lieu to being calculated by square feet instead of counted by units, that was summarized in the January 22 Activist’s Diary https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-01-22/article/50158?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-week-ending-Jan.-22-2023--Kelly-Hammargren
In case you need a brush up on housing terms, “Housing Buzz Words Explained” can be found here: https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-01-22/article/50157?headline=Housing-Buzz-Words-Explained--Kelly-Hammargren
At the Monday Community for a Cultural Civic Center (CCCC) meeting Councilmember Kate Harrison informed the group that the results of the Civic Center survey the three top priorities for the Civic Center Park were biodiversity, daylighting the creek (restoring the creek to its natural state) and seating in the park.
Thursday was the Civic Center update to the super commission subcommittee (Arts, Parks, Landmarks and Infrastructure). As all to usual for city meetings, the presentation and slides were not available to the commissioners in advance of the meeting, but they are posted now. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Berkeley-Civic-Center-presentation-design-concepts-Feb2023_0.pdf
The consultants have given up the promenade through the center of the park, but they are still holding on to bulb outs and other narrowing alterations to MLK Jr Way at the Civic Center. So far, they are ignoring that MLK Jr Way is an evacuation route. The consultants were weakly open to daylighting the creek and said they would save existing trees and develop a tree succession plan.
Landmarks Commissioner Finacom’s long list of comments on the Maudelle Shirek Building included that a new single use council chamber was deadly to gaining public support. Instead it should be a flexible multi-purpose room used by council and for other purposes. And, that with so many city and community activities needing meeting space, creating a public policy center as a new program with space should be a flat no. He also suggested adding a kitchen to make the building usable for events.
Parks Commissioner Diehm supported Finacom’s comments and added that she understood that an application for a grant on exploring daylighting the creek had already been submitted. Commissioner Cox nixed the consultants’ suggestion of food trucks and said the city should be supporting local merchants. And while he liked the idea of an amphitheater, the topography is the opposite of a natural grade for an amphitheater.
John Caner pushed a performance center with stage in the park. Wyndy KnoxCarr had questioned how the buildings would be managed. She was also glad to see that the playgrounds for children for younger and older children were together no longer separated.
When it came to my turn, I expressed my disappointment that there is not more of a connection of the Civic Center to the downtown and expanding the potential for festival space into the downtown. I also commented that so often consultants have a misconception of biodiversity and think that bringing in plants from China and the Mediterranean make it a diverse setting when what is needed to create and restore intact ecosystems is at least 70% native plants. I was surprised by the number of commenters who followed me on native plants.
Lawrence Abbott challenged the consultants to reach out to the California Native Plant Society, stating that everything starts with the plants and if nonnative plants are used they might as well be plastic because insects can’t eat the nonnative plants and the entire ecosystem collapses.
At the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission on Wednesday, Director Ferris reported that the T1 funds were short $7 million to $8 million to complete the already approved projects. I asked what happened in the intervening eight days, when Ferris reported to City Council at the special 4 pm meeting on January 31, that the T1 funding gap was $3.2 million to $4.5 million. Ferris said rebuilding the African American Holistic Center made the difference. At the Council meeting Ferris reported that the cost of rebuilding would be maybe $1 million more than a remodel.
There were many commenters at the T1 special Council meeting that the City was not engaging with the African American community. It certainly appears that with a plan to tear down and rebuild this should be revisited. With this major change in the cost estimate of constructing rather than reuse remodeling, the African American Holistic Center faces more postponements.
How the 2018 ballot Measure P funds for homeless services, are used was the subject of questioning at the Budget and Finance Committee by Harrison. She started with how does a sprinkler system in old City Hall (Maudelle Shirek Building) fit into Measure P funds when the homeless are sheltered there for a very limited time of the year. Councilmember Kesarwani asked if there was a strategic plan (there isn’t) and what it costs to shelter a person and get a person into permanent housing.
Everyone can feel better now that the Here There homeless encampment on Adeline is closed. We don’t have to face the failures of our society as we drive by and it looks better for the musical chairs mentioned earlier, but the real problem exposed at the Budget and Finance Committee is that no one representing the City of Berkeley administration present at the Budget meeting including Dee Williams-Ridley, City Manager, Peter Radu, Assistant City Manager, Lisa Warhuus, Director of Health Housing and Community Services and Joshua Jacobs from Health, Housing and Community Services seemed to have any idea of how many people are served with Measure P funds.
The projected expenditures for FY 2023 Measure P funds are $25,482,864. As I called around to check if I was on the right track that there were no reports of persons placed and for how long, I learned that one of the first things approved by the Homeless Services Panel of Experts and approved by Council was spending P funds for housing families and children and that the program was never implemented.
The other piece missing is when homeless people are housed, how many end up back on the street without shelter and how soon does that happen?
Reading meeting agendas as I do for the Activist’s Calendar and attending as many city meetings as I can to report back to you, the Homeless Services Panel of Experts which is supposed to oversee Measure P funds seems to be a pass through for how the city administration has decided to allocate the funds. What I think we should all know is how many individuals were helped by the various programs, how many were moved off the street, how many were placed in housing and how many of those placed are still in housing at six months, one year, two years and five years. And when it comes to children, being homeless as a child is the path to being homeless as an adult.
The Zoning Adjustment Board had only three items on the agenda, no big projects. They all passed on consent and the meeting ended at 7:41 pm. The big multi-unit projects including 2190 Shattuck, the 25 story project at the Walgreens site come this week at the Design Review Committee.
The book finished this week was The Complete Guide to MEMORY: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind by Richard Restak, MD. It was filled with memory exercises and the recitation of brain science that didn’t strike my interest. I almost sent it back to the library unfinished, but kept reading in the hope that the book would get better and it did.
In the last two chapters Restak veered off course from memory exercises into politics and the use of disinformation, misinformation and the corrosive effects of falsifications on individual and collective memory even quoting George Orwell, “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.”
Restak followed Orwell with comments on Russia and China and the drive to create a common vision of the past and future, to suppress alternative points of view and then moved on to the U.S. South, how history taught in school, the reported in the media and how this embeds as true in memory.
This brings us to what is going on right now in Florida to shutter access to books and classes on Black history.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders dipped into the buzz words to stoke right/conservative fears and anxieties in her rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union address. She infused her speech with “critical race theory,” “WOKE fantasies,” “indoctrination,” “radical left,” and references to transgender persons with Democrats “can’t define a woman is” all while touting Republicans stand for freedom and normalcy against crazy. Crazy seemed to be a better definition of her own view and speech. Banning books, censuring classes, and taking away the right of women to control their own bodies doesn’t sound like freedom to me.
My father used to quote Tip O’Neil, always tell the truth, then you don’t have to remember what you said yesterday. Telling the truth doesn’t seem to matter much anymore as new lies replace the old ones. The memory from yesterday is erased and filled with a new version today.
Restak did not get into how the constant lying and replacing one story with another from “the former guy” fits into memory, but for improving memory he likened it to exercise. Stop depending on our devices and focus. His advice on alcohol is if you are still imbibing at 65 stop which he followed with citing studies on the impact of alcohol on heart rate, irregular heart rhythms and blood pressure and finished with alcohol is toxic to the brain.
January 5, 2023
In another time, pre-pandemic, I would be standing in line at the Shattuck Cinemas to see “All That Breathes” the Academy Award nominated documentary film of two brothers in New Delhi who rescue black kite birds. https://www.democracynow.org/2023/2/2/all_that_breathes_shaunak_sen
The ten theatres with the murals so many of us love are closed and on the demolition block to make way for 2065 Kittredge. In place of the Shattuck Cinemas once the economic engine of the downtown with over 300,000 patrons annually from the entire Bay Area and beyond, will stand student housing. It is a development many will applaud with 187 units (including four live/work and nine very low income units) stacked into eight stories with 4,993 square feet of commercial space at street level and 43 parking spaces underground. The nine very low income units qualify the project for a density bonus and added height and California Senate Bill 330 limits review to five meetings including the appeal on January 31 to City Council.
The appeal to City Council was not brought by unhappy neighbors protesting the planting of an oversize tower lording over their little houses. This appeal was brought by Adams, Broadwell, Joseph and Cardozo on behalf of East Bay Residents for Responsible Development. East Bay Residents for Responsible Development are our local skilled and trained workforce, union workers like plumbers, electricians, and sheet metal workers and local residents seeking to complete apprenticeship training. They were not trying to stop the project, they were asking for the hiring of local union trade workers, healthcare, apprenticeships and safe working conditions. You can read the complaint in pages 63 – 80 https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2023-01-31%20Item%2021%20ZAB%20Appeal%202065%20Kittredge%20Street.pdf
The applicant for 2065 Kittredge is William “Bill” Shrader (developer/builder) with CA Student Living Berkeley, LLC as the property owner which is Student Living – CA Ventures, an international investor in student housing based in Chicago with European headquarters in London and offices in Milan, Barcelona and Amsterdam. The big investors have come to town.
There was a lot that came to light. Bill Shrader, who has several active projects in Berkeley, said he ran an open shop and less than 40% of workers were union. Healthcare coverage is not provided.
The Hard Hat ordinance authored by Mayor Arreguin with councilmembers Bartlett, Hahn and Taplin as supporters which was central to the complaint as the conditions sought by the workers is so far a big nothing. The ordinance described in the September 20, 2022 City Council agenda as “Helping Achieve Responsible Development with Healthcare and Apprenticeship Training Standards (HARD HATS) Referral” languishes somewhere in the bowels of city administration as a referral to the City Manager and the City Attorney. It is a referral likely to wither and die with big money on the plate. At the very least it is months possibly years away from turning into legislation (local law).
The appellants visited seven worksites in Berkeley and sent photos of findings of unsafe conditions to the City for action. While it was acknowledged at the hearing that the City received the photos and is acting on the unsafe work conditions, the public was given no information as to the sites or the extent of the conditions.
The City Council voted unanimously to dismiss the appeal and approve 2065 Kittredge with Arreguin’s “modifications from the floor.” The added conditions sounded as though the issues from the unions were recognized. Actually, Shrader received a green light to proceed. Shrader only has to consider the feasibility of an apprenticeship program, only consider making contributions to healthcare, and make a good faith effort to hire residents living within 10 miles of the project. The only binding modification that Arreguin added and council approved is for Shrader to send an affidavit (report) after all the work is done and the building is ready for the students to move in of the number of union workers and local workers within 10 miles of the project who actually worked at the Kittredge job site.
The other big news of the week was the Department of Housing and Community Development Division of Housing Policy Development (HCD) rejected the Berkeley Housing Element for the years 2023 – 2031. The contract with the consultants Rami + Associates hired for $540,000 to “perform professional planning services” for the Housing Element doesn’t expire until May 15, 2023, so maybe they can still pull it out of the rejection bag.
The plan sent to HCD was based on an Environmental Impact Report for adding 15,001 new dwelling units, 6,067 more than the assigned 8,934. In all of the maps and charts in the Housing Element sent to HCD, not one of them showed the fault line, running through the hills, the slide areas and the high fire hazard zones where we shouldn’t be adding more housing. Nor was there any mapping of liquefaction and flood plains. These things ought to be of higher consideration after the atmospheric river put the hillside and at least one house on the move.
The day before the HCD letter arrived the January 29, 2023 San Francisco Chronicle edition published back in section E page 7, “Population in Bay Area, state continues to decline. The entire Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) and mandate for the updated Housing Element is based on enormous population growth. There is a major disconnect between the facts on the ground of declining population which is a good thing and HCD growth projections.
The January 30, 2023 letter from HCD is finally posted for the public to read on the City Housing Element Update webpage by clicking on the words “formal comments.” There is the call for upzoning (increasing density with multi-unit projects) in high resource areas (wealthy neighborhoods) and more importantly the housing element “…should include additional actions beyond housing improvements such as infrastructure,
streetscapes, active transportation, community amenities, parks, and other
community improvements...” https://berkeleyca.gov/construction-development/land-use-development/general-plan-and-area-plans/housing-element-update
It is the call for parks that I love. If we are going to add more people or even if we don’t, parks rejuvenate us. One of my favorite books An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong is #6 on the SF Chronicle bestsellers list. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer has been on the SF best seller list for months. These are wonderful books about nature. People love nature. Parks filled with birds and butterflies bring the awesome world around us right to us. Strawberry Creek Park is a magnate for people. Just imagine how lovely the Civic Center Park could be with restoring Strawberry Creek to its natural state (daylighting).
For all the bad news, the HCD rejection there is opportunity here. We should be adding and enhancing our parks.
There are times and places for entertainment. We can do a lot more with taking advantage of the BART Plaza and downtown for festivals. The times Shattuck Avenue has been closed to traffic and open for events, it was filled with people making activating the street a real thing.
And it isn’t just parks, we have our own part in nature by making connections with creating habitat for birds and butterflies where ever we live. Go back to the January 29 Activist’s Diary and read Erin Diehm’s gardening directions steps 1 to 5. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-01-28/article/50165?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-week-ending-Jan.-29--Kelly-Hammargren
In case you missed it, at the Community for a Cultural Civic Center on January 30th, former mayor Tom Bates suggested that since the Civic Center buildings (old city hall-Maudelle Shirik and the Veterans Building) are in need of millions of dollars of seismic upgrade, maybe the city should give the buildings to UC.
In the “go to meeting” of the week, the Monday Agenda and Rules Committee with the Droste proposals, one to limit public comment at City Council meetings and the other to limit legislation to one item per year per each councilmember, Arreguin kept the attendees hanging on for nearly two hours until 4:20 pm. That is when Arreguin finally said he opposed former Councilmember Droste’s measure to limit public comment at city meetings. He wasn’t even sure if it was legal. After public comment Arreguin and Vice Mayor Bartlett voted to make a negative recommendation to Council on the Droste public comment proposal.
Another important statement at the meeting was by Todd Darling who described South Berkeley as a “pin cushion of projects,” consultants as a rubber stamp for the Planning Department and the need for a better process. That the Planning Department which is dependent on developer fees selects consultants who go along with developers wishes and intentions and this is not in the public interest.
The Droste proposal on legislation will come back again. The proposal to add Youth to the Climate and Environment Commissions will show up at a future Council meeting with three options. Arreguin and Bartlett were not in favor of allowing BUSD making the appointments citing BUSD has not been filling all the vacant commission spots. What is the saying? “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” I am for BUSD making the appointments not council. Council already has nine spots.
The Commission on Disability has only two commissioners and seven open spots. We need a robust Commission on Disability with the challenges impacting the disabled community in street redesign. As stated at one of the many meetings on the Hopkins corridor Plan, there are at least as many disabled persons as bicyclists.
Pete Buttegieg was making the rounds this last week on pedestrian deaths. In one interview he noted, pedestrian deaths increased after the implementation of Vision Zero in Los Angeles. Vision Zero is supposed to eliminate traffic deaths through narrowing streets with road diets, bulb outs, bike lanes and such. https://www.fastcompany.com/90841997/this-is-a-preventable-crisis-pete-buttigieg-on-spending-800-million-to-eliminate-traffic-deaths
In the interview I caught, Buttegieg skirted commenting on vehicle design. I suppose to avoid giving the GOP more bait with adding SUVs and light trucks to their list of threats, “they (Democrats) are coming for your guns and gas stoves.”
Next time you look at an SUV or truck compare that to a car. It is that high front end that restricts visibility and hits people in the chest. These vehicles come with a deadly cost. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/07/27/study-americas-suv-jag-spurred-pedestrian-death-surge/
My own opinion is evolving as a pedestrian and a driver following the furor over the Hopkins Corridor Plan. I had a bunch of errands to run for a friend sick with COVID (now is not the time to skip that N95 mask) and drove up Hopkins from Gilman to Sutter. Hopkins is already narrow and the state of moderate disrepair slows traffic.
I made a third trip at dusk to pick up Paxlovid from Kaiser Oakland and drove back after dark on Telegraph then Shattuck. The street lighting high above the tree canopy doesn’t do much for pedestrians nearly all dressed in black. Only one cyclist of the handful had a bike light and that was in the front, not the back.
I am coming to the point where I do not believe bike lanes on busy streets reduces injuries and fatalities. In fact, bike lanes seem to give the bicyclist a false unwarranted sense of safety. That is not what the consultants, road diet enthusiasts and bicyclists what to hear.
Politicians love newly repaved streets and of course all the repaving and redesign keeps the engineers, repaving companies and transportation administration happy. It also quiets complaining residents. If you want to speed up vehicle traffic, increase traffic deaths, then the way to do it is repave the streets. If you want more people to die in an emergency then do what Paradise, California did, put evacuation routes on a road diet.
I’d like to go back to the pandemic slow streets. Maybe put an island in the middle of Monterey at Hopkins. Otherwise fix the potholes and leave the rest alone. There are plenty of other ways to spend taxpayer money. And repairing ecosystems sits higher on my priority list.
Not so long ago, a friend sent the link to the article “Addressing Climate Change Will Not Save the Planet” by Christopher Ketcham in the Intercept. Ketcham is correct. Climate change was not the cause of 69% of total wildlife between 1970 and 2018. That was us. https://theintercept.com/2022/12/03/climate-biodiversity-green-energy/
The cause of the biodiversity crisis, more aptly described as the biodiversity apocalypse is deforestation, overgrazing of livestock, monocrop agriculture, megafauna kill-off, soil degradation, habitat fragmentation, pollution, open pit and mountain top mining, depleted fresh water, toxification of rainfall, destruction of ecosystems. The constant is a dysfunctional system of perpetual growth of economies and population.
Warren M. Hern, physician, anthropologist, epidemiologist, writes that the earth cannot be saved without identifying the disease process, the diagnosis and that is Homo Ecophagus, “the man who devours the ecosystem.”
Homo Ecophagus: A Deep Diagnosis to Save the Earth is not the kind of book you will find on any shelf in Governor Ron DeSantis’ Florida where anything that might make a child uncomfortable or challenge the thinking of college students like classes on race must be removed and censured.
There is a lot in Hern’s book as he lays out how he reached his diagnosis of the disease process. Hern describes the harsh truths we wish to deny. The book is also filled with beautiful photographs, charts and stories of his travels to remote villages in South America and hiking in the Colorado wilderness.
Hern describes the tension between denial and the diagnosis, the wanting to turn away from the facts. The diagnosis is grim, humans as a cancer devouring the planet, but not hopeless if we accept the urgency and choose to act with immediacy.
Douglas Tallamy gives hope too. There is a challenge here, restoring biodiversity, restoring ecosystems. Joining the Homegrown National Park is a movement that can bring endless pleasure in the amazing world around us. Will we grab it?
The psychology professor in the nursing program in my college classes, lectured endlessly on the capacity for denial. I never believed her.
After graduation, I remember vividly as a young nurse standing in the room when the physician walked in to give the results of surgery to one of my assigned patients. It was 1970 three years before the first CT scanner was installed in the U.S. In 1970 surgeons performed “exploratory” surgery. The physician told my patient he was sorry, she had an aggressive cancer that had spread. There was nothing he could do, it was inoperable. It was terrible news, a death sentence. After the doctor left the room. My patient turned to me and said, “Isn’t it wonderful, my doctor told me I am going to be just fine.”
In another time, pre-pandemic, I would be standing in line at the Shattuck Cinemas to see “All That Breathes” the Academy Award nominated documentary film of two brothers in New Delhi who rescue black kite birds. https://www.democracynow.org/2023/2/2/all_that_breathes_shaunak_sen
The ten theatres with the murals so many of us love are closed and on the demolition block to make way for 2065 Kittredge. In place of the Shattuck Cinemas once the economic engine of the downtown with over 300,000 patrons annually from the entire Bay Area and beyond, will stand student housing. It is a development many will applaud with 187 units (including four live/work and nine very low income units) stacked into eight stories with 4,993 square feet of commercial space at street level and 43 parking spaces underground. The nine very low income units qualify the project for a density bonus and added height and California Senate Bill 330 limits review to five meetings including the appeal on January 31 to City Council.
The appeal to City Council was not brought by unhappy neighbors protesting the planting of an oversize tower lording over their little houses. This appeal was brought by Adams, Broadwell, Joseph and Cardozo on behalf of East Bay Residents for Responsible Development. East Bay Residents for Responsible Development are our local skilled and trained workforce, union workers like plumbers, electricians, and sheet metal workers and local residents seeking to complete apprenticeship training. They were not trying to stop the project, they were asking for the hiring of local union trade workers, healthcare, apprenticeships and safe working conditions. You can read the complaint in pages 63 – 80 https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2023-01-31%20Item%2021%20ZAB%20Appeal%202065%20Kittredge%20Street.pdf
The applicant for 2065 Kittredge is William “Bill” Shrader (developer/builder) with CA Student Living Berkeley, LLC as the property owner which is Student Living – CA Ventures, an international investor in student housing based in Chicago with European headquarters in London and offices in Milan, Barcelona and Amsterdam. The big investors have come to town.
There was a lot that came to light. Bill Shrader, who has several active projects in Berkeley, said he ran an open shop and less than 40% of workers were union. Healthcare coverage is not provided.
The Hard Hat ordinance authored by Mayor Arreguin with councilmembers Bartlett, Hahn and Taplin as supporters which was central to the complaint as the conditions sought by the workers is so far a big nothing. The ordinance described in the September 20, 2022 City Council agenda as “Helping Achieve Responsible Development with Healthcare and Apprenticeship Training Standards (HARD HATS) Referral” languishes somewhere in the bowels of city administration as a referral to the City Manager and the City Attorney. It is a referral likely to wither and die with big money on the plate. At the very least it is months possibly years away from turning into legislation (local law).
The appellants visited seven worksites in Berkeley and sent photos of findings of unsafe conditions to the City for action. While it was acknowledged at the hearing that the City received the photos and is acting on the unsafe work conditions, the public was given no information as to the sites or the extent of the conditions.
The City Council voted unanimously to dismiss the appeal and approve 2065 Kittredge with Arreguin’s “modifications from the floor.” The added conditions sounded as though the issues from the unions were recognized. Actually, Shrader received a green light to proceed. Shrader only has to consider the feasibility of an apprenticeship program, only consider making contributions to healthcare, and make a good faith effort to hire residents living within 10 miles of the project. The only binding modification that Arreguin added and council approved is for Shrader to send an affidavit (report) after all the work is done and the building is ready for the students to move in of the number of union workers and local workers within 10 miles of the project who actually worked at the Kittredge job site.
The other big news of the week was the Department of Housing and Community Development Division of Housing Policy Development (HCD) rejected the Berkeley Housing Element for the years 2023 – 2031. The contract with the consultants Rami + Associates hired for $540,000 to “perform professional planning services” for the Housing Element doesn’t expire until May 15, 2023, so maybe they can still pull it out of the rejection bag.
The plan sent to HCD was based on an Environmental Impact Report for adding 15,001 new dwelling units, 6,067 more than the assigned 8,934. In all of the maps and charts in the Housing Element sent to HCD, not one of them showed the fault line, running through the hills, the slide areas and the high fire hazard zones where we shouldn’t be adding more housing. Nor was there any mapping of liquefaction and flood plains. These things ought to be of higher consideration after the atmospheric river put the hillside and at least one house on the move.
The day before the HCD letter arrived the January 29, 2023 San Francisco Chronicle edition published back in section E page 7, “Population in Bay Area, state continues to decline. The entire Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) and mandate for the updated Housing Element is based on enormous population growth. There is a major disconnect between the facts on the ground of declining population which is a good thing and HCD growth projections.
The January 30, 2023 letter from HCD is finally posted for the public to read on the City Housing Element Update webpage by clicking on the words “formal comments.” There is the call for upzoning (increasing density with multi-unit projects) in high resource areas (wealthy neighborhoods) and more importantly the housing element “…should include additional actions beyond housing improvements such as infrastructure,
streetscapes, active transportation, community amenities, parks, and other
community improvements...” https://berkeleyca.gov/construction-development/land-use-development/general-plan-and-area-plans/housing-element-update
It is the call for parks that I love. If we are going to add more people or even if we don’t, parks rejuvenate us. One of my favorite books An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong is #6 on the SF Chronicle bestsellers list. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer has been on the SF best seller list for months. These are wonderful books about nature. People love nature. Parks filled with birds and butterflies bring the awesome world around us right to us. Strawberry Creek Park is a magnate for people. Just imagine how lovely the Civic Center Park could be with restoring Strawberry Creek to its natural state (daylighting).
For all the bad news, the HCD rejection there is opportunity here. We should be adding and enhancing our parks.
There are times and places for entertainment. We can do a lot more with taking advantage of the BART Plaza and downtown for festivals. The times Shattuck Avenue has been closed to traffic and open for events, it was filled with people making activating the street a real thing.
And it isn’t just parks, we have our own part in nature by making connections with creating habitat for birds and butterflies where ever we live. Go back to the January 29 Activist’s Diary and read Erin Diehm’s gardening directions steps 1 to 5. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-01-28/article/50165?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-week-ending-Jan.-29--Kelly-Hammargren
In case you missed it, at the Community for a Cultural Civic Center on January 30th, former mayor Tom Bates suggested that since the Civic Center buildings (old city hall-Maudelle Shirik and the Veterans Building) are in need of millions of dollars of seismic upgrade, maybe the city should give the buildings to UC.
In the “go to meeting” of the week, the Monday Agenda and Rules Committee with the Droste proposals, one to limit public comment at City Council meetings and the other to limit legislation to one item per year per each councilmember, Arreguin kept the attendees hanging on for nearly two hours until 4:20 pm. That is when Arreguin finally said he opposed former Councilmember Droste’s measure to limit public comment at city meetings. He wasn’t even sure if it was legal. After public comment Arreguin and Vice Mayor Bartlett voted to make a negative recommendation to Council on the Droste public comment proposal.
Another important statement at the meeting was by Todd Darling who described South Berkeley as a “pin cushion of projects,” consultants as a rubber stamp for the Planning Department and the need for a better process. That the Planning Department which is dependent on developer fees selects consultants who go along with developers wishes and intentions and this is not in the public interest.
The Droste proposal on legislation will come back again. The proposal to add Youth to the Climate and Environment Commissions will show up at a future Council meeting with three options. Arreguin and Bartlett were not in favor of allowing BUSD making the appointments citing BUSD has not been filling all the vacant commission spots. What is the saying? “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” I am for BUSD making the appointments not council. Council already has nine spots.
The Commission on Disability has only two commissioners and seven open spots. We need a robust Commission on Disability with the challenges impacting the disabled community in street redesign. As stated at one of the many meetings on the Hopkins corridor Plan, there are at least as many disabled persons as bicyclists.
Pete Buttegieg was making the rounds this last week on pedestrian deaths. In one interview he noted, pedestrian deaths increased after the implementation of Vision Zero in Los Angeles. Vision Zero is supposed to eliminate traffic deaths through narrowing streets with road diets, bulb outs, bike lanes and such. https://www.fastcompany.com/90841997/this-is-a-preventable-crisis-pete-buttigieg-on-spending-800-million-to-eliminate-traffic-deaths
In the interview I caught, Buttegieg skirted commenting on vehicle design. I suppose to avoid giving the GOP more bait with adding SUVs and light trucks to their list of threats, “they (Democrats) are coming for your guns and gas stoves.”
Next time you look at an SUV or truck compare that to a car. It is that high front end that restricts visibility and hits people in the chest. These vehicles come with a deadly cost. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/07/27/study-americas-suv-jag-spurred-pedestrian-death-surge/
My own opinion is evolving as a pedestrian and a driver following the furor over the Hopkins Corridor Plan. I had a bunch of errands to run for a friend sick with COVID (now is not the time to skip that N95 mask) and drove up Hopkins from Gilman to Sutter. Hopkins is already narrow and the state of moderate disrepair slows traffic.
I made a third trip at dusk to pick up Paxlovid from Kaiser Oakland and drove back after dark on Telegraph then Shattuck. The street lighting high above the tree canopy doesn’t do much for pedestrians nearly all dressed in black. Only one cyclist of the handful had a bike light and that was in the front, not the back.
I am coming to the point where I do not believe bike lanes on busy streets reduces injuries and fatalities. In fact, bike lanes seem to give the bicyclist a false unwarranted sense of safety. That is not what the consultants, road diet enthusiasts and bicyclists what to hear.
Politicians love newly repaved streets and of course all the repaving and redesign keeps the engineers, repaving companies and transportation administration happy. It also quiets complaining residents. If you want to speed up vehicle traffic, increase traffic deaths, then the way to do it is repave the streets. If you want more people to die in an emergency then do what Paradise, California did, put evacuation routes on a road diet.
I’d like to go back to the pandemic slow streets. Maybe put an island in the middle of Monterey at Hopkins. Otherwise fix the potholes and leave the rest alone. There are plenty of other ways to spend taxpayer money. And repairing ecosystems sits higher on my priority list.
Not so long ago, a friend sent the link to the article “Addressing Climate Change Will Not Save the Planet” by Christopher Ketcham in the Intercept. Ketcham is correct. Climate change was not the cause of 69% of total wildlife between 1970 and 2018. That was us. https://theintercept.com/2022/12/03/climate-biodiversity-green-energy/
The cause of the biodiversity crisis, more aptly described as the biodiversity apocalypse is deforestation, overgrazing of livestock, monocrop agriculture, megafauna kill-off, soil degradation, habitat fragmentation, pollution, open pit and mountain top mining, depleted fresh water, toxification of rainfall, destruction of ecosystems. The constant is a dysfunctional system of perpetual growth of economies and population.
Warren M. Hern, physician, anthropologist, epidemiologist, writes that the earth cannot be saved without identifying the disease process, the diagnosis and that is Homo Ecophagus, “the man who devours the ecosystem.”
Homo Ecophagus: A Deep Diagnosis to Save the Earth is not the kind of book you will find on any shelf in Governor Ron DeSantis’ Florida where anything that might make a child uncomfortable or challenge the thinking of college students like classes on race must be removed and censured.
There is a lot in Hern’s book as he lays out how he reached his diagnosis of the disease process. Hern describes the harsh truths we wish to deny. The book is also filled with beautiful photographs, charts and stories of his travels to remote villages in South America and hiking in the Colorado wilderness.
Hern describes the tension between denial and the diagnosis, the wanting to turn away from the facts. The diagnosis is grim, humans as a cancer devouring the planet, but not hopeless if we accept the urgency and choose to act with immediacy.
Douglas Tallamy gives hope too. There is a challenge here, restoring biodiversity, restoring ecosystems. Joining the Homegrown National Park is a movement that can bring endless pleasure in the amazing world around us. Will we grab it?
The psychology professor in the nursing program in my college classes, lectured endlessly on the capacity for denial. I never believed her.
After graduation, I remember vividly as a young nurse standing in the room when the physician walked in to give the results of surgery to one of my assigned patients. It was 1970 three years before the first CT scanner was installed in the U.S. In 1970 surgeons performed “exploratory” surgery. The physician told my patient he was sorry, she had an aggressive cancer that had spread. There was nothing he could do, it was inoperable. It was terrible news, a death sentence. After the doctor left the room. My patient turned to me and said, “Isn’t it wonderful, my doctor told me I am going to be just fine.”
January 29, 2023
Nature and gardening are restorative about halfway down is how to create habitat for birds and butterflies even in small spaces.
This was a very difficult week with more mass shootings and the terrible beating and death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis Police
The special unit Scorpian which stands for Street Crimes Operations to Restore Peace In Our Neighborhoods is disbanded now, but I expect it was built on the myth that Black men, Black boys and Black neighborhoods require tougher policing than white, high resource (wealthy) neighborhoods. The kind of policing that grew stop and frisk and exercises in power, intimidation, harassment, fear and violence. It is all justified as stopping crime. It is ugly and described over and over in books on systemic racism and disparate treatment like White Space Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality by Sheryll Cashin, A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes, Walking with the Devil: The Police Code of Silence 3rd Edition by Michael W. Quinn, The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth by Kristin Henning.
Taking away police from traffic stops for minor infractions is in the talk show discussions again along with how body cameras were supposed to stop police violence. Body cameras just give the public a record when and if they are released.
In the beating of Tyre Nichols, the police gave 71 confusing and conflicting commands in 13 minutes like yelling “on the ground” when Nichols was already pinned down on the ground. All apparently to create the narrative that Nichols was the aggressor and the police a victim. It is sickening.
Berkeley Mayor Arreguin generated the concept of BerkDOT back in 2020. BerkDOT stands for a new Berkeley Department of Transportation with the purpose of removing minor traffic violations away from policing as a method to address biased policing. Months of meetings were devoted to creating BerkDOT and then it stopped. California State law prevents implementation of BerkDOT, but that may change.
I was never an enthusiast of BerkDOT as I felt it doesn’t get to the core of biased policing, but we shall see. It does take away one method to deliver policing by intimidation and force that is imbedded in systemic racism myths and the long ugly national history of using police as enforcers to keep people of color in their “place.”
Governor Newsom declared that the climate emergency that gave us virtual meetings will end February 28, 2023 and President Biden set the date as May 11. City Council is going to stay hybrid (in-person and virtual), but all commission meetings will be in-person starting March 1, 2023. Once we go back to in-person we really need more volunteers who are willing to attend commission meetings and fill us in.
Thursday morning, I listened to podcast 123 with Dr. Osterholm https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/ and Thursday evening I listened to Dr. Lisa Hernandez, Health Officer for the City of Berkeley answer questions from Commissioner Andy Katz about COVID and masking as the Community Health Commission meeting was getting started.
Dr. Hernandez said she still masked, but she did not take the opportunity to differentiate the difference between a mask and a N95 securely fitting mask (respirator). Maybe there was an assumption that this was already known or possibly to Dr. Hernandez there is little difference in what mask is used so the generic term is adequate.
This lack of differentiation in the protection performance of the various masks and treating all of them as the same is a pet peeve with Dr. Osterholm. He is forever educating his listeners in masks, protection or the lack thereof. Dr. Osterholm reminded listeners that COVID is still very much with us no matter how much we want it to be over. There are right now 550 deaths per day from COVID.
Dr. Osterholm also gave the statistics on gun deaths, another series of tragedies. There are roughly 124 deaths per day in the U.S. from guns. In 2020 the most recent year accurate statistics are available there were 45,222 deaths from guns, 43% murder, 54% suicide and 3% unintentional. The incidence of suicide by gun at a startling 54% of all gun deaths reminded me of the chapter on suicide in Jonathan M. Metzel’s 2019 book Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland.
The Community Health Commission meeting agenda was on the annual workplan. After the introductory comments and the beginning of line by line review of the workplan, I left.
I can’t say that after attending the January 24, 2023 Zero Waste Commission, I have any better understanding of the Zero Waste Strategic Plan other than two Zero Waste Commission Commissioners were named by the presenter Ruth Abbe of Abbe & Associates as key team members of the Strategic Plan. Commissioner Christienne de Tournay is Assisstant Project Manager and Commissioner Steven Sherman is listed as Operations Analysis. From the presentation chart they are part of Abbe & Associates who was responsible for the strategic plan.
That brings another question. We need well informed commissioners to contribute to recommendations to City Council, but when is work or association a conflict of interest? Elected officials, appointees are required to submit a Statement of Economic Interests (form 700) reporting investments, business entities/trusts, property (excludes residence), income, gifts, and travel payment from third parties.
Attending as many City meetings as I do and watching commissioners over time, sometimes bias is subtle and sometimes I feel like it comes with a bullhorn. As important as that 700 form might be, membership in various organizations or association with groups and work as an employee or consultant looks to be the heavy weight on where decisions and recommendations to council land.
Attending the Zero Waste Commission, I often feel the “insider industry language” demonstrates little interest in communicating with the public and commissioners have said as much. Of course, if Berkeley is to meet zero waste goals, and all of us, the residents are part of meeting the goals, it seems to me there should be a high degree of interest in the effectiveness of communication with the public.
The Mental Health Commission was Saturday and devoted to the workplan. I did not attend.
As I wrote previously with all this water-soaked soil, now this is the perfect time to remove /pull
up non-native plants and replace them with natives that will provide critical habitat. Per Doug
Tallamy to support sustainable bird populations we need to strive for at least 70% native plants.
Anything less won’t provide the insects birds need to feed their babies.
I had planned to do this last year, but a fracture put that to an end. I am healed so before making any more gardening mistakes, I contacted Erin Diehm who has turned her city yard into a delightful native plant paradise filled with birds, bees, butterflies and little crawly bugs that become baby bird food. I know of Diehm’s gardening talent through her volunteer work to help create and maintain pollinator gardens in our city parks.
Here are Erin Diehm’s directions:
Step 1) Pull out the larger non-native vegetation that needs to be removed or at least pull them out (or cut down) enough of it so that what is left can be sheet mulched.
Step 2) To sheet mulch, completely cover the area with one or two layers of cardboard as
the first layer and, then add 4 to 6 inches of mulch (more is better). There is free mulch by the
community garden on Bancroft and at the Marina. The mulch and cardboard will kill the
existing vegetation in the ground and make pulling out stragglers (which may sprout
from the existing weed seed bank) easier in the future. Leave space about a foot or two between sheet mulch and tree trunks.
Step 3) Make your list of plants. Go to https://calscape.org/ Everywhere there are pictures, descriptions of planting conditions and plants to attract butterflies and birds. There is a whole new section under design and inspiration, Bay Area Garden Planner. https://bayarea.calscape.org/
Step 4) Go shopping, Calscape has a map and list of native plant nurseries.
Step 5) The perfect time to plant and break through the cardboard and mulch is just before a
rain.
As I spent an afternoon in my tiny yard on step 1, pulling out non-natives (wet ground helps) two things were on my mind, how can one person make so many gardening mistakes and how is it the green bin is not full yet. Of course, I wanted to jump to step three picking out my plants from Calscape and ran into some frustration that the plants I picked out weren’t available so I went back to the drawing board looking at Calscape and the list at the Watershed Nursery list of available plants. There are other native plant nurseries you can find by just pulling up the map in the website.
We live in a society that is into instant gratification. I decided I need to rearrange my thinking. Creating habitat to provide food for native bees, butterflies, caterpillars takes a little time. Like in the Doug Tallamy talks, videos and books, plant it and they (nature) will come. And, that is the reward for a little patience.
Last words from Diehm, it is true that the sheet mulching will block native bees access to the soil (70% of native bees are ground nesting), but the cardboard and mulch will break down and blocking the weeds is a real time saver to creating a healthy habitat for nature to survive. For more information on sheet mulching, see the video posted by the Bringing back the Natives Garden Tour at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0oCY59NsBc
Last week the City Council actions ate up so much space I couldn’t get back to my award to David Trachtenberg for the project presented at the Zoning Adjustment Board with the fewest native plants. I did hear from him.
David Trachtenberg emailed me that I was unfair and he is a fan of Douglas Tallamy. I call out behavior to change behavior. At the Design Review Committee (DRC) the following week, Isaiah Stackhouse presented the project at 3000 Shattuck for Trachtenberg Architects. At the beginning of the presentation before a word was said from anyone, Stackhouse announced the plant palette was changed and would be 80% native plants. A big thank you comes from this corner.
The DRC was not happy with the building design for 3000 Shattuck, though not much can be done to change that with state legislation like SB 330. This will be the first 10 story building in a neighborhood of one and two story houses. There are problems that need correction related to loading zones for this 166 unit building that when full may house somewhere between 250 and 400 people depending on how many people share a unit. Included in that 166 are 17 very low income units to take advantage of the state density bonus and bring the height to 10 floors.
The other project of that evening was 3031 Adeline. Moshe Dinar is the architect and presented the building. It is seven stories with 64 units which Dinar stated would be 25% affordable. The project has a light feel to it with all the glass and that is exactly the problem. 3031 Adeline is a death trap for birds with floors of glass corner walls. Birds don’t see glass and will fly into it as to a bird’s eye the glass is open space to fly through. There are walls of glass to reflect sky and trees. There is a fix and that is to use bird safe glass with markings/etchings that birds see.
After speaking up to these issues, bird safe glass, downward directed lighting month after month, it is a mystery as to why these hazardous designs are not addressed before they arrive at the Design Review Committee or the Zoning Adjustment Board. We had the same problem with corner windows at 1773 Oxford represented by Mark Rhoades and Yes Duffy Architects.
From what I’ve seen by attending meetings month after month, year after year doing the right thing doesn’t just happen by being asked, making recommendations. It requires pressure and strong ordinances.
Berkeley has a chance here to be a real leader in the bird safe ordinance like this city was with banning natural gas in new construction something other cities have picked up. Gas stoves are now a national discussion.
There is construction all over the downtown and none of these projects are going up with bird safe glass and it isn’t because the developers have not heard about bird safe glass. I was present at those meetings where projects were reviewed and approved. The absence of bird safe glass is that it is not required. There should be no excuse for not requiring new building projects to be 100% bird safe glass based on the model from the American Bird Conservancy. https://abcbirds.org/glass-collisions/model-ordinance/
Small projects like the window replacements I am planning when the weather warms up are an easy fix. As I learned from Glenn Philips, Golden Gate Audubon Executive Director, all I need to do is order the windows with screens on the outside. Double hung windows that open at the top and the bottom with a full screen are perfect.
Casement windows that roll out and have screens on the inside are the dangerous model for birds. Applying film can fix those windows.
I first heard of the book How to Stand up to a Dictator: The Fight of Our Future on November 30, 2022 on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert with guest Maria Ressa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpWevZ5yQz8
Ressa writes of her initial excitement and vision of opportunities in Facebook and social media. Then reality sets in and the book gets into the meat of how social media algorithms, bots, fake accounts and bloggers trash journalists and fill the space with lies, misinformation and disinformation. She gives warnings and advice in her urgent plea for integrity, vigilance and transparency.
The Philippines has the highest percentage of Facebook users in the world. As Ressa writes, Facebook carries oversize influence to the detriment of democracy.
META/Facebook not to be outdone by Twitter announced it is going to let Trump back on the Platform. Alex Wagner in her show tonight on January 25, 2023 covered the perils well. https://www.msnbc.com/alex-wagner-tonight/watch/facebook-ignores-risk-of-trump-inciting-violence-with-lifting-of-ban-161821253720
Nature and gardening are restorative about halfway down is how to create habitat for birds and butterflies even in small spaces.
This was a very difficult week with more mass shootings and the terrible beating and death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis Police
The special unit Scorpian which stands for Street Crimes Operations to Restore Peace In Our Neighborhoods is disbanded now, but I expect it was built on the myth that Black men, Black boys and Black neighborhoods require tougher policing than white, high resource (wealthy) neighborhoods. The kind of policing that grew stop and frisk and exercises in power, intimidation, harassment, fear and violence. It is all justified as stopping crime. It is ugly and described over and over in books on systemic racism and disparate treatment like White Space Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality by Sheryll Cashin, A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes, Walking with the Devil: The Police Code of Silence 3rd Edition by Michael W. Quinn, The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth by Kristin Henning.
Taking away police from traffic stops for minor infractions is in the talk show discussions again along with how body cameras were supposed to stop police violence. Body cameras just give the public a record when and if they are released.
In the beating of Tyre Nichols, the police gave 71 confusing and conflicting commands in 13 minutes like yelling “on the ground” when Nichols was already pinned down on the ground. All apparently to create the narrative that Nichols was the aggressor and the police a victim. It is sickening.
Berkeley Mayor Arreguin generated the concept of BerkDOT back in 2020. BerkDOT stands for a new Berkeley Department of Transportation with the purpose of removing minor traffic violations away from policing as a method to address biased policing. Months of meetings were devoted to creating BerkDOT and then it stopped. California State law prevents implementation of BerkDOT, but that may change.
I was never an enthusiast of BerkDOT as I felt it doesn’t get to the core of biased policing, but we shall see. It does take away one method to deliver policing by intimidation and force that is imbedded in systemic racism myths and the long ugly national history of using police as enforcers to keep people of color in their “place.”
Governor Newsom declared that the climate emergency that gave us virtual meetings will end February 28, 2023 and President Biden set the date as May 11. City Council is going to stay hybrid (in-person and virtual), but all commission meetings will be in-person starting March 1, 2023. Once we go back to in-person we really need more volunteers who are willing to attend commission meetings and fill us in.
Thursday morning, I listened to podcast 123 with Dr. Osterholm https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/ and Thursday evening I listened to Dr. Lisa Hernandez, Health Officer for the City of Berkeley answer questions from Commissioner Andy Katz about COVID and masking as the Community Health Commission meeting was getting started.
Dr. Hernandez said she still masked, but she did not take the opportunity to differentiate the difference between a mask and a N95 securely fitting mask (respirator). Maybe there was an assumption that this was already known or possibly to Dr. Hernandez there is little difference in what mask is used so the generic term is adequate.
This lack of differentiation in the protection performance of the various masks and treating all of them as the same is a pet peeve with Dr. Osterholm. He is forever educating his listeners in masks, protection or the lack thereof. Dr. Osterholm reminded listeners that COVID is still very much with us no matter how much we want it to be over. There are right now 550 deaths per day from COVID.
Dr. Osterholm also gave the statistics on gun deaths, another series of tragedies. There are roughly 124 deaths per day in the U.S. from guns. In 2020 the most recent year accurate statistics are available there were 45,222 deaths from guns, 43% murder, 54% suicide and 3% unintentional. The incidence of suicide by gun at a startling 54% of all gun deaths reminded me of the chapter on suicide in Jonathan M. Metzel’s 2019 book Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland.
The Community Health Commission meeting agenda was on the annual workplan. After the introductory comments and the beginning of line by line review of the workplan, I left.
I can’t say that after attending the January 24, 2023 Zero Waste Commission, I have any better understanding of the Zero Waste Strategic Plan other than two Zero Waste Commission Commissioners were named by the presenter Ruth Abbe of Abbe & Associates as key team members of the Strategic Plan. Commissioner Christienne de Tournay is Assisstant Project Manager and Commissioner Steven Sherman is listed as Operations Analysis. From the presentation chart they are part of Abbe & Associates who was responsible for the strategic plan.
That brings another question. We need well informed commissioners to contribute to recommendations to City Council, but when is work or association a conflict of interest? Elected officials, appointees are required to submit a Statement of Economic Interests (form 700) reporting investments, business entities/trusts, property (excludes residence), income, gifts, and travel payment from third parties.
Attending as many City meetings as I do and watching commissioners over time, sometimes bias is subtle and sometimes I feel like it comes with a bullhorn. As important as that 700 form might be, membership in various organizations or association with groups and work as an employee or consultant looks to be the heavy weight on where decisions and recommendations to council land.
Attending the Zero Waste Commission, I often feel the “insider industry language” demonstrates little interest in communicating with the public and commissioners have said as much. Of course, if Berkeley is to meet zero waste goals, and all of us, the residents are part of meeting the goals, it seems to me there should be a high degree of interest in the effectiveness of communication with the public.
The Mental Health Commission was Saturday and devoted to the workplan. I did not attend.
As I wrote previously with all this water-soaked soil, now this is the perfect time to remove /pull
up non-native plants and replace them with natives that will provide critical habitat. Per Doug
Tallamy to support sustainable bird populations we need to strive for at least 70% native plants.
Anything less won’t provide the insects birds need to feed their babies.
I had planned to do this last year, but a fracture put that to an end. I am healed so before making any more gardening mistakes, I contacted Erin Diehm who has turned her city yard into a delightful native plant paradise filled with birds, bees, butterflies and little crawly bugs that become baby bird food. I know of Diehm’s gardening talent through her volunteer work to help create and maintain pollinator gardens in our city parks.
Here are Erin Diehm’s directions:
Step 1) Pull out the larger non-native vegetation that needs to be removed or at least pull them out (or cut down) enough of it so that what is left can be sheet mulched.
Step 2) To sheet mulch, completely cover the area with one or two layers of cardboard as
the first layer and, then add 4 to 6 inches of mulch (more is better). There is free mulch by the
community garden on Bancroft and at the Marina. The mulch and cardboard will kill the
existing vegetation in the ground and make pulling out stragglers (which may sprout
from the existing weed seed bank) easier in the future. Leave space about a foot or two between sheet mulch and tree trunks.
Step 3) Make your list of plants. Go to https://calscape.org/ Everywhere there are pictures, descriptions of planting conditions and plants to attract butterflies and birds. There is a whole new section under design and inspiration, Bay Area Garden Planner. https://bayarea.calscape.org/
Step 4) Go shopping, Calscape has a map and list of native plant nurseries.
Step 5) The perfect time to plant and break through the cardboard and mulch is just before a
rain.
As I spent an afternoon in my tiny yard on step 1, pulling out non-natives (wet ground helps) two things were on my mind, how can one person make so many gardening mistakes and how is it the green bin is not full yet. Of course, I wanted to jump to step three picking out my plants from Calscape and ran into some frustration that the plants I picked out weren’t available so I went back to the drawing board looking at Calscape and the list at the Watershed Nursery list of available plants. There are other native plant nurseries you can find by just pulling up the map in the website.
We live in a society that is into instant gratification. I decided I need to rearrange my thinking. Creating habitat to provide food for native bees, butterflies, caterpillars takes a little time. Like in the Doug Tallamy talks, videos and books, plant it and they (nature) will come. And, that is the reward for a little patience.
Last words from Diehm, it is true that the sheet mulching will block native bees access to the soil (70% of native bees are ground nesting), but the cardboard and mulch will break down and blocking the weeds is a real time saver to creating a healthy habitat for nature to survive. For more information on sheet mulching, see the video posted by the Bringing back the Natives Garden Tour at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0oCY59NsBc
Last week the City Council actions ate up so much space I couldn’t get back to my award to David Trachtenberg for the project presented at the Zoning Adjustment Board with the fewest native plants. I did hear from him.
David Trachtenberg emailed me that I was unfair and he is a fan of Douglas Tallamy. I call out behavior to change behavior. At the Design Review Committee (DRC) the following week, Isaiah Stackhouse presented the project at 3000 Shattuck for Trachtenberg Architects. At the beginning of the presentation before a word was said from anyone, Stackhouse announced the plant palette was changed and would be 80% native plants. A big thank you comes from this corner.
The DRC was not happy with the building design for 3000 Shattuck, though not much can be done to change that with state legislation like SB 330. This will be the first 10 story building in a neighborhood of one and two story houses. There are problems that need correction related to loading zones for this 166 unit building that when full may house somewhere between 250 and 400 people depending on how many people share a unit. Included in that 166 are 17 very low income units to take advantage of the state density bonus and bring the height to 10 floors.
The other project of that evening was 3031 Adeline. Moshe Dinar is the architect and presented the building. It is seven stories with 64 units which Dinar stated would be 25% affordable. The project has a light feel to it with all the glass and that is exactly the problem. 3031 Adeline is a death trap for birds with floors of glass corner walls. Birds don’t see glass and will fly into it as to a bird’s eye the glass is open space to fly through. There are walls of glass to reflect sky and trees. There is a fix and that is to use bird safe glass with markings/etchings that birds see.
After speaking up to these issues, bird safe glass, downward directed lighting month after month, it is a mystery as to why these hazardous designs are not addressed before they arrive at the Design Review Committee or the Zoning Adjustment Board. We had the same problem with corner windows at 1773 Oxford represented by Mark Rhoades and Yes Duffy Architects.
From what I’ve seen by attending meetings month after month, year after year doing the right thing doesn’t just happen by being asked, making recommendations. It requires pressure and strong ordinances.
Berkeley has a chance here to be a real leader in the bird safe ordinance like this city was with banning natural gas in new construction something other cities have picked up. Gas stoves are now a national discussion.
There is construction all over the downtown and none of these projects are going up with bird safe glass and it isn’t because the developers have not heard about bird safe glass. I was present at those meetings where projects were reviewed and approved. The absence of bird safe glass is that it is not required. There should be no excuse for not requiring new building projects to be 100% bird safe glass based on the model from the American Bird Conservancy. https://abcbirds.org/glass-collisions/model-ordinance/
Small projects like the window replacements I am planning when the weather warms up are an easy fix. As I learned from Glenn Philips, Golden Gate Audubon Executive Director, all I need to do is order the windows with screens on the outside. Double hung windows that open at the top and the bottom with a full screen are perfect.
Casement windows that roll out and have screens on the inside are the dangerous model for birds. Applying film can fix those windows.
I first heard of the book How to Stand up to a Dictator: The Fight of Our Future on November 30, 2022 on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert with guest Maria Ressa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpWevZ5yQz8
Ressa writes of her initial excitement and vision of opportunities in Facebook and social media. Then reality sets in and the book gets into the meat of how social media algorithms, bots, fake accounts and bloggers trash journalists and fill the space with lies, misinformation and disinformation. She gives warnings and advice in her urgent plea for integrity, vigilance and transparency.
The Philippines has the highest percentage of Facebook users in the world. As Ressa writes, Facebook carries oversize influence to the detriment of democracy.
META/Facebook not to be outdone by Twitter announced it is going to let Trump back on the Platform. Alex Wagner in her show tonight on January 25, 2023 covered the perils well. https://www.msnbc.com/alex-wagner-tonight/watch/facebook-ignores-risk-of-trump-inciting-violence-with-lifting-of-ban-161821253720
January 22, 2023
Harry Brill once said he wasn’t much interested in local politics, it was just about real estate. He was correct. Much of local politics is about real estate. And, real estate is about so much more, where we live, yearn to live, can’t afford to live, racism, classism, profit, greed and poverty.
Developers, the real estate industry are significant contributors to election campaigns either directly or indirectly through PACs (Political Action Committees) often called dark money. For small direct and PAC investments in local elections, the public can be influenced into electing industry friendly city councils, mayors and other officials and voting for or against ballot measures. Industry friendly mayors and council members can be swayed into industry friendly legislation, discounts and exemptions. And, this background makes local, state and national politics so very interesting.
There is a lot to cover and a great deal of council actions were not good news so buckle up.
The week started with a rather tame Agenda Committee on January 17, 2023. Both Mayor Arreguin and Councilmember Hahn were absent leaving Councilmember Wengraf and the alternate committee member Vice Mayor Bartlett holding down the fort. Little happened with the agenda for the January 31 council meeting, however, the public arrived on ZOOM to comment in opposition to the Droste proposals to limit public participation at City Council meetings. The Droste proposals were in the “unscheduled list” not officially up for discussion and action. With Arreguin and Hahn absent it is unknown when the two items will be discussed one on limiting public comment and the other on limiting legislation, so concerned citizens are on the hook to keep showing up. Both proposals are explained in the January 8 Activist’s Diary. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-01-08/article/50141?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-week-ending-January-8--Kelly-Hammargren )
The Tuesday evening regular City Council meeting and the Special City Council meeting on Wednesday are connected with big implications.
This gets complicated fast and I have broken out the basics on what is RHNA, an in lieu mitigation fee, a Nexus study, AMI, inclusionary housing, AB 1505 - the Palmer Fix, SB 330 and the 2022 chart on affordable income levels separately to keep what happened at City Council on January 17 and January 18 to a readable length and give space to adding comment and to provide a separate reference for this Diary and anyone who needs it for the future.
Tuesday evening Item-21 was Affordable Housing Requirements amending BMC 23.328. The purpose of this section of the Berkeley Municipal Code (BMC) is described as to, “Promote Housing Element goals to develop affordable housing for households with incomes below the median…” https://berkeley.municipal.codes/BMC/23.328.010
Item-21 changes how the in lieu mitigation fee is calculated. Councilmember Robinson takes credit for suggesting changing the in lieu mitigation fee from per unit to square footage as one of his first actions after being elected in 2018. It was a welcome suggestion with visions of ending developers gaming the system by designing mixed-use buildings with four, five, even six bedroom units to maximize rent and minimize the in lieu fee. With an in lieu fee by square feet, there would be no need to exempt projects with fewer than five units and McMansions could also be charged a fee.
The process to change the fee was long and protracted as it was handed off to Street Level Advisors and wound its way through the Planning Department with stops at the Planning Commission on October 21, 2020 and May 5, 2021. Finally, on March 2, 2022 the Planning Commissioners approved the recommended fee schedule and sent it to City Council where it arrived another 10 ½ months later for a City Council vote on Tuesday, January 17 with several options including discounting the square footage fee back to the 2020 level instead of 2022.
So how did the City Council play out for Mayor Arreguin to get an eight to one vote when 43% of the 8934 units assigned to Berkeley to build through the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) are for very low income households (2446 units) and low income households (1408 units)?
After closing the public comment (only six members of the public spoke), Mayor Arreguin called on Councilmember Hahn, even though Councilmember Harrison had her ZOOM hand up first.
Hahn stated she supported the inclusion of all projects regardless of their size and that there is no basis for adopting the lower 2020 fee level. The fact that developers choose to pay the fee instead of providing inclusionary units indicates that the in lieu fee may actually be too low.
Then Arreguin called on himself, made his motion to accept the supplemental from Planning choosing the discounted 2020 fee schedule and exempting the projects under five units.
Then Arreguin called on Robinson who praised the motion. Wengraf followed asking questions and settled in behind Arreguin. Finally, Arreguin called on the patiently waiting Harrison who got into the meat of the proposed ordinance and the mayor’s motion asking why if the ordinance was to change the in lieu fee to square feet then why was there an exemption for four unit buildings instead of setting the exemption by size, square feet which would reasonably be around 4000 square feet.
Harrison asked what was the reasoning behind recommending reducing the in lieu fee with a sliding scale fee starting at 11,999 square feet and how were those reduced fees created? Was there any study to come up with the adjusted fees? Rick Jacobus, the Principal of Street Level Advisors (the consultant) and Steven Buckley, City of Berkeley Planning Manager, had no explanation, saying that a study was not done for the sliding scale and one would be done in the future, implying a new Nexus study.
An 11,999 square foot project could be anywhere from 13 to over thirty units depending on whether the building is filled with two bedroom units with an average of 700 square feet or small studios of 350 square feet. Or that 11,999 square foot building could be a fourplex, triplex or duplex with luxury size units of over 3000 square feet each as was suggested and rejected by members of the Planning Commission during a discussion on zoning.
From all appearances, a deal had been made prior to the meeting. Arreguin bristled at the questioning and time after time Arreguin refused consideration of any changes to his motion. Arreguin even went so far as directing his comment at Harrison and stating, “For open government purposes, I think sticking with the proposal that’s in the packet and that’s public is probably the appropriate thing. If we’re reinventing this on the floor, I don’t know whether, you know, there are Brown Act implications, so I’m not going to accept that.”
Arreguin’s statement that making modifications “from the floor” during a public city council meeting was a Brown Act violation is pretty shocking coming from someone who is forever making modifications “from the floor” when it suits him or more accurately suits those who have his ear. Modifications “from the floor” are common at City Council meetings as agenda action items are hashed out following public comment and council discussion.
But maybe the “Brown Act implications” was a slip that there have been serial meetings with councilmembers to line up behind an industry friendlier amendment. Serial meetings are a series of private meetings by which a majority of the members of a legislative body like council commit to a decision or engage in collective deliberation violating the Brown Act’s open meeting requirement.
The mayor and majority chose the fee based on net floor area with the theory that developers would be more generous with common space like mailrooms, laundry rooms, hallways, maybe even a common room with a fee calculated only on the actual living/dwelling unit. It looks more like net floor area will bring smaller units which might be a good thing depending on your point of view.
Mayor Arreguin’s Tuesday evening motion that passed with eight yes votes and one abstention from Councilmember Harrison discounted the in lieu fee back to the 2020 using the net residential floor area with an in lieu fee of $56.25 per square foot. The formula in the agenda packet placed the net floor area in lieu fee of $56.25 per square foot as equivalent to $45 per square foot if gross residential square footage had been used instead.
When I read through the old 2015 Berkeley Nexus study and calculated the gross square foot fee from the recommended $34,000 per unit fee, a fee that in 2015 gave the developers a 13.9% profit when a 10% to 12% profit was considered reasonable. That fee was $45 per square foot.
The in lieu mitigation fee essentially says to the developer, the investors in these multi-unit apartment and condominiums buildings, you cannot build on Berkeley City land and profiteer without giving back to the community. Your new building carries with it an impact on the community. You can either include in your building 20% affordable housing units with 10% for low income households and 10% for very low income households or you can pay the in lieu mitigation fee to avoid having any lower income residents in the building or some combination of the fee and units.
Berkeley is a microcosm of what is happening around the country and around the world. People who used to define themselves as middle class are priced out of housing and people who fall into what they and we define as poor are on the street in tents, sleeping in cars, living in RVs, shelters or with nothing. Yes, some are mentally ill, but it is market rate (high priced) housing and a dearth of affordable housing that keeps a stable place to live out of reach and places low income households in the precarious position where an unplanned financial emergency of even a few hundred dollars can mean the difference between being able to pay rent, buy food, pay for medications, or keep a car running that is needed to keep the job to pay the bills.
For all the wealth in Berkeley, in the years 2016-2020 (that latest available record) twenty-two percent of children in Berkeley were on SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) commonly known as food stamps. https://www.healthyalamedacounty.org/indicators/index/view?indicatorId=5749&localeId=132160
When nearly every multi-unit building under construction or planned is housing for students, what happened Tuesday evening won’t get us housing for moderate income and low income households. To secure the maximum state density bonus with the fewest inclusionary affordable units, 10% very low income units are the ticket. When the eventual day comes that there is enough money in the Housing Trust Fund to build affordable housing it is dominated by units for very low income households. Watch out for this in the BART station housing projects.
Councilmember Kesarwani started her comments on Tuesday evening referencing the Laffer Curve. That is the theoretical relationship between the rates of taxes and the resulting levels of revenue. The Laffer Curve has been a GOP favorite used as the justification that cutting taxes will spur so much economic growth, that the new growth will offset the losses created by tax cuts.
Kesarwani and I obviously went to different graduate programs. The business lectures I listened to for my MBA called the Laffer Curve the Laugher Curve meaning it was questionable nonsense, but obviously there are true believers.
That takes care of Tuesday. Wednesday the City Council voted on the Housing Element.
Kesarwani’s gift to the Housing Element with co-sponsors Arreguin, Taplin and Humbert was the supplemental to increase density and development along San Pablo Avenue and by right demolition (no one can stop the demolition) of single family homes if the home to be demolished has not been occupied by tenants in the last five years and is replaced by a middle housing project that increases density. The middle housing projects are the duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes that the mayor and seven councilmembers (Kesarwani, Taplin, Bartlett, Hahn, Wengraf, Humbert) voted to exempt from any in lieu fee on Tuesday evening.
Calling single family home zoning as racist and exclusionary is how the real estate industry and true believers in density convince cities to change zoning and open historic minority neighborhoods to development. Mayor Arreguin and the Berkeley City Council jumped on that bandwagon a year ago. Arreguin made his nod to the real estate industry and California YIMBY parroting the same banner of triumph of ending exclusionary zoning Wednesday night.
Never mind that single family zoning (R-1) in the historical Black neighborhood in South Berkeley around San Pablo Park is what protected those homes from demolition up until now. Berkeley eliminated that protection ignoring that Black families just like White families like yards where their children can play and their own space where they can gather with family and friends. Now that will go to getting on the list first to reserve a table if there is one at a park.
Segregation through housing law is way more complicated than single family zoning. It was covenants to prohibit the sale of property to any potential home owner who was other than white. It was refusing to rent to non-whites in White neighborhoods. It was redlining to define minority neighborhoods as high risk limiting bank loans, investment, resources, sinking housing values and keeping them low. Richard Rothstein lays it all out in his excellent book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.
Redlining continues to impact housing and land value in Berkeley. It was because of the former redlining that I was able to afford the house I now live in. There was a lot I didn’t know in 1990, but lots of reading, discussions, listening and the Black Panther exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California brought it all home with the map of redlining on full display that put my house right in the redlined area.
Councilmembers Hahn, Harrison and Wengraf voted against by right demolition of single family homes and lost to the majority so it was folded into the Housing Element and the Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR) which passed with a unanimous vote.
Tucked into that Housing Element and FEIR are plans to add 15,001 new housing units or 5,167 more units than the required 8,934 RHNA which many of us see as ridiculous in this city of 10.5 square miles bounded on the west by water and the Hayward Fault, landslides and high fire hazard zones in the hills on the east side. Despite this foolishness, the council promised to attack zoning to increase density. And, we can expect where all that new building will land, on the land that costs the least in a tight market.
Stay tuned.
Harry Brill once said he wasn’t much interested in local politics, it was just about real estate. He was correct. Much of local politics is about real estate. And, real estate is about so much more, where we live, yearn to live, can’t afford to live, racism, classism, profit, greed and poverty.
Developers, the real estate industry are significant contributors to election campaigns either directly or indirectly through PACs (Political Action Committees) often called dark money. For small direct and PAC investments in local elections, the public can be influenced into electing industry friendly city councils, mayors and other officials and voting for or against ballot measures. Industry friendly mayors and council members can be swayed into industry friendly legislation, discounts and exemptions. And, this background makes local, state and national politics so very interesting.
There is a lot to cover and a great deal of council actions were not good news so buckle up.
The week started with a rather tame Agenda Committee on January 17, 2023. Both Mayor Arreguin and Councilmember Hahn were absent leaving Councilmember Wengraf and the alternate committee member Vice Mayor Bartlett holding down the fort. Little happened with the agenda for the January 31 council meeting, however, the public arrived on ZOOM to comment in opposition to the Droste proposals to limit public participation at City Council meetings. The Droste proposals were in the “unscheduled list” not officially up for discussion and action. With Arreguin and Hahn absent it is unknown when the two items will be discussed one on limiting public comment and the other on limiting legislation, so concerned citizens are on the hook to keep showing up. Both proposals are explained in the January 8 Activist’s Diary. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-01-08/article/50141?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-week-ending-January-8--Kelly-Hammargren )
The Tuesday evening regular City Council meeting and the Special City Council meeting on Wednesday are connected with big implications.
This gets complicated fast and I have broken out the basics on what is RHNA, an in lieu mitigation fee, a Nexus study, AMI, inclusionary housing, AB 1505 - the Palmer Fix, SB 330 and the 2022 chart on affordable income levels separately to keep what happened at City Council on January 17 and January 18 to a readable length and give space to adding comment and to provide a separate reference for this Diary and anyone who needs it for the future.
Tuesday evening Item-21 was Affordable Housing Requirements amending BMC 23.328. The purpose of this section of the Berkeley Municipal Code (BMC) is described as to, “Promote Housing Element goals to develop affordable housing for households with incomes below the median…” https://berkeley.municipal.codes/BMC/23.328.010
Item-21 changes how the in lieu mitigation fee is calculated. Councilmember Robinson takes credit for suggesting changing the in lieu mitigation fee from per unit to square footage as one of his first actions after being elected in 2018. It was a welcome suggestion with visions of ending developers gaming the system by designing mixed-use buildings with four, five, even six bedroom units to maximize rent and minimize the in lieu fee. With an in lieu fee by square feet, there would be no need to exempt projects with fewer than five units and McMansions could also be charged a fee.
The process to change the fee was long and protracted as it was handed off to Street Level Advisors and wound its way through the Planning Department with stops at the Planning Commission on October 21, 2020 and May 5, 2021. Finally, on March 2, 2022 the Planning Commissioners approved the recommended fee schedule and sent it to City Council where it arrived another 10 ½ months later for a City Council vote on Tuesday, January 17 with several options including discounting the square footage fee back to the 2020 level instead of 2022.
So how did the City Council play out for Mayor Arreguin to get an eight to one vote when 43% of the 8934 units assigned to Berkeley to build through the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) are for very low income households (2446 units) and low income households (1408 units)?
After closing the public comment (only six members of the public spoke), Mayor Arreguin called on Councilmember Hahn, even though Councilmember Harrison had her ZOOM hand up first.
Hahn stated she supported the inclusion of all projects regardless of their size and that there is no basis for adopting the lower 2020 fee level. The fact that developers choose to pay the fee instead of providing inclusionary units indicates that the in lieu fee may actually be too low.
Then Arreguin called on himself, made his motion to accept the supplemental from Planning choosing the discounted 2020 fee schedule and exempting the projects under five units.
Then Arreguin called on Robinson who praised the motion. Wengraf followed asking questions and settled in behind Arreguin. Finally, Arreguin called on the patiently waiting Harrison who got into the meat of the proposed ordinance and the mayor’s motion asking why if the ordinance was to change the in lieu fee to square feet then why was there an exemption for four unit buildings instead of setting the exemption by size, square feet which would reasonably be around 4000 square feet.
Harrison asked what was the reasoning behind recommending reducing the in lieu fee with a sliding scale fee starting at 11,999 square feet and how were those reduced fees created? Was there any study to come up with the adjusted fees? Rick Jacobus, the Principal of Street Level Advisors (the consultant) and Steven Buckley, City of Berkeley Planning Manager, had no explanation, saying that a study was not done for the sliding scale and one would be done in the future, implying a new Nexus study.
An 11,999 square foot project could be anywhere from 13 to over thirty units depending on whether the building is filled with two bedroom units with an average of 700 square feet or small studios of 350 square feet. Or that 11,999 square foot building could be a fourplex, triplex or duplex with luxury size units of over 3000 square feet each as was suggested and rejected by members of the Planning Commission during a discussion on zoning.
From all appearances, a deal had been made prior to the meeting. Arreguin bristled at the questioning and time after time Arreguin refused consideration of any changes to his motion. Arreguin even went so far as directing his comment at Harrison and stating, “For open government purposes, I think sticking with the proposal that’s in the packet and that’s public is probably the appropriate thing. If we’re reinventing this on the floor, I don’t know whether, you know, there are Brown Act implications, so I’m not going to accept that.”
Arreguin’s statement that making modifications “from the floor” during a public city council meeting was a Brown Act violation is pretty shocking coming from someone who is forever making modifications “from the floor” when it suits him or more accurately suits those who have his ear. Modifications “from the floor” are common at City Council meetings as agenda action items are hashed out following public comment and council discussion.
But maybe the “Brown Act implications” was a slip that there have been serial meetings with councilmembers to line up behind an industry friendlier amendment. Serial meetings are a series of private meetings by which a majority of the members of a legislative body like council commit to a decision or engage in collective deliberation violating the Brown Act’s open meeting requirement.
The mayor and majority chose the fee based on net floor area with the theory that developers would be more generous with common space like mailrooms, laundry rooms, hallways, maybe even a common room with a fee calculated only on the actual living/dwelling unit. It looks more like net floor area will bring smaller units which might be a good thing depending on your point of view.
Mayor Arreguin’s Tuesday evening motion that passed with eight yes votes and one abstention from Councilmember Harrison discounted the in lieu fee back to the 2020 using the net residential floor area with an in lieu fee of $56.25 per square foot. The formula in the agenda packet placed the net floor area in lieu fee of $56.25 per square foot as equivalent to $45 per square foot if gross residential square footage had been used instead.
When I read through the old 2015 Berkeley Nexus study and calculated the gross square foot fee from the recommended $34,000 per unit fee, a fee that in 2015 gave the developers a 13.9% profit when a 10% to 12% profit was considered reasonable. That fee was $45 per square foot.
The in lieu mitigation fee essentially says to the developer, the investors in these multi-unit apartment and condominiums buildings, you cannot build on Berkeley City land and profiteer without giving back to the community. Your new building carries with it an impact on the community. You can either include in your building 20% affordable housing units with 10% for low income households and 10% for very low income households or you can pay the in lieu mitigation fee to avoid having any lower income residents in the building or some combination of the fee and units.
Berkeley is a microcosm of what is happening around the country and around the world. People who used to define themselves as middle class are priced out of housing and people who fall into what they and we define as poor are on the street in tents, sleeping in cars, living in RVs, shelters or with nothing. Yes, some are mentally ill, but it is market rate (high priced) housing and a dearth of affordable housing that keeps a stable place to live out of reach and places low income households in the precarious position where an unplanned financial emergency of even a few hundred dollars can mean the difference between being able to pay rent, buy food, pay for medications, or keep a car running that is needed to keep the job to pay the bills.
For all the wealth in Berkeley, in the years 2016-2020 (that latest available record) twenty-two percent of children in Berkeley were on SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) commonly known as food stamps. https://www.healthyalamedacounty.org/indicators/index/view?indicatorId=5749&localeId=132160
When nearly every multi-unit building under construction or planned is housing for students, what happened Tuesday evening won’t get us housing for moderate income and low income households. To secure the maximum state density bonus with the fewest inclusionary affordable units, 10% very low income units are the ticket. When the eventual day comes that there is enough money in the Housing Trust Fund to build affordable housing it is dominated by units for very low income households. Watch out for this in the BART station housing projects.
Councilmember Kesarwani started her comments on Tuesday evening referencing the Laffer Curve. That is the theoretical relationship between the rates of taxes and the resulting levels of revenue. The Laffer Curve has been a GOP favorite used as the justification that cutting taxes will spur so much economic growth, that the new growth will offset the losses created by tax cuts.
Kesarwani and I obviously went to different graduate programs. The business lectures I listened to for my MBA called the Laffer Curve the Laugher Curve meaning it was questionable nonsense, but obviously there are true believers.
That takes care of Tuesday. Wednesday the City Council voted on the Housing Element.
Kesarwani’s gift to the Housing Element with co-sponsors Arreguin, Taplin and Humbert was the supplemental to increase density and development along San Pablo Avenue and by right demolition (no one can stop the demolition) of single family homes if the home to be demolished has not been occupied by tenants in the last five years and is replaced by a middle housing project that increases density. The middle housing projects are the duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes that the mayor and seven councilmembers (Kesarwani, Taplin, Bartlett, Hahn, Wengraf, Humbert) voted to exempt from any in lieu fee on Tuesday evening.
Calling single family home zoning as racist and exclusionary is how the real estate industry and true believers in density convince cities to change zoning and open historic minority neighborhoods to development. Mayor Arreguin and the Berkeley City Council jumped on that bandwagon a year ago. Arreguin made his nod to the real estate industry and California YIMBY parroting the same banner of triumph of ending exclusionary zoning Wednesday night.
Never mind that single family zoning (R-1) in the historical Black neighborhood in South Berkeley around San Pablo Park is what protected those homes from demolition up until now. Berkeley eliminated that protection ignoring that Black families just like White families like yards where their children can play and their own space where they can gather with family and friends. Now that will go to getting on the list first to reserve a table if there is one at a park.
Segregation through housing law is way more complicated than single family zoning. It was covenants to prohibit the sale of property to any potential home owner who was other than white. It was refusing to rent to non-whites in White neighborhoods. It was redlining to define minority neighborhoods as high risk limiting bank loans, investment, resources, sinking housing values and keeping them low. Richard Rothstein lays it all out in his excellent book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.
Redlining continues to impact housing and land value in Berkeley. It was because of the former redlining that I was able to afford the house I now live in. There was a lot I didn’t know in 1990, but lots of reading, discussions, listening and the Black Panther exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California brought it all home with the map of redlining on full display that put my house right in the redlined area.
Councilmembers Hahn, Harrison and Wengraf voted against by right demolition of single family homes and lost to the majority so it was folded into the Housing Element and the Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR) which passed with a unanimous vote.
Tucked into that Housing Element and FEIR are plans to add 15,001 new housing units or 5,167 more units than the required 8,934 RHNA which many of us see as ridiculous in this city of 10.5 square miles bounded on the west by water and the Hayward Fault, landslides and high fire hazard zones in the hills on the east side. Despite this foolishness, the council promised to attack zoning to increase density. And, we can expect where all that new building will land, on the land that costs the least in a tight market.
Stay tuned.
January 15, 2023
I’ve taken to keeping an eye on the battery status of my phone and iPad, knowing that at any point there might be another power failure. It was just a little over a week ago, when I was watching the late news with a map on the screen of all the power outages, when my house and the neighborhood dropped into darkness.
Most of us are probably in the middle of precipitation whiplash watching pictures of flooded land that until December were drying and dried up creeks and rivers after years of drought. It is difficult to absorb that the future may bring storms with twice as much water as what has already dropped if we are to believe the impact of warming ocean and air on atmospheric rivers.
It may be difficult to grasp in the middle of back to back storms, flooding and mudslides that climate driven weather disasters are not our biggest threat. The biggest threat is the loss of biodiversity and the collapse of nature. And, each of us has the opportunity and responsibility to act. That was the message of Douglas Tallamy Wednesday evening at the Golden Gate Audubon Society.
In case you missed Tallamy as I did, the recording is already posted on the Golden Gate Audubon website and that is where I watched it. https://goldengateaudubon.org/speaker_series/natures-best-hope/
I confess the whole host plant and special relationship between insects and native plants was lost on me until on our way to the Y my swim partner started pointing out which yards with non-native plants were dead zones for pollinators. I thought plants were plants, you pick the pretty one and never having much gardening talent, it didn’t much matter as in my care it would die anyway. Then my swim pointed out the yards with native plants local to our area filled with activity, buzzing bees, fluttering butterflies, caterpillars lunching on their host plants.
Reading Tallamy’s book the Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of our Most Essential Native Trees filled the gap for me. Now I understand Monarch butterflies may spend their winter resting on the non-native eucalyptus, when there are no pine, fir or cedar trees to moderate winter temperatures, but unless there is milkweed on which to lay their eggs come spring there will be no Monarch butterflies. Milkweed is the only source of digestible food for Monarch caterpillars. The host relationship is the same for the pipevine and pipevine butterfly.
The meaning of ecosystems, the interdependent relationships between plants, animals, insects, fungi, organisms that work together with their physical environment finally sunk in.
It is a message that is lost on the city foresters and the Parks Department and unfortunately too many people who are in the position to give direction and make planting choices. From everything I hear and see we have city foresters who think diversity means taking plants from around the world that are drought tolerant and planting them in Berkeley apparently not understanding there is an evolutionary relationship in nature that developed over hundreds and thousands of years.
When it comes to the restoration of ecosystems, alien plants are dead zones. This matters.
Wildlife, nature is affected by climate, but the biggest threat is us, we are the biggest threat to the survival of our own species.
Tallamy started his talk with this message from E.O. Wilson, Insects are: “The Little Things That Run the World”
Life as we know it depends on insects
If insects were to disappear
1)Most flowering plants would go extinct
2)That would change the physical structure and energy flow of most terrestrial habitats
3)Which would cause the rapid collapse of the food webs that support amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals (including us)
4)The biosphere would rot due to the loss of insect decomposers
5)Humanity would be doomed!
After all this rain with water logged soil, downed trees, ruined gardens, we have the perfect setting to pull out all of our non-native plants, especially those non-native invasive plants and replace them with California natives. Tallamy emphasized not all native plants are equal and to put our sights on the plants that support the most species (available in calscape). No matter what is the size of your space for plants, Tallamy said there is a place for us in the Homegrown National Park and we have Calscape to help. https://calscape.org/
We can restore ecosystems and that was the message Tallamy gave.
Thursday evening there were seven projects on the Zoning Adjustment Board agenda with the last at 1752 Shattuck a Trachtenberg project. In my public comment, I gave David Trachtenberg the award for the evening with the project with the fewest native plants followed with that given all the projects he designs in Berkeley he should do and know better by now. When I suggested he watch and read Douglas Tallamy, Trachtenberg said he had his book. I continue to wonder if he read it given the list of plants in the project plans.
When starting fresh it should be easy to do the right thing. The plan for the 68 unit mixed-use building at 1752 Shattuck gained added height by including seven very low income units to capture the state density bonus.
On a happier note you can read “They Fought the Lawn. And the Lawn’s Done” about how Janet and Jeff Crouch changed state law in the process to change minds about native plants.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/14/climate/native-plants-lawns-homeowners.html
I attended the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission on ZOOM on one computer and captured the transcript of the Police Accountability Board (PAB) meeting through ZOOM, save transcript on another. The computerized voice capture isn’t perfect, but close enough for meeting content.
The PAB had two agenda items I’ve been following, the complaints against the Police Downtown Bike Unit which upended the appointment of Jennifer Louis from interim chief to Chief of Police on November 15, 2022 (check the November 20, 2022 Activist’s Diary) https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-11-20/article/50077?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-Week-Ending-November-20--Kelly-Hammargren and the report of misconduct by Jennifer Louis in 2017 when Andrew Greenwood was still Police Chief.
The accusation of sexual harassment leaked to the public on December 29, 2022. I might have missed it if I hadn’t turned on the late night news on KRON4. The Los Angeles Times has the most complete report, but these days you need a subscription to read it.
Jennifer Louis was accused in 2017 of sexual harassment, misconduct. After an independent investigator sustained the complaint, Chief Greenwood moved to suspend Louis for five days. Louis appealed the suspension and City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley reduced it to a written reprimand and one-on-one training. Then in 2020 according to the LA Times the report was removed from Louis’s file.
I was expecting the PAB to discuss the content of what happened, but instead the discussion was about getting the information, especially from Internal Affairs.
My questions and concerns revolve around the response by the City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley undermining police chief Greenwood and why the whole affair (employee complaint, investigation, reprimand with a letter that was later removed instead of a suspension) did not reach the Mayor and City Council and the Police Accountability Board during consideration of awarding Jennifer Louis the permanent position as Chief of Police?
Furthermore, how is it that the officer that owes a “clean” file to the city manager is recommended by the same city manager to be appointed interim chief in 2021 and “permanent” police chief in November 2022? Did this affair in its entirety, essentially a tap on the wrist, set the stage where Berkeley Police officers could send racist texts, arrest quotas, harass the homeless, and act with impunity as described by Brandon Woods, Public Defender for Alameda County at the November 15, 2022 City Council meeting? Is this City administration environment why a 20-month search for a new police chief (from the outside) turned up empty?
The Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission does not record meetings and requests for recording meetings or even turning on closed captioning falls on deaf ears. And, the description “deaf” is not used lightly. The subject of closed captioning, live transcription and allowing attendees to save meeting transcripts is the subject of the complaint I brought to the Open Government Commission that will be discussed on January 19, 2023.
Scott Ferris, Director of Parks, Recreation and Waterfront, reported a T1 funding gap of around $4,500,000 due to an increase in construction costs by about 25% and that priority projects were facilities, roads and restrooms. Ferris’s proposal to remove $300,000 from the Civic Center Turtle Island Monument Project was met with firm resistance from the Parks Commission. The estimate to renovate the African American Holistic Center is about $1,000,000 less than what it would cost to tear down the existing building and start from scratch. All of these estimates were before we feel the full impact of the destruction from our winter storms.
The list of unfinished projects will go back to the joint subcommittee of Parks and Infrastructure and Transportation and eventually City Council.
Brennan Cox, Parks Commissioner and Landscape Architect voted in the end with the rest of the commissioners to support the Turtle Island Monument Project latest design. His comments prior to voting captured the state of affairs and much that I agree with. “This has gone on too long, something should be built, I don’t think we should build something to build something…The design is not moving enough for me” Cox stated he spent a lot of time looking at monuments/memorials and went on to name some, the National African American Museum, the National Veterans Memorial, the Kindred Spirits: Choctaw Native American Monument, the exhibit by Wai Wai at Alcatraz.
When my turn to speak came I answered Martin Nicholus’ question of did the monument include a snapping turtle, I answered in the affirmative and added that snapping turtles are illegal to possess or release in California.
Ferris still has no estimate for the cost of the latest design or any timeline, though he stated that his experience shows he can get it done on time.
The next day the Community for a Cultural Civic Center met and the discussion continued. One member asked how the Turtle Island Monument represents the local Indigenous Peoples the Ohlone. It doesn’t. The Ohlone creation story is of an eagle, a hummingbird and a coyote not a turtle.
The saga continues, no cost estimates, no timeline, a T1 fund shortage. This still looks to me like Lucy pulling the football.
Before the Supreme Court ended Roe v. Wade with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, there never would have been the need for a 10-year child in Ohio to travel to Indiana for a medication abortion. While access to abortion and contraceptives is a fundamental right in California, the Peace and Justice Commission ensued researching the availability of information and access to reproductive health services for Berkeley High and UC Berkeley students. Most of the meeting evening was consumed with the discussion of the results of their research which ended in a report that will be sent to council supporting hiring two community health educators as suggested by Lisa Warhuus PhD, ORSCC, Director of Health, Housing and Community Services.
No mention was made in the Peace and Justice discussion or report of Berkeley City College students, nor did there seem to be any mention of middle school and grade school. The average age for menarche in the U.S. is 12, but some little girls start menstruating years earlier, even as young as 8. Sadly, the need for reproductive health services reaches to children.
BNC (Berkeley Neighborhoods Council) finished the week. The agenda as always is so full, we could really use two meetings to cover it all. What you won’t catch elsewhere was the presentation on the reconfiguration of San Pablo. There is an open website to submit comment. https://www.alamedactc.org/programs-projects/multimodal-arterial-roads/sanpabloave
In contrast to the City of Berkeley, the team for the San Pablo Avenue Corridor Project looks to establishing a parallel bike network. Meaning that instead of Road Diets and taking away traffic lanes, the San Pablo Corridor Project plan is to place the bike routes on quieter parallel streets.
The reconfiguration of Hopkins with removing traffic lanes, parking and adding bike lanes in front of the Monterey Market and block of businesses continues to create an uproar and for good reason. The whole redesign is justified by a fatal accident that occurred April 14, 2017 at 6:30 pm when a driver failed to yield to a pedestrian in the crosswalk. The entire redesign doesn’t end distracted driving, but it does make Hopkins more confusing to navigate for everyone, narrow an evacuation route and put the survival of local businesses at risk.
When I finish here, the Housing Element is waiting, all 1428 pages of it. It is a reading task that I have been dreading. The Housing Element is how Berkeley will add enough new housing to meet the assigned Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) of 8,934 units with 3,854 of them for extremely low income, very low income and low income households between now and December 31, 2031. It is the only agenda item for the special City Council meeting Wednesday, January 18 at 4 pm.
The draft came with adding 19,098 units, basically 14,016 market rate and moderate income to get to 3,854 affordable units and a statement to the effect that so much of Berkeley is ruined with non-native plants, we might as well cover the city with housing.
The final version is supposed to be proposing squeezing around 15,000 additional units into this 10.5 square miles we call Berkeley. That should turn Berkeley into a city of wall to wall cement. Not terribly appealing except for the land owners who can expect big profits from upzoning for bigger buildings and the developers who will build them. By the time Berkeley is built over with housing and coffee shops there might be more several more atmospheric rivers to send weather disaster refugees to our doorsteps along with the burgeoning classes of UC Berkeley students.
The reading I did finish was Revenge: How Donald Trump Weaponized the US Department of Justice Against His Critics by Michael Cohen. I read Cohen’s first book Disloyal and found the inside scoop fascinating. Revenge is Cohen’s perspective on how Trump used the Department of Justice against him. I kept reading Cohen’s second book expecting it to get better. It didn’t.
Despite this there is an important message, it is grievance politics. It is about getting even something it looks like we will be living with for the next two years with the Republican majority in the House. If Trump runs in 2024 and manages to win, revenge will be on the platter.
The stack of books on Trump seems endless and there are many that are better written and more thorough like The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 by Peter Baker and Susan Glaser. At 752 pages or 29 hours if you pick up the audiobook as I did, there is little that is left out. I am anxious to see how that book compares with the copy of January 6 Report by the January 6 House Committee that arrived this week.
Last week I wrote about Bob Woodward’s book The Trump Tapes. The podcast the Political Scene with David Remnick and Bob Woodward discussing the book, Trump and reporting is worth a listen. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bob-woodward-on-his-calls-with-trump/id268213039?i=1000594674083
I’ve taken to keeping an eye on the battery status of my phone and iPad, knowing that at any point there might be another power failure. It was just a little over a week ago, when I was watching the late news with a map on the screen of all the power outages, when my house and the neighborhood dropped into darkness.
Most of us are probably in the middle of precipitation whiplash watching pictures of flooded land that until December were drying and dried up creeks and rivers after years of drought. It is difficult to absorb that the future may bring storms with twice as much water as what has already dropped if we are to believe the impact of warming ocean and air on atmospheric rivers.
It may be difficult to grasp in the middle of back to back storms, flooding and mudslides that climate driven weather disasters are not our biggest threat. The biggest threat is the loss of biodiversity and the collapse of nature. And, each of us has the opportunity and responsibility to act. That was the message of Douglas Tallamy Wednesday evening at the Golden Gate Audubon Society.
In case you missed Tallamy as I did, the recording is already posted on the Golden Gate Audubon website and that is where I watched it. https://goldengateaudubon.org/speaker_series/natures-best-hope/
I confess the whole host plant and special relationship between insects and native plants was lost on me until on our way to the Y my swim partner started pointing out which yards with non-native plants were dead zones for pollinators. I thought plants were plants, you pick the pretty one and never having much gardening talent, it didn’t much matter as in my care it would die anyway. Then my swim pointed out the yards with native plants local to our area filled with activity, buzzing bees, fluttering butterflies, caterpillars lunching on their host plants.
Reading Tallamy’s book the Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of our Most Essential Native Trees filled the gap for me. Now I understand Monarch butterflies may spend their winter resting on the non-native eucalyptus, when there are no pine, fir or cedar trees to moderate winter temperatures, but unless there is milkweed on which to lay their eggs come spring there will be no Monarch butterflies. Milkweed is the only source of digestible food for Monarch caterpillars. The host relationship is the same for the pipevine and pipevine butterfly.
The meaning of ecosystems, the interdependent relationships between plants, animals, insects, fungi, organisms that work together with their physical environment finally sunk in.
It is a message that is lost on the city foresters and the Parks Department and unfortunately too many people who are in the position to give direction and make planting choices. From everything I hear and see we have city foresters who think diversity means taking plants from around the world that are drought tolerant and planting them in Berkeley apparently not understanding there is an evolutionary relationship in nature that developed over hundreds and thousands of years.
When it comes to the restoration of ecosystems, alien plants are dead zones. This matters.
Wildlife, nature is affected by climate, but the biggest threat is us, we are the biggest threat to the survival of our own species.
Tallamy started his talk with this message from E.O. Wilson, Insects are: “The Little Things That Run the World”
Life as we know it depends on insects
If insects were to disappear
1)Most flowering plants would go extinct
2)That would change the physical structure and energy flow of most terrestrial habitats
3)Which would cause the rapid collapse of the food webs that support amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals (including us)
4)The biosphere would rot due to the loss of insect decomposers
5)Humanity would be doomed!
After all this rain with water logged soil, downed trees, ruined gardens, we have the perfect setting to pull out all of our non-native plants, especially those non-native invasive plants and replace them with California natives. Tallamy emphasized not all native plants are equal and to put our sights on the plants that support the most species (available in calscape). No matter what is the size of your space for plants, Tallamy said there is a place for us in the Homegrown National Park and we have Calscape to help. https://calscape.org/
We can restore ecosystems and that was the message Tallamy gave.
Thursday evening there were seven projects on the Zoning Adjustment Board agenda with the last at 1752 Shattuck a Trachtenberg project. In my public comment, I gave David Trachtenberg the award for the evening with the project with the fewest native plants followed with that given all the projects he designs in Berkeley he should do and know better by now. When I suggested he watch and read Douglas Tallamy, Trachtenberg said he had his book. I continue to wonder if he read it given the list of plants in the project plans.
When starting fresh it should be easy to do the right thing. The plan for the 68 unit mixed-use building at 1752 Shattuck gained added height by including seven very low income units to capture the state density bonus.
On a happier note you can read “They Fought the Lawn. And the Lawn’s Done” about how Janet and Jeff Crouch changed state law in the process to change minds about native plants.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/14/climate/native-plants-lawns-homeowners.html
I attended the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission on ZOOM on one computer and captured the transcript of the Police Accountability Board (PAB) meeting through ZOOM, save transcript on another. The computerized voice capture isn’t perfect, but close enough for meeting content.
The PAB had two agenda items I’ve been following, the complaints against the Police Downtown Bike Unit which upended the appointment of Jennifer Louis from interim chief to Chief of Police on November 15, 2022 (check the November 20, 2022 Activist’s Diary) https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-11-20/article/50077?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-Week-Ending-November-20--Kelly-Hammargren and the report of misconduct by Jennifer Louis in 2017 when Andrew Greenwood was still Police Chief.
The accusation of sexual harassment leaked to the public on December 29, 2022. I might have missed it if I hadn’t turned on the late night news on KRON4. The Los Angeles Times has the most complete report, but these days you need a subscription to read it.
Jennifer Louis was accused in 2017 of sexual harassment, misconduct. After an independent investigator sustained the complaint, Chief Greenwood moved to suspend Louis for five days. Louis appealed the suspension and City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley reduced it to a written reprimand and one-on-one training. Then in 2020 according to the LA Times the report was removed from Louis’s file.
I was expecting the PAB to discuss the content of what happened, but instead the discussion was about getting the information, especially from Internal Affairs.
My questions and concerns revolve around the response by the City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley undermining police chief Greenwood and why the whole affair (employee complaint, investigation, reprimand with a letter that was later removed instead of a suspension) did not reach the Mayor and City Council and the Police Accountability Board during consideration of awarding Jennifer Louis the permanent position as Chief of Police?
Furthermore, how is it that the officer that owes a “clean” file to the city manager is recommended by the same city manager to be appointed interim chief in 2021 and “permanent” police chief in November 2022? Did this affair in its entirety, essentially a tap on the wrist, set the stage where Berkeley Police officers could send racist texts, arrest quotas, harass the homeless, and act with impunity as described by Brandon Woods, Public Defender for Alameda County at the November 15, 2022 City Council meeting? Is this City administration environment why a 20-month search for a new police chief (from the outside) turned up empty?
The Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission does not record meetings and requests for recording meetings or even turning on closed captioning falls on deaf ears. And, the description “deaf” is not used lightly. The subject of closed captioning, live transcription and allowing attendees to save meeting transcripts is the subject of the complaint I brought to the Open Government Commission that will be discussed on January 19, 2023.
Scott Ferris, Director of Parks, Recreation and Waterfront, reported a T1 funding gap of around $4,500,000 due to an increase in construction costs by about 25% and that priority projects were facilities, roads and restrooms. Ferris’s proposal to remove $300,000 from the Civic Center Turtle Island Monument Project was met with firm resistance from the Parks Commission. The estimate to renovate the African American Holistic Center is about $1,000,000 less than what it would cost to tear down the existing building and start from scratch. All of these estimates were before we feel the full impact of the destruction from our winter storms.
The list of unfinished projects will go back to the joint subcommittee of Parks and Infrastructure and Transportation and eventually City Council.
Brennan Cox, Parks Commissioner and Landscape Architect voted in the end with the rest of the commissioners to support the Turtle Island Monument Project latest design. His comments prior to voting captured the state of affairs and much that I agree with. “This has gone on too long, something should be built, I don’t think we should build something to build something…The design is not moving enough for me” Cox stated he spent a lot of time looking at monuments/memorials and went on to name some, the National African American Museum, the National Veterans Memorial, the Kindred Spirits: Choctaw Native American Monument, the exhibit by Wai Wai at Alcatraz.
When my turn to speak came I answered Martin Nicholus’ question of did the monument include a snapping turtle, I answered in the affirmative and added that snapping turtles are illegal to possess or release in California.
Ferris still has no estimate for the cost of the latest design or any timeline, though he stated that his experience shows he can get it done on time.
The next day the Community for a Cultural Civic Center met and the discussion continued. One member asked how the Turtle Island Monument represents the local Indigenous Peoples the Ohlone. It doesn’t. The Ohlone creation story is of an eagle, a hummingbird and a coyote not a turtle.
The saga continues, no cost estimates, no timeline, a T1 fund shortage. This still looks to me like Lucy pulling the football.
Before the Supreme Court ended Roe v. Wade with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, there never would have been the need for a 10-year child in Ohio to travel to Indiana for a medication abortion. While access to abortion and contraceptives is a fundamental right in California, the Peace and Justice Commission ensued researching the availability of information and access to reproductive health services for Berkeley High and UC Berkeley students. Most of the meeting evening was consumed with the discussion of the results of their research which ended in a report that will be sent to council supporting hiring two community health educators as suggested by Lisa Warhuus PhD, ORSCC, Director of Health, Housing and Community Services.
No mention was made in the Peace and Justice discussion or report of Berkeley City College students, nor did there seem to be any mention of middle school and grade school. The average age for menarche in the U.S. is 12, but some little girls start menstruating years earlier, even as young as 8. Sadly, the need for reproductive health services reaches to children.
BNC (Berkeley Neighborhoods Council) finished the week. The agenda as always is so full, we could really use two meetings to cover it all. What you won’t catch elsewhere was the presentation on the reconfiguration of San Pablo. There is an open website to submit comment. https://www.alamedactc.org/programs-projects/multimodal-arterial-roads/sanpabloave
In contrast to the City of Berkeley, the team for the San Pablo Avenue Corridor Project looks to establishing a parallel bike network. Meaning that instead of Road Diets and taking away traffic lanes, the San Pablo Corridor Project plan is to place the bike routes on quieter parallel streets.
The reconfiguration of Hopkins with removing traffic lanes, parking and adding bike lanes in front of the Monterey Market and block of businesses continues to create an uproar and for good reason. The whole redesign is justified by a fatal accident that occurred April 14, 2017 at 6:30 pm when a driver failed to yield to a pedestrian in the crosswalk. The entire redesign doesn’t end distracted driving, but it does make Hopkins more confusing to navigate for everyone, narrow an evacuation route and put the survival of local businesses at risk.
When I finish here, the Housing Element is waiting, all 1428 pages of it. It is a reading task that I have been dreading. The Housing Element is how Berkeley will add enough new housing to meet the assigned Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) of 8,934 units with 3,854 of them for extremely low income, very low income and low income households between now and December 31, 2031. It is the only agenda item for the special City Council meeting Wednesday, January 18 at 4 pm.
The draft came with adding 19,098 units, basically 14,016 market rate and moderate income to get to 3,854 affordable units and a statement to the effect that so much of Berkeley is ruined with non-native plants, we might as well cover the city with housing.
The final version is supposed to be proposing squeezing around 15,000 additional units into this 10.5 square miles we call Berkeley. That should turn Berkeley into a city of wall to wall cement. Not terribly appealing except for the land owners who can expect big profits from upzoning for bigger buildings and the developers who will build them. By the time Berkeley is built over with housing and coffee shops there might be more several more atmospheric rivers to send weather disaster refugees to our doorsteps along with the burgeoning classes of UC Berkeley students.
The reading I did finish was Revenge: How Donald Trump Weaponized the US Department of Justice Against His Critics by Michael Cohen. I read Cohen’s first book Disloyal and found the inside scoop fascinating. Revenge is Cohen’s perspective on how Trump used the Department of Justice against him. I kept reading Cohen’s second book expecting it to get better. It didn’t.
Despite this there is an important message, it is grievance politics. It is about getting even something it looks like we will be living with for the next two years with the Republican majority in the House. If Trump runs in 2024 and manages to win, revenge will be on the platter.
The stack of books on Trump seems endless and there are many that are better written and more thorough like The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 by Peter Baker and Susan Glaser. At 752 pages or 29 hours if you pick up the audiobook as I did, there is little that is left out. I am anxious to see how that book compares with the copy of January 6 Report by the January 6 House Committee that arrived this week.
Last week I wrote about Bob Woodward’s book The Trump Tapes. The podcast the Political Scene with David Remnick and Bob Woodward discussing the book, Trump and reporting is worth a listen. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bob-woodward-on-his-calls-with-trump/id268213039?i=1000594674083
January 8, 2023
City Council sent Lori Droste off into the sunset as a former two term Councilmember with nearly 1 ½ hours of accolades on December 6, 2022. Sometime before signing off that last evening Droste submitted two proposals that were first seen in the draft agenda for the January 17, 2023 City Council meeting as items 26 and 27 at the January 4, 2023 Agenda and Rules Committee.
The Agenda and Rules Committee with members Mayor Arreguin and Councilmembers Hahn and Wengraf, rarely receives much attention. There are only two or three regular public attendees (I am one) and city staff.
If you have been following Kevin McCarthy’s quest for Speaker of the House and the concessions made to get the gavel including three spots on the Rules Committee for Freedom Caucus members, then you might have heard Representative Jim McGovern Democrat from Massachusetts describe the Rules Committee as the most powerful committee that no one knows anything about. The House of Representatives Rules Committee decides what gets to the floor for a vote. And the Rules, McCarthy concessions (promises), most of which are in a secret appendix determine how the House of Representatives will operate.
The Berkeley Council Agenda and Rules does much the same, determines what reaches the final agenda for a Council vote and how Council meetings are managed. For now, the Council Agenda and Rules Committee referred Droste’s parting gestures back to itself for further discussion, but that shouldn’t give anyone any assurance that Council won’t get behind these changes.
Draft Agenda Item 26 was “Bureaucratic Effectiveness and Referral Improvement and Prioritization Effort (BE RIPE).” This agenda item would limit each councilmember to no more than one major legislative proposal or set of amendments to any existing ordinance per year, with the mayor allowed two proposals. And, budget referrals and allocations must be explicitly related to previously established or passed policies or programs.
Droste’s proposal for limiting legislation and budget referrals would certainly dampen Berkeley’s position as a progressive city though other than Harrison’s natural gas ban in new construction in 2019, Berkeley has fallen off a cliff when it comes to innovation. Looking at submissions, the two councilmembers who would be most affected by limiting legislation are Taplin and Harrison. Every councilmember would feel the pinch on budget referrals.
Councilmember Taplin turns out a stack of legislative proposals every month, more than what would be reasonably produced by office staff/legislative aide with Taplin turning over presentations and responses to questions to others. I can only think of one Taplin proposal that didn’t end up as a referral for the City Manager to finish and that was the ordinance on giving priority to native plants. By the time it reached a council vote it was so watered down it can best be described as a near meaningless gesture when what is really needed is recognition of the critical importance of urban forests, support for ecosystems and firm thresholds for native plants which research shows should not drop below 70%.
The other councilmember that turns in significant legislation is Harrison. The difference between the two councilmembers is: Harrison knows her legislative proposals thoroughly, goes through steps of refinement, is ready to answer questions which frequently turns into grilling requiring explaining every facet and little to nothing is left to finish except implementation if approved.
Droste’s Draft Agenda Item 27 “Reforms to Public Comment Procedures at meetings of the Berkeley City Council“ consolidates all public comment non-agenda, agenda consent and action into a single comment period with a limit on the number of speakers at the beginning of meetings and additional time at the end of meetings using BUSD (Berkeley Unified School District) School Board as a model. This rule revision is proposed as temporary during COVID-19, however, no one should feel confident if it is passed that this would not be extended.
This would leave public comment to emails/letters. Since it appears that some council members never finish reading the agenda packet, it lays open to question how they do with reading emails/letters.
I remember sitting at a BUSD with two others until I was called on at 1:35 am to give public comment. I also remember months ago when Mayor Arreguin said at a public meeting that commenters opposing his plan for a ferry didn’t represent Berkeley. I can think of no better way to create a bubble of sycophants around the mayor and council than to shut down public comment.
The Landmarks Preservation Commission started off Thursday evening January 5, 2023 ordinarily enough with a demolition referral for the rather non-descript box like commercial building at 1652 – 1658 University last occupied by Radio Shack. There was the usual back and forth over how a new building (size and mass unknown) might impact the existing historical buildings next door.
Mark Hulbert Preservation Architect hired to do the demolition assessment of 1652-1658 University concluded:
“[T]he subject property and building are not associated with the movement or evolution of religious, cultural, government, social or economic developments of the City (LPO Section A.2). In its mid-University Ave. and mid-20th century commercial development context there are no development patterns of any potential historic importance associated with this property or its ordinary store and office building.”
The conclusion in the staff report by Allison Riemer, Associate Planner was similar:
“[A] study of its construction history, ownership and occupancy records revealed no information linking this site to any events or singular episode of primary importance to Berkeley’s history or economic development.”
Both the Preservation Architect and City staff missed what Fran Cappelletti, Archivist for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association found. In 1923, a permit was taken for the West Gate Masonic Association to build a building on that corner (University and Jefferson) for the Masonic Lodge for African Americans. Objections arose from the neighbors who did not want African Americans at this site in any form and went so far as to pressure the City to change the zoning. The City Council did not approve the zoning change, but the construction stopped and the lot sat vacant for twenty-four years until the current commercial building was constructed in 1947.
Commissioner Finacom asked for a plaque to be at the site to commemorate the history, but was met with pushback and objections from Commission Chair Enchill, “So I think we can find those type of histories and stories throughout the city, and I don’t think there’s enough for me to that that’s a particularly unique story that the developer should be required to provide a plaque here.” Commission Crandall agreed as did the rest of the commissioners.
Commissioner Finacom stated he respectfully disagreed and spoke to the vanishing collective history. “[I]f there is a plaque, it seeps its way into a public consciousness, because people read it, and they mention it… it actually has a cultural context to the property and the story of Berkeley.”
Commissioner Chair Encill’s statement that there is nothing particularly unique about the history of 1652 – 1658 University seems to be all the more reason to memorialize how racism ended building a Masonic Lodge for African Americans at the corner of University and Jefferson. How many other stories need to be told and memorialized?
If we look to the cover story in the December 2022 issue of the Atlantic, “Monuments to the Unthinkable America still can’t figure out how to memorialize the sins of our history. What can we learn from Germany?” by Clint Smith we should have plaques everywhere. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/12/holocaust-remembrance-lessons-america/671893/
Smith gives us a lot to think about. How do we come to grips with the sins of our history and the continuing racism that seeps into every corner of this country.
Councilmember Hahn put forward the land acknowledgement to remind us of our history, that we are on unceded Indigenous land. Hahn also authored the letter sent by Council to the leaders of the House of Representatives and Representative Barbara Lee to honor the Treaty of New Echota and seat the official delegate nominated by the Cherokee Nation.
It is a start.
As I finish this Diary it is 100 years to the day, January 10, 1923 since a white mob burned the Black town of Rosewood, Florida to the ground and murdered six Black residents. Florida is now the state where Governor Ron DeSantis proudly champions legislation designed to limit instruction about racism and privilege in the STOP W.O.K.E. Act https://www.flgov.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Stop-Woke-Handout.pdf
I did attend the Homeless Services Panel of Experts meeting on January 4, but about halfway through the long rambling discussion that ate up most of the meeting with Sharon Byrne from Santa Barbara, I lost focus. Byrne detailed the effort and collaboration of unlikely partners redirecting little more than a handful of disruptive chronically homeless persons into housing and productive behavior. No meeting actions were taken other than approving the minutes and agreeing on the meeting agenda.
After listening to the first two taped interviews in the audiobook The Trump Tapes by Bob Woodward, 2022, 11 hours and 29 minutes I was about ready to hang it all up, but I pushed ahead and finished the entire audiobook. As with nearly every book I pick up the impact is so much greater by reading or listening in its entirety. Listening to Trump in his own words, adds even more to the question of how can it be that he has a solid core of true believers somewhere around 30% - 40% of the voting public.
The Trump tapes are amazing in so many ways like how Woodward attempted to lead Trump to self-reflection only for Trump to bark back his grievances and self-aggrandizement.
Woodward reminds us that a switch of 44,000 votes in Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia would have given Trump and Biden an electoral tie sending the election back to the House of Representatives where each state would have one vote. Since more states were Republican dominated, Trump would have won.
Woodward concludes Trump lives in his own self-inflicted melodrama where “everything is mine, I do what I want” and is totally unfit for office.
Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows you How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People by Joe Navarro and Toni Sciarra Poynter published in 2014 was the perfect reading companion to the Trump tapes. Navarro and Sciarra describe four dangerous personality types: narcissistic, unstable, paranoid and predator and give a check list with scoring for the lay reader.
I went through the exercise of every list, checking the boxes and scoring Trump. I fully expected the outlandishly high score for the narcissistic personality, but I was less prepared for the scoring as a predator to land in the dangerous territory too. I should have been ready with all the reports of swindling investors and contractors, the assaults on women, the Trump University scandal, the Fair Housing Act discrimination settlement, the conviction of the Trump Corporation and Trump Payroll Corporation of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records, the Trump Foundation charity scam and the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
Remember how pre-election Trump promoters said he will become presidential when he is elected and Susan Collins said after the first impeachment Trump has learned a lesson. He did, he can get away with anything.
The message throughout the book is people with dangerous personalities do not change. They are an emotional, physical and financial threat.
Donald J. Trump fits the profile of a narcissistic personality and a predator. Donald J. Trump is not going to change and using the profiles we all need to remember he is not just a narcissist, he is also a predator.
There is one more thing to remember. It took fifteen cycles of voting and a pile of concessions for Kevin McCarthy to be elected Speaker of the House. Let us not forget who McCarthy made those concessions to. Out of the 218 Republican members in the House of Representatives, 121 were re-elected after voting against certifying the election of President Biden on January 6, 2021. We are in for a rough ride with a caucus bent on burning the House down.
City Council sent Lori Droste off into the sunset as a former two term Councilmember with nearly 1 ½ hours of accolades on December 6, 2022. Sometime before signing off that last evening Droste submitted two proposals that were first seen in the draft agenda for the January 17, 2023 City Council meeting as items 26 and 27 at the January 4, 2023 Agenda and Rules Committee.
The Agenda and Rules Committee with members Mayor Arreguin and Councilmembers Hahn and Wengraf, rarely receives much attention. There are only two or three regular public attendees (I am one) and city staff.
If you have been following Kevin McCarthy’s quest for Speaker of the House and the concessions made to get the gavel including three spots on the Rules Committee for Freedom Caucus members, then you might have heard Representative Jim McGovern Democrat from Massachusetts describe the Rules Committee as the most powerful committee that no one knows anything about. The House of Representatives Rules Committee decides what gets to the floor for a vote. And the Rules, McCarthy concessions (promises), most of which are in a secret appendix determine how the House of Representatives will operate.
The Berkeley Council Agenda and Rules does much the same, determines what reaches the final agenda for a Council vote and how Council meetings are managed. For now, the Council Agenda and Rules Committee referred Droste’s parting gestures back to itself for further discussion, but that shouldn’t give anyone any assurance that Council won’t get behind these changes.
Draft Agenda Item 26 was “Bureaucratic Effectiveness and Referral Improvement and Prioritization Effort (BE RIPE).” This agenda item would limit each councilmember to no more than one major legislative proposal or set of amendments to any existing ordinance per year, with the mayor allowed two proposals. And, budget referrals and allocations must be explicitly related to previously established or passed policies or programs.
Droste’s proposal for limiting legislation and budget referrals would certainly dampen Berkeley’s position as a progressive city though other than Harrison’s natural gas ban in new construction in 2019, Berkeley has fallen off a cliff when it comes to innovation. Looking at submissions, the two councilmembers who would be most affected by limiting legislation are Taplin and Harrison. Every councilmember would feel the pinch on budget referrals.
Councilmember Taplin turns out a stack of legislative proposals every month, more than what would be reasonably produced by office staff/legislative aide with Taplin turning over presentations and responses to questions to others. I can only think of one Taplin proposal that didn’t end up as a referral for the City Manager to finish and that was the ordinance on giving priority to native plants. By the time it reached a council vote it was so watered down it can best be described as a near meaningless gesture when what is really needed is recognition of the critical importance of urban forests, support for ecosystems and firm thresholds for native plants which research shows should not drop below 70%.
The other councilmember that turns in significant legislation is Harrison. The difference between the two councilmembers is: Harrison knows her legislative proposals thoroughly, goes through steps of refinement, is ready to answer questions which frequently turns into grilling requiring explaining every facet and little to nothing is left to finish except implementation if approved.
Droste’s Draft Agenda Item 27 “Reforms to Public Comment Procedures at meetings of the Berkeley City Council“ consolidates all public comment non-agenda, agenda consent and action into a single comment period with a limit on the number of speakers at the beginning of meetings and additional time at the end of meetings using BUSD (Berkeley Unified School District) School Board as a model. This rule revision is proposed as temporary during COVID-19, however, no one should feel confident if it is passed that this would not be extended.
This would leave public comment to emails/letters. Since it appears that some council members never finish reading the agenda packet, it lays open to question how they do with reading emails/letters.
I remember sitting at a BUSD with two others until I was called on at 1:35 am to give public comment. I also remember months ago when Mayor Arreguin said at a public meeting that commenters opposing his plan for a ferry didn’t represent Berkeley. I can think of no better way to create a bubble of sycophants around the mayor and council than to shut down public comment.
The Landmarks Preservation Commission started off Thursday evening January 5, 2023 ordinarily enough with a demolition referral for the rather non-descript box like commercial building at 1652 – 1658 University last occupied by Radio Shack. There was the usual back and forth over how a new building (size and mass unknown) might impact the existing historical buildings next door.
Mark Hulbert Preservation Architect hired to do the demolition assessment of 1652-1658 University concluded:
“[T]he subject property and building are not associated with the movement or evolution of religious, cultural, government, social or economic developments of the City (LPO Section A.2). In its mid-University Ave. and mid-20th century commercial development context there are no development patterns of any potential historic importance associated with this property or its ordinary store and office building.”
The conclusion in the staff report by Allison Riemer, Associate Planner was similar:
“[A] study of its construction history, ownership and occupancy records revealed no information linking this site to any events or singular episode of primary importance to Berkeley’s history or economic development.”
Both the Preservation Architect and City staff missed what Fran Cappelletti, Archivist for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association found. In 1923, a permit was taken for the West Gate Masonic Association to build a building on that corner (University and Jefferson) for the Masonic Lodge for African Americans. Objections arose from the neighbors who did not want African Americans at this site in any form and went so far as to pressure the City to change the zoning. The City Council did not approve the zoning change, but the construction stopped and the lot sat vacant for twenty-four years until the current commercial building was constructed in 1947.
Commissioner Finacom asked for a plaque to be at the site to commemorate the history, but was met with pushback and objections from Commission Chair Enchill, “So I think we can find those type of histories and stories throughout the city, and I don’t think there’s enough for me to that that’s a particularly unique story that the developer should be required to provide a plaque here.” Commission Crandall agreed as did the rest of the commissioners.
Commissioner Finacom stated he respectfully disagreed and spoke to the vanishing collective history. “[I]f there is a plaque, it seeps its way into a public consciousness, because people read it, and they mention it… it actually has a cultural context to the property and the story of Berkeley.”
Commissioner Chair Encill’s statement that there is nothing particularly unique about the history of 1652 – 1658 University seems to be all the more reason to memorialize how racism ended building a Masonic Lodge for African Americans at the corner of University and Jefferson. How many other stories need to be told and memorialized?
If we look to the cover story in the December 2022 issue of the Atlantic, “Monuments to the Unthinkable America still can’t figure out how to memorialize the sins of our history. What can we learn from Germany?” by Clint Smith we should have plaques everywhere. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/12/holocaust-remembrance-lessons-america/671893/
Smith gives us a lot to think about. How do we come to grips with the sins of our history and the continuing racism that seeps into every corner of this country.
Councilmember Hahn put forward the land acknowledgement to remind us of our history, that we are on unceded Indigenous land. Hahn also authored the letter sent by Council to the leaders of the House of Representatives and Representative Barbara Lee to honor the Treaty of New Echota and seat the official delegate nominated by the Cherokee Nation.
It is a start.
As I finish this Diary it is 100 years to the day, January 10, 1923 since a white mob burned the Black town of Rosewood, Florida to the ground and murdered six Black residents. Florida is now the state where Governor Ron DeSantis proudly champions legislation designed to limit instruction about racism and privilege in the STOP W.O.K.E. Act https://www.flgov.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Stop-Woke-Handout.pdf
I did attend the Homeless Services Panel of Experts meeting on January 4, but about halfway through the long rambling discussion that ate up most of the meeting with Sharon Byrne from Santa Barbara, I lost focus. Byrne detailed the effort and collaboration of unlikely partners redirecting little more than a handful of disruptive chronically homeless persons into housing and productive behavior. No meeting actions were taken other than approving the minutes and agreeing on the meeting agenda.
After listening to the first two taped interviews in the audiobook The Trump Tapes by Bob Woodward, 2022, 11 hours and 29 minutes I was about ready to hang it all up, but I pushed ahead and finished the entire audiobook. As with nearly every book I pick up the impact is so much greater by reading or listening in its entirety. Listening to Trump in his own words, adds even more to the question of how can it be that he has a solid core of true believers somewhere around 30% - 40% of the voting public.
The Trump tapes are amazing in so many ways like how Woodward attempted to lead Trump to self-reflection only for Trump to bark back his grievances and self-aggrandizement.
Woodward reminds us that a switch of 44,000 votes in Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia would have given Trump and Biden an electoral tie sending the election back to the House of Representatives where each state would have one vote. Since more states were Republican dominated, Trump would have won.
Woodward concludes Trump lives in his own self-inflicted melodrama where “everything is mine, I do what I want” and is totally unfit for office.
Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows you How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People by Joe Navarro and Toni Sciarra Poynter published in 2014 was the perfect reading companion to the Trump tapes. Navarro and Sciarra describe four dangerous personality types: narcissistic, unstable, paranoid and predator and give a check list with scoring for the lay reader.
I went through the exercise of every list, checking the boxes and scoring Trump. I fully expected the outlandishly high score for the narcissistic personality, but I was less prepared for the scoring as a predator to land in the dangerous territory too. I should have been ready with all the reports of swindling investors and contractors, the assaults on women, the Trump University scandal, the Fair Housing Act discrimination settlement, the conviction of the Trump Corporation and Trump Payroll Corporation of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records, the Trump Foundation charity scam and the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
Remember how pre-election Trump promoters said he will become presidential when he is elected and Susan Collins said after the first impeachment Trump has learned a lesson. He did, he can get away with anything.
The message throughout the book is people with dangerous personalities do not change. They are an emotional, physical and financial threat.
Donald J. Trump fits the profile of a narcissistic personality and a predator. Donald J. Trump is not going to change and using the profiles we all need to remember he is not just a narcissist, he is also a predator.
There is one more thing to remember. It took fifteen cycles of voting and a pile of concessions for Kevin McCarthy to be elected Speaker of the House. Let us not forget who McCarthy made those concessions to. Out of the 218 Republican members in the House of Representatives, 121 were re-elected after voting against certifying the election of President Biden on January 6, 2021. We are in for a rough ride with a caucus bent on burning the House down.
December 11, 2022
I’ve been attending the Community for a Cultural Civic Center (CCCC) meetings for months and following the Turtle Island Monument Project story. Looking over the history of the Turtle Island Monument sketchy as it is and the current situation, it looks ever so much like Lucy pulling the football once again and unstated plans to spend the close to $1,000,000 elsewhere.
I wasted what felt like a day trying to find the documents in the city archives, “records online” to see for myself the original approval process. I had heard the Turtle Island Monument had been discussed for years, but finding documents in records online is like crawling into a deep computer rabbit hole for hours and coming up with little to nothing. I could not find artist submissions or the selection process or meeting agendas and minutes I was seeking. I did find the contracts with Scott K. Parsons and expenditure statements from 2006 and a few other reports. The rest comes from the Landmarks Preservation Commission meeting documents on December 1, 2022.
The dedication of Indigenous Peoples Day was declared in 1992 and the idea of turning the defunct Civic Center fountain into the Turtle Island Monument evolved shortly after. In 1996, $900,000 was dedicated from Measure S to the Civic Center Park. The Turtle Island Monument was to be paid for out of those funds. Obviously that money went somewhere other than the Turtle Island Monument.
The Turtle Island Project came back again in 2005 and Council approved a scaled back version with the four bronze Loggerhead Sea Turtles and eight medallions 3 feet in diameter commemorating Native People. A contract was signed with the Scott K. Parson from Sioux Falls, South Dakota on June 16, 2006. Parsons fulfilled his commitment and finished the eight medallions and four bronze life size Loggerhead Sea Turtles. None of these artworks ever made it for placement in the fountain.
In 2018, the Turtle Island Monument Project was resurrected again incorporating the turtles sculpted and cast by Scott Parsons and the eight medallions. The proposal using native plants and creating a new seating ledge worked within the restriction of keeping the fountain intact. This design was approved by the T1 Committee in 2020. https://turtleislandfountain.org/
PGAdesign was hired by the City to implement the project and the T1 committee approved design. The T1 approved design was discarded in 2022 in meetings which were not public. A new design credited to Lee Sprague and Marlene Watson for the Turtle Island Monument and presented to the public at the Landmarks Preservation Commission on December 1, 2022 consists of removing the top of the fountain, then placing on top of what is left of the fountain a piece of black granite 15 feet in diameter and 4 feet 3 inches thick (estimated weight 18 tons) with a 12 foot bronze snapping turtle on top. There are four openings in the base of fountain with a blue glass mosaic representing water in two of the openings. The eight tribal medallions are to be embedded in boulders and six more blank medallions representing tribes lost to colonialism are to be placed in the renovated flagstone. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2022-12-01_LPC_Item%205_Turtle%20Island.pdf
Sprague has been very insistent in placing a snapping turtle on top of the granite as the symbol of the indigenous peoples’ creation story. The hard shell back of the turtle is the emblem of land and life emerging from the sea to land.
The deadlines to spend the funds financing the project are June 30, 2024 for the $591,666 from the Clean California Local Grant Program and December 2025 for the $300,000 from the T1 funds. These spending deadlines may seem like a long way off, but a circular piece of black granite 15 feet in diameter and 51 inches thick is not like going over to your local kitchen and bath remodeling store to buy a black granite counter.
The Civic Arts Commission did review the project on December 7, 2022 and voted to approve the new conceptual design. This time quite a number of local tribal members did show up to support the project and others who had not previously identified as having indigenous heritage also spoke.
Lisa Bullwinkel as promised to CCCC asked about budget/cost of the project. Jennifer Lovvorn City of Berkeley staff dismissed Bullwinkel’s question and insisted the cost was unimportant. Bullwinkel moved from there to support the design and it was passed unanimously by the Arts Commission.
The Turtle Island Monument Project was expected to be on the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission (PRW) agenda on December 14, but it was pushed down to an information item containing a letter from John Caner for CCCC. The worry from CCCC is that the Turtle Island Monument project will not be completed within the funding grant deadlines and the funds diverted elsewhere. Gordon Wozniak, PRW commission chair stated the city manager asked to have discussion postponed until January when the City will give a presentation.
Scott Parson’s public art can be seen in Colorado, Ohio, Canada, Florida, Minnesota, Arizona and Wisconsin, but in Berkeley Parsons’ artwork for the Turtle Island Monument sits in storage and at 2180 Milvia. https://damnfineart.com/our-projects/page/2/
The artwork I found for Marlene Watson are paintings and posters. I can’t find any public art for Lee Sprague. This isn’t to say Watson and Sprague can’t have impressive wonderful concepts and the latest design is quite exciting, but it does lay to question whether they have the experience to maneuver a project in a city that has a long history of what once again looks more like Lucy pulling the football and feels like there are other plans on where and how to spend the money with statements like project cost is unimportant.
There are two corrections from my December 4 write-up. it was the group that resurrected the Turtle Island Monument Project in 2018 that tracked down Lee Sprague first not City staff and I rechecked the size of the granite it is 15 feet in diameter and 51 inches thick changing the weight to 18 tons. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-12-04/article/50095?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-Week-Ending-December-4--Kelly-Hammargren)
Bait and switch is a well worn tactic in Berkeley when it comes to how money is spent and it happened again at the Council 5 pm special meeting on December 13 and was the topic of discussion at the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission on December 14.
In the City Council’s letter to Nancy Skinner, Chair of the State Senate Budget Committee and to Phil Ting, Chair of the State Assembly Budget Committee, the City Council lined out how they would spend the $15 million requested for the Berkeley Marina. Once the money was granted when it came around to approving the expenditures on December 13, $2,961,000 of the all important dock and piling replacement funds turned into paying for the environmental review and design of the pier/ferry project.
Scott Ferris and crew swear that WETA (Water Emergency Transportation Authority) is going pay the city back when or if the lawsuit for Regional Measure 3 funds is settled in favor of the Bay Area Toll Authority and WETA gets a cut of the Measure 3 bridge tolls.
Ferris put forward the argument that completing an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and design is only a study and not a commitment. EIRs are completed to meet CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) requirements and not undertaken unless there are plans to move forward, meaning “study and not a commitment” falls into pure B.S.
The entire pier/ferry plan with the promise of WETA is going to pay for it makes me think of Trump’s border wall and Mexico is going to pay for it. Commissioner Kerry Birnbach said her friends were anxious for a ferry ride in Berkeley. In my public comment, I asked if they would feel the same if they paid a full fare of around $28. I received a text that some believe the true per person cost of ferrying people across the bay when all costs are included may be as high as $100 per rider.
After going through the WETA year to date revenue and expenditures, that average fare cost of around $5.53 is subsidized with bridge tolls, Contra Costa Measure J and federal funds to the tune of $27.74 or actual cost of $33.27 per ferry ride. This subsidy calculation is low as it does not include all of the funding needed for terminal rehabilitation, infrastructure, new and replacement vessels.
The main point is that ferries do not exist on the Bay without substantial public financing through federal funds, state funds, bridge tolls and sales taxes. The people who use the ferries are disproportionally high income households with 35% of weekday commuter survey respondents reporting household incomes of greater than $200,000. People from low income households earning less than $50,000 make up 7% of riders overall with their utilization primarily on the weekends.
Over the weekend I had the opportunity to ask Tom Rubin who described himself as having over five decades of experience in transportation what he thought about road diets. He was quite blunt in his answer after first differentiating that “streets” are for local traffic and “roads” are to get from one place to another. Putting roads on a diet meaning decreasing the lanes of traffic pushes drivers on narrowed principal roads onto neighborhood streets not designed for through traffic creating a “stroad” problem.
Another problem Rubin noted with road diets and redesigns is that once the changes are made it is near impossible to undo the damage. That should be a warning to us, not to let up on the pressure to save Hopkins and the businesses we love there.
He added that road diets create major public safety problems. Every minute of delay for an emergency vehicle means substantial increase in a fatal incident or permanent injury. Pedestrian deaths increased after road diets in Southern California the opposite of the claim that road diets make streets safer. Rubin ended with, “fire chiefs are under great pressure to keep their mouths shut if they want to keep their jobs.”
If you haven’t responded to the Civic Center Survey, set aside a few minutes to send off your opinion. It doesn’t take long to look at the diagrams, check boxes and add comments if you choose. Survey link: https://qualtricsxmjph7lvfxl.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_aa71ggvGKG50ZIa
If you wish to see the presentation from the consultants before completing the survey here is the link: https://qualtricsxmjph7lvfxl.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_aa71ggvGKG50ZIa
The consultants Siegal & Strain Architects for the Civic Center seem set on a road diet for MLK Jr. Way. They also have in their plans new offices for city council in Maudelle Shirek. CCCC members have had their eyes on using a restored Maudelle Shirek Building for community non-profits and a historical museum. I’d like to see space for indigenous people.
Book and Film Recommendations
In a cruise through the New York Times before settling in for the final edit of this Diary, I saw the article that a Statue of Henrietta Lacks will replace a monument to Robert E. Lee in Roanoke, Virginia as part of a local project to recognize Black history in community spaces.
Henrietta Lacks, a poor Black woman, living not far from the Johns Hopkins Hospital was treated for cervical cancer, but before diagnosis was made and treatment begun, a sample of her tumor was taken. For the first time, when all other attempts to culture cancerous cells, grow cancerous cells in a lab failed, the tumor cells from Henrietta Lacks grew and multiplied every 20 to 24 hours. The cell line was named HeLa.
I didn’t read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot when it was published in 2010. It wasn’t until 2014 when it really sunk in how much I was missing by not reading books. That is when I went looking for a book club that focused on nonfiction and politics and couldn’t find one. It was a conversation over coffee with Barbara Ruffner that lead to starting a group that reads nearly 100% nonfiction on politics, race, climate and the environment. Barbara was a vibrant 88 when we started, but failing health caught up.
Barbara always pulled our choices to Democratic Socialism and it wasn’t long before we understood, we couldn’t read about politics without reading about race and racism. This review is dedicated to Barbara who passed away in October.
The book is the story of Henrietta, her family, descendants, the research, researchers and travels and the persistence of Rebecca Skloot to put it altogether.
Henrietta Lacks died at the young age of 31. The HeLa cells were used in the development of polio and COVID-19 vaccines, the study of leukemia, AIDS virus and cancer. HeLa cancer cells are the root of worldwide research studying the effects of toxins, drugs, hormones and viruses.
Honoring Henrietta Lacks is even more meaningful after reading the The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks if you haven’t picked it up already.
Film
Senator Warnock just won re-election by a healthy margin over Hershel Walker and much was made of voter turnout and questioning whether there really was voter suppression. The film “Vigilante: Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman” written by Greg Palast produced by Maria Florio with Executive Producers Martin Sheen, George DiCaprio and Stephen Nemeth lays bare the impact of Georgia’s SB 202 “Election Integrity Act of 2021” and the disenfranchisement of Black voters in Georgia. Mail-in voting dropped by 81%.
After seeing Greg Palast in person at a KPFA event, I always think of him as a man full of himself. I found the film unexpectantly informative and good and definitely worth watching especially because Georgia’s SB 202 is a bill that is and will be imitated elsewhere.
The film is currently free online until January 1, 2023 at 11 pm. https://watch.showandtell.film/watch/vigilante-ga/
I’ve been attending the Community for a Cultural Civic Center (CCCC) meetings for months and following the Turtle Island Monument Project story. Looking over the history of the Turtle Island Monument sketchy as it is and the current situation, it looks ever so much like Lucy pulling the football once again and unstated plans to spend the close to $1,000,000 elsewhere.
I wasted what felt like a day trying to find the documents in the city archives, “records online” to see for myself the original approval process. I had heard the Turtle Island Monument had been discussed for years, but finding documents in records online is like crawling into a deep computer rabbit hole for hours and coming up with little to nothing. I could not find artist submissions or the selection process or meeting agendas and minutes I was seeking. I did find the contracts with Scott K. Parsons and expenditure statements from 2006 and a few other reports. The rest comes from the Landmarks Preservation Commission meeting documents on December 1, 2022.
The dedication of Indigenous Peoples Day was declared in 1992 and the idea of turning the defunct Civic Center fountain into the Turtle Island Monument evolved shortly after. In 1996, $900,000 was dedicated from Measure S to the Civic Center Park. The Turtle Island Monument was to be paid for out of those funds. Obviously that money went somewhere other than the Turtle Island Monument.
The Turtle Island Project came back again in 2005 and Council approved a scaled back version with the four bronze Loggerhead Sea Turtles and eight medallions 3 feet in diameter commemorating Native People. A contract was signed with the Scott K. Parson from Sioux Falls, South Dakota on June 16, 2006. Parsons fulfilled his commitment and finished the eight medallions and four bronze life size Loggerhead Sea Turtles. None of these artworks ever made it for placement in the fountain.
In 2018, the Turtle Island Monument Project was resurrected again incorporating the turtles sculpted and cast by Scott Parsons and the eight medallions. The proposal using native plants and creating a new seating ledge worked within the restriction of keeping the fountain intact. This design was approved by the T1 Committee in 2020. https://turtleislandfountain.org/
PGAdesign was hired by the City to implement the project and the T1 committee approved design. The T1 approved design was discarded in 2022 in meetings which were not public. A new design credited to Lee Sprague and Marlene Watson for the Turtle Island Monument and presented to the public at the Landmarks Preservation Commission on December 1, 2022 consists of removing the top of the fountain, then placing on top of what is left of the fountain a piece of black granite 15 feet in diameter and 4 feet 3 inches thick (estimated weight 18 tons) with a 12 foot bronze snapping turtle on top. There are four openings in the base of fountain with a blue glass mosaic representing water in two of the openings. The eight tribal medallions are to be embedded in boulders and six more blank medallions representing tribes lost to colonialism are to be placed in the renovated flagstone. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2022-12-01_LPC_Item%205_Turtle%20Island.pdf
Sprague has been very insistent in placing a snapping turtle on top of the granite as the symbol of the indigenous peoples’ creation story. The hard shell back of the turtle is the emblem of land and life emerging from the sea to land.
The deadlines to spend the funds financing the project are June 30, 2024 for the $591,666 from the Clean California Local Grant Program and December 2025 for the $300,000 from the T1 funds. These spending deadlines may seem like a long way off, but a circular piece of black granite 15 feet in diameter and 51 inches thick is not like going over to your local kitchen and bath remodeling store to buy a black granite counter.
The Civic Arts Commission did review the project on December 7, 2022 and voted to approve the new conceptual design. This time quite a number of local tribal members did show up to support the project and others who had not previously identified as having indigenous heritage also spoke.
Lisa Bullwinkel as promised to CCCC asked about budget/cost of the project. Jennifer Lovvorn City of Berkeley staff dismissed Bullwinkel’s question and insisted the cost was unimportant. Bullwinkel moved from there to support the design and it was passed unanimously by the Arts Commission.
The Turtle Island Monument Project was expected to be on the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission (PRW) agenda on December 14, but it was pushed down to an information item containing a letter from John Caner for CCCC. The worry from CCCC is that the Turtle Island Monument project will not be completed within the funding grant deadlines and the funds diverted elsewhere. Gordon Wozniak, PRW commission chair stated the city manager asked to have discussion postponed until January when the City will give a presentation.
Scott Parson’s public art can be seen in Colorado, Ohio, Canada, Florida, Minnesota, Arizona and Wisconsin, but in Berkeley Parsons’ artwork for the Turtle Island Monument sits in storage and at 2180 Milvia. https://damnfineart.com/our-projects/page/2/
The artwork I found for Marlene Watson are paintings and posters. I can’t find any public art for Lee Sprague. This isn’t to say Watson and Sprague can’t have impressive wonderful concepts and the latest design is quite exciting, but it does lay to question whether they have the experience to maneuver a project in a city that has a long history of what once again looks more like Lucy pulling the football and feels like there are other plans on where and how to spend the money with statements like project cost is unimportant.
There are two corrections from my December 4 write-up. it was the group that resurrected the Turtle Island Monument Project in 2018 that tracked down Lee Sprague first not City staff and I rechecked the size of the granite it is 15 feet in diameter and 51 inches thick changing the weight to 18 tons. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-12-04/article/50095?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-Week-Ending-December-4--Kelly-Hammargren)
Bait and switch is a well worn tactic in Berkeley when it comes to how money is spent and it happened again at the Council 5 pm special meeting on December 13 and was the topic of discussion at the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission on December 14.
In the City Council’s letter to Nancy Skinner, Chair of the State Senate Budget Committee and to Phil Ting, Chair of the State Assembly Budget Committee, the City Council lined out how they would spend the $15 million requested for the Berkeley Marina. Once the money was granted when it came around to approving the expenditures on December 13, $2,961,000 of the all important dock and piling replacement funds turned into paying for the environmental review and design of the pier/ferry project.
Scott Ferris and crew swear that WETA (Water Emergency Transportation Authority) is going pay the city back when or if the lawsuit for Regional Measure 3 funds is settled in favor of the Bay Area Toll Authority and WETA gets a cut of the Measure 3 bridge tolls.
Ferris put forward the argument that completing an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and design is only a study and not a commitment. EIRs are completed to meet CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) requirements and not undertaken unless there are plans to move forward, meaning “study and not a commitment” falls into pure B.S.
The entire pier/ferry plan with the promise of WETA is going to pay for it makes me think of Trump’s border wall and Mexico is going to pay for it. Commissioner Kerry Birnbach said her friends were anxious for a ferry ride in Berkeley. In my public comment, I asked if they would feel the same if they paid a full fare of around $28. I received a text that some believe the true per person cost of ferrying people across the bay when all costs are included may be as high as $100 per rider.
After going through the WETA year to date revenue and expenditures, that average fare cost of around $5.53 is subsidized with bridge tolls, Contra Costa Measure J and federal funds to the tune of $27.74 or actual cost of $33.27 per ferry ride. This subsidy calculation is low as it does not include all of the funding needed for terminal rehabilitation, infrastructure, new and replacement vessels.
The main point is that ferries do not exist on the Bay without substantial public financing through federal funds, state funds, bridge tolls and sales taxes. The people who use the ferries are disproportionally high income households with 35% of weekday commuter survey respondents reporting household incomes of greater than $200,000. People from low income households earning less than $50,000 make up 7% of riders overall with their utilization primarily on the weekends.
Over the weekend I had the opportunity to ask Tom Rubin who described himself as having over five decades of experience in transportation what he thought about road diets. He was quite blunt in his answer after first differentiating that “streets” are for local traffic and “roads” are to get from one place to another. Putting roads on a diet meaning decreasing the lanes of traffic pushes drivers on narrowed principal roads onto neighborhood streets not designed for through traffic creating a “stroad” problem.
Another problem Rubin noted with road diets and redesigns is that once the changes are made it is near impossible to undo the damage. That should be a warning to us, not to let up on the pressure to save Hopkins and the businesses we love there.
He added that road diets create major public safety problems. Every minute of delay for an emergency vehicle means substantial increase in a fatal incident or permanent injury. Pedestrian deaths increased after road diets in Southern California the opposite of the claim that road diets make streets safer. Rubin ended with, “fire chiefs are under great pressure to keep their mouths shut if they want to keep their jobs.”
If you haven’t responded to the Civic Center Survey, set aside a few minutes to send off your opinion. It doesn’t take long to look at the diagrams, check boxes and add comments if you choose. Survey link: https://qualtricsxmjph7lvfxl.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_aa71ggvGKG50ZIa
If you wish to see the presentation from the consultants before completing the survey here is the link: https://qualtricsxmjph7lvfxl.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_aa71ggvGKG50ZIa
The consultants Siegal & Strain Architects for the Civic Center seem set on a road diet for MLK Jr. Way. They also have in their plans new offices for city council in Maudelle Shirek. CCCC members have had their eyes on using a restored Maudelle Shirek Building for community non-profits and a historical museum. I’d like to see space for indigenous people.
Book and Film Recommendations
In a cruise through the New York Times before settling in for the final edit of this Diary, I saw the article that a Statue of Henrietta Lacks will replace a monument to Robert E. Lee in Roanoke, Virginia as part of a local project to recognize Black history in community spaces.
Henrietta Lacks, a poor Black woman, living not far from the Johns Hopkins Hospital was treated for cervical cancer, but before diagnosis was made and treatment begun, a sample of her tumor was taken. For the first time, when all other attempts to culture cancerous cells, grow cancerous cells in a lab failed, the tumor cells from Henrietta Lacks grew and multiplied every 20 to 24 hours. The cell line was named HeLa.
I didn’t read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot when it was published in 2010. It wasn’t until 2014 when it really sunk in how much I was missing by not reading books. That is when I went looking for a book club that focused on nonfiction and politics and couldn’t find one. It was a conversation over coffee with Barbara Ruffner that lead to starting a group that reads nearly 100% nonfiction on politics, race, climate and the environment. Barbara was a vibrant 88 when we started, but failing health caught up.
Barbara always pulled our choices to Democratic Socialism and it wasn’t long before we understood, we couldn’t read about politics without reading about race and racism. This review is dedicated to Barbara who passed away in October.
The book is the story of Henrietta, her family, descendants, the research, researchers and travels and the persistence of Rebecca Skloot to put it altogether.
Henrietta Lacks died at the young age of 31. The HeLa cells were used in the development of polio and COVID-19 vaccines, the study of leukemia, AIDS virus and cancer. HeLa cancer cells are the root of worldwide research studying the effects of toxins, drugs, hormones and viruses.
Honoring Henrietta Lacks is even more meaningful after reading the The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks if you haven’t picked it up already.
Film
Senator Warnock just won re-election by a healthy margin over Hershel Walker and much was made of voter turnout and questioning whether there really was voter suppression. The film “Vigilante: Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman” written by Greg Palast produced by Maria Florio with Executive Producers Martin Sheen, George DiCaprio and Stephen Nemeth lays bare the impact of Georgia’s SB 202 “Election Integrity Act of 2021” and the disenfranchisement of Black voters in Georgia. Mail-in voting dropped by 81%.
After seeing Greg Palast in person at a KPFA event, I always think of him as a man full of himself. I found the film unexpectantly informative and good and definitely worth watching especially because Georgia’s SB 202 is a bill that is and will be imitated elsewhere.
The film is currently free online until January 1, 2023 at 11 pm. https://watch.showandtell.film/watch/vigilante-ga/
December 4, 2022
I watched a nearly empty San Francisco bound train go by before boarding Lake Merritt BART at 8:01 Monday to report for jury duty. According to BART reports ridership has increased (incrementally), but comparing the present to pre-pandemic ridership, it has basically fallen off a cliff. Even the best day of the week, Tuesday, ridership reaches a high of 40% of pre-pandemic. Monday is the lowest at 35%.
This was only my second time on BART since COVID hit our shores and the first ride during commute hours.
The Water Emergency Transportation Authority (WETA) meets this week and as with every monthly Board meeting there are charts showing WETA ridership with CalTrain and BART comparing where each is in recovering to pre-pandemic levels. WETA is doing the best at near 80%, but looking deeper into utilization, systemwide at the very best hour of the morning at 80% recovery the highest ridership is 31% of capacity. In the evening it is 36%. All of this means that most of the time the 307,603 gallons of fuel (October 2022 usage) is to take near empty ferries back and forth across the bay. (ridership reports are on pages 17 – 20 https://weta.sanfranciscobayferry.com/sites/default/files/weta-public/currentmeeting/b120822aFULL.pdf )
You may ask why does this matter? It is because the City of Berkeley contracted with consultants for $1,100,000 for a plan for the Berkeley Marina to make the Marina a booming income generating enterprise zone with a new pier and ferry. And all this is based on a thriving utilization of ferries two and from San Francisco bolstered by morning and evening commuters.
When the pandemic hit and everyone who could work from home was sent home the initial reaction was something like “what you expect me to work from home, I can’t possibly work from home” and then once adjustment set in, it is, “what you want me to return to the office, I can’t possibly go back to the office, at least not every day.” Commuter car traffic still seems to be pretty heavy, but on the few days, I’ve actually had to drive in it, it is not as bad as it used to be.
I think it is time to rearrange our thinking on expecting offices full of workers. Scanning business articles, a 50% return to the office seems to be the national average. This has wide ranging implications.
I am all for a smaller footprint, a smaller impact on the environment and climate and working remotely can certainly help. The next four to six months should be very telling in how much we need to rearrange our thinking. Whatever changes do or don’t appear, we need to plan for a different future than just expecting to replicate how we lived prior to March 2020.
As for jury duty, we were given a screening questionnaire for a criminal case. I got the call Friday I didn’t need to return. No surprise, I had so many “yes” answers and explanations to complete, I was the last one out of the room.
At Monday’s Agenda Committee meeting, Councilmember Ben Bartlett’s item on regulating miniature bottles of alcohol was forwarded to the Health Commission and his item on creating a Berkeley song and flag was forwarded to the Civic Arts Commission. Councilmember Terry Taplin’s item on hiring consultants for creating a plan for dedicated bus lanes and elevated platforms on University Avenue was referred to the Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment and Sustainability (FITES) Committee. I asked that all of these road diets and modifications on emergency access and evacuation routes be looked at in total not one street at a time.
My walk partner and I were in the last mile of our 5 mile walk when a Fire Truck came screaming down Monterey and turned onto Hopkins. She commented, with the reminder that Hopkins is one of those emergency routes about to be narrowed.
At council on Tuesday Jim O’Fell (spelling from captioner’s record) commented on the lack of public engagement from City staff on the Hopkins corridor. There has been no response from questions regarding whether the plan had been reviewed by the Fire Department and Department of Emergency Services. Also, people on Talbot blocks away from Hopkins were asked about parking, but not neighbors on Alvina a half block from Hopkins that would bear the brunt of the removal of parking.
Berkeley has a new Fire Chief, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on a fire chief standing up to a team of consultants, the council, city planners and bicycle activists bent on road diets, turning emergency access and evacuation routes into single lane roads as is the current fashion, but while we’re waiting we might want to watch this video of the impacts of road diets on public safety and possibly Chief Sprague could use it in showing what happens with road diets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PamppHOHTs
Council returns to hybrid meetings with the option to attend in-person or virtually via zoom on December 6. This is just as RSV, Flu and COVID are surging in California. Do not follow the announcement Friday evening on KRON 10 pm news that surgical masks are just as effective as N95 (or KN95). Epidemiologist Osterholm ripped that study to shreds in his Thursday podcast. He said surgical masks offer little protection and it is fine to reuse your N95 until it is visibly dirty or no longer holds a seal (men with beards cannot maintain a seal). Osterholm also said get your vaccines and boosters and if you contract COVID do your best to get access to Paxlovid ASAP. Per Johns Hopkins data 12/3/2022 in the U.S. the daily average of deaths from COVID is 305. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/podcasts-webinars/episode-119
The last item on the council agenda was the reconfiguration of Adeline at BART and Ed Roberts Campus. Machai Freeman, Mary Lee Smith and others spoke to the problems of access for persons with disabilities with road diets and street reconfigurations with Milvia as an example of the worst design for disabled persons in wheelchairs.
The reconfiguration of Milvia with its bicycle lanes and curbs is often touted as a huge success. A picture of Farid Javandel, Transportation Division Manager on his bicycle riding down Milvia even made a frontpage splash on the local paper that comes in print.
Parking didn’t get much attention except in relation to disabled persons at the Ed Roberts campus. It did not come up for how the flea market vendors will get their goods to the locations on the plaza. I guess the assumption was made that was covered, but I am not sure how it all will work.
Councilmember Hahn was full of ideas for the plaza like chess boards as seen at Washington Square in Manhattan and bocchi ball like in Spain, France and Portugal. No one needs to go to Manhattan to see people playing chess outside. A trip to the plaza in front of the old Cody’s bookstore on Telegraph will do the same.
An actual plan for the housing project at Ashby BART is several years away. A statement was added to the motion by Councilmember Harrison to “developing preliminary engineering concepts ensuring universal design and access for the public.” The council voted for configuration 2 with a 60 foot wide plaza that will extend to the retail frontage. (page 9 https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2022-11-29%20Item%2015%20Adeline%20Street%20at%20Ashby%20BART.pdf)
The presentations and discussion of lighting and restroom improvements at Ohlone Park were refreshing. The plan is not yet finalized with public comment open until January 2, 2023 You can send your comments to [email protected] and [email protected]. When you go to the city webpage, scroll to past events and pick the 3rd document in the list, the presentation. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/our-work/capital-projects/ohlone-park-restroom-and-lighting-improvements
The Romtec restroom received the most votes by attendees and A and D were the top restroom site choices, but that was before we heard from the neighbor at site D. There were requests for night lighting on the volleyball court and multiple attendees requested directed, shielded down lighting below tree canopy for pathways. Concerns were raised about the impact of night light.
It was an ugly Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) meeting on Thursday evening and it may well be repeated on Wednesday, December 7 at the Civic Arts Commission at 6 pm.
It is now 30 years since Berkeley renamed Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day and when the idea started of changing the defunct Civic Center Fountain into a space for dedication to the indigenous people of this area, the Lisjan/Ohlone. Lee Sprague and Marlene Watson both of whom are indigenous people were the original design team in 1992. The project stalled for over two decades when a community group of supporters and local indigenous people came together around 2018 picking it back up, raising money and developing a design that would fit within the confines of the existing fountain structures incorporating the bronze turtles created for the project sitting in City Hall and the eight indigenous peoples’ medallions. https://turtleislandfountain.org/
City staff stepped in this year, tracked down Lee Sprague and Marelene Watson, hired PGA as consultants, threw out previous designs including the most recent and started over and this is where the evening at LPC began its descent.
After the new design was presented, I asked where were the representatives of the Lisjan/Ohlone we are accustomed to seeing and hearing from? Scott Ferris Director of Parks, Recreation and Waterfront said “we chose not to bring them” to the effect it would be too chaotic. Lee Sprague and Marlene Watson (neither of whom are Lisjan/Ohlone) while the original designers are not local and we have been hearing how the local indigenous people have been shut out of meetings in creating the public art to honor their history.
Beyond the questions and comments from the Landmarks Preservation Commissioners requesting a water feature, expressing the difficulty as an outsider of determining who is representative of the indigenous community and being asked to be a jury and not a commissioner, the design itself appears to be steeped with problems. And that is beside the fact that the newest Sprague and Watson design would conflict with the historical designation. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2022-12-01_LPC_Item%205_Turtle%20Island.pdf
The new design comes with no budget estimate. It features a 12 foot snapping turtle on top of a circular slab of polished granite that sits on top of the fountain (top level of the fountain removed) and glass tile work at the base to simulate water. To me it did not appear that this design would actually work especially the large slap of granite.
I found an online calculator https://stoneyard.com/calculators/stone-slab-weight/ just to get a gross estimate of what a slap of granite would weigh to sit on top of the fountain with a 12 foot bronze turtle on top. A circular slab of granite 14 feet in diameter and two feet thick would weigh 64,680 lbs or 32.34 tons. Slimming it down to 13 feet by 1 foot thick would be 27,885 lbs or 13.9425 tons. I heard today at CCCC there is not solid ground under the fountain so weight is even more of a problem.
One additional problem (I am sure there are others) Snapping Turtles are not native to California, are illegal in California and the California Fish & Game regulations specifically forbid possession or release of any genus or species of snapping turtle. So, the centerpiece, the snapping turtle is a predator of local wildlife. Maybe Sprague, Watson, PGA and the City have an explanation as to why they chose an invasive predatory species to honor the Ohlone. Is there another message here, maybe the genocide of the indigenous people and the theft of their land or am I reading too much into the symbolism?
If we are really going to honor the Lisjan/Ohlone a more meaningful action than land acknowledgements recited at City meetings would be giving our indigenous people prominent space in the Maudelle Shirek Building instead of building new offices for city council and staff.
I skipped the Monday Sugar Sweetened Beverage subcommittee meeting and Tuesday morning Civic Arts Commission Policy Subcommittee meeting. I couldn’t attend the Zero Waste Commission and Community Health Commission meetings as they ran the same time as City Council. I attended the 4 x 4 Joint Task Force Committee on Housing only long enough to raise the concern that minutes were not posted in a timely manner. I attended the Environment and Climate Commission long enough to learn that the subcommittee on Native Plants and Pesticide Reduction had not met, but I was encouraged by the remarks on native plants from Shannon Allen who has left City of Berkeley employment. The Thursday morning Land Use Committee meeting was cancelled.
I can’t say exactly where I heard of Kelly Weill’s book Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture and Why People Believe Anything, but it seemed like a perfect selection for these times when conspiracies appear to have consumed seemingly well-educated people we thought to be normal and most days it feels like half the country at least half of those who voted live in a different universe.
Weill a journalist for the Daily Beast wrote she started looking at the Flat Earth website in 2017 whenever the days news felt too crazy and checking in on the Flat Earth movement gave a sense of normalcy.
2017 was, of course, at the beginning of Trump’s presidency before COVID and the U.S. and the world slid into embracing bizarre level conspiracies, fortified by social media. Before we were surrounded by anti-vaxxers claiming COVID vaccines were injecting micro-chips to track us (a smart phone and google do that).
Pizzagate started in 2016 with the hacking of John Podesta’s and the claim that Comet Ping Pong pizzeria pizza orders in the emails were really code for human trafficking and a child sex ring. This conspiracy was merged into QAnon and we saw those believers joining the Oathkeepers and Proud Boys in the attempted coup on January 6th, 2021. Weill wrote 97 QAnon supporters ran for Congress in 2020.
After hearing that over one hundred legislators that voted to overturn the election of President Biden in the evening after the January 6 attack on the capital were re-elected in November 2022, I went looking for an article that gave the actual results. When I couldn’t find one, I pulled up the list and went through them one by one. Of the eight senators only John Neely Kennedy from Louisiana was up for re-election. He won with 61.6% of the vote against twelve other candidates. The other seven senators are up for re-election in 2024 and 2026.
In the House of Representatives, one hundred thirty-nine voted against certifying the election of President Biden. Only two of the 139 were defeated by Democrats. Yvette Herrell lost to Gabriel Vasquez in New Mexico and Steve Chabot lost to Greg Landsman in Ohio. Of the remaining 137, five ran for other offices, four were defeated in the primary, four did not run for re-election and three died, leaving 121 who voted to overturn the election and were re-elected in November 2022. Of that 121 eight ran unopposed.
If you are feeling at all secure that there was no Republican sweep, we still lost the House and are barely hanging on to the Senate. We have work ahead if we want to maintain a democracy and we would do well to understand how people are sucked into conspiracies. Kelly Weill found many fell into flat earth through YouTube algorithms. And the more they were questioned, rejected, unfriended, the more they with dug in reaching for reinforcement within in their group (sound familiar). And one more thing, the deeper the flat earthers were into one conspiracy, the easier the reach to other conspiracies.
I watched a nearly empty San Francisco bound train go by before boarding Lake Merritt BART at 8:01 Monday to report for jury duty. According to BART reports ridership has increased (incrementally), but comparing the present to pre-pandemic ridership, it has basically fallen off a cliff. Even the best day of the week, Tuesday, ridership reaches a high of 40% of pre-pandemic. Monday is the lowest at 35%.
This was only my second time on BART since COVID hit our shores and the first ride during commute hours.
The Water Emergency Transportation Authority (WETA) meets this week and as with every monthly Board meeting there are charts showing WETA ridership with CalTrain and BART comparing where each is in recovering to pre-pandemic levels. WETA is doing the best at near 80%, but looking deeper into utilization, systemwide at the very best hour of the morning at 80% recovery the highest ridership is 31% of capacity. In the evening it is 36%. All of this means that most of the time the 307,603 gallons of fuel (October 2022 usage) is to take near empty ferries back and forth across the bay. (ridership reports are on pages 17 – 20 https://weta.sanfranciscobayferry.com/sites/default/files/weta-public/currentmeeting/b120822aFULL.pdf )
You may ask why does this matter? It is because the City of Berkeley contracted with consultants for $1,100,000 for a plan for the Berkeley Marina to make the Marina a booming income generating enterprise zone with a new pier and ferry. And all this is based on a thriving utilization of ferries two and from San Francisco bolstered by morning and evening commuters.
When the pandemic hit and everyone who could work from home was sent home the initial reaction was something like “what you expect me to work from home, I can’t possibly work from home” and then once adjustment set in, it is, “what you want me to return to the office, I can’t possibly go back to the office, at least not every day.” Commuter car traffic still seems to be pretty heavy, but on the few days, I’ve actually had to drive in it, it is not as bad as it used to be.
I think it is time to rearrange our thinking on expecting offices full of workers. Scanning business articles, a 50% return to the office seems to be the national average. This has wide ranging implications.
I am all for a smaller footprint, a smaller impact on the environment and climate and working remotely can certainly help. The next four to six months should be very telling in how much we need to rearrange our thinking. Whatever changes do or don’t appear, we need to plan for a different future than just expecting to replicate how we lived prior to March 2020.
As for jury duty, we were given a screening questionnaire for a criminal case. I got the call Friday I didn’t need to return. No surprise, I had so many “yes” answers and explanations to complete, I was the last one out of the room.
At Monday’s Agenda Committee meeting, Councilmember Ben Bartlett’s item on regulating miniature bottles of alcohol was forwarded to the Health Commission and his item on creating a Berkeley song and flag was forwarded to the Civic Arts Commission. Councilmember Terry Taplin’s item on hiring consultants for creating a plan for dedicated bus lanes and elevated platforms on University Avenue was referred to the Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment and Sustainability (FITES) Committee. I asked that all of these road diets and modifications on emergency access and evacuation routes be looked at in total not one street at a time.
My walk partner and I were in the last mile of our 5 mile walk when a Fire Truck came screaming down Monterey and turned onto Hopkins. She commented, with the reminder that Hopkins is one of those emergency routes about to be narrowed.
At council on Tuesday Jim O’Fell (spelling from captioner’s record) commented on the lack of public engagement from City staff on the Hopkins corridor. There has been no response from questions regarding whether the plan had been reviewed by the Fire Department and Department of Emergency Services. Also, people on Talbot blocks away from Hopkins were asked about parking, but not neighbors on Alvina a half block from Hopkins that would bear the brunt of the removal of parking.
Berkeley has a new Fire Chief, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on a fire chief standing up to a team of consultants, the council, city planners and bicycle activists bent on road diets, turning emergency access and evacuation routes into single lane roads as is the current fashion, but while we’re waiting we might want to watch this video of the impacts of road diets on public safety and possibly Chief Sprague could use it in showing what happens with road diets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PamppHOHTs
Council returns to hybrid meetings with the option to attend in-person or virtually via zoom on December 6. This is just as RSV, Flu and COVID are surging in California. Do not follow the announcement Friday evening on KRON 10 pm news that surgical masks are just as effective as N95 (or KN95). Epidemiologist Osterholm ripped that study to shreds in his Thursday podcast. He said surgical masks offer little protection and it is fine to reuse your N95 until it is visibly dirty or no longer holds a seal (men with beards cannot maintain a seal). Osterholm also said get your vaccines and boosters and if you contract COVID do your best to get access to Paxlovid ASAP. Per Johns Hopkins data 12/3/2022 in the U.S. the daily average of deaths from COVID is 305. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/podcasts-webinars/episode-119
The last item on the council agenda was the reconfiguration of Adeline at BART and Ed Roberts Campus. Machai Freeman, Mary Lee Smith and others spoke to the problems of access for persons with disabilities with road diets and street reconfigurations with Milvia as an example of the worst design for disabled persons in wheelchairs.
The reconfiguration of Milvia with its bicycle lanes and curbs is often touted as a huge success. A picture of Farid Javandel, Transportation Division Manager on his bicycle riding down Milvia even made a frontpage splash on the local paper that comes in print.
Parking didn’t get much attention except in relation to disabled persons at the Ed Roberts campus. It did not come up for how the flea market vendors will get their goods to the locations on the plaza. I guess the assumption was made that was covered, but I am not sure how it all will work.
Councilmember Hahn was full of ideas for the plaza like chess boards as seen at Washington Square in Manhattan and bocchi ball like in Spain, France and Portugal. No one needs to go to Manhattan to see people playing chess outside. A trip to the plaza in front of the old Cody’s bookstore on Telegraph will do the same.
An actual plan for the housing project at Ashby BART is several years away. A statement was added to the motion by Councilmember Harrison to “developing preliminary engineering concepts ensuring universal design and access for the public.” The council voted for configuration 2 with a 60 foot wide plaza that will extend to the retail frontage. (page 9 https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2022-11-29%20Item%2015%20Adeline%20Street%20at%20Ashby%20BART.pdf)
The presentations and discussion of lighting and restroom improvements at Ohlone Park were refreshing. The plan is not yet finalized with public comment open until January 2, 2023 You can send your comments to [email protected] and [email protected]. When you go to the city webpage, scroll to past events and pick the 3rd document in the list, the presentation. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/our-work/capital-projects/ohlone-park-restroom-and-lighting-improvements
The Romtec restroom received the most votes by attendees and A and D were the top restroom site choices, but that was before we heard from the neighbor at site D. There were requests for night lighting on the volleyball court and multiple attendees requested directed, shielded down lighting below tree canopy for pathways. Concerns were raised about the impact of night light.
It was an ugly Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) meeting on Thursday evening and it may well be repeated on Wednesday, December 7 at the Civic Arts Commission at 6 pm.
It is now 30 years since Berkeley renamed Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day and when the idea started of changing the defunct Civic Center Fountain into a space for dedication to the indigenous people of this area, the Lisjan/Ohlone. Lee Sprague and Marlene Watson both of whom are indigenous people were the original design team in 1992. The project stalled for over two decades when a community group of supporters and local indigenous people came together around 2018 picking it back up, raising money and developing a design that would fit within the confines of the existing fountain structures incorporating the bronze turtles created for the project sitting in City Hall and the eight indigenous peoples’ medallions. https://turtleislandfountain.org/
City staff stepped in this year, tracked down Lee Sprague and Marelene Watson, hired PGA as consultants, threw out previous designs including the most recent and started over and this is where the evening at LPC began its descent.
After the new design was presented, I asked where were the representatives of the Lisjan/Ohlone we are accustomed to seeing and hearing from? Scott Ferris Director of Parks, Recreation and Waterfront said “we chose not to bring them” to the effect it would be too chaotic. Lee Sprague and Marlene Watson (neither of whom are Lisjan/Ohlone) while the original designers are not local and we have been hearing how the local indigenous people have been shut out of meetings in creating the public art to honor their history.
Beyond the questions and comments from the Landmarks Preservation Commissioners requesting a water feature, expressing the difficulty as an outsider of determining who is representative of the indigenous community and being asked to be a jury and not a commissioner, the design itself appears to be steeped with problems. And that is beside the fact that the newest Sprague and Watson design would conflict with the historical designation. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2022-12-01_LPC_Item%205_Turtle%20Island.pdf
The new design comes with no budget estimate. It features a 12 foot snapping turtle on top of a circular slab of polished granite that sits on top of the fountain (top level of the fountain removed) and glass tile work at the base to simulate water. To me it did not appear that this design would actually work especially the large slap of granite.
I found an online calculator https://stoneyard.com/calculators/stone-slab-weight/ just to get a gross estimate of what a slap of granite would weigh to sit on top of the fountain with a 12 foot bronze turtle on top. A circular slab of granite 14 feet in diameter and two feet thick would weigh 64,680 lbs or 32.34 tons. Slimming it down to 13 feet by 1 foot thick would be 27,885 lbs or 13.9425 tons. I heard today at CCCC there is not solid ground under the fountain so weight is even more of a problem.
One additional problem (I am sure there are others) Snapping Turtles are not native to California, are illegal in California and the California Fish & Game regulations specifically forbid possession or release of any genus or species of snapping turtle. So, the centerpiece, the snapping turtle is a predator of local wildlife. Maybe Sprague, Watson, PGA and the City have an explanation as to why they chose an invasive predatory species to honor the Ohlone. Is there another message here, maybe the genocide of the indigenous people and the theft of their land or am I reading too much into the symbolism?
If we are really going to honor the Lisjan/Ohlone a more meaningful action than land acknowledgements recited at City meetings would be giving our indigenous people prominent space in the Maudelle Shirek Building instead of building new offices for city council and staff.
I skipped the Monday Sugar Sweetened Beverage subcommittee meeting and Tuesday morning Civic Arts Commission Policy Subcommittee meeting. I couldn’t attend the Zero Waste Commission and Community Health Commission meetings as they ran the same time as City Council. I attended the 4 x 4 Joint Task Force Committee on Housing only long enough to raise the concern that minutes were not posted in a timely manner. I attended the Environment and Climate Commission long enough to learn that the subcommittee on Native Plants and Pesticide Reduction had not met, but I was encouraged by the remarks on native plants from Shannon Allen who has left City of Berkeley employment. The Thursday morning Land Use Committee meeting was cancelled.
I can’t say exactly where I heard of Kelly Weill’s book Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture and Why People Believe Anything, but it seemed like a perfect selection for these times when conspiracies appear to have consumed seemingly well-educated people we thought to be normal and most days it feels like half the country at least half of those who voted live in a different universe.
Weill a journalist for the Daily Beast wrote she started looking at the Flat Earth website in 2017 whenever the days news felt too crazy and checking in on the Flat Earth movement gave a sense of normalcy.
2017 was, of course, at the beginning of Trump’s presidency before COVID and the U.S. and the world slid into embracing bizarre level conspiracies, fortified by social media. Before we were surrounded by anti-vaxxers claiming COVID vaccines were injecting micro-chips to track us (a smart phone and google do that).
Pizzagate started in 2016 with the hacking of John Podesta’s and the claim that Comet Ping Pong pizzeria pizza orders in the emails were really code for human trafficking and a child sex ring. This conspiracy was merged into QAnon and we saw those believers joining the Oathkeepers and Proud Boys in the attempted coup on January 6th, 2021. Weill wrote 97 QAnon supporters ran for Congress in 2020.
After hearing that over one hundred legislators that voted to overturn the election of President Biden in the evening after the January 6 attack on the capital were re-elected in November 2022, I went looking for an article that gave the actual results. When I couldn’t find one, I pulled up the list and went through them one by one. Of the eight senators only John Neely Kennedy from Louisiana was up for re-election. He won with 61.6% of the vote against twelve other candidates. The other seven senators are up for re-election in 2024 and 2026.
In the House of Representatives, one hundred thirty-nine voted against certifying the election of President Biden. Only two of the 139 were defeated by Democrats. Yvette Herrell lost to Gabriel Vasquez in New Mexico and Steve Chabot lost to Greg Landsman in Ohio. Of the remaining 137, five ran for other offices, four were defeated in the primary, four did not run for re-election and three died, leaving 121 who voted to overturn the election and were re-elected in November 2022. Of that 121 eight ran unopposed.
If you are feeling at all secure that there was no Republican sweep, we still lost the House and are barely hanging on to the Senate. We have work ahead if we want to maintain a democracy and we would do well to understand how people are sucked into conspiracies. Kelly Weill found many fell into flat earth through YouTube algorithms. And the more they were questioned, rejected, unfriended, the more they with dug in reaching for reinforcement within in their group (sound familiar). And one more thing, the deeper the flat earthers were into one conspiracy, the easier the reach to other conspiracies.
November 27, 2022
I don’t know how complete my diary will be next week as I’ve been summoned to report to jury duty on Monday. My first reaction was, did you not look at my age? I’m closer to 80 than 70, but then our President just turned 80 this week. Bernie Sanders is 81 and Noam Chomsky is 94.
I always say, people age at different rates and so do bodies and minds. Age was the subject of my morning podcast. Reagan was showing signs of dementia in his second term (age 73-77) and Adam Schiff wrote in his book Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could of the mental decline of Robert Mueller III (age 74 when Mueller report was released)
When Elton John walked on and off the stage in 2019 in Vegas, then 72 he was no longer capable of the cartwheels and flips I saw him do across the stage at the end of his performance at Hollywood Bowl nearly 50 years earlier when we were both in our early twenties. But as he sat down at the piano starting the evening performance, the music was richer and more dynamic. I said to my friends he walks like an old man and plays like a young man.
If the Paradise City Council had listened to the Mildred Eslin in 2014, the 88 year-old woman who was the lone voice in opposition to narrowing the road (road diet) in and out of Paradise, would that same road have become the “kill zone” as it was labeled after the 2018 fire? Would 85 people have died? How prescient were her words, “The main thing is fire danger, if the council is searching for a way to diminish the population of Paradise, this would be the way to do it.”
Vision Zero (reducing traffic deaths to zero) - Road Diets are the latest fashion in city planning. In “Artificial Gridlock: Who Put the ‘Die’ in LA Road DIEts?” published in City Watch, Liz Amsden wrote that the LAPD reported 294 people were killed in traffic collisions in 2021, 22% more than in 2020 and a 58% increase in pedestrian deaths since Vision Zero was launched.
Road diets work in some places and not others. Dwight is much easier to cross at California with the reconfiguration.
The main message is road diets don’t work everywhere and when they are on emergency access and evacuation routes disaster isn’t far behind. That is the warning that Margot Smith has been giving and Liz Amsden lays it out clearly in her article with this:
“As implemented in the United States, road diets have proven to be dangerous, doing the opposite of what they're supposed to – causing more accidents and fatalities, while slowing emergency responders from reaching people.
It took an ambulance and fire engine nearly four minutes to travel four blocks to where a motorcyclist lay pinned under a semi due to the Venice Boulevard road diet.
A road diet on Foothill Boulevard the in Sunland-Tujunga neighborhood during the 2017 La Tuna Fire, the biggest in Los Angeles in half a century, created a bottleneck for evacuations and blocked access by police and fire.
The Sunland-Tujunga Neighborhood Council passed a motion to return the boulevard to four lanes, two in each direction to avoid a repeat but the City ignored the request and, to add insult to injury, has added another road diet, this one to La Tuna Canyon Road which is the sole route through hilly wildfire-prone terrain.
Firefighters, paramedics, and police officers in Los Angeles and elsewhere have confirmed lane reductions, particularly so-called “road diets,” have significantly increased response times. Ask any first responder – even 30 seconds delay can mean the difference if someone lives or dies.
The Paradise fire was so deadly because three years earlier a Complete Streets road diet narrowed the main road from four lanes to two creating total gridlock when residents attempted to flee the advancing flames. The fire department called it their kill zone. Places where there have been similar lane removals are being called death traps for fires still to come.
Imposing solutions that worked in another country or even from another area of Los Angeles without addressing underlying needs and local concerns will never work in a city with so many geographically diverse neighborhoods.
The goal of getting people out of their cars is based on the theory that people can readily shift to other ways of commuting. That is just plain balderdash for Los Angeles which is an enormous, spread-out city with limited viable public transportation options.
Every road diet also exacerbates the problem of drivers cutting through side streets and residential neighborhoods, past schools and parks.”
https://citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/los-angeles/24745-la-traffic-who-put-the-die-in-road-diets
Fashion and fads are hard to break. Adeline, Telegraph, Hopkins are all mapped as emergency access and evacuation routes and are in some stage of planning for a road diet. Siegal & Strain is pushing a road diet for MLK Jr Way. And, Taplin’s proposal for University Avenue listed in the draft agenda for December 13 makes five. If there is one take away, it is in the title who put the DIE in road DIEt. If you follow the link, the die extends to businesses which sits in contrast to comments from Walk Bike Berkeley that the reconfiguration of Hopkins Street will benefit businesses.
The City meetings piled up on Monday with the main event being the City Council special meeting on the Fair Work Week Ordinance at 5 pm. I gave a description of the November 3 Fair Work Week filibuster in my November 6 edition of the Activist’s Diary. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-11-06/article/50047?headline=A-Berkeley-Activist-s-Diary-Week-Ending-November-6-2022--Kelly-Hammargren
The effort for the Fair Work Week Ordinance started in 2018. Basically, it protects workers earning less than twice the minimum wage (under $33.98 per hour). In the Fair Work Week Ordinance, qualified current employed workers must be offered additional hours before new employees are hired or staffing agencies are called in. They also receive a minimum pay (4 hours of pay or the hours scheduled whichever is less) when canceled in less than 24 hours. In scheduling changes of greater than 24 hours, the employee receives one hour of pay for the scheduling changes or cancellations.
For those of us who have been tracking the Fair Work Week Ordinance and attended the November 3, 2022 council meeting, the core resistance was coming from the City of Berkeley Administration with game playing and pick up by Wengraf and Droste to carry administration water.
Dee Williams-Ridley, City Manager and LaTanya Bellow, Deputy City Manager were not present Monday evening. Instead in this round, the City was represented by Paul Budenhaggen who was in general supportive and came with financial analysis that put objections to rest. Wengraf tried and failed to modify the proposed ordinance by excluding Longlife Medical Berkeley and changing the criteria for businesses exempted from the ordinance.
Droste was absent the entire evening and Wengraf signed off the meeting according to record at 6:39 pm which I first noticed when the vote was called. The ordinance passed with no changes with a unanimous vote by those remaining (Kesarwani, Taplin, Bartlett, Harrison, Hahn, Robinson and Arreguin). The meeting adjourned at 6:58 pm.
In all the council meetings I’ve attended, I don’t ever recall Wengraf taking a stand alone. When she comes up for re-election in 2024 (if she runs) District 6 voters might want to ask why she left without staying just a few minutes longer to cast her vote for or against the Fair Work Week Ordinance.
By Tuesday morning all that was left of City meetings was the Land Use, Housing and Economic Development special meeting at 9:30 am. The chair Councilmember Rigel Robinson announced that neither of the authors (Wengraf and Harrison) could attend for the single item on the agenda so no action would be taken on the amendment to BMC Chapter 13.110 the COVID emergency eviction moratorium. Mayor Arreguin stepped in as an alternate for the meeting and opened his statement with that he was opposed to the proposed amendment. With no action in the offing, I tuned out. The 1 ½ hour recording is available if you wish to listen, just go to the bottom of the page under Additional Information and click on audio recordings. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/city-council/council-committees/policy-committee-land-use-housing-economic-development
The Community for a Cultural Civic Center (CCCC) met at noon on Monday to discuss the election results, the Civic Center Vision Plan open house and the status of the Turtle Island Monument Project.
There was disappointment from some that Measure L didn’t pass, but no one thought there was going to be any significant contribution to the Civic Center. More than the election was the concern that the plan presented at the open house by Susi Mazuola from Siegal & Strain and Gehl Consultants was to move city offices into the Maudelle Shirek Building and relegate the media and the historical society museum to the basement.
I said from the beginning that Measure L money would be going to vanity projects. The Civic Center plans presented at the open house certainly confirmed for me that my instinct was correct. Looks like if this goes forward, Berkeley can have its own multi-million-dollar expenditure, so the mayor and council can strut around in their new digs while community non-profits sit in any leftover space the basement, out of sight out of mind sinking the community visions for use of Maudelle Shirek and the Veterans Buildings.
The update on the Turtle Island Monument Project for the Civic Center Fountain brought more bad news. The architects PGA Design Landscape Architects https://pgadesign.com/ have completely shut out the indigenous people that the monument is supposed to honor and the group that raised the money for the project.
It is unknown what PGA Design Landscape Architects will present at the Landscape Preservation Commission on December 1 at 7 pm and at the Civic Center Commission on December 7. CCCC voted to send a letter to city council regarding the handling of the Turtle Island Monument Project.
On October 11, 2022 Berkeley City Council voted to adopt the Land Acknowledgement Statement recognizing Berkeley as the ancestral, unceded home of the Ohlone people. The Land Acknowledgement is now included in writing (not recited) under preliminary matters in council regular meeting agendas (not special meetings or closed meeting agendas).
Councilmember Hahn who authored the acknowledgement spoke to how much she learned in the process. There is much to learn and one piece that barely hit the radar until notice of a hearing was published in New York Times that the U.S. has yet to fulfill the promise of Article 7 in the Treaty of New Echota of 1835 / TREATY WITH THE CHEROKEE, 1835. Kim Teehee is the Cherokee Nation Delegate requesting to be seated as a nonvoting delegate in the House of Representatives. Teehee has been waiting three years, the Cherokees nearly 200 years for the vote of admission as a delegate to the House of Representatives.
“ARTICLE 7. The Cherokee nation having already made great progress in civilization and deeming it important that every proper and laudable inducement should be offered to their people to improve their condition as well as to guard and secure in the most effectual manner the rights guaranteed to them in this treaty, and with a view to illustrate the liberal and enlarged policy of the Government of the United States towards the Indians in their removal beyond the territorial limits of the States, it is stipulated that they shall be entitled to a delegate in the House of Representatives of the United states whenever Congress shall make provision for the same.”
https://americanindian.si.edu/static/nationtonation/pdf/Treaty-of-New-Echota-1835.pdf
The community meeting on the Ohlone Park restroom and lighting is Wednesday evening at 6:30 pm. It has been ingrained for decades through scary movies and suspense scenes that crime lurks in the darkness and if we just have enough bright light we will be safe and secure. In the webinar “Light at Night: A Glowing Hazard” one of the speakers related how her partner’s catalytic converter was stolen from a vehicle parked in bright light right under a street light.
Light at night disrupts our own circadian rhythm and wild life. The question is can we overcome our fear of the dark and put artificial light at night (ALAN) in the proper frame as light pollution and treat it like every other pollution? Reducing night light pollution means shielding light so it is directed to only where and when it is needed, placing fixtures close to the ground, using the least amount of light needed with the appropriate color temperature with red/orange/yellow wave lengths and utilizing timers and motion detectors.
Dahlia Lithwick who as senior legal correspondent for Slate writes about law, the Supreme Court and hosts the podcast Amicus https://slate.com/podcasts/amicus is also the author of the book Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America. The early chapters are energizing reviews of women in law who took courageous stands, started programs, took on white supremacists, defended reproductive rights, like Sally Yates serving as Acting Attorney General in the transition from President Obama to Trump refused to defend the Muslim ban, Becca Hellar started the International Refugee Assistance Program and was instrumental in the lawyers that showed up at airports providing legal support during the Trump travel ban, Roberta Kaplan and Karen Dunn litigated Charlottesville. Bridgitte Ameri was the attorney assisting for the teenager seeking an abortion in an ICE detention facility who overcame through appeal the 2 to 1 decision with Kavanaugh in the majority delaying access to abortion.
The chapter titled MeToo speaks to the sexual harrassment of Judge Alex Kozinski, how Kozinski’s sexual misconduct was an “open secret” until Heidi Bond a former clerk finally blew the whistle in the Washington Post. Lithwick writes “Everybody knew something awful absolved all of us of the burden of doing anything. All of us hoping the story would break someday and we would be off the hook.” The powerful Judge Kozinski was in the position to make or break legal careers. For Brett Kavanaugh clerking for Judge Kosinski was the step to clerking for Justice Kennedy and making his way to the Supreme Court.
Lithwick lays out how those subjected to the harassment and the bystanders who stayed silent makes everyone complicit. It is the ethical question of when and where do we draw the line.
I don’t know how complete my diary will be next week as I’ve been summoned to report to jury duty on Monday. My first reaction was, did you not look at my age? I’m closer to 80 than 70, but then our President just turned 80 this week. Bernie Sanders is 81 and Noam Chomsky is 94.
I always say, people age at different rates and so do bodies and minds. Age was the subject of my morning podcast. Reagan was showing signs of dementia in his second term (age 73-77) and Adam Schiff wrote in his book Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could of the mental decline of Robert Mueller III (age 74 when Mueller report was released)
When Elton John walked on and off the stage in 2019 in Vegas, then 72 he was no longer capable of the cartwheels and flips I saw him do across the stage at the end of his performance at Hollywood Bowl nearly 50 years earlier when we were both in our early twenties. But as he sat down at the piano starting the evening performance, the music was richer and more dynamic. I said to my friends he walks like an old man and plays like a young man.
If the Paradise City Council had listened to the Mildred Eslin in 2014, the 88 year-old woman who was the lone voice in opposition to narrowing the road (road diet) in and out of Paradise, would that same road have become the “kill zone” as it was labeled after the 2018 fire? Would 85 people have died? How prescient were her words, “The main thing is fire danger, if the council is searching for a way to diminish the population of Paradise, this would be the way to do it.”
Vision Zero (reducing traffic deaths to zero) - Road Diets are the latest fashion in city planning. In “Artificial Gridlock: Who Put the ‘Die’ in LA Road DIEts?” published in City Watch, Liz Amsden wrote that the LAPD reported 294 people were killed in traffic collisions in 2021, 22% more than in 2020 and a 58% increase in pedestrian deaths since Vision Zero was launched.
Road diets work in some places and not others. Dwight is much easier to cross at California with the reconfiguration.
The main message is road diets don’t work everywhere and when they are on emergency access and evacuation routes disaster isn’t far behind. That is the warning that Margot Smith has been giving and Liz Amsden lays it out clearly in her article with this:
“As implemented in the United States, road diets have proven to be dangerous, doing the opposite of what they're supposed to – causing more accidents and fatalities, while slowing emergency responders from reaching people.
It took an ambulance and fire engine nearly four minutes to travel four blocks to where a motorcyclist lay pinned under a semi due to the Venice Boulevard road diet.
A road diet on Foothill Boulevard the in Sunland-Tujunga neighborhood during the 2017 La Tuna Fire, the biggest in Los Angeles in half a century, created a bottleneck for evacuations and blocked access by police and fire.
The Sunland-Tujunga Neighborhood Council passed a motion to return the boulevard to four lanes, two in each direction to avoid a repeat but the City ignored the request and, to add insult to injury, has added another road diet, this one to La Tuna Canyon Road which is the sole route through hilly wildfire-prone terrain.
Firefighters, paramedics, and police officers in Los Angeles and elsewhere have confirmed lane reductions, particularly so-called “road diets,” have significantly increased response times. Ask any first responder – even 30 seconds delay can mean the difference if someone lives or dies.
The Paradise fire was so deadly because three years earlier a Complete Streets road diet narrowed the main road from four lanes to two creating total gridlock when residents attempted to flee the advancing flames. The fire department called it their kill zone. Places where there have been similar lane removals are being called death traps for fires still to come.
Imposing solutions that worked in another country or even from another area of Los Angeles without addressing underlying needs and local concerns will never work in a city with so many geographically diverse neighborhoods.
The goal of getting people out of their cars is based on the theory that people can readily shift to other ways of commuting. That is just plain balderdash for Los Angeles which is an enormous, spread-out city with limited viable public transportation options.
Every road diet also exacerbates the problem of drivers cutting through side streets and residential neighborhoods, past schools and parks.”
https://citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/los-angeles/24745-la-traffic-who-put-the-die-in-road-diets
Fashion and fads are hard to break. Adeline, Telegraph, Hopkins are all mapped as emergency access and evacuation routes and are in some stage of planning for a road diet. Siegal & Strain is pushing a road diet for MLK Jr Way. And, Taplin’s proposal for University Avenue listed in the draft agenda for December 13 makes five. If there is one take away, it is in the title who put the DIE in road DIEt. If you follow the link, the die extends to businesses which sits in contrast to comments from Walk Bike Berkeley that the reconfiguration of Hopkins Street will benefit businesses.
The City meetings piled up on Monday with the main event being the City Council special meeting on the Fair Work Week Ordinance at 5 pm. I gave a description of the November 3 Fair Work Week filibuster in my November 6 edition of the Activist’s Diary. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-11-06/article/50047?headline=A-Berkeley-Activist-s-Diary-Week-Ending-November-6-2022--Kelly-Hammargren
The effort for the Fair Work Week Ordinance started in 2018. Basically, it protects workers earning less than twice the minimum wage (under $33.98 per hour). In the Fair Work Week Ordinance, qualified current employed workers must be offered additional hours before new employees are hired or staffing agencies are called in. They also receive a minimum pay (4 hours of pay or the hours scheduled whichever is less) when canceled in less than 24 hours. In scheduling changes of greater than 24 hours, the employee receives one hour of pay for the scheduling changes or cancellations.
For those of us who have been tracking the Fair Work Week Ordinance and attended the November 3, 2022 council meeting, the core resistance was coming from the City of Berkeley Administration with game playing and pick up by Wengraf and Droste to carry administration water.
Dee Williams-Ridley, City Manager and LaTanya Bellow, Deputy City Manager were not present Monday evening. Instead in this round, the City was represented by Paul Budenhaggen who was in general supportive and came with financial analysis that put objections to rest. Wengraf tried and failed to modify the proposed ordinance by excluding Longlife Medical Berkeley and changing the criteria for businesses exempted from the ordinance.
Droste was absent the entire evening and Wengraf signed off the meeting according to record at 6:39 pm which I first noticed when the vote was called. The ordinance passed with no changes with a unanimous vote by those remaining (Kesarwani, Taplin, Bartlett, Harrison, Hahn, Robinson and Arreguin). The meeting adjourned at 6:58 pm.
In all the council meetings I’ve attended, I don’t ever recall Wengraf taking a stand alone. When she comes up for re-election in 2024 (if she runs) District 6 voters might want to ask why she left without staying just a few minutes longer to cast her vote for or against the Fair Work Week Ordinance.
By Tuesday morning all that was left of City meetings was the Land Use, Housing and Economic Development special meeting at 9:30 am. The chair Councilmember Rigel Robinson announced that neither of the authors (Wengraf and Harrison) could attend for the single item on the agenda so no action would be taken on the amendment to BMC Chapter 13.110 the COVID emergency eviction moratorium. Mayor Arreguin stepped in as an alternate for the meeting and opened his statement with that he was opposed to the proposed amendment. With no action in the offing, I tuned out. The 1 ½ hour recording is available if you wish to listen, just go to the bottom of the page under Additional Information and click on audio recordings. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/city-council/council-committees/policy-committee-land-use-housing-economic-development
The Community for a Cultural Civic Center (CCCC) met at noon on Monday to discuss the election results, the Civic Center Vision Plan open house and the status of the Turtle Island Monument Project.
There was disappointment from some that Measure L didn’t pass, but no one thought there was going to be any significant contribution to the Civic Center. More than the election was the concern that the plan presented at the open house by Susi Mazuola from Siegal & Strain and Gehl Consultants was to move city offices into the Maudelle Shirek Building and relegate the media and the historical society museum to the basement.
I said from the beginning that Measure L money would be going to vanity projects. The Civic Center plans presented at the open house certainly confirmed for me that my instinct was correct. Looks like if this goes forward, Berkeley can have its own multi-million-dollar expenditure, so the mayor and council can strut around in their new digs while community non-profits sit in any leftover space the basement, out of sight out of mind sinking the community visions for use of Maudelle Shirek and the Veterans Buildings.
The update on the Turtle Island Monument Project for the Civic Center Fountain brought more bad news. The architects PGA Design Landscape Architects https://pgadesign.com/ have completely shut out the indigenous people that the monument is supposed to honor and the group that raised the money for the project.
It is unknown what PGA Design Landscape Architects will present at the Landscape Preservation Commission on December 1 at 7 pm and at the Civic Center Commission on December 7. CCCC voted to send a letter to city council regarding the handling of the Turtle Island Monument Project.
On October 11, 2022 Berkeley City Council voted to adopt the Land Acknowledgement Statement recognizing Berkeley as the ancestral, unceded home of the Ohlone people. The Land Acknowledgement is now included in writing (not recited) under preliminary matters in council regular meeting agendas (not special meetings or closed meeting agendas).
Councilmember Hahn who authored the acknowledgement spoke to how much she learned in the process. There is much to learn and one piece that barely hit the radar until notice of a hearing was published in New York Times that the U.S. has yet to fulfill the promise of Article 7 in the Treaty of New Echota of 1835 / TREATY WITH THE CHEROKEE, 1835. Kim Teehee is the Cherokee Nation Delegate requesting to be seated as a nonvoting delegate in the House of Representatives. Teehee has been waiting three years, the Cherokees nearly 200 years for the vote of admission as a delegate to the House of Representatives.
“ARTICLE 7. The Cherokee nation having already made great progress in civilization and deeming it important that every proper and laudable inducement should be offered to their people to improve their condition as well as to guard and secure in the most effectual manner the rights guaranteed to them in this treaty, and with a view to illustrate the liberal and enlarged policy of the Government of the United States towards the Indians in their removal beyond the territorial limits of the States, it is stipulated that they shall be entitled to a delegate in the House of Representatives of the United states whenever Congress shall make provision for the same.”
https://americanindian.si.edu/static/nationtonation/pdf/Treaty-of-New-Echota-1835.pdf
The community meeting on the Ohlone Park restroom and lighting is Wednesday evening at 6:30 pm. It has been ingrained for decades through scary movies and suspense scenes that crime lurks in the darkness and if we just have enough bright light we will be safe and secure. In the webinar “Light at Night: A Glowing Hazard” one of the speakers related how her partner’s catalytic converter was stolen from a vehicle parked in bright light right under a street light.
Light at night disrupts our own circadian rhythm and wild life. The question is can we overcome our fear of the dark and put artificial light at night (ALAN) in the proper frame as light pollution and treat it like every other pollution? Reducing night light pollution means shielding light so it is directed to only where and when it is needed, placing fixtures close to the ground, using the least amount of light needed with the appropriate color temperature with red/orange/yellow wave lengths and utilizing timers and motion detectors.
Dahlia Lithwick who as senior legal correspondent for Slate writes about law, the Supreme Court and hosts the podcast Amicus https://slate.com/podcasts/amicus is also the author of the book Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America. The early chapters are energizing reviews of women in law who took courageous stands, started programs, took on white supremacists, defended reproductive rights, like Sally Yates serving as Acting Attorney General in the transition from President Obama to Trump refused to defend the Muslim ban, Becca Hellar started the International Refugee Assistance Program and was instrumental in the lawyers that showed up at airports providing legal support during the Trump travel ban, Roberta Kaplan and Karen Dunn litigated Charlottesville. Bridgitte Ameri was the attorney assisting for the teenager seeking an abortion in an ICE detention facility who overcame through appeal the 2 to 1 decision with Kavanaugh in the majority delaying access to abortion.
The chapter titled MeToo speaks to the sexual harrassment of Judge Alex Kozinski, how Kozinski’s sexual misconduct was an “open secret” until Heidi Bond a former clerk finally blew the whistle in the Washington Post. Lithwick writes “Everybody knew something awful absolved all of us of the burden of doing anything. All of us hoping the story would break someday and we would be off the hook.” The powerful Judge Kozinski was in the position to make or break legal careers. For Brett Kavanaugh clerking for Judge Kosinski was the step to clerking for Justice Kennedy and making his way to the Supreme Court.
Lithwick lays out how those subjected to the harassment and the bystanders who stayed silent makes everyone complicit. It is the ethical question of when and where do we draw the line.
November 20, 2022
So much happened this last week it is hard to know where to begin. And much of it has been in the news already. Here is how the Tuesday evening, November 15, 2022 Berkeley City Council meeting rolled out. Jennifer Louis’s appointment as Berkeley Police Chief was supposed to slide through on consent with 21 other items and likely no comment from council other than congratulations, but the entirety of the appointment broke open Monday afternoon when Nathan Mizell sent out a press release published in the Planet and elsewhere. The dump of derogatory, racist texts alluding to arrest quotas from whistleblower Corey Shedoudy, a former Berkeley police officer who was fired earlier in the year started circulating in emails on Tuesday morning.
The Police Accountability Board (PAB) held an emergency meeting at 2 pm Tuesday afternoon, November 15. It was there that we learned the PAB had received the notification of the allegations on the previous Thursday. After a long discussion the PAB agreed on a letter to council to be sent after the close of the meeting requesting a delay in the appointment of Louis as police chief and the formation of a subcommittee. The PAB will do its own investigation separate from whatever investigations are performed by the city manager.
At just 22 minutes into the evening council meeting, Mayor Arreguin called on Brandon Woods, Public Defender for Alameda County who made this statement:
“I’m coming on to discuss my issues. I’m urging you delay the confirmation of interim chief Louis until the full investigation is completed and my belief come comes from my interactions or lack of with her. On July 6, I sent her an email outlining outrageous conduct by her officers as they refused to read the Miranda Rights on the phone with our attorneys. A new law provides minors should be allowed to speak to an attorney when they read the Miranda Rights to make sure they understand. The officers were hostile and rude and often hang up on our attorneys. The Oakland Police Department did the same conduct and corrected the conduct when addressed. I emailed on July 6, no response, I emailed on July 10 and on July 11. I see the response from a captain. On August * I emailed the chief again and today I have not received a response from her correcting their practices. That’s the way she responds to the Public Defender of Alameda County and the way she handled minors in her custody and I don’t have faith she’ll respond properly to the new allegations, arrest quotas, derogatory comments about unhoused people and racism have no place in policing but seem to be present in the Berkeley Police Department and prevalent under the current leadership. I’m asking, I’m requesting, the least the council can do is postpone this vote tonight. Thank you for giving me the time and space to advocate for the residents of Alameda County and the residents of Berkeley and for the people that I’m honored to represent. Thank you.”
Councilmember Hahn asked if the emails to the chief had been sent to council, they hadn’t and then requested the emails to Louis be forwarded to city council.
The council meeting went on for the next half hour with the usual blather about agenda items until 6:57 pm when Councilmember Bartlett was called on and in a subdued, unemotional voice asked for item 2 the appointment of Jennifer Louis as Chief of Police to be removed from consent and moved to action. The council rules require three councilmembers to remove a consent item and place it on action. Councilmembers Harrison and Hahn joined Bartlett.
No mention of the letter from the PAB requesting delay was ever made during the evening.
Arreguin told meeting attendees before opening public comment on the consent calendar that they would need to wait to comment on the appointment of the chief until. “we get to the item.”
Item 17 on the consent calendar was declaring November 13 – 19th, 2022 as United Against Hate Week. Andrea Pritchette did what the mayor and council did not do, she tied united against hate to the texts in her allotted one minute,
“I’m definitely appreciative of the efforts to address hate speech and I would like to think that we are united against hate. But, I fear that more than events and posters and more than slogans, is the actions of our city leaders that can really direct our city. So when racist messages appear in the city department, when people are made aware of it, or when people in positions of authority ignore it, then that undermines the good intentions of your united against hate week. I hope you understand that the most potent, the best work we can create against hate crimes is good leadership that is willing to being brave in situations that are uncomfortable.”
The appointment of Louis as Chief of Police sat as the last discussion and action item of the evening until 10:10 pm when the City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley announced that she was withdrawing the appointment of Jennifer Louis as Chief of Police until the investigation complete stating, “Chief Lewis is still the interim Chief. I also believe that ultimately the outcome of the investigation will find she was not aware of and made public statement, to this effect, to my understanding and were aware of it she would have taken immediate action to address the issue. I hope that the outcome of an investigation will collaborate that.”
Back in 2017, the City Council received the report from the Center for Policing Equity on biased policing in Berkeley. Residents of Berkeley have been reporting incidents of harassment at public meetings. There was a task force that met for months on Reimagining Public Safety, there was the task force on Fair and Impartial Policing. Harassment has been reported in the Planet.
How soon we forget what happened to Jorge Colon, Program Manager at the Berkeley Drop-In Center on February 2, 2022 (under Jennifer Louis watch) Four police officers approached Colon from behind with guns drawn, forced Colon on the ground, handcuffed and detained him. What was Colon’s sin? Hanging Black History Month Decorations while Black. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-03-06/article/49638?headline=Un-armed-Berkeley-Drop-In-Center-Manager-Detained-at-Gun-Point-by-BPD-Letter-to-Berkeley-Mayor-Arreguin--Katrina-Killian-Executive-Director-Alameda-County-Network-of-Mental-Health-Clients- Was there ever an apology, was there ever an investigation of police behavior? What was the follow-up with the four police officers and is it the same four police officers that are in the string of texts released now?
The release of text that are racist with arrest quotas should come as a surprise to no one. It is the excuse of not knowing that comes as a surprise for someone who has been a member of the police department for 23 years.
Jennifer Louis has been with the Berkeley Police Department since 1999. She became a Police Captain in 2016 and was appointed interim Police Chief in March 2021.
Not knowing what is going on in a department makes a police chief just as incapable and ineffectual as a Chief of Police that knows and does nothing.
Darren Kacalek on the downtown bike patrol and the center of the arrest quotas, texts, president of the Berkeley Police Association, the police union is now on leave of absence.
Adam Serwer, journalist, senior editor at the Atlantic and author of the 2021 book The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present and Future of Trump’s America had this to say about police unions, “This is not a system ruined by a few bad apples. This is a system that creates and protects bad apples by design. Being a good cop can get you in trouble with your superiors, your fellow officers, and the union that represents you. Being a bad one can get you elected as a union rep.”
Reflecting on past public comment at city meetings of harassment of the poor, the homeless, of People of Color leaves a lot of questions. From the outside, what looks like a failure of meaningful follow-through says more about who we are as a city than a declaration of United Against Hate.
While the Health, Life, Enrichment, Equity & Community City Council Policy Committee was considering Councilmember Taplin’s Office of Racial Equity: Re-Entry Employment and Guaranteed Income Program proposal, the Ashby Village/Elder Action and Berkeley Friends/Racial Justice Action Team was moderating “Shining the Light on The Militarization of Police Departments” on AB 481.
California AB 481 requires law enforcement agencies to obtain approval for the acquisition and use of military equipment and for the governing body to either disapprove or authorize the controlling ordinance(s) annually. In Berkeley the PAB writes/reviews the policy and City Council approves the final version often with council modifications. Berkeley and the PAB are further along in the process than Oakland and Richmond.
I wouldn’t label the video of the panel discussion on the Militarization of Police Departments as a must see, but it helped me put together the responsibilities of the PAB and City Council in relation to controlling the availability and use of military equipment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9gHJyvaI-E Given the Oakland panelist Omar Farmer’s description of the use of the bearcat (a tank with wheels instead of treads) and military equipment in Oakland and multi-million-dollar settlements, to everyone in Berkeley who fought against military equipment here, it was and is worth the fight.
As for Taplin’s proposal on guaranteed income and re-entry employment, it was modified and passed out of committee and now sits in the draft agenda for the December 6 council meeting. Like so much that comes out of Taplin’s office it is a referral to the city manager which means it could be months or years before we see it again. The re-entry employment was diluted to review available services.
The in-person public meeting on the Civic Center design started with a presentation by Susi Muzuola from Siegel & Strain Architects and followed with four stations to give comment on the design of the Maudelle Shirek and Veterans Buildings, the Civic Center Park and reconfiguration of MLK Jr. Way. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Berkeley-Civic-Center-Phase-II_Open-House-Presentation.pdf
The proposed plan is to move city council into new offices in the Maudelle Shirek Building, build a 14,000 square foot addition (or close to that size) for new city council meeting chambers and put the Media Center and Historical Society Museum in the basement. And, bring the Maudelle Shirek building to immediate occupancy (IO) seismic standards (the level used for hospitals).
The Veterans Building seismic upgrade would be downgraded to basic life safety plus without buttressing that would have added needed backstage space to increase functionality.
The plan for the Emergency Access and Evacuation Network Route street MLK Jr Way is to put this evacuation route on a “road diet” with narrowing driving lanes, widening sidewalks and pedestrian bulb outs.
There appears to be a disconnect. A large chunk of Berkeley sits in high fire hazard zones and evacuation from fire in the high fire hazard zones is already challenged. This means that a rapidly moving fire will likely overtake people trying to escape (evacuate) under current conditions. This is before according to the evening presentation, the architects, city planners, and the transportation department will put together a plan for the Civic Center to narrow yet another emergency access and evacuation route.
We would all do well to listen to those warning of the hazard of narrowing roads. Margot Smith has been calling the alarm in Berkeley of the looming danger of putting the Emergency Access and Evacuation Routes on road diets. Before any of us dismiss those warnings, we should all remember, Mildred Eselin’s words to the city council of Paradise, California as reported in the Los Angeles Times.
“Town recordings show a lone voice of concern at the 2014 council meeting giving final approval to the road narrowing. ‘The main thing is fire danger,’ Mildred Eselin, 88. ‘If the council is searching for a way to diminish the population of Paradise, this would be the way to do it.’” https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-camp-fire-deathtrap-20181230-story.html
Reading a little further in the article you will come across this,
“Paradise officials repeatedly told The Times they never envisioned a firestorm reaching the town. But the 2005 state fire management plan for the ridge, developed in consultation with some of those same Paradise planners, warned that canyon winds posed a ‘serious threat’ to Paradise. The ‘greatest risk’ was an ‘east wind’ fire, the document said, ‘the same type of fire that impacted the Oakland Berkeley Hills during the Oct. 20, 1991, firestorm’ that killed 25 people.”
The meeting on North Berkeley BART objective standards started with an hour-long large group introduction and a 90-page presentation which is on the city website for the North Berkeley BART housing project. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/NB-BART_PreODS_Community_Meeting_1_v1.pdf The introduction was followed with breakout groups and the evening closed without reports of breakout group discussions. Nothing was decided and there will be more meetings on establishing objective standards.
The Open Government Commission heard my complaint and request and will be following up in January. For the complaint I submitted a list of the committees, boards and commissions that are not posting draft meeting minutes within 14 calendar days of meeting (as recommended by the Open Government Commission and passed by City Council). The list includes the 2 x 2 (Council and BUSD), 3 x 3 (Council and Housing Authority), 4 x 4, (Council and Rent Stabilization Board) City/UC/Student Relations Committee Housing, Board of Library Trustees, Commission on Disability, Community Health Commission, Fair Campaign Practices Commission, Landmarks Preservation Commission, Mental Health Commission, Youth Commission and the Zoning Adjustment Board.
The request was that live transcription be made available at all city meetings (not just city council) as a requirement.
This is long already. I will cover the webinar “Light at Night a Glowing Hazard” in the next Diary.
I’ve already included a short quote from Adam Serwer’s The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present and Future of Trump’s America. With Trump declaring he is running for President again, the book is worth reading. Serwer is a senior editor for the Atlantic. The book is an expansion on his articles, Trump and his devotees, his cult revolve around cruelty, revenge, name calling, blaming, getting even, greed and selfishness.
It is all such a sharp contrast to the link a friend sent me on why / how/ what lead people to call themselves socialists. Their responses to why they were socialists were all about caring about the welfare of others. This is a link worth pulling up when you feel everything is hopeless. Click on comments. https://rb.gy/79zodb
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving. Kelly
So much happened this last week it is hard to know where to begin. And much of it has been in the news already. Here is how the Tuesday evening, November 15, 2022 Berkeley City Council meeting rolled out. Jennifer Louis’s appointment as Berkeley Police Chief was supposed to slide through on consent with 21 other items and likely no comment from council other than congratulations, but the entirety of the appointment broke open Monday afternoon when Nathan Mizell sent out a press release published in the Planet and elsewhere. The dump of derogatory, racist texts alluding to arrest quotas from whistleblower Corey Shedoudy, a former Berkeley police officer who was fired earlier in the year started circulating in emails on Tuesday morning.
The Police Accountability Board (PAB) held an emergency meeting at 2 pm Tuesday afternoon, November 15. It was there that we learned the PAB had received the notification of the allegations on the previous Thursday. After a long discussion the PAB agreed on a letter to council to be sent after the close of the meeting requesting a delay in the appointment of Louis as police chief and the formation of a subcommittee. The PAB will do its own investigation separate from whatever investigations are performed by the city manager.
At just 22 minutes into the evening council meeting, Mayor Arreguin called on Brandon Woods, Public Defender for Alameda County who made this statement:
“I’m coming on to discuss my issues. I’m urging you delay the confirmation of interim chief Louis until the full investigation is completed and my belief come comes from my interactions or lack of with her. On July 6, I sent her an email outlining outrageous conduct by her officers as they refused to read the Miranda Rights on the phone with our attorneys. A new law provides minors should be allowed to speak to an attorney when they read the Miranda Rights to make sure they understand. The officers were hostile and rude and often hang up on our attorneys. The Oakland Police Department did the same conduct and corrected the conduct when addressed. I emailed on July 6, no response, I emailed on July 10 and on July 11. I see the response from a captain. On August * I emailed the chief again and today I have not received a response from her correcting their practices. That’s the way she responds to the Public Defender of Alameda County and the way she handled minors in her custody and I don’t have faith she’ll respond properly to the new allegations, arrest quotas, derogatory comments about unhoused people and racism have no place in policing but seem to be present in the Berkeley Police Department and prevalent under the current leadership. I’m asking, I’m requesting, the least the council can do is postpone this vote tonight. Thank you for giving me the time and space to advocate for the residents of Alameda County and the residents of Berkeley and for the people that I’m honored to represent. Thank you.”
Councilmember Hahn asked if the emails to the chief had been sent to council, they hadn’t and then requested the emails to Louis be forwarded to city council.
The council meeting went on for the next half hour with the usual blather about agenda items until 6:57 pm when Councilmember Bartlett was called on and in a subdued, unemotional voice asked for item 2 the appointment of Jennifer Louis as Chief of Police to be removed from consent and moved to action. The council rules require three councilmembers to remove a consent item and place it on action. Councilmembers Harrison and Hahn joined Bartlett.
No mention of the letter from the PAB requesting delay was ever made during the evening.
Arreguin told meeting attendees before opening public comment on the consent calendar that they would need to wait to comment on the appointment of the chief until. “we get to the item.”
Item 17 on the consent calendar was declaring November 13 – 19th, 2022 as United Against Hate Week. Andrea Pritchette did what the mayor and council did not do, she tied united against hate to the texts in her allotted one minute,
“I’m definitely appreciative of the efforts to address hate speech and I would like to think that we are united against hate. But, I fear that more than events and posters and more than slogans, is the actions of our city leaders that can really direct our city. So when racist messages appear in the city department, when people are made aware of it, or when people in positions of authority ignore it, then that undermines the good intentions of your united against hate week. I hope you understand that the most potent, the best work we can create against hate crimes is good leadership that is willing to being brave in situations that are uncomfortable.”
The appointment of Louis as Chief of Police sat as the last discussion and action item of the evening until 10:10 pm when the City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley announced that she was withdrawing the appointment of Jennifer Louis as Chief of Police until the investigation complete stating, “Chief Lewis is still the interim Chief. I also believe that ultimately the outcome of the investigation will find she was not aware of and made public statement, to this effect, to my understanding and were aware of it she would have taken immediate action to address the issue. I hope that the outcome of an investigation will collaborate that.”
Back in 2017, the City Council received the report from the Center for Policing Equity on biased policing in Berkeley. Residents of Berkeley have been reporting incidents of harassment at public meetings. There was a task force that met for months on Reimagining Public Safety, there was the task force on Fair and Impartial Policing. Harassment has been reported in the Planet.
How soon we forget what happened to Jorge Colon, Program Manager at the Berkeley Drop-In Center on February 2, 2022 (under Jennifer Louis watch) Four police officers approached Colon from behind with guns drawn, forced Colon on the ground, handcuffed and detained him. What was Colon’s sin? Hanging Black History Month Decorations while Black. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-03-06/article/49638?headline=Un-armed-Berkeley-Drop-In-Center-Manager-Detained-at-Gun-Point-by-BPD-Letter-to-Berkeley-Mayor-Arreguin--Katrina-Killian-Executive-Director-Alameda-County-Network-of-Mental-Health-Clients- Was there ever an apology, was there ever an investigation of police behavior? What was the follow-up with the four police officers and is it the same four police officers that are in the string of texts released now?
The release of text that are racist with arrest quotas should come as a surprise to no one. It is the excuse of not knowing that comes as a surprise for someone who has been a member of the police department for 23 years.
Jennifer Louis has been with the Berkeley Police Department since 1999. She became a Police Captain in 2016 and was appointed interim Police Chief in March 2021.
Not knowing what is going on in a department makes a police chief just as incapable and ineffectual as a Chief of Police that knows and does nothing.
Darren Kacalek on the downtown bike patrol and the center of the arrest quotas, texts, president of the Berkeley Police Association, the police union is now on leave of absence.
Adam Serwer, journalist, senior editor at the Atlantic and author of the 2021 book The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present and Future of Trump’s America had this to say about police unions, “This is not a system ruined by a few bad apples. This is a system that creates and protects bad apples by design. Being a good cop can get you in trouble with your superiors, your fellow officers, and the union that represents you. Being a bad one can get you elected as a union rep.”
Reflecting on past public comment at city meetings of harassment of the poor, the homeless, of People of Color leaves a lot of questions. From the outside, what looks like a failure of meaningful follow-through says more about who we are as a city than a declaration of United Against Hate.
While the Health, Life, Enrichment, Equity & Community City Council Policy Committee was considering Councilmember Taplin’s Office of Racial Equity: Re-Entry Employment and Guaranteed Income Program proposal, the Ashby Village/Elder Action and Berkeley Friends/Racial Justice Action Team was moderating “Shining the Light on The Militarization of Police Departments” on AB 481.
California AB 481 requires law enforcement agencies to obtain approval for the acquisition and use of military equipment and for the governing body to either disapprove or authorize the controlling ordinance(s) annually. In Berkeley the PAB writes/reviews the policy and City Council approves the final version often with council modifications. Berkeley and the PAB are further along in the process than Oakland and Richmond.
I wouldn’t label the video of the panel discussion on the Militarization of Police Departments as a must see, but it helped me put together the responsibilities of the PAB and City Council in relation to controlling the availability and use of military equipment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9gHJyvaI-E Given the Oakland panelist Omar Farmer’s description of the use of the bearcat (a tank with wheels instead of treads) and military equipment in Oakland and multi-million-dollar settlements, to everyone in Berkeley who fought against military equipment here, it was and is worth the fight.
As for Taplin’s proposal on guaranteed income and re-entry employment, it was modified and passed out of committee and now sits in the draft agenda for the December 6 council meeting. Like so much that comes out of Taplin’s office it is a referral to the city manager which means it could be months or years before we see it again. The re-entry employment was diluted to review available services.
The in-person public meeting on the Civic Center design started with a presentation by Susi Muzuola from Siegel & Strain Architects and followed with four stations to give comment on the design of the Maudelle Shirek and Veterans Buildings, the Civic Center Park and reconfiguration of MLK Jr. Way. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Berkeley-Civic-Center-Phase-II_Open-House-Presentation.pdf
The proposed plan is to move city council into new offices in the Maudelle Shirek Building, build a 14,000 square foot addition (or close to that size) for new city council meeting chambers and put the Media Center and Historical Society Museum in the basement. And, bring the Maudelle Shirek building to immediate occupancy (IO) seismic standards (the level used for hospitals).
The Veterans Building seismic upgrade would be downgraded to basic life safety plus without buttressing that would have added needed backstage space to increase functionality.
The plan for the Emergency Access and Evacuation Network Route street MLK Jr Way is to put this evacuation route on a “road diet” with narrowing driving lanes, widening sidewalks and pedestrian bulb outs.
There appears to be a disconnect. A large chunk of Berkeley sits in high fire hazard zones and evacuation from fire in the high fire hazard zones is already challenged. This means that a rapidly moving fire will likely overtake people trying to escape (evacuate) under current conditions. This is before according to the evening presentation, the architects, city planners, and the transportation department will put together a plan for the Civic Center to narrow yet another emergency access and evacuation route.
We would all do well to listen to those warning of the hazard of narrowing roads. Margot Smith has been calling the alarm in Berkeley of the looming danger of putting the Emergency Access and Evacuation Routes on road diets. Before any of us dismiss those warnings, we should all remember, Mildred Eselin’s words to the city council of Paradise, California as reported in the Los Angeles Times.
“Town recordings show a lone voice of concern at the 2014 council meeting giving final approval to the road narrowing. ‘The main thing is fire danger,’ Mildred Eselin, 88. ‘If the council is searching for a way to diminish the population of Paradise, this would be the way to do it.’” https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-camp-fire-deathtrap-20181230-story.html
Reading a little further in the article you will come across this,
“Paradise officials repeatedly told The Times they never envisioned a firestorm reaching the town. But the 2005 state fire management plan for the ridge, developed in consultation with some of those same Paradise planners, warned that canyon winds posed a ‘serious threat’ to Paradise. The ‘greatest risk’ was an ‘east wind’ fire, the document said, ‘the same type of fire that impacted the Oakland Berkeley Hills during the Oct. 20, 1991, firestorm’ that killed 25 people.”
The meeting on North Berkeley BART objective standards started with an hour-long large group introduction and a 90-page presentation which is on the city website for the North Berkeley BART housing project. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/NB-BART_PreODS_Community_Meeting_1_v1.pdf The introduction was followed with breakout groups and the evening closed without reports of breakout group discussions. Nothing was decided and there will be more meetings on establishing objective standards.
The Open Government Commission heard my complaint and request and will be following up in January. For the complaint I submitted a list of the committees, boards and commissions that are not posting draft meeting minutes within 14 calendar days of meeting (as recommended by the Open Government Commission and passed by City Council). The list includes the 2 x 2 (Council and BUSD), 3 x 3 (Council and Housing Authority), 4 x 4, (Council and Rent Stabilization Board) City/UC/Student Relations Committee Housing, Board of Library Trustees, Commission on Disability, Community Health Commission, Fair Campaign Practices Commission, Landmarks Preservation Commission, Mental Health Commission, Youth Commission and the Zoning Adjustment Board.
The request was that live transcription be made available at all city meetings (not just city council) as a requirement.
This is long already. I will cover the webinar “Light at Night a Glowing Hazard” in the next Diary.
I’ve already included a short quote from Adam Serwer’s The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present and Future of Trump’s America. With Trump declaring he is running for President again, the book is worth reading. Serwer is a senior editor for the Atlantic. The book is an expansion on his articles, Trump and his devotees, his cult revolve around cruelty, revenge, name calling, blaming, getting even, greed and selfishness.
It is all such a sharp contrast to the link a friend sent me on why / how/ what lead people to call themselves socialists. Their responses to why they were socialists were all about caring about the welfare of others. This is a link worth pulling up when you feel everything is hopeless. Click on comments. https://rb.gy/79zodb
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving. Kelly
November 13, 2022
Before going on to the meetings of the week, first why did Measure L lose. Measure L certainly didn’t lose through lack of funding. Donations to pass Measure L are now over $400,000 if my addition is correct while No on Measure L is a little over $30,000. Most donations to No on L were in the $100 to $250 range. The few listed as $1200 pale in the shadow of Yes on Measure L donations with $10,000 after $10,000 after $10,000.
You can see the list for yourself just go to the City of Berkeley Portal https://public.netfile.com/pub2/?aid=BRK and type: Measure L in “Search By Name” and click on “search” (no other blocks need to be filled).
Berkeley City Council, Council committees, boards and commissions generally operate in the bliss of a city that pays more attention to national politics than the actions of city elected and council appointees. This time that bliss of inattentive residents was not enough to slide through the $650,000,000 Measure L bonds even with a normally kneejerk generous community and $400,000 of funds to fill our mail boxes with glossy card stock Yes on L flyers.
After listening to a lengthy discussion with a mix of people describing why they voted for or against Measure L, it came down to the same objections as those who signed on to oppose Measure L. Measure L was poorly written. It was too ill-defined, too big, too expensive. There were no named projects. The promise of oversight didn’t hold water with the City’s poor track record of providing the necessary information to the commissions to perform their oversight responsibilities of existing ballot measures.
One person took a slightly different view citing inflation and the possible loss of Proposition 13 homeowner protections, but that doesn’t explain why Berkeley’s Measure L lost and Oakland’s similar but incrementally better written Measure U sailed through with 71% approval.
It is interesting that the Yes vote on Measure L is so far right on target with the voter survey results by Lake Research Partners (reported to city council May 31, 2022). The survey results showed voters favored a split between a parcel tax for streets and a $300,000,000 bond. Only 57% of the surveyed voters supported a $600,000,000 bond. So instead of listening to the voters and using the survey results, this Mayor and City Council dug in and decided to go for an even bigger bond. And, because of mistakes in the financial calculations and the cost to property owners the period of the bonds was placed as 48 years.
Since it appears that some people were counting on passing Measure L to advance to the next step on their political ambition ladder, we can expect at least one of those “some people” to throw blame around for losing instead of looking inward at their responsibility for creating this debacle.
None of us that signed on to oppose Measure L disagreed that there are significant infrastructure needs. What we saw is a Mayor, Council and City Manager that could not be trusted with a big slush fund and no defined projects.
The Housing Element was on the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council Agenda at the November 12th meeting. There is continued frustration with the RHNA (Regional Housing Needs Allocation) allocation to Berkeley with inflating the number of new housing units to 19,098 from 8934 for the planning purposes to supposedly reach the assigned 2446 very low income and 1408 low income and 1416 moderate income units. That would mean saddling Berkeley with an excess of 10,164 units of market rate housing, tearing down of older structures and adding more 8-story residential buildings towering over little one-story houses as will happen again with 1598 University. Since Measure M passed maybe one day Berkeley will see revenue from vacant market rate units.
It is the same story heard over and over at the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council meetings, the late discovery that Berkeley zoning codes and State density bonuses mean big tall projects backing up to your lot line and little house. 1598 University is an SB 330 project so it will likely slide through with little change. The neighbors can thank State Senator Nancy Skinner for the streamlined approval process that allows only a maximum of five city meetings and a near guarantee that new groups of neighbors will have a mixed-use tower next door. The appeal of 2018 Blake, a middle of the block 6-story residential project, comes back again to Council Tuesday evening.
The Planning Department staff stated publicly, the 19,098 number was to drive changing the zoning codes. The push to turn Berkeley into a dense Manhattan style city continues.
The Planning Department seems to have absorbed that they actually need to meet the Housing Element (the plan for where to put these new units) submission deadlines, so we can all expect more, lengthy reports to read with insufficient time to digest the content. The Housing Element and building housing for UCB students are the drivers for changing zoning codes and suggesting there should be a Berkeley density bonus for bigger, taller buildings in the southside area next to campus that don’t require inclusionary affordable housing. As written previously, the Planning Department contends it is too difficult to determine student financial status and since the southside is planned for student housing, developers should be awarded density bonuses for bigger taller buildings by paying a fee. That proposal will come back to the Planning Commission at a future meeting.
In December, after the year-end financial reports are completed, the Council makes adjustments to the budget. The process is called AAO (Annual Appropriations Ordinance) #1. This is when previously denied budget requests are reconsidered along with new requests. Interestingly, only the City Manager’s requests were listed with the reports at the Thursday morning Council Budget and Finance Committee meeting and none of the councilmember requests were listed. When Mayor Arreguin asked about this omission, it was promised to be added at the next round.
Some things stood out in the preliminary reports, like why do we have homeless on the street and a year-end balance of $19,513,097 under Measure P – the fund the voters approved for homeless services in 2018? Another, with the City website such an abysmal mess with historical data stashed in impossible to find Records Online, how is the IT (Information Technology) budget under spent by 30%?
The Berkeley Police Department (BPD) as always is over budget and it was again. The reason given was a shortage of officers and mandatory overtime. There was no answer to my question during public comment, with all these shortages, was BPD still sending an officer to Apple? It was after the meeting I received this link that states that Berkeley spent $243,023 per police position in 2022. https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/as-berkeley-struggles-with-police-costs-14-cops-made-over-300-000/article_0e615650-5b8b-11ed-83fd-f79e2d55fb0a.html
Thursday evening was the North Berkeley BART Station developer candidate presentations. It was initially listed as four candidates, but two were eliminated before the meeting leaving BRIDGE and RCD each with companion for-profit developers. They both did their self-promotion presentations.
The public was asked to submit questions in advance or at the meeting on cards or on zoom.
Here are the questions from the North Berkeley Neighborhood Alliance that did not get asked by the BART meeting moderator. Maybe they will come up at the BART meeting on Objective Standards this coming Wednesday, November 16 at 7 pm.
· What is the largest size project that your lead partner has been directly responsible for developing and building?
· What is your view of what the area around the North Berkeley BART station should be like, looking out 10-20 years?
· If you are chosen to sign an exclusive negotiating agreement with BART, you will then have a vested right to the zoning (per AB 2923) - what development rights do you believe that gives you?
· Have you ever been involved in a project that provides you a vested right to the site's zoning upon signing a negotiating agreement with the agency that owns the land?
· How do you see the affordable housing component of this project fitting into the actual site plan at North Berkeley?
· What experience do you have and what approach will you take toward having a significant part of the development at North Berkeley provide for substantial "missing middle" housing?
· The area around North Berkeley BART (for over a half mile radius) is primarily made up of 50'x150' lots with single homes, duplexes and small apartments - how will your project integrate into this community fabric?
· What commitments will you make to what level of community engagement in the design process, given that BART and AB 2923 greatly limit the requirement for any such engagement?
· Will you rule out right now building any structure taller than seven stories at North Berkeley BART?
· Why do you think that the financial marketplace for development (and the present supply chain/inflation circumstances) will be favorable for any type of project at North Berkeley BART within 10 years?
· If there were no AB 2923 requirements, what type of project would you think most appropriate to build at North Berkeley BART?
My questions asking if they would commit to bird safe glass and dark skies also didn’t get asked. My question about constructing a zero-net energy building was merged into a question on sustainability that was answered by both teams in a way that left me wondering if they had any clear understanding of sustainable construction.
Davis and Sacramento are listed as two of the top cities in the nation with the largest number of net-zero housing projects, but none of that has spilled over to Berkeley. There are two net-zero projects I’ve been watching 303 Battery in Seattle by Sustainable Living Innovations https://sli.co/ (our goal is mid-size – 7 stories) and Soleil Lofts in Herriman, Utah.
As an FYI here is A Technical Guide to Zoning for AB 2923 Conformance which defines the broad parameters for the BART housing projects.
https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/02_AB2923_TechGuide_Draft_Appendix2.pdf
Not enough happened at the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission or the Peace and Justice Commission to take up space. Double and triple scheduling of meetings meant I missed the Personnel Board meeting, the Housing Advisory Commission, and the Police Accountability Board. I did attend the E-Bike webinar with an over-the-top E-Bike enthusiast as the presenter, but had to sign off to attend the BART meeting before they covered pricing and discounts. We really need more people attending and reporting on city meetings so nothing gets passed over.
It was October 11, 2022 that the Berkeley City Council adopted item 19. “Land Acknowledgement Recognizing Berkeley as the Ancestral, Unceded Home of the Ohlone people.” with councilmember Hahn as the author and co-sponsors Arreguin, Taplin, Robinson. It is another tiny step forward for indigenous people, but looming over this well intended motion is the Supreme Court, which is poised to take a hacksaw to the Indian Child Welfare Act and federal Indian law.
For those of us who listen to Democracy Now, Thursday morning we heard about the Supreme Court and Haaland v. Brackeen, “a case challenging the Indian Child Welfare Act and ultimately threatening the legal foundations of federal Indian law. ICWA was created in 1978 to address the systemic crisis of family separation in Native communities waged by the U.S. and requires the government to ensure foster children are adopted by members of their Indigenous tribes, as well as blood relatives, before being adopted by non-Indigenous parents. Now right-wing groups are supporting white foster parents to challenge the law as discriminatory. ‘Not only are our children on the line, but the legal foundation, the legal structure that defends the rights of Indigenous nations in the United States is literally at stake,’ says journalist Rebecca Nagle, who has been reporting on the case for years and says it’s likely the Supreme Court will strike ICWA down.” https://www.democracynow.org/2022/11/10/haaland_v_brackeen_indian_child_welfare
How We Go Home: Voices from Indigenous North America by Sara Sinclair isn’t an easy read. The book is a narrative from twelve Indigenous People in the United States and Canada and their individual struggles for identity and place in the frame of discrimination, bullying, poverty, drugs, alcohol, coerced residential and boarding schools, foster care, forced assimilation, loss of family, and on top of everything failure of the United States to fulfill Indian treaty agreements.
How We Go Home from the oral history project, Voice of Witness provides a look into the past and present we need to know.
Justice Gorsuch comes from the United States Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals encompassing six states: Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming and the territory of 76 federally recognized Indian Tribes. Justice Gorsuch has decided a number of cases in favor of tribal sovereignty. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/vol--43/vol--43--no--1/justice-gorsuch-and-federal-indian-law/
As noted in the podcast Strict Scrutiny https://crooked.com/podcast/the-uncertain-future-of-the-indian-child-welfare-act/, the Indian Tribes worked with Justice Gorsuch during his tenure in the Tenth Circuit.
The question remains, will Justice Gorsuch pull one more to support LCWA? From the descriptions of the questioning and comments of the Supreme Court hearing, Justice Thomas will definitely decide with the plaintiff against LCWA, Justice Kavanagh is a probable against LCWA and Chief Justice Roberts is always on the side of dismantling anything that whiffs of protections for minority groups. That leaves Justice Amy Coney Barrett who was not mentioned in any reviews as the swing vote.
Before going on to the meetings of the week, first why did Measure L lose. Measure L certainly didn’t lose through lack of funding. Donations to pass Measure L are now over $400,000 if my addition is correct while No on Measure L is a little over $30,000. Most donations to No on L were in the $100 to $250 range. The few listed as $1200 pale in the shadow of Yes on Measure L donations with $10,000 after $10,000 after $10,000.
You can see the list for yourself just go to the City of Berkeley Portal https://public.netfile.com/pub2/?aid=BRK and type: Measure L in “Search By Name” and click on “search” (no other blocks need to be filled).
Berkeley City Council, Council committees, boards and commissions generally operate in the bliss of a city that pays more attention to national politics than the actions of city elected and council appointees. This time that bliss of inattentive residents was not enough to slide through the $650,000,000 Measure L bonds even with a normally kneejerk generous community and $400,000 of funds to fill our mail boxes with glossy card stock Yes on L flyers.
After listening to a lengthy discussion with a mix of people describing why they voted for or against Measure L, it came down to the same objections as those who signed on to oppose Measure L. Measure L was poorly written. It was too ill-defined, too big, too expensive. There were no named projects. The promise of oversight didn’t hold water with the City’s poor track record of providing the necessary information to the commissions to perform their oversight responsibilities of existing ballot measures.
One person took a slightly different view citing inflation and the possible loss of Proposition 13 homeowner protections, but that doesn’t explain why Berkeley’s Measure L lost and Oakland’s similar but incrementally better written Measure U sailed through with 71% approval.
It is interesting that the Yes vote on Measure L is so far right on target with the voter survey results by Lake Research Partners (reported to city council May 31, 2022). The survey results showed voters favored a split between a parcel tax for streets and a $300,000,000 bond. Only 57% of the surveyed voters supported a $600,000,000 bond. So instead of listening to the voters and using the survey results, this Mayor and City Council dug in and decided to go for an even bigger bond. And, because of mistakes in the financial calculations and the cost to property owners the period of the bonds was placed as 48 years.
Since it appears that some people were counting on passing Measure L to advance to the next step on their political ambition ladder, we can expect at least one of those “some people” to throw blame around for losing instead of looking inward at their responsibility for creating this debacle.
None of us that signed on to oppose Measure L disagreed that there are significant infrastructure needs. What we saw is a Mayor, Council and City Manager that could not be trusted with a big slush fund and no defined projects.
The Housing Element was on the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council Agenda at the November 12th meeting. There is continued frustration with the RHNA (Regional Housing Needs Allocation) allocation to Berkeley with inflating the number of new housing units to 19,098 from 8934 for the planning purposes to supposedly reach the assigned 2446 very low income and 1408 low income and 1416 moderate income units. That would mean saddling Berkeley with an excess of 10,164 units of market rate housing, tearing down of older structures and adding more 8-story residential buildings towering over little one-story houses as will happen again with 1598 University. Since Measure M passed maybe one day Berkeley will see revenue from vacant market rate units.
It is the same story heard over and over at the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council meetings, the late discovery that Berkeley zoning codes and State density bonuses mean big tall projects backing up to your lot line and little house. 1598 University is an SB 330 project so it will likely slide through with little change. The neighbors can thank State Senator Nancy Skinner for the streamlined approval process that allows only a maximum of five city meetings and a near guarantee that new groups of neighbors will have a mixed-use tower next door. The appeal of 2018 Blake, a middle of the block 6-story residential project, comes back again to Council Tuesday evening.
The Planning Department staff stated publicly, the 19,098 number was to drive changing the zoning codes. The push to turn Berkeley into a dense Manhattan style city continues.
The Planning Department seems to have absorbed that they actually need to meet the Housing Element (the plan for where to put these new units) submission deadlines, so we can all expect more, lengthy reports to read with insufficient time to digest the content. The Housing Element and building housing for UCB students are the drivers for changing zoning codes and suggesting there should be a Berkeley density bonus for bigger, taller buildings in the southside area next to campus that don’t require inclusionary affordable housing. As written previously, the Planning Department contends it is too difficult to determine student financial status and since the southside is planned for student housing, developers should be awarded density bonuses for bigger taller buildings by paying a fee. That proposal will come back to the Planning Commission at a future meeting.
In December, after the year-end financial reports are completed, the Council makes adjustments to the budget. The process is called AAO (Annual Appropriations Ordinance) #1. This is when previously denied budget requests are reconsidered along with new requests. Interestingly, only the City Manager’s requests were listed with the reports at the Thursday morning Council Budget and Finance Committee meeting and none of the councilmember requests were listed. When Mayor Arreguin asked about this omission, it was promised to be added at the next round.
Some things stood out in the preliminary reports, like why do we have homeless on the street and a year-end balance of $19,513,097 under Measure P – the fund the voters approved for homeless services in 2018? Another, with the City website such an abysmal mess with historical data stashed in impossible to find Records Online, how is the IT (Information Technology) budget under spent by 30%?
The Berkeley Police Department (BPD) as always is over budget and it was again. The reason given was a shortage of officers and mandatory overtime. There was no answer to my question during public comment, with all these shortages, was BPD still sending an officer to Apple? It was after the meeting I received this link that states that Berkeley spent $243,023 per police position in 2022. https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/as-berkeley-struggles-with-police-costs-14-cops-made-over-300-000/article_0e615650-5b8b-11ed-83fd-f79e2d55fb0a.html
Thursday evening was the North Berkeley BART Station developer candidate presentations. It was initially listed as four candidates, but two were eliminated before the meeting leaving BRIDGE and RCD each with companion for-profit developers. They both did their self-promotion presentations.
The public was asked to submit questions in advance or at the meeting on cards or on zoom.
Here are the questions from the North Berkeley Neighborhood Alliance that did not get asked by the BART meeting moderator. Maybe they will come up at the BART meeting on Objective Standards this coming Wednesday, November 16 at 7 pm.
· What is the largest size project that your lead partner has been directly responsible for developing and building?
· What is your view of what the area around the North Berkeley BART station should be like, looking out 10-20 years?
· If you are chosen to sign an exclusive negotiating agreement with BART, you will then have a vested right to the zoning (per AB 2923) - what development rights do you believe that gives you?
· Have you ever been involved in a project that provides you a vested right to the site's zoning upon signing a negotiating agreement with the agency that owns the land?
· How do you see the affordable housing component of this project fitting into the actual site plan at North Berkeley?
· What experience do you have and what approach will you take toward having a significant part of the development at North Berkeley provide for substantial "missing middle" housing?
· The area around North Berkeley BART (for over a half mile radius) is primarily made up of 50'x150' lots with single homes, duplexes and small apartments - how will your project integrate into this community fabric?
· What commitments will you make to what level of community engagement in the design process, given that BART and AB 2923 greatly limit the requirement for any such engagement?
· Will you rule out right now building any structure taller than seven stories at North Berkeley BART?
· Why do you think that the financial marketplace for development (and the present supply chain/inflation circumstances) will be favorable for any type of project at North Berkeley BART within 10 years?
· If there were no AB 2923 requirements, what type of project would you think most appropriate to build at North Berkeley BART?
My questions asking if they would commit to bird safe glass and dark skies also didn’t get asked. My question about constructing a zero-net energy building was merged into a question on sustainability that was answered by both teams in a way that left me wondering if they had any clear understanding of sustainable construction.
Davis and Sacramento are listed as two of the top cities in the nation with the largest number of net-zero housing projects, but none of that has spilled over to Berkeley. There are two net-zero projects I’ve been watching 303 Battery in Seattle by Sustainable Living Innovations https://sli.co/ (our goal is mid-size – 7 stories) and Soleil Lofts in Herriman, Utah.
As an FYI here is A Technical Guide to Zoning for AB 2923 Conformance which defines the broad parameters for the BART housing projects.
https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/02_AB2923_TechGuide_Draft_Appendix2.pdf
Not enough happened at the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission or the Peace and Justice Commission to take up space. Double and triple scheduling of meetings meant I missed the Personnel Board meeting, the Housing Advisory Commission, and the Police Accountability Board. I did attend the E-Bike webinar with an over-the-top E-Bike enthusiast as the presenter, but had to sign off to attend the BART meeting before they covered pricing and discounts. We really need more people attending and reporting on city meetings so nothing gets passed over.
It was October 11, 2022 that the Berkeley City Council adopted item 19. “Land Acknowledgement Recognizing Berkeley as the Ancestral, Unceded Home of the Ohlone people.” with councilmember Hahn as the author and co-sponsors Arreguin, Taplin, Robinson. It is another tiny step forward for indigenous people, but looming over this well intended motion is the Supreme Court, which is poised to take a hacksaw to the Indian Child Welfare Act and federal Indian law.
For those of us who listen to Democracy Now, Thursday morning we heard about the Supreme Court and Haaland v. Brackeen, “a case challenging the Indian Child Welfare Act and ultimately threatening the legal foundations of federal Indian law. ICWA was created in 1978 to address the systemic crisis of family separation in Native communities waged by the U.S. and requires the government to ensure foster children are adopted by members of their Indigenous tribes, as well as blood relatives, before being adopted by non-Indigenous parents. Now right-wing groups are supporting white foster parents to challenge the law as discriminatory. ‘Not only are our children on the line, but the legal foundation, the legal structure that defends the rights of Indigenous nations in the United States is literally at stake,’ says journalist Rebecca Nagle, who has been reporting on the case for years and says it’s likely the Supreme Court will strike ICWA down.” https://www.democracynow.org/2022/11/10/haaland_v_brackeen_indian_child_welfare
How We Go Home: Voices from Indigenous North America by Sara Sinclair isn’t an easy read. The book is a narrative from twelve Indigenous People in the United States and Canada and their individual struggles for identity and place in the frame of discrimination, bullying, poverty, drugs, alcohol, coerced residential and boarding schools, foster care, forced assimilation, loss of family, and on top of everything failure of the United States to fulfill Indian treaty agreements.
How We Go Home from the oral history project, Voice of Witness provides a look into the past and present we need to know.
Justice Gorsuch comes from the United States Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals encompassing six states: Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming and the territory of 76 federally recognized Indian Tribes. Justice Gorsuch has decided a number of cases in favor of tribal sovereignty. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/vol--43/vol--43--no--1/justice-gorsuch-and-federal-indian-law/
As noted in the podcast Strict Scrutiny https://crooked.com/podcast/the-uncertain-future-of-the-indian-child-welfare-act/, the Indian Tribes worked with Justice Gorsuch during his tenure in the Tenth Circuit.
The question remains, will Justice Gorsuch pull one more to support LCWA? From the descriptions of the questioning and comments of the Supreme Court hearing, Justice Thomas will definitely decide with the plaintiff against LCWA, Justice Kavanagh is a probable against LCWA and Chief Justice Roberts is always on the side of dismantling anything that whiffs of protections for minority groups. That leaves Justice Amy Coney Barrett who was not mentioned in any reviews as the swing vote.
November 6, 2022
I play Wordle in the New York Times every day. It is a word game with six chances to guess the five letter word of the day. By my second try I had four of the five letters R-E-A-D. The answer was DREAM which I got on my fourth try. My third try was DREAD which tells you everything you need to know about how I feel about the election. I am worried.
The big news of the week is the filibuster by Councilmembers Wengraf and Droste with help from Councilmembers Taplin and Kesarwani and the maneuver by LaTanya Bellow, Deputy City Manager and Dee Williams-Ridley, City Manager to block passing the Fair Work Week Ordinance.
The City Council discussion of the Fair Work Week Ordinance started at 8:43 pm Thursday evening (council was on Thursday instead of the usual Tuesday) with Labor Commission commissioner Andy Katz describing the labor protections in the ordinance and that the protections are for low wage workers. After Katz, the floor was turned over to Vice Mayor Kate Harrison who added detail and the process of developing the Fair Work Week Ordinance which started on May 15, 2018.
The four key features of the Fair Work Week Ordinance to provide more stability to low wage workers are: 1) At least 14 days advance notice of work schedules in writing, 2) Predictability Pay (Cancellation pay) if a shift is changed, reduced, cancelled with 24 hour notice or greater the predictability pay would be one hour of pay. If the reduced hours or cancellation is less than 24 hours notice the predictability pay would be 4 hours of pay or the scheduled hours of work whichever is less, 3) Additional hours shall be offered to existing qualified workers before hiring new employees or using staffing agencies, and 4) Right to rest, the right to decline work hours that occur less than 11 hours after the end of the previous shift.
Mayor Arreguin was quite wound up when he took the floor emphasizing he was voting for the Fair Work Week and wanted to see it passed and stated, “I believe this is really essential to show the respect and to provide more rights to our essential workers in Berkeley” and then went through grammatical and clarifying corrections one of which exempted Life Long Medical Care.
It was then turned over to Councilmember Wengraf who wanted “an analysis of the fiscal impacts on the City of Berkeley of implementing this ordinance and I don’t see a report.” And this is where the filibuster started with this batting back and forth with Wengraf and Droste about not knowing the cost to the City of Berkeley and they couldn’t possibly vote for it without knowing the cost and Dee Williams-Ridley saying she didn’t know that number and LaTanya Bellow stating she needed more time for that data. (Williams-Ridley and Bellow had already been given an extension on October 11, 2022 to collect this data.) This went on without public comment even starting until 10:36 pm when Hahn made a motion to extend the meeting until midnight and then backed off midnight and made the motion for 11:45 pm. The vote to extend was unanimous.
Hahn was the last to speak before public comment and pointed out the contrast to when raises were given the to the City’s highest paid employees, the impact on the budget was never questioned and there was never the kind of “handwringing” that was going on over the cost of benefits to the lowest paid City of Berkeley workers.
Public speakers emphasized the bias, the number of years this had been in process and workers needing protection. Swati Rayasam (spelling) asked that the exemption be removed for Life Long Medical and spoke movingly to the undue burden of healthcare workers and the oppression of the lowest paid workers.
The most recent salary post I could find for LaTanya Bellow is $310,150 and Dee Williams-Ridley $386,160. Williams-Ridley was awarded a 28% raise of $84,732 in November 2021. Keep that in mind when considering the Thursday evening actions impact to City of Berkeley employees and workers in Berkeley earning less than twice the minimum wage.
Using the current Berkeley minimum wage of $16.99, the Fair Work Week Ordinance would benefit workers earning under $33.98 per hour or $70,684.40 per year. That is less money than the generous $84,732 raise to Williams-Ridley which placed her salary greater than the City Manager of San Jose a city of nearly 180 square miles and over 1 million people. (Berkeley is 10.5 square miles with a population of 124,000). In the salary survey completed for that $84,732 raise, it actually demonstrated that the city manager’s existing salary of $301,428 was in line or possibly just a little bit high when compared to bay area cities of similar population and size.
Debate continued with the main motion to pass the Fair Work Week Ordinance with the final amendments and Life Long Medical back in. At about 11:43 Arreguin asked the clerk if the extension was to 11:45 pm or midnight. The clerk stated 11:45. Arreguin called for a vote to extend the meeting. Taplin, Droste, Wengraf and Kesarwani all voted No. The vote to extend failed. Six yes votes were needed. Arreguin called for a vote on the Fair Work Work ordinance, but the clock had ticked past 11:45 pm and the meeting was declared over by the clerk, the parliamentarian.
The Fair Work Week ordinance died. Kesarwani stated earlier in the evening that she would vote for the Fair Work Week Ordinance, but by joining with Droste, Wengraf, and Taplin to vote against extending the meeting for a vote on the ordinance, she killed the Fair Work Week Ordinance. Harrison was in shock, saying, “I’ve been gobsmacked.”
Sitting on the sidelines watching, I called it a filibuster in my public comment at 11:15 pm. I also stated that as a former shift employee and a manager responsible for scheduling this was not an impossible task. If the vote had been called in time before 11:45 pm, I counted five (Arreguin, Bartlett, Harrison, Hahn, Robinson) to pass it.
Nothing earth shattering happened at the Monday Agenda committee. City Council will return to hybrid meetings December 6. The Boards and Commissions will return to in person. The City does not have enough equipment to conduct the board and commission meetings as hybrid, so those will return to in person only, when the COVID emergency ends on February 28th.
I received a number of emails this week asking why items in the draft agenda from the City Manager (and city department directors, city manager deputies, etc.) are listed with “See Report” and then the page in the packet for the report states, “No Material Available for this Item.” My answer was it is always this way. City Administration reports are not available until the Council agenda is finalized and published ten days before the meeting. Access to financial reports for the Council Budget Committee is even worse. Early access to financial reports seems to be the day before and the usual practice is too often a posting on the morning of the meeting.
All this is annoying, but certainly not as critical or as disastrous as the new city website which Wyndy J Hella KnoxCarrRuud described this way, “I absolutely agree about the new City of Berkeley website. The thing is absolutely opaque, "simplified" to the point of idiocy, with archival and other search options completely absent, unlinked to documentation and/or unusable. Dead ends everywhere, putting walls of cheery-looking nothing up in front of the public and our active participation in civic life. SO disappointing! Techno-privatization at its worst. Ugh. What more can I say?” KnoxCarrRudd has a Master of Library, Archives and Information Studies and certainly knows more than a thing or two about the importance of historical archives.
The November 2, 2022 Planning Commission held discussion on zoning changes for the Southside Area and a Local density Bonus to compete with the State Density bonus. No vote was held. This is all to create student housing and will come back for a hearing. There is a lot to absorb. If you have any thoughts either for or against increasing building height, lot coverage, reducing setbacks and removing building separations, the time to get involved is now. You can read the proposals and see the maps with this link. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/legislative-body-meeting-agendas/2022-11-02_PC%20Agenda%20Packet.pdf (starts on page 9)
The density bonus suggestion is that since determining true student income status is so difficult to determine, shouldn’t there be an alternative to onsite affordable housing units so projects can qualify for a density bonus without being required to provide affordable housing units within the project. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/legislative-body-meeting-agendas/2022-11-02_PC%20Agenda%20Packet.pdf (starts on page 669)
It appears that the decision has been made, the Southside, the blocks south of UC Berkeley are to be developed for student housing with six to twelve story residential buildings. And, as UC continues to increase student admissions will there be zoning “creep?”
The Planning Commission vote on the Bird Safe Ordinance is now postponed to February or March 2023. The two ad hoc subcommittee members Christina Oates and Alfred Twu, along with Glenn Philips from Golden Gate Audubon, Erin Diehm and myself met with City staff Justin Horner on Friday. Juli Dickey a birder joined and listened to the discussion on the Bird Safe ordinance. I don’t know how this will turn out. Oates, Twu and Horner agreed that when the Bird Safe Ordinance comes back to the Planning Commission it should be in the final form ready for a vote.
It doesn’t look like there will be another ad hoc committee meeting and this was our last chance for real discussion. Diehm and I gave our best pleas to keep Dark Skies as part of the ordinance. In talking about requirements or phasing in for small remodels or limited installation of replacement windows, Glenn Philips put the order of preference to bird safe glass the optimal choice with the alternative of bug screens as second and film on the outside of windows third. Any glass that is greater than 2” high and 4” wide is a hazard for birds, but of course the greater the amount of glass on a building and the size of the panes multiplies the danger.
In the morning before the meeting, I was out walking with a friend talking about the bird safe ordinance, when I saw a house across the street from us in a major remodel. It had been raised to two stories and every single window was new. It probably had 40 to 50 new windows. I took my friend across the street as I talked about the bird safe features that could have been applied. The owner came out saying how they had followed all the building codes. I responded of course you did. It is not your fault. It is the city that failed to act.
The Water Emergency Transportation Authority plans to add ferry service in Berkeley in 2027. The Board is optimistic ridership will return even though since the onset of the pandemic commuters have really never shown up as anything more than a small blip on the charts. Now that summer is over, total ridership is showing a downward slope.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a brief review of Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice by David Enrich published this year in September. Enrich covered the Jones Day Law Firm and the revolving door with the Trump administration and stacking the courts. That lead me to his 2020 book Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump and an Epic Trail of Destruction.
I was really hoping for an inside scoop on the relationship between Donald Trump and Justin Kennedy, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s son. The author did not furnish much in that answer only that the Trump Administration courted Justice Kennedy the Supreme Court swing vote to retire making an opening for Brett Kavanaugh the expected reliable pro-business, pro-Trump, culturally conservative vote. What the book does cover in great detail is the sordid story of how the insatiable hunger for ever bigger profits lead to money laundering for Russian oligarchs, the rise of Rosemary Vrablic in the private banking division who arranged hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to Trump even after Trump sued Deutsche Bank to squeeze out of the loan repayment over the Chicago Trump Tower and the sad account of Val Broeksmit the son of Willian Broeksmit, Deutsche Bank executive who committed suicide in 2014.
In Val’s journey to uncover why his father committed suicide, Val accessed his father’s email account and shared his late father’s internal bank documents with federal authorities and the media.
Val was found dead at age 46 in Los Angeles April 25, 2022 (19 months after the publication of Dark Towers). No cause of death is listed for Val and conspiracies abound. Reported in the book, Val had a long history of drug abuse and addiction which frequently lead to the media and federal authorities dismissing the treasure trove of Deutsche Bank documents in his possession through his father’s emails. Even Adam Schiff is described as being put off by Val’s appearance and ushering him out of his office without grasping the boatload of information Val was trying to offer.
I play Wordle in the New York Times every day. It is a word game with six chances to guess the five letter word of the day. By my second try I had four of the five letters R-E-A-D. The answer was DREAM which I got on my fourth try. My third try was DREAD which tells you everything you need to know about how I feel about the election. I am worried.
The big news of the week is the filibuster by Councilmembers Wengraf and Droste with help from Councilmembers Taplin and Kesarwani and the maneuver by LaTanya Bellow, Deputy City Manager and Dee Williams-Ridley, City Manager to block passing the Fair Work Week Ordinance.
The City Council discussion of the Fair Work Week Ordinance started at 8:43 pm Thursday evening (council was on Thursday instead of the usual Tuesday) with Labor Commission commissioner Andy Katz describing the labor protections in the ordinance and that the protections are for low wage workers. After Katz, the floor was turned over to Vice Mayor Kate Harrison who added detail and the process of developing the Fair Work Week Ordinance which started on May 15, 2018.
The four key features of the Fair Work Week Ordinance to provide more stability to low wage workers are: 1) At least 14 days advance notice of work schedules in writing, 2) Predictability Pay (Cancellation pay) if a shift is changed, reduced, cancelled with 24 hour notice or greater the predictability pay would be one hour of pay. If the reduced hours or cancellation is less than 24 hours notice the predictability pay would be 4 hours of pay or the scheduled hours of work whichever is less, 3) Additional hours shall be offered to existing qualified workers before hiring new employees or using staffing agencies, and 4) Right to rest, the right to decline work hours that occur less than 11 hours after the end of the previous shift.
Mayor Arreguin was quite wound up when he took the floor emphasizing he was voting for the Fair Work Week and wanted to see it passed and stated, “I believe this is really essential to show the respect and to provide more rights to our essential workers in Berkeley” and then went through grammatical and clarifying corrections one of which exempted Life Long Medical Care.
It was then turned over to Councilmember Wengraf who wanted “an analysis of the fiscal impacts on the City of Berkeley of implementing this ordinance and I don’t see a report.” And this is where the filibuster started with this batting back and forth with Wengraf and Droste about not knowing the cost to the City of Berkeley and they couldn’t possibly vote for it without knowing the cost and Dee Williams-Ridley saying she didn’t know that number and LaTanya Bellow stating she needed more time for that data. (Williams-Ridley and Bellow had already been given an extension on October 11, 2022 to collect this data.) This went on without public comment even starting until 10:36 pm when Hahn made a motion to extend the meeting until midnight and then backed off midnight and made the motion for 11:45 pm. The vote to extend was unanimous.
Hahn was the last to speak before public comment and pointed out the contrast to when raises were given the to the City’s highest paid employees, the impact on the budget was never questioned and there was never the kind of “handwringing” that was going on over the cost of benefits to the lowest paid City of Berkeley workers.
Public speakers emphasized the bias, the number of years this had been in process and workers needing protection. Swati Rayasam (spelling) asked that the exemption be removed for Life Long Medical and spoke movingly to the undue burden of healthcare workers and the oppression of the lowest paid workers.
The most recent salary post I could find for LaTanya Bellow is $310,150 and Dee Williams-Ridley $386,160. Williams-Ridley was awarded a 28% raise of $84,732 in November 2021. Keep that in mind when considering the Thursday evening actions impact to City of Berkeley employees and workers in Berkeley earning less than twice the minimum wage.
Using the current Berkeley minimum wage of $16.99, the Fair Work Week Ordinance would benefit workers earning under $33.98 per hour or $70,684.40 per year. That is less money than the generous $84,732 raise to Williams-Ridley which placed her salary greater than the City Manager of San Jose a city of nearly 180 square miles and over 1 million people. (Berkeley is 10.5 square miles with a population of 124,000). In the salary survey completed for that $84,732 raise, it actually demonstrated that the city manager’s existing salary of $301,428 was in line or possibly just a little bit high when compared to bay area cities of similar population and size.
Debate continued with the main motion to pass the Fair Work Week Ordinance with the final amendments and Life Long Medical back in. At about 11:43 Arreguin asked the clerk if the extension was to 11:45 pm or midnight. The clerk stated 11:45. Arreguin called for a vote to extend the meeting. Taplin, Droste, Wengraf and Kesarwani all voted No. The vote to extend failed. Six yes votes were needed. Arreguin called for a vote on the Fair Work Work ordinance, but the clock had ticked past 11:45 pm and the meeting was declared over by the clerk, the parliamentarian.
The Fair Work Week ordinance died. Kesarwani stated earlier in the evening that she would vote for the Fair Work Week Ordinance, but by joining with Droste, Wengraf, and Taplin to vote against extending the meeting for a vote on the ordinance, she killed the Fair Work Week Ordinance. Harrison was in shock, saying, “I’ve been gobsmacked.”
Sitting on the sidelines watching, I called it a filibuster in my public comment at 11:15 pm. I also stated that as a former shift employee and a manager responsible for scheduling this was not an impossible task. If the vote had been called in time before 11:45 pm, I counted five (Arreguin, Bartlett, Harrison, Hahn, Robinson) to pass it.
Nothing earth shattering happened at the Monday Agenda committee. City Council will return to hybrid meetings December 6. The Boards and Commissions will return to in person. The City does not have enough equipment to conduct the board and commission meetings as hybrid, so those will return to in person only, when the COVID emergency ends on February 28th.
I received a number of emails this week asking why items in the draft agenda from the City Manager (and city department directors, city manager deputies, etc.) are listed with “See Report” and then the page in the packet for the report states, “No Material Available for this Item.” My answer was it is always this way. City Administration reports are not available until the Council agenda is finalized and published ten days before the meeting. Access to financial reports for the Council Budget Committee is even worse. Early access to financial reports seems to be the day before and the usual practice is too often a posting on the morning of the meeting.
All this is annoying, but certainly not as critical or as disastrous as the new city website which Wyndy J Hella KnoxCarrRuud described this way, “I absolutely agree about the new City of Berkeley website. The thing is absolutely opaque, "simplified" to the point of idiocy, with archival and other search options completely absent, unlinked to documentation and/or unusable. Dead ends everywhere, putting walls of cheery-looking nothing up in front of the public and our active participation in civic life. SO disappointing! Techno-privatization at its worst. Ugh. What more can I say?” KnoxCarrRudd has a Master of Library, Archives and Information Studies and certainly knows more than a thing or two about the importance of historical archives.
The November 2, 2022 Planning Commission held discussion on zoning changes for the Southside Area and a Local density Bonus to compete with the State Density bonus. No vote was held. This is all to create student housing and will come back for a hearing. There is a lot to absorb. If you have any thoughts either for or against increasing building height, lot coverage, reducing setbacks and removing building separations, the time to get involved is now. You can read the proposals and see the maps with this link. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/legislative-body-meeting-agendas/2022-11-02_PC%20Agenda%20Packet.pdf (starts on page 9)
The density bonus suggestion is that since determining true student income status is so difficult to determine, shouldn’t there be an alternative to onsite affordable housing units so projects can qualify for a density bonus without being required to provide affordable housing units within the project. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/legislative-body-meeting-agendas/2022-11-02_PC%20Agenda%20Packet.pdf (starts on page 669)
It appears that the decision has been made, the Southside, the blocks south of UC Berkeley are to be developed for student housing with six to twelve story residential buildings. And, as UC continues to increase student admissions will there be zoning “creep?”
The Planning Commission vote on the Bird Safe Ordinance is now postponed to February or March 2023. The two ad hoc subcommittee members Christina Oates and Alfred Twu, along with Glenn Philips from Golden Gate Audubon, Erin Diehm and myself met with City staff Justin Horner on Friday. Juli Dickey a birder joined and listened to the discussion on the Bird Safe ordinance. I don’t know how this will turn out. Oates, Twu and Horner agreed that when the Bird Safe Ordinance comes back to the Planning Commission it should be in the final form ready for a vote.
It doesn’t look like there will be another ad hoc committee meeting and this was our last chance for real discussion. Diehm and I gave our best pleas to keep Dark Skies as part of the ordinance. In talking about requirements or phasing in for small remodels or limited installation of replacement windows, Glenn Philips put the order of preference to bird safe glass the optimal choice with the alternative of bug screens as second and film on the outside of windows third. Any glass that is greater than 2” high and 4” wide is a hazard for birds, but of course the greater the amount of glass on a building and the size of the panes multiplies the danger.
In the morning before the meeting, I was out walking with a friend talking about the bird safe ordinance, when I saw a house across the street from us in a major remodel. It had been raised to two stories and every single window was new. It probably had 40 to 50 new windows. I took my friend across the street as I talked about the bird safe features that could have been applied. The owner came out saying how they had followed all the building codes. I responded of course you did. It is not your fault. It is the city that failed to act.
The Water Emergency Transportation Authority plans to add ferry service in Berkeley in 2027. The Board is optimistic ridership will return even though since the onset of the pandemic commuters have really never shown up as anything more than a small blip on the charts. Now that summer is over, total ridership is showing a downward slope.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a brief review of Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice by David Enrich published this year in September. Enrich covered the Jones Day Law Firm and the revolving door with the Trump administration and stacking the courts. That lead me to his 2020 book Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump and an Epic Trail of Destruction.
I was really hoping for an inside scoop on the relationship between Donald Trump and Justin Kennedy, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s son. The author did not furnish much in that answer only that the Trump Administration courted Justice Kennedy the Supreme Court swing vote to retire making an opening for Brett Kavanaugh the expected reliable pro-business, pro-Trump, culturally conservative vote. What the book does cover in great detail is the sordid story of how the insatiable hunger for ever bigger profits lead to money laundering for Russian oligarchs, the rise of Rosemary Vrablic in the private banking division who arranged hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to Trump even after Trump sued Deutsche Bank to squeeze out of the loan repayment over the Chicago Trump Tower and the sad account of Val Broeksmit the son of Willian Broeksmit, Deutsche Bank executive who committed suicide in 2014.
In Val’s journey to uncover why his father committed suicide, Val accessed his father’s email account and shared his late father’s internal bank documents with federal authorities and the media.
Val was found dead at age 46 in Los Angeles April 25, 2022 (19 months after the publication of Dark Towers). No cause of death is listed for Val and conspiracies abound. Reported in the book, Val had a long history of drug abuse and addiction which frequently lead to the media and federal authorities dismissing the treasure trove of Deutsche Bank documents in his possession through his father’s emails. Even Adam Schiff is described as being put off by Val’s appearance and ushering him out of his office without grasping the boatload of information Val was trying to offer.
October 30, 2022
This may seem out of order, starting out my Activist’s Diary with a book review, but as you keep reading you will see how it all pulls together with this last week’s meetings.
Our book club choice for October/November was A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds by Scott Weidensaul published in 2021.
Even though I have been pleading for many months for dark skies, bird safe glass and native plants at the Design Review Committee and the Zoning Adjustment Board and for the Planning Commission to approve the Bird Safe ordinance with the latest science my appreciation of the importance of these actions is so much deeper after reading Scott Weidensaul’s book A World on the Wing.
In the chapter titled Big Data, we learn how miniature GPS tracking devices so tiny they can be put on the backs of even little songbirds has changed what we know about migration, habitat stopovers, winter and nesting locations and how many miles birds travel without stopping. Because of one of those GPS devices on the back of a juvenile (5-month old) bar-tailed godwit known only by its satellite tag 234684 there is a new record flight. This little bird around 10 ounces flew without stopping from Alaska to north-east Tasmania 8,435 miles in 11 days and one hour.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/27/bar-tailed-godwit-sets-world-record-with-13560km-continuous-flight-from-alaska-to-southern-australia
Migratory feats that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years feel like nothing less than a miracle.
As mentioned in previous Diaries, nearly 3 billion birds, 30% of the birds in North America have disappeared since 1970. It is not just North America. Just published in September 2022 in the fifth edition of BirdLife’s “State of the World’s Birds,” nearly half of all bird species are in decline worldwide with one in eight at risk of extinction. https://www.birdlife.org/papers-reports/state-of-the-worlds-birds-2022/ This includes common birds like sparrows. An exception are geese like those invading Lake Merritt. This species is expanding. Maybe cities and meat-eating readers ought to consider a goose for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner instead of turkey. It would save farmland.
The scientific report published September 19, 2019 about loss of birds would not have been possible without decades of data of annual bird counts. There are two online programs that add to our knowledge of bird migration, habitat, stopovers and survival, eBird https://ebird.org/about managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology which collects data/information submitted by citizen birders on birds seen and heard worldwide and birdcast https://birdcast.info/migration-tools/local-migration-alerts/ which uses radar to track bird migration live.
In the chapter on climate, Weidensaul calls it climate weirding as some locations in migration are heating up faster and others have unexpected cold. Climate change puts the timing of migration of thousands of miles to arrive, mate, nest and when baby birds hatch out of sync with when insects (caterpillars their primary source of food) emerge.
Climate change does much more than change the timing of the arrival seasons. Sea level rise washes away coastal habitat and drought dries up inland wetlands. Even global wind patterns which migrating birds use to ease their flight are weirding. Take a look at the path of the polar jet stream from the Sunday Chronicle weather map.
Through new study made possible by those tiny GPS devices, ornithologists are able to track the impact of deterioration in wintering habitat carrying over into birds unable to build the fat stores and muscle to survive migration, reduced clutches in nesting habitat and poorer chick survival. Douglas Tallamy in his study of resident birds (birds that do not migrate) found that areas that have replaced native trees and plants with non-native plant species (ornamental plants and trees) results in smaller chicks and poorer chick survival.
Even though the negative impact of urban light was noted in the 1800s, it was those miniature GPS devices that demonstrated how artificial night light lures birds away from higher quality habitat to cities where urban parks are overrun with exotic invasive plants of limited value to birds. Young birds in their first migration are especially vulnerable to light pollution and are drawn to urban areas to rest and refuel only to find useless ornamental plants devoid of insects. A lesson here from A World on the Wing is that restoring habitat in a fairly small urban park may be more important than a larger tract of land in some more distant location.
The authors of the Housing Element Update Draft Environmental Impact Report (HEU DEIR) that closed for comment on October 17, 2022 reasoned that the abundance of ornamental, exotic and invasive non-native plants and non-native trees in Berkeley that are unsuitable habitat would make further development adding 19,098 units with 47,433 new residents insignificant. In other words, since we have already destroyed so much of the landscape, further destruction from developments carries little impact.
The conclusion from the HEU DEIR is the opposite to the thinking and planning that I heard from Dr. Ann Riley in her presentation to the Community for a Cultural Civic Center group. I listed Riley, expert in urban creek restoration, daylighting urban creeks as my “go to meeting” of the week. And, she did not disappoint.
Riley spoke to how daylighting creeks has proven over and over to be a significant economic benefit to business and city centers as people are drawn to open streams, nature and wildlife habitat.
If you have never heard the term daylighting creeks, this is the process for restoring a creek to its natural state, above ground open to day light, hence the term daylighting. That is instead of diverting creeks into underground culverts. When undergrounded creek culverts fail, disintegrate and collapse that can result in sink holes and flooding.
Riley showed picture after picture of the transformation from undergrounded culverted creeks to open streams and parks. Strawberry Creek in Strawberry Creek Park was one of the first projects of taking down a culvert and restoring a creek to daylight.
Most amazing is that there are grants to daylight creeks and the Coastal Conservancy has money available for projects like daylighting Strawberry Creek in Civic Center Park.
Daylighting urban creeks really got its start in 1983 in the California Assembly when Tom Bates authored the urban creeks legislation (Bates was a representative to the California Assembly before becoming Berkeley mayor). The first attempt failed when Governor Deukmejian (R) vetoed it. The bill was brought back in 1984 with the Republican legislator Eric Seastrand as the author and Bates as co-author.
Riley describes it this way in her book, “The Urban Creeks Restoration and Flood Control Act of 1984, acquired political legs because it recognized that restoration projects were a new, multi-objective strategy to address common urban stream erosion and flood hazards with practical but environmentally friendly solutions.”
It was also got legs because the revived bill placed a Republican name prominently in the author list. That got it by the Republican governor. The grants from the Urban Creeks Act continue to be awarded to this day.
The idea of daylighting the creek is not in the plan from consultants Berkeley hired. Gehl was tasked to create a plan for the Civic Center to restore and stabilize the Maudelle Shirek (old city hall) and Veterans Buildings and redo the Civic Center Park. Their concept was a promenade across the center of the park either north to south between the Veterans Building and Berkeley High or east to west from city offices at 2180 Milvia to the Maudelle Shirek Building. The Gehl park plan for Berkeley is a smaller version of the San Francisco City Hall park, a park with lots of gravel which seems to be more of an attraction for the homeless and protests than a place to go to relax and refresh.
The Gehl plan from the time I first saw it conjured up a vision of councilmembers and city administrators parading across the park marking their importance on the promenade.
Contrast that to Strawberry Creek Park. The Strawberry Creek Park is just lovely, a well-used treasure that neighbors in large numbers spoke to at the Redistricting meetings last spring.
I was open to the idea of daylighting Strawberry Creek in Civic Center Park before hearing Riley’s presentation. Now that I have a better understanding of the importance of restoring habitat in cities and urban parks and the how daylighting creeks benefits the well-being of all of us including nature and local businesses, daylighting Strawberry Creek in the Civic Center Park has moved up to the top of the list of important actions.
This presentation would never have happened without the work of Erin Diehm, who put this program together. It is because of Diehm and her depth of knowledge of ecosystems and habitat that we are even having this discussion. Diehm’s work gave us pollinator gardens in our parks.
Diehm also sent the link to birdcast last Fall so we could track how many migrating birds were flying over Berkeley. Berkeley is in the Pacific Flyway, the flight path birds take from northern nesting areas to wintering sites in Central and South America.
When I hear about turning parks into entertainment centers, I wonder why we aren’t taking a broader look at our city center. We close down Shattuck for events. Why are we not looking at making better use of the BART Plaza and the Shattuck street scape?
And why are we not looking at corridors connecting habitat across the city? Is cement and lot line to lot line building the only answer for the future which is the picture painted in the Revised Housing Element Update (RHEU)? Even the old 2012 Downtown Area Plan includes environmental sustainability “nature in the city” (pdf page 45) and that was written before the recent research covered in The World on a Wing which tells us parks with native plant habitat are important to bird survival.
The Revised Housing Element Update (RHEU) stand that since we have already destroyed so much landscape, we should just finish it off isn’t the only misstep. The authors of the RHEU in their declaration that utilities are adequate for the projected growth, seem to have missed Leila Moncharsh’s review of infrastructure, that Berkeley still has in parts of the city hollowed redwood tree trunks as sewer lines. Leave it to the historians to know what lies in the ground below.
Wastewater processing for the projected growth was also declared to be adequate. That ignores the 2014 consent decree with the EPA and the violations of sewage release of waste overflow in 2017 and, the harmful algae bloom of Heterosigma akashiwo in August 2022 with a huge die - off of thousands of fish in the bay and Lake Merritt. The algae bloom of Heterosigma akashiwo was possible through the confluence of warming bay water and nutrients/Nitrogen and Phosphorus released from water processing plants. EBMUD was one of the top two named culprits in the October 24, 2022 webinar by Baykeeper and Speaking Up for Point Molate on the algae bloom and causes. Water processing plants need upgrading now to prevent another like algae bloom in the future.
There is another section in the RHEU that Moncharsh did not cover in the October 26, 2022 post in the Berkeley Daily Planet, water! What caught my attention was the Infrastructure Constraints 4.2.1 on document pages 89 & 90 (pdf pages 90 & 91) “EBMUD’s water supplies are estimated to be sufficient during the planning period (2010-2040) in normal and single dry years.” Which begs the question is no one aware that we are in a multiple year drought? And, has no one looked at the drought map? It is pretty bleak. https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/ The RHEU provided the simple answer, during multi-year drought water will be rationed.
If we really think that the Housing Element is a planning tool instead of just an exercise to fulfill a state mandate, and we really think that significant population growth is in our future, then we need to step back and consider what that means, how do we need to change to absorb 47,433 more people. One question might be, when do we stop flushing our toilets with drinkable water? Is the answer when the faucet goes dry? Or, do we change how we construct new buildings and remodel old?
As for new construction and remodeling, updating the fire code will be on the City Council November 15, 2022 agenda. Last time when requiring sprinkler systems in new construction and remodels of over $100,000 in the high fire hazard zones came before council, the building and real estate industry ran to the podium to protest and got their way in removing it. I’ll be watching to see what happens this time with a new Fire Department Chief.
I missed the Zero Waste Commission opting instead to attend Speaking up for Point Molate on the algae bloom. This was the week that NYT published only 5% of plastic is actually recycled.
I did attend the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission. Two issues came up that have been repeated in multiple meetings, why are commissioners not notified when commission items finally reach the council agenda? (This problem is common to nearly all the commissions) And, why are reports not part of the minutes? Kim Chin said the City Clerks office notified him that minutes should be action only. Chin related minutes are saved by the city but staff reports and agendas are kept for only eight years.
Discarding reports and agendas after eight years erases history that that used to be at our fingertips with the old website. This makes one more loss for transparency.
The redesign for Telegraph Avenue Dwight to Woolsey from one side to the other is: curb – bike lane – parking – traffic lane – traffic lane – parking – bike lane - curb. The questions are what to do about right turns and left turns.
Remember Cooper (the birder) versus Cooper (the dog owner) in Central Park? Christian Cooper the birder wrote the book review for A World on the Wing for the New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/books/review/a-world-on-the-wing-scott-weidensaul.html A World on the Wing is available in print, ebook and audiobook from our local library.
This may seem out of order, starting out my Activist’s Diary with a book review, but as you keep reading you will see how it all pulls together with this last week’s meetings.
Our book club choice for October/November was A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds by Scott Weidensaul published in 2021.
Even though I have been pleading for many months for dark skies, bird safe glass and native plants at the Design Review Committee and the Zoning Adjustment Board and for the Planning Commission to approve the Bird Safe ordinance with the latest science my appreciation of the importance of these actions is so much deeper after reading Scott Weidensaul’s book A World on the Wing.
In the chapter titled Big Data, we learn how miniature GPS tracking devices so tiny they can be put on the backs of even little songbirds has changed what we know about migration, habitat stopovers, winter and nesting locations and how many miles birds travel without stopping. Because of one of those GPS devices on the back of a juvenile (5-month old) bar-tailed godwit known only by its satellite tag 234684 there is a new record flight. This little bird around 10 ounces flew without stopping from Alaska to north-east Tasmania 8,435 miles in 11 days and one hour.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/27/bar-tailed-godwit-sets-world-record-with-13560km-continuous-flight-from-alaska-to-southern-australia
Migratory feats that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years feel like nothing less than a miracle.
As mentioned in previous Diaries, nearly 3 billion birds, 30% of the birds in North America have disappeared since 1970. It is not just North America. Just published in September 2022 in the fifth edition of BirdLife’s “State of the World’s Birds,” nearly half of all bird species are in decline worldwide with one in eight at risk of extinction. https://www.birdlife.org/papers-reports/state-of-the-worlds-birds-2022/ This includes common birds like sparrows. An exception are geese like those invading Lake Merritt. This species is expanding. Maybe cities and meat-eating readers ought to consider a goose for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner instead of turkey. It would save farmland.
The scientific report published September 19, 2019 about loss of birds would not have been possible without decades of data of annual bird counts. There are two online programs that add to our knowledge of bird migration, habitat, stopovers and survival, eBird https://ebird.org/about managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology which collects data/information submitted by citizen birders on birds seen and heard worldwide and birdcast https://birdcast.info/migration-tools/local-migration-alerts/ which uses radar to track bird migration live.
In the chapter on climate, Weidensaul calls it climate weirding as some locations in migration are heating up faster and others have unexpected cold. Climate change puts the timing of migration of thousands of miles to arrive, mate, nest and when baby birds hatch out of sync with when insects (caterpillars their primary source of food) emerge.
Climate change does much more than change the timing of the arrival seasons. Sea level rise washes away coastal habitat and drought dries up inland wetlands. Even global wind patterns which migrating birds use to ease their flight are weirding. Take a look at the path of the polar jet stream from the Sunday Chronicle weather map.
Through new study made possible by those tiny GPS devices, ornithologists are able to track the impact of deterioration in wintering habitat carrying over into birds unable to build the fat stores and muscle to survive migration, reduced clutches in nesting habitat and poorer chick survival. Douglas Tallamy in his study of resident birds (birds that do not migrate) found that areas that have replaced native trees and plants with non-native plant species (ornamental plants and trees) results in smaller chicks and poorer chick survival.
Even though the negative impact of urban light was noted in the 1800s, it was those miniature GPS devices that demonstrated how artificial night light lures birds away from higher quality habitat to cities where urban parks are overrun with exotic invasive plants of limited value to birds. Young birds in their first migration are especially vulnerable to light pollution and are drawn to urban areas to rest and refuel only to find useless ornamental plants devoid of insects. A lesson here from A World on the Wing is that restoring habitat in a fairly small urban park may be more important than a larger tract of land in some more distant location.
The authors of the Housing Element Update Draft Environmental Impact Report (HEU DEIR) that closed for comment on October 17, 2022 reasoned that the abundance of ornamental, exotic and invasive non-native plants and non-native trees in Berkeley that are unsuitable habitat would make further development adding 19,098 units with 47,433 new residents insignificant. In other words, since we have already destroyed so much of the landscape, further destruction from developments carries little impact.
The conclusion from the HEU DEIR is the opposite to the thinking and planning that I heard from Dr. Ann Riley in her presentation to the Community for a Cultural Civic Center group. I listed Riley, expert in urban creek restoration, daylighting urban creeks as my “go to meeting” of the week. And, she did not disappoint.
Riley spoke to how daylighting creeks has proven over and over to be a significant economic benefit to business and city centers as people are drawn to open streams, nature and wildlife habitat.
If you have never heard the term daylighting creeks, this is the process for restoring a creek to its natural state, above ground open to day light, hence the term daylighting. That is instead of diverting creeks into underground culverts. When undergrounded creek culverts fail, disintegrate and collapse that can result in sink holes and flooding.
Riley showed picture after picture of the transformation from undergrounded culverted creeks to open streams and parks. Strawberry Creek in Strawberry Creek Park was one of the first projects of taking down a culvert and restoring a creek to daylight.
Most amazing is that there are grants to daylight creeks and the Coastal Conservancy has money available for projects like daylighting Strawberry Creek in Civic Center Park.
Daylighting urban creeks really got its start in 1983 in the California Assembly when Tom Bates authored the urban creeks legislation (Bates was a representative to the California Assembly before becoming Berkeley mayor). The first attempt failed when Governor Deukmejian (R) vetoed it. The bill was brought back in 1984 with the Republican legislator Eric Seastrand as the author and Bates as co-author.
Riley describes it this way in her book, “The Urban Creeks Restoration and Flood Control Act of 1984, acquired political legs because it recognized that restoration projects were a new, multi-objective strategy to address common urban stream erosion and flood hazards with practical but environmentally friendly solutions.”
It was also got legs because the revived bill placed a Republican name prominently in the author list. That got it by the Republican governor. The grants from the Urban Creeks Act continue to be awarded to this day.
The idea of daylighting the creek is not in the plan from consultants Berkeley hired. Gehl was tasked to create a plan for the Civic Center to restore and stabilize the Maudelle Shirek (old city hall) and Veterans Buildings and redo the Civic Center Park. Their concept was a promenade across the center of the park either north to south between the Veterans Building and Berkeley High or east to west from city offices at 2180 Milvia to the Maudelle Shirek Building. The Gehl park plan for Berkeley is a smaller version of the San Francisco City Hall park, a park with lots of gravel which seems to be more of an attraction for the homeless and protests than a place to go to relax and refresh.
The Gehl plan from the time I first saw it conjured up a vision of councilmembers and city administrators parading across the park marking their importance on the promenade.
Contrast that to Strawberry Creek Park. The Strawberry Creek Park is just lovely, a well-used treasure that neighbors in large numbers spoke to at the Redistricting meetings last spring.
I was open to the idea of daylighting Strawberry Creek in Civic Center Park before hearing Riley’s presentation. Now that I have a better understanding of the importance of restoring habitat in cities and urban parks and the how daylighting creeks benefits the well-being of all of us including nature and local businesses, daylighting Strawberry Creek in the Civic Center Park has moved up to the top of the list of important actions.
This presentation would never have happened without the work of Erin Diehm, who put this program together. It is because of Diehm and her depth of knowledge of ecosystems and habitat that we are even having this discussion. Diehm’s work gave us pollinator gardens in our parks.
Diehm also sent the link to birdcast last Fall so we could track how many migrating birds were flying over Berkeley. Berkeley is in the Pacific Flyway, the flight path birds take from northern nesting areas to wintering sites in Central and South America.
When I hear about turning parks into entertainment centers, I wonder why we aren’t taking a broader look at our city center. We close down Shattuck for events. Why are we not looking at making better use of the BART Plaza and the Shattuck street scape?
And why are we not looking at corridors connecting habitat across the city? Is cement and lot line to lot line building the only answer for the future which is the picture painted in the Revised Housing Element Update (RHEU)? Even the old 2012 Downtown Area Plan includes environmental sustainability “nature in the city” (pdf page 45) and that was written before the recent research covered in The World on a Wing which tells us parks with native plant habitat are important to bird survival.
The Revised Housing Element Update (RHEU) stand that since we have already destroyed so much landscape, we should just finish it off isn’t the only misstep. The authors of the RHEU in their declaration that utilities are adequate for the projected growth, seem to have missed Leila Moncharsh’s review of infrastructure, that Berkeley still has in parts of the city hollowed redwood tree trunks as sewer lines. Leave it to the historians to know what lies in the ground below.
Wastewater processing for the projected growth was also declared to be adequate. That ignores the 2014 consent decree with the EPA and the violations of sewage release of waste overflow in 2017 and, the harmful algae bloom of Heterosigma akashiwo in August 2022 with a huge die - off of thousands of fish in the bay and Lake Merritt. The algae bloom of Heterosigma akashiwo was possible through the confluence of warming bay water and nutrients/Nitrogen and Phosphorus released from water processing plants. EBMUD was one of the top two named culprits in the October 24, 2022 webinar by Baykeeper and Speaking Up for Point Molate on the algae bloom and causes. Water processing plants need upgrading now to prevent another like algae bloom in the future.
There is another section in the RHEU that Moncharsh did not cover in the October 26, 2022 post in the Berkeley Daily Planet, water! What caught my attention was the Infrastructure Constraints 4.2.1 on document pages 89 & 90 (pdf pages 90 & 91) “EBMUD’s water supplies are estimated to be sufficient during the planning period (2010-2040) in normal and single dry years.” Which begs the question is no one aware that we are in a multiple year drought? And, has no one looked at the drought map? It is pretty bleak. https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/ The RHEU provided the simple answer, during multi-year drought water will be rationed.
If we really think that the Housing Element is a planning tool instead of just an exercise to fulfill a state mandate, and we really think that significant population growth is in our future, then we need to step back and consider what that means, how do we need to change to absorb 47,433 more people. One question might be, when do we stop flushing our toilets with drinkable water? Is the answer when the faucet goes dry? Or, do we change how we construct new buildings and remodel old?
As for new construction and remodeling, updating the fire code will be on the City Council November 15, 2022 agenda. Last time when requiring sprinkler systems in new construction and remodels of over $100,000 in the high fire hazard zones came before council, the building and real estate industry ran to the podium to protest and got their way in removing it. I’ll be watching to see what happens this time with a new Fire Department Chief.
I missed the Zero Waste Commission opting instead to attend Speaking up for Point Molate on the algae bloom. This was the week that NYT published only 5% of plastic is actually recycled.
I did attend the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission. Two issues came up that have been repeated in multiple meetings, why are commissioners not notified when commission items finally reach the council agenda? (This problem is common to nearly all the commissions) And, why are reports not part of the minutes? Kim Chin said the City Clerks office notified him that minutes should be action only. Chin related minutes are saved by the city but staff reports and agendas are kept for only eight years.
Discarding reports and agendas after eight years erases history that that used to be at our fingertips with the old website. This makes one more loss for transparency.
The redesign for Telegraph Avenue Dwight to Woolsey from one side to the other is: curb – bike lane – parking – traffic lane – traffic lane – parking – bike lane - curb. The questions are what to do about right turns and left turns.
Remember Cooper (the birder) versus Cooper (the dog owner) in Central Park? Christian Cooper the birder wrote the book review for A World on the Wing for the New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/books/review/a-world-on-the-wing-scott-weidensaul.html A World on the Wing is available in print, ebook and audiobook from our local library.
October 24, 2022
I totally missed the Berkeley Bird Festival last Sunday, instead I was tethered to the computer pulling together the response to the Housing Element Update (HEU) Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) to meet the 5 pm Monday, October 17 deadline only to be hit on Tuesday with a revision arriving with a one week to respond putting me behind for another week. I have never heard of such a thing, one week to respond to a revision of a DEIR, but as I wrote last week Berkeley was outed by the San Francisco Business Times and looks to be on target to miss the January 31, 2023 Housing Element deadline. So I guess to make up time, we get the minimal seven days to find the changes and respond. https://berkeleyca.gov/construction-development/land-use-development/general-plan-and-area-plans/housing-element-update
One interesting chart in the revised HEU DEIR on pages 11-13 is the list of community groups the preparers chose to contact, East Bay for Everyone, Berkeley Design Advocates and Southside Neighborhood Consortium and who they did not contact, Friends of Adeline, Berkeley Neighborhoods Council and Berkeley Tenants Union. The groups not contacted represent the communities most impacted by gentrification and exorbitant market rate rents. The excuse is these three organizations did not respond, which adds another layer of unanswered questions of how did this happen.
At the Monday Community for a Cultural Civic Center (CCCC) meeting, John Caner expressed his doubt that enough money will come out of the Measure L Bonds to do the seismic work at the Maudelle Shirek and Veterans Buildings. That feeling was seconded by others. Since the Measure L Bonds are as put to me by Vincent Casalaina are “money looking for projects not projects looking for money” no one knows or better said the voting public doesn’t know what the Mayor and his tightest cronies have in their sights. I might have thought “tightest cronies” was too strong, but given the amount of money pouring into the yes on L campaign, somebody(s) is looking to have their hands in the pot.
Deb Durant gave an update on the Berkeley Turtle Island Monument Project. Through grants, awards and support the funds to implement the project is over $1,000,000, however, those funds look to be evaporating after the City turned over the project to PGAdesign Landscape Architects based in Oakland. https://pgadesign.com/ The Turtle Island Monument group is being pushed aside and this includes the indigenous community for whom the monument is supposed to be dedicated with the message to the indigenous community to start from scratch. A mess unless you are the architects eating up the project funds.
The Agenda Committee met on Wednesday. I am so accustomed to a Monday meeting that I automatically listed it there, but as of late, the Agenda Committee has been moved to other days. Nothing earth shattering happened. Hybrid meetings will likely resume with the November 15 council meeting, but stay tuned. With Governor Newsom announcing the pandemic emergency to end February 28, 2023, everyone needs to get ready to return to in-person meetings, that also looks to mean the end to the convenience of zoom for committee and commission meetings.
California AB 361 signed October 10, 2021 authorized exceptions to local government open meeting requirements during the pandemic giving us the zoom boom. California AB 2449 signed September 13, 2022 defines the rules for teleconferencing when the pandemic emergency ends. https://www.hansonbridgett.com/Publications/articles/220916-4000-ab-2449 The City still promises to have hybrid meetings for City Council so the public can still videoconference and teleconference meetings that can last until 12:42 am or later, but it looks like council members will be required to be onsite for the meeting with few exceptions and a limit on how often an exception can be used.
Bringing the bird safe ordinance back to the Planning Commission is the story of a long haul to make change in building standards in Berkeley and it is not over. Jamie Cooney continues to persist and zoomed in Wednesday evening to tell her personal story. In 2018 when Jamie Cooney was a hazardous materials intern, she found two dead birds from glass collisions in front of her office in downtown Berkeley in one week. She began reaching out to a number of bird organizations including Golden Gate Audubon Society which responded by coming to the Community Environmental Advisory Commission (CEAC) to present on bird safe glass and building features. And that is how the bird safe ordinance in Berkeley started.
A lot has happened since the proposed ordinance made it out of the Community Environmental Advisory Commission in the spring of 2019 to weave through to council in November 2019 and then on to the Planning Commission where it languished at the bottom of the to do list aka workplan until there were finally enough calls from the public to revive it.
On September 19, 2019 Kenneth V. Rosenberg and colleagues published the results of their study of the staggering decline of bird populations in North America, with an estimated loss of nearly 3 billion birds since 1970 or 30% of the bird population. https://www.science.org/content/article/three-billion-north-american-birds-have-vanished-1970-surveys-show#:~:text=His%20team%20determined%20that%2019,house%20sparrows%2C%20are%20losing%20ground.
Simultaneously, the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) in the last year published a model ordinance for bird safety for cities to use https://abcbirds.org/glass-collisions/model-ordinance/
There are many factors threatening bird survival, loss of habitat, climate change and a warming planet but at the top of the list of what we can control on a local basis are outdoor cats followed by collisions with glass. And 44% of collisions with glass are one and two story buildings including single family houses. We can fix this.
While this has been in the works, I’ve watched building after building being approved and going up without bird safe glass. Though we have had success with several projects lately voluntarily committing to installing bird safe glass, that does not include David Trachtenberg and Bill Schrader. Trachtenberg and Schrader have multiple projects going up in Berkeley. Schrader agreed to install one window of bird safe glass in one building at the entrance next to a green wall of plants. That is it. And, that came with a lot of whining and moaning. These two are an excellent example of why recommendations that are voluntary do not work and a strong mandatory ordinance in line with the ABC model is desperately needed.
In March 2022 when the proposed bird safe ordinance was first heard by the Planning Commission, commissioners wanted the latest science and asked for more research. Now on October 19, 2022 listening to the commissioners’ discussion it is unclear whether there is a majority with a real interest in using science to establish policy.
Alfred Twu (who is running for AC Transit District Director-at-Large) wanted to know if there are other cities currently exploring ordinances, “so we don’t end up with 10 different standards” a statement that would make sense until one realizes that some cities that implemented bird safe standards did them years ago and they need to be updated to the new science. So will Berkeley lead by using the latest science? That is the unanswered question.
Christina Oatfield and Alfred Twu agreed to be on the adhoc subcommittee to bring back recommendations for the December Planning Commission meeting.
I am worried about Alfred Twu’s place on the subcommittee. I can’t put out of my mind Alfred Twu’s tweet to remove the woodlands from Tilden Park and fill it with housing. I couldn’t grab the old tweet from Twitter, but Thomas Lord captured it and the Berkeley Daily Planet published it in 2021. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2021-05-02/article/49171##49171
The original proposed ordinance from CEAC included a well written section on Dark Skies (I would still like to see fewer exceptions), but when Erin Diehm asked whether Dark Skies would be included, there was no answer.
The next evening near the end of the Design Review Committee (DRC) meeting Steve Finacom picked up on my comment and spoke to dark skies relating what happened when PG&E shut off street lights so they could replace power poles. Steve said, “You went out in the street, and you could see the sky. Orion was up there and you could see Orion’s belt. And, we even saw a meteor. I can’t ever remember seeing a meteor in Berkeley. So even a little change, this was just the street lights were out and home lights went on, and the rest of the city was brilliant, but we could see the sky, so the dark sky stuff does really matter.”
Dark skies are not just better for nature. In fact, just as dark skies are important for ecosystems and habitat, dark skies and complete darkness when we sleep is important for our own health. (advice from nurse Kelly turn off the lights).
The Hopkins Street Corridor is still a hot enough issue to break through the steady stream of campaign requests for donations flooding my email inbox. All these City plans for bicycle lanes and “road diets” which is the term for making streets narrower to slow down traffic seem to be disconnected from the citywide Emergency Access and Evacuation Network map (see picture - Thank you Margot Smith) You can also get a good look from the map link at https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Berkeley-Emergency-Access-Evacuation-Routes-06-2011.pdf embedded in the Fire weather and Evacuation webpage https://berkeleyca.gov/safety-health/fire/fire-weather-evacuation
The reconfiguration of Adeline between Ashby and MLK Jr Way was Thursday night with the Transportation Commission offered two choices both of which narrow the street (an evacuation route). Adolfo Cabral has started attending the Transportation Commission. We spoke afterwards. I was at the DRC and only caught a sliver of the Transportation Commission meeting. Cabral said he wanted to look at the recording to capture everything and was surprised that the meeting wasn’t recorded. We both worry the plan for the plaza on Adeline is just not going to work for the flea market. This coming Wednesday the redesign for Telegraph from Dwight south to Woolsey will be presented on zoom another evacuation route.
The election is heating up. I called several friends to find out what happened at their ballot get togethers. It was an interesting mix especially when it came to Measure L. At one ballot gathering someone called people opposed to L liars and another someone looked up San Jose a city with a population over one million and the physical size of 179.97 square miles and was quite incensed comparing the salaries of Berkeley City administrators and the size of Measure L compared to San Jose 17 times larger in land mass and 8 times larger in population and a bond that was passed in San Jose that was considered as huge. It was $650,000,000.
San Jose is the third largest city in California. Berkeley doesn’t even make the top 50, but this council wants to spend like it is in the top 3 except when it comes to taking care of city employees, not the top paid employees who have been given generous raises, but those on the lower rungs. That is where resistance comes down from city management with energy put into blocking the passage of the Fair Work Week ordinance. The attempt to pass legislation protecting part time workers started back in 2018. It was first mentioned as a council referral to the Commission on Labor in their February 2019 minutes.
The City Manager finally withdrew her companion report to send the Fair Work Week ordinance back through another round of committee meetings at the October 11, 2022 council meeting.
Fair Work Week is item 35 on the November 3 Council regular 6 pm meeting agenda. Expect road blocks from the city administration and the conservative wing council members throwing wrenches at it. Fair Work Week includes offering existing part-time workers more hours or fulltime positions before hiring new employees, advance scheduling, minimum pay for scheduled work cancellations and rest between shifts. It is all spelled out under #35 https://berkeleyca.gov/city-council-regular-meeting-eagenda-november-3-2022.
Anyone who is wobbling in supporting Ukraine or maybe even believes negotiating with Vladimir Putin is possible needs to pick up Masha Gessen’s book The Man Without a Face the Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin published in 2012. Reviews done when the book was published criticize it as biased, speculative and harsh, but so much more has happened in the intervening decade. Gessen’s descriptions of Putin as a ruthless tyrant look to be far more accurate than her book critics as we watch the obliteration of Ukraine play out right now.
Gessen portrays Putin as a vindictive cold-hearted man who willingly rains destruction for any perceived insult or slight or just to cement his power. Accordingly, we should never underestimate his craven lust for power or greed or revenge. Gessen gives many examples painting the picture of who Putin is from his orchestrated pictures as the virile man with tigers and bears, of FSB (Russian Federal Security Bureau) connections to bombings and botched hostage recues. Add the suspicious deaths of Russian oligarchs, murders of Russian reporters, poisonings with polonium-210 and imprisonment of those who challenge him.
Gessen closes with a face to face interview with Putin, her assessment of how Obama misjudged the nature of Putin and how Putin uses the demonization of the LGBTQ community.
When I turn in the ebook today, Libby (the library ebook program) tells me there are three people waiting and out of the five libraries I use, only San Francisco has The Man Without a Face. Our libraries are an incredible service and worth every penny and more than that fee that shows up on our property tax bill. My bill is $309.96 and I happily pay it, thankful that nearly all of the 57 books I’ve read so far this year are from our Bay Area libraries.
I totally missed the Berkeley Bird Festival last Sunday, instead I was tethered to the computer pulling together the response to the Housing Element Update (HEU) Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) to meet the 5 pm Monday, October 17 deadline only to be hit on Tuesday with a revision arriving with a one week to respond putting me behind for another week. I have never heard of such a thing, one week to respond to a revision of a DEIR, but as I wrote last week Berkeley was outed by the San Francisco Business Times and looks to be on target to miss the January 31, 2023 Housing Element deadline. So I guess to make up time, we get the minimal seven days to find the changes and respond. https://berkeleyca.gov/construction-development/land-use-development/general-plan-and-area-plans/housing-element-update
One interesting chart in the revised HEU DEIR on pages 11-13 is the list of community groups the preparers chose to contact, East Bay for Everyone, Berkeley Design Advocates and Southside Neighborhood Consortium and who they did not contact, Friends of Adeline, Berkeley Neighborhoods Council and Berkeley Tenants Union. The groups not contacted represent the communities most impacted by gentrification and exorbitant market rate rents. The excuse is these three organizations did not respond, which adds another layer of unanswered questions of how did this happen.
At the Monday Community for a Cultural Civic Center (CCCC) meeting, John Caner expressed his doubt that enough money will come out of the Measure L Bonds to do the seismic work at the Maudelle Shirek and Veterans Buildings. That feeling was seconded by others. Since the Measure L Bonds are as put to me by Vincent Casalaina are “money looking for projects not projects looking for money” no one knows or better said the voting public doesn’t know what the Mayor and his tightest cronies have in their sights. I might have thought “tightest cronies” was too strong, but given the amount of money pouring into the yes on L campaign, somebody(s) is looking to have their hands in the pot.
Deb Durant gave an update on the Berkeley Turtle Island Monument Project. Through grants, awards and support the funds to implement the project is over $1,000,000, however, those funds look to be evaporating after the City turned over the project to PGAdesign Landscape Architects based in Oakland. https://pgadesign.com/ The Turtle Island Monument group is being pushed aside and this includes the indigenous community for whom the monument is supposed to be dedicated with the message to the indigenous community to start from scratch. A mess unless you are the architects eating up the project funds.
The Agenda Committee met on Wednesday. I am so accustomed to a Monday meeting that I automatically listed it there, but as of late, the Agenda Committee has been moved to other days. Nothing earth shattering happened. Hybrid meetings will likely resume with the November 15 council meeting, but stay tuned. With Governor Newsom announcing the pandemic emergency to end February 28, 2023, everyone needs to get ready to return to in-person meetings, that also looks to mean the end to the convenience of zoom for committee and commission meetings.
California AB 361 signed October 10, 2021 authorized exceptions to local government open meeting requirements during the pandemic giving us the zoom boom. California AB 2449 signed September 13, 2022 defines the rules for teleconferencing when the pandemic emergency ends. https://www.hansonbridgett.com/Publications/articles/220916-4000-ab-2449 The City still promises to have hybrid meetings for City Council so the public can still videoconference and teleconference meetings that can last until 12:42 am or later, but it looks like council members will be required to be onsite for the meeting with few exceptions and a limit on how often an exception can be used.
Bringing the bird safe ordinance back to the Planning Commission is the story of a long haul to make change in building standards in Berkeley and it is not over. Jamie Cooney continues to persist and zoomed in Wednesday evening to tell her personal story. In 2018 when Jamie Cooney was a hazardous materials intern, she found two dead birds from glass collisions in front of her office in downtown Berkeley in one week. She began reaching out to a number of bird organizations including Golden Gate Audubon Society which responded by coming to the Community Environmental Advisory Commission (CEAC) to present on bird safe glass and building features. And that is how the bird safe ordinance in Berkeley started.
A lot has happened since the proposed ordinance made it out of the Community Environmental Advisory Commission in the spring of 2019 to weave through to council in November 2019 and then on to the Planning Commission where it languished at the bottom of the to do list aka workplan until there were finally enough calls from the public to revive it.
On September 19, 2019 Kenneth V. Rosenberg and colleagues published the results of their study of the staggering decline of bird populations in North America, with an estimated loss of nearly 3 billion birds since 1970 or 30% of the bird population. https://www.science.org/content/article/three-billion-north-american-birds-have-vanished-1970-surveys-show#:~:text=His%20team%20determined%20that%2019,house%20sparrows%2C%20are%20losing%20ground.
Simultaneously, the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) in the last year published a model ordinance for bird safety for cities to use https://abcbirds.org/glass-collisions/model-ordinance/
There are many factors threatening bird survival, loss of habitat, climate change and a warming planet but at the top of the list of what we can control on a local basis are outdoor cats followed by collisions with glass. And 44% of collisions with glass are one and two story buildings including single family houses. We can fix this.
While this has been in the works, I’ve watched building after building being approved and going up without bird safe glass. Though we have had success with several projects lately voluntarily committing to installing bird safe glass, that does not include David Trachtenberg and Bill Schrader. Trachtenberg and Schrader have multiple projects going up in Berkeley. Schrader agreed to install one window of bird safe glass in one building at the entrance next to a green wall of plants. That is it. And, that came with a lot of whining and moaning. These two are an excellent example of why recommendations that are voluntary do not work and a strong mandatory ordinance in line with the ABC model is desperately needed.
In March 2022 when the proposed bird safe ordinance was first heard by the Planning Commission, commissioners wanted the latest science and asked for more research. Now on October 19, 2022 listening to the commissioners’ discussion it is unclear whether there is a majority with a real interest in using science to establish policy.
Alfred Twu (who is running for AC Transit District Director-at-Large) wanted to know if there are other cities currently exploring ordinances, “so we don’t end up with 10 different standards” a statement that would make sense until one realizes that some cities that implemented bird safe standards did them years ago and they need to be updated to the new science. So will Berkeley lead by using the latest science? That is the unanswered question.
Christina Oatfield and Alfred Twu agreed to be on the adhoc subcommittee to bring back recommendations for the December Planning Commission meeting.
I am worried about Alfred Twu’s place on the subcommittee. I can’t put out of my mind Alfred Twu’s tweet to remove the woodlands from Tilden Park and fill it with housing. I couldn’t grab the old tweet from Twitter, but Thomas Lord captured it and the Berkeley Daily Planet published it in 2021. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2021-05-02/article/49171##49171
The original proposed ordinance from CEAC included a well written section on Dark Skies (I would still like to see fewer exceptions), but when Erin Diehm asked whether Dark Skies would be included, there was no answer.
The next evening near the end of the Design Review Committee (DRC) meeting Steve Finacom picked up on my comment and spoke to dark skies relating what happened when PG&E shut off street lights so they could replace power poles. Steve said, “You went out in the street, and you could see the sky. Orion was up there and you could see Orion’s belt. And, we even saw a meteor. I can’t ever remember seeing a meteor in Berkeley. So even a little change, this was just the street lights were out and home lights went on, and the rest of the city was brilliant, but we could see the sky, so the dark sky stuff does really matter.”
Dark skies are not just better for nature. In fact, just as dark skies are important for ecosystems and habitat, dark skies and complete darkness when we sleep is important for our own health. (advice from nurse Kelly turn off the lights).
The Hopkins Street Corridor is still a hot enough issue to break through the steady stream of campaign requests for donations flooding my email inbox. All these City plans for bicycle lanes and “road diets” which is the term for making streets narrower to slow down traffic seem to be disconnected from the citywide Emergency Access and Evacuation Network map (see picture - Thank you Margot Smith) You can also get a good look from the map link at https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Berkeley-Emergency-Access-Evacuation-Routes-06-2011.pdf embedded in the Fire weather and Evacuation webpage https://berkeleyca.gov/safety-health/fire/fire-weather-evacuation
The reconfiguration of Adeline between Ashby and MLK Jr Way was Thursday night with the Transportation Commission offered two choices both of which narrow the street (an evacuation route). Adolfo Cabral has started attending the Transportation Commission. We spoke afterwards. I was at the DRC and only caught a sliver of the Transportation Commission meeting. Cabral said he wanted to look at the recording to capture everything and was surprised that the meeting wasn’t recorded. We both worry the plan for the plaza on Adeline is just not going to work for the flea market. This coming Wednesday the redesign for Telegraph from Dwight south to Woolsey will be presented on zoom another evacuation route.
The election is heating up. I called several friends to find out what happened at their ballot get togethers. It was an interesting mix especially when it came to Measure L. At one ballot gathering someone called people opposed to L liars and another someone looked up San Jose a city with a population over one million and the physical size of 179.97 square miles and was quite incensed comparing the salaries of Berkeley City administrators and the size of Measure L compared to San Jose 17 times larger in land mass and 8 times larger in population and a bond that was passed in San Jose that was considered as huge. It was $650,000,000.
San Jose is the third largest city in California. Berkeley doesn’t even make the top 50, but this council wants to spend like it is in the top 3 except when it comes to taking care of city employees, not the top paid employees who have been given generous raises, but those on the lower rungs. That is where resistance comes down from city management with energy put into blocking the passage of the Fair Work Week ordinance. The attempt to pass legislation protecting part time workers started back in 2018. It was first mentioned as a council referral to the Commission on Labor in their February 2019 minutes.
The City Manager finally withdrew her companion report to send the Fair Work Week ordinance back through another round of committee meetings at the October 11, 2022 council meeting.
Fair Work Week is item 35 on the November 3 Council regular 6 pm meeting agenda. Expect road blocks from the city administration and the conservative wing council members throwing wrenches at it. Fair Work Week includes offering existing part-time workers more hours or fulltime positions before hiring new employees, advance scheduling, minimum pay for scheduled work cancellations and rest between shifts. It is all spelled out under #35 https://berkeleyca.gov/city-council-regular-meeting-eagenda-november-3-2022.
Anyone who is wobbling in supporting Ukraine or maybe even believes negotiating with Vladimir Putin is possible needs to pick up Masha Gessen’s book The Man Without a Face the Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin published in 2012. Reviews done when the book was published criticize it as biased, speculative and harsh, but so much more has happened in the intervening decade. Gessen’s descriptions of Putin as a ruthless tyrant look to be far more accurate than her book critics as we watch the obliteration of Ukraine play out right now.
Gessen portrays Putin as a vindictive cold-hearted man who willingly rains destruction for any perceived insult or slight or just to cement his power. Accordingly, we should never underestimate his craven lust for power or greed or revenge. Gessen gives many examples painting the picture of who Putin is from his orchestrated pictures as the virile man with tigers and bears, of FSB (Russian Federal Security Bureau) connections to bombings and botched hostage recues. Add the suspicious deaths of Russian oligarchs, murders of Russian reporters, poisonings with polonium-210 and imprisonment of those who challenge him.
Gessen closes with a face to face interview with Putin, her assessment of how Obama misjudged the nature of Putin and how Putin uses the demonization of the LGBTQ community.
When I turn in the ebook today, Libby (the library ebook program) tells me there are three people waiting and out of the five libraries I use, only San Francisco has The Man Without a Face. Our libraries are an incredible service and worth every penny and more than that fee that shows up on our property tax bill. My bill is $309.96 and I happily pay it, thankful that nearly all of the 57 books I’ve read so far this year are from our Bay Area libraries.
October 16, 2022
My Diary is late again. After the political discussion with my walk partner, I realized everything that I took out in my editing has to go back in. So here we go.
My week was bookended by listening to Rachel Maddow’s new podcast Ultra on Monday and finishing with the book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Friday and spending the weekend on responding to the Housing Element Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR). In between there was a council meeting, a stack of city meetings, the January 6th business/hearing, the State of the City address by Mayor Arreguin and a Measure L forum with debate between Mayor Arreguin and Jim MacGrath.
The Tuesday 4 pm Council special meeting was an attempt to quell the criticisms of Measure L the $650,000,000 Bonds that is spread over 48 years. We are supposed to feel reassured that the new to be created Affordable Housing and Infrastructure Bond Oversight Committee staffed by the Budget office will ensure that bond money is well spent and there will be an independent audit and reporting. It is all laid out in the Arreguin’s resolution, which he declares is absolutely binding.
Rock solid resolutions are only as binding as five votes to keep or undo them or the desire to enforce them.
At the Berkeley Chamber sponsored Measure L Forum with Mayor Arreguin supporting L and Jim MacGrath opposing L, MacGrath described picking projects as a “food fight” and looking at the process from Arreguin’s resolution, it certainly looks that way.
The mayor’s resolution does not define any priorities or specific projects, that list according to the resolution will come from the Public Works Department, the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Department, Health Housing and Community Services Department, Office of Energy and Sustainability and the Fire Department all of which will send their prioritized (wish) lists with bond and funding sources to the “authorized commissions” the Housing Advisory Commission, the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission and the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission where there will be robust public participation to develop recommendations to send to council.
Meanwhile the Affordable Housing and Infrastructure Bond Oversight Committee “nominated” by council (meaning council selects the members) “would create a policy and procedures manual that would include project goals and projection selection and prioritization criteria”
So let’s try to get this straight, the departments submit their wish lists, the wish list somehow get to the authorized commissions where we get to appear and plead our case in one or two minute bites for our desired project which may or may not have made the list, the commissions are swayed or ignore our pleas while the commissioners add their own opinions and make their recommendations to the council, the oversight committee meets four times a year and creates their list of how to decide on projects (from the policy and procedures manual created) which may or may not match the recommendations from the authorized commissions. This goes to the council where it meets up with the phrase in the Resolution, “Funding from the Bonds will be guided by the City Council’s plans and policies, as may be amended from time to time…”
Which, of course, makes sense. These bonds are going to be spread over 48 years with spending commitments made over 18 years, things change, which begs the real question, why are we handing council $650,000,000 now?
More importantly all this sounds like what we usually get: this is what we’ve decided don’t you love it? Which from this corner looks to why projects are decided/revealed after handing over the money. All while endless volunteer hours tally up and the consultants prepare their plans and reports at substantial expense.
To the second-hand comment passed on to me about being “parcel taxed out,” and therefore supportive of the bonds, Measure L, because it isn’t a parcel tax, have you not figured out who pays for the Bonds? It is property owners. When future property tax bills come, the bonds will be added to the long list of Fixed Charges and/or Special Assessments in the property tax statement. The Measure O Bond fee to property owners starts in 2025/2026.
The bonds are based on assessed value, so new homeowners/property owners pay the most. Parcel taxes are based on square footage of improvements/buildings (BSFT). Occasionally, parcel taxes can be based on square footage of the parcel/lot/land (LSFT). Berkeley usually uses the former (BSFT). With parcel taxes new and long time property owners are taxed the same rate depending on size, of course.
Low income senior households who own property (like the house they live in) are not exempted from the property tax fees for bonds. At least for parcel taxes, the way streets should be financed, low-income over 65 seniors can apply for parcel tax exemptions. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/2022-02/PropertyTaxesFAQs.pdf
Why should streets be paid for with parcel taxes instead of bonds? Streets can start breaking down in as little as four years, but may last 10-15 years, while the bonds financing the repair are paid off with interest over 30 years. This is why bonds are used for infrastructure and projects expected to last decades not streets that need continuous repair.
Two things stood out from the Arreguin - MCGrath Measure L debate forum sponsored by the Berkeley Chamber. Jim McGrath’s picture of street deterioration four years after repair and Mayor Arreguin blaming prior mayors for deterioration of the City’s infrastructure, stating he had been mayor for only five years. Once again, I need to apologize for working on Arreguin’s 2016 campaign for mayor. In Arreguin’s speeches and literature, he bragged about all his accomplishments during his years on City Council. I know, it was part of the canvassing pitch. Arreguin had eight years on council as a councilmember and five years as mayor, thirteen years in total and now after thirteen years infrastructure deterioration is somebody else’s fault. https://youtu.be/AS4exMTwSys
On to the October 11 regular council meeting. The Fair Work Week and Harriet Tubman Terrace agenda items were postponed to November 3. Council finally made it to the second item under action at 9:00 pm, an appeal of the six-story multi-unit building at 2018 Blake. The appeal started with Jordan Klein Director of Planning and Development recognizing Sharon Gong, Planner who would present the project for the City for her “excellent work” and the hearing went downhill from there.
Councilmember Wengraf started the questioning on the project noting this was targeted to students and asked questions about the density bonus, which units would be the two low income units, what would be the requirements. Vice Mayor Harrison was next asking more about density bonus. Questioning continued to the number of bedrooms, group living requirements as the city planning staff and Director Klein fumbled, clearly out of their league unable to answer the council’s questions. It all dragged on until 10:50 pm when Harrison made a motion to stop and continue the appeal to another meeting when the Planning Department would be prepared to answer council questions.
At 10:52 pm, there were still 171 attendees tethered to ZOOM hanging on to comment on the Reconsideration of the Hopkins Corridor Plan. While most of the older folks and disabled tuckered out, the walk bike Berkeley held on in large numbers to insist moving forward without delay with the current plan removing parking and adding bike lanes in front of the shops and Monterey Market.
The meeting dragged on so long that even live transcription/closed captioning ended at 11:30 pm. It was after 12:30 am when Arreguin called on Former Mayor Shirley Dean. She was the last of the public to speak and came out strongly against the Hopkins redesign. The meeting finally closed at 12:42 am with a unanimous council vote to reconsider the Hopkins Street Plan between McGee and Sacramento and throw another $400,000 at the project.
The little bit I caught of the Homeless Services Panel of Experts (HSPE) meeting, Carol Marasovic, chair has not let go of discounting the HSPE June 22, 2022 meeting in which the motion to send the letter to council denouncing the use of Measure P funds to balance the City budget rather than for new homeless services was unanimously approved by those present. Marasovic who was not present for the vote brought it up again this week that June 22 wasn’t a valid meeting, stating it wasn’t properly announced and that such strong language in the letter passed by meeting attendees might offend some people (is the offended people the mayor who appointed her?).
The meeting was announced and Paul Kealoha-Blake said at the HSPE October 12th meeting he stood by the comments/letter from June 22.
The Mayor read his State of the City speech Thursday evening before a half-filled room and a YouTube audience. You can watch it on YouTube just go to JesseArreguin.com. Other than the usual reassuring everything is wonderful, so much has been accomplished. There isn’t much. If you weren’t tuned in to the Housing Element Draft Environmental Impact Report being written for adding 19,098 housing units you might have missed that comment.
I didn’t follow my own instructions on the Housing Element and spent my weekend responding. Probably a good thing I was out of time as my response was already over 12 pages by Monday at 4:30 pm. The 441 pages of the Housing Element Update Draft Environmental Impact Report (HEU DEIR) basically declares that the impact to Berkeley of adding 19,098 new housing units and 47,443 more people to fill all these units is insignificant. The only thing that merited significant and unavoidable impact was adding development in the hills and that the Housing Element Update recommended anyway.
The City Housing Element webpage lists that State law requires submission by January 2023 and then states the timeline for adoption of the final draft is December 2022 – March 2023. The actual deadline is January 31, 2023 and as published in the San Francisco Business Times, “Any jurisdiction that adopts its Housing Element later than the January 31, 2023 deadline for this region will immediately be subject to loss of local zoning control, a punitive measure colloquially known as the builder’s remedy.”
At the presentation of the Housing Element Update Draft Environmental Impact Report to the Planning Commission, I asked why the report was written for 19,098 units when the RHNA allocation is 8934 units. The answer was to push zoning code changes. It now looks like with this apparent screw-up in the making - missing the deadline, the City doesn’t need to go through all that messy changing zoning codes, the staff, consultants and council can just miss the deadline instead and the builder’s get their “remedy.”
Even if you are NOT a fan and can’t stand Rachel Maddow, you have got to listen to the podcast Ultra (it is free) https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-presents-ultra. The absolute first thing I thought as I tuned in was I wished my dad was alive so I could ask him what it was like when the U.S. Senator from Minnesota Ernest Lundeen was killed in a plane crash in 1940 and found to have a speech he was going to give written by a Nazi agent.
The podcast is about the embrace of authoritarianism, support for Nazis and fascism the America First movement, the Christian Front, and the Senators and Congressman involved in the plot and the sedition trial of 1944, and denial that it all happened even though much of this made front page news.
There are so many parallels to today with the embrace of authoritarianism and the growing militias and violence. Even if you don’t listen to Fox, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity or traffic in websites like Parlor, Gab, TheDonald or Truth Social Trump’s website, the conspiracies, hate speech and disinformation spillover and infect school boards, city councils, politics, the media nationwide with the same old tropes recirculating, replacement theory, antisemitism. We have escaped a lot of this in Berkeley, but these far-right movements are present in Southern California and inland and all around us.
Reading about prior attempted coups and the pull back to reason and democracy is not making me feel any better about the upcoming election. Most of us reading this lived through the Assassination of JFK, 1968 and Watergate, but if we look at history, each attempted coup to overthrow the U.S. Government moves closer to success. Smedley Butler blowing the whistle on industrialists trying to pull him in as a war hero to lead a coup to overthrow the U.S. government was in 1933. That is all detailed in the Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire, by Jonathan Katz and precedes the next attempt in 1940 the subject of Ultra by just a few years.
Setting aside the little bit of grandstanding before the camera in Alexandria’s film documenting the actions of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer during the January 6th rampage of the capital, watching it this time brought back how I felt that day, unbelieving this could really happen and at the same time taking in the horror of it all. The push back and slow walking from the Department of Defense on the recorded phone calls in the documentary shows we are only as secure as good people in the right places at the right time.
In closing, Talia Lavin does a much better longer review of Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present than I can do here, but no review can replace what is gained from reading the book. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/corruption-violence-and-toxic-masculinity-what-strongmen-like-trump-have-in-common/2020/12/23/bc58b076-40dc-11eb-9453-fc36ba051781_story.html
Ruth Ben-Ghiat lays out how Trump fits the strongman, authoritarian takeover playbook, demanding loyalty, shuffling and firing staff and cabinet members, giving family members positions of prominence and responsibility, self-dealing, corruption and the repeated embrace of violence and normalization of violence. Think about all those MAGA rally clips with Trump calling on his crowd to “beat him up,” name calling and demonization of the “other.”
Going back to January 6th, Trump’s demand to take him to the capital sounds ever so close to Mussolini’s march on Rome in 1922. Mussolini had his fascist demonstrators and Blackshirt para militaries. Trump didn’t get his wish “I’ll be there with you,” to march to the capital as he declared on the ellipse, but Trump had his MAGA and QAnon demonstrators and the three militias, the Oathkeepers, the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters storming the capital.
If you are prone to nightmares, don’t read the chapter on violence or at least don’t read that chapter at bedtime.
The best time to save a democracy is before it’s gone.
My Diary is late again. After the political discussion with my walk partner, I realized everything that I took out in my editing has to go back in. So here we go.
My week was bookended by listening to Rachel Maddow’s new podcast Ultra on Monday and finishing with the book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Friday and spending the weekend on responding to the Housing Element Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR). In between there was a council meeting, a stack of city meetings, the January 6th business/hearing, the State of the City address by Mayor Arreguin and a Measure L forum with debate between Mayor Arreguin and Jim MacGrath.
The Tuesday 4 pm Council special meeting was an attempt to quell the criticisms of Measure L the $650,000,000 Bonds that is spread over 48 years. We are supposed to feel reassured that the new to be created Affordable Housing and Infrastructure Bond Oversight Committee staffed by the Budget office will ensure that bond money is well spent and there will be an independent audit and reporting. It is all laid out in the Arreguin’s resolution, which he declares is absolutely binding.
Rock solid resolutions are only as binding as five votes to keep or undo them or the desire to enforce them.
At the Berkeley Chamber sponsored Measure L Forum with Mayor Arreguin supporting L and Jim MacGrath opposing L, MacGrath described picking projects as a “food fight” and looking at the process from Arreguin’s resolution, it certainly looks that way.
The mayor’s resolution does not define any priorities or specific projects, that list according to the resolution will come from the Public Works Department, the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Department, Health Housing and Community Services Department, Office of Energy and Sustainability and the Fire Department all of which will send their prioritized (wish) lists with bond and funding sources to the “authorized commissions” the Housing Advisory Commission, the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission and the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission where there will be robust public participation to develop recommendations to send to council.
Meanwhile the Affordable Housing and Infrastructure Bond Oversight Committee “nominated” by council (meaning council selects the members) “would create a policy and procedures manual that would include project goals and projection selection and prioritization criteria”
So let’s try to get this straight, the departments submit their wish lists, the wish list somehow get to the authorized commissions where we get to appear and plead our case in one or two minute bites for our desired project which may or may not have made the list, the commissions are swayed or ignore our pleas while the commissioners add their own opinions and make their recommendations to the council, the oversight committee meets four times a year and creates their list of how to decide on projects (from the policy and procedures manual created) which may or may not match the recommendations from the authorized commissions. This goes to the council where it meets up with the phrase in the Resolution, “Funding from the Bonds will be guided by the City Council’s plans and policies, as may be amended from time to time…”
Which, of course, makes sense. These bonds are going to be spread over 48 years with spending commitments made over 18 years, things change, which begs the real question, why are we handing council $650,000,000 now?
More importantly all this sounds like what we usually get: this is what we’ve decided don’t you love it? Which from this corner looks to why projects are decided/revealed after handing over the money. All while endless volunteer hours tally up and the consultants prepare their plans and reports at substantial expense.
To the second-hand comment passed on to me about being “parcel taxed out,” and therefore supportive of the bonds, Measure L, because it isn’t a parcel tax, have you not figured out who pays for the Bonds? It is property owners. When future property tax bills come, the bonds will be added to the long list of Fixed Charges and/or Special Assessments in the property tax statement. The Measure O Bond fee to property owners starts in 2025/2026.
The bonds are based on assessed value, so new homeowners/property owners pay the most. Parcel taxes are based on square footage of improvements/buildings (BSFT). Occasionally, parcel taxes can be based on square footage of the parcel/lot/land (LSFT). Berkeley usually uses the former (BSFT). With parcel taxes new and long time property owners are taxed the same rate depending on size, of course.
Low income senior households who own property (like the house they live in) are not exempted from the property tax fees for bonds. At least for parcel taxes, the way streets should be financed, low-income over 65 seniors can apply for parcel tax exemptions. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/2022-02/PropertyTaxesFAQs.pdf
Why should streets be paid for with parcel taxes instead of bonds? Streets can start breaking down in as little as four years, but may last 10-15 years, while the bonds financing the repair are paid off with interest over 30 years. This is why bonds are used for infrastructure and projects expected to last decades not streets that need continuous repair.
Two things stood out from the Arreguin - MCGrath Measure L debate forum sponsored by the Berkeley Chamber. Jim McGrath’s picture of street deterioration four years after repair and Mayor Arreguin blaming prior mayors for deterioration of the City’s infrastructure, stating he had been mayor for only five years. Once again, I need to apologize for working on Arreguin’s 2016 campaign for mayor. In Arreguin’s speeches and literature, he bragged about all his accomplishments during his years on City Council. I know, it was part of the canvassing pitch. Arreguin had eight years on council as a councilmember and five years as mayor, thirteen years in total and now after thirteen years infrastructure deterioration is somebody else’s fault. https://youtu.be/AS4exMTwSys
On to the October 11 regular council meeting. The Fair Work Week and Harriet Tubman Terrace agenda items were postponed to November 3. Council finally made it to the second item under action at 9:00 pm, an appeal of the six-story multi-unit building at 2018 Blake. The appeal started with Jordan Klein Director of Planning and Development recognizing Sharon Gong, Planner who would present the project for the City for her “excellent work” and the hearing went downhill from there.
Councilmember Wengraf started the questioning on the project noting this was targeted to students and asked questions about the density bonus, which units would be the two low income units, what would be the requirements. Vice Mayor Harrison was next asking more about density bonus. Questioning continued to the number of bedrooms, group living requirements as the city planning staff and Director Klein fumbled, clearly out of their league unable to answer the council’s questions. It all dragged on until 10:50 pm when Harrison made a motion to stop and continue the appeal to another meeting when the Planning Department would be prepared to answer council questions.
At 10:52 pm, there were still 171 attendees tethered to ZOOM hanging on to comment on the Reconsideration of the Hopkins Corridor Plan. While most of the older folks and disabled tuckered out, the walk bike Berkeley held on in large numbers to insist moving forward without delay with the current plan removing parking and adding bike lanes in front of the shops and Monterey Market.
The meeting dragged on so long that even live transcription/closed captioning ended at 11:30 pm. It was after 12:30 am when Arreguin called on Former Mayor Shirley Dean. She was the last of the public to speak and came out strongly against the Hopkins redesign. The meeting finally closed at 12:42 am with a unanimous council vote to reconsider the Hopkins Street Plan between McGee and Sacramento and throw another $400,000 at the project.
The little bit I caught of the Homeless Services Panel of Experts (HSPE) meeting, Carol Marasovic, chair has not let go of discounting the HSPE June 22, 2022 meeting in which the motion to send the letter to council denouncing the use of Measure P funds to balance the City budget rather than for new homeless services was unanimously approved by those present. Marasovic who was not present for the vote brought it up again this week that June 22 wasn’t a valid meeting, stating it wasn’t properly announced and that such strong language in the letter passed by meeting attendees might offend some people (is the offended people the mayor who appointed her?).
The meeting was announced and Paul Kealoha-Blake said at the HSPE October 12th meeting he stood by the comments/letter from June 22.
The Mayor read his State of the City speech Thursday evening before a half-filled room and a YouTube audience. You can watch it on YouTube just go to JesseArreguin.com. Other than the usual reassuring everything is wonderful, so much has been accomplished. There isn’t much. If you weren’t tuned in to the Housing Element Draft Environmental Impact Report being written for adding 19,098 housing units you might have missed that comment.
I didn’t follow my own instructions on the Housing Element and spent my weekend responding. Probably a good thing I was out of time as my response was already over 12 pages by Monday at 4:30 pm. The 441 pages of the Housing Element Update Draft Environmental Impact Report (HEU DEIR) basically declares that the impact to Berkeley of adding 19,098 new housing units and 47,443 more people to fill all these units is insignificant. The only thing that merited significant and unavoidable impact was adding development in the hills and that the Housing Element Update recommended anyway.
The City Housing Element webpage lists that State law requires submission by January 2023 and then states the timeline for adoption of the final draft is December 2022 – March 2023. The actual deadline is January 31, 2023 and as published in the San Francisco Business Times, “Any jurisdiction that adopts its Housing Element later than the January 31, 2023 deadline for this region will immediately be subject to loss of local zoning control, a punitive measure colloquially known as the builder’s remedy.”
At the presentation of the Housing Element Update Draft Environmental Impact Report to the Planning Commission, I asked why the report was written for 19,098 units when the RHNA allocation is 8934 units. The answer was to push zoning code changes. It now looks like with this apparent screw-up in the making - missing the deadline, the City doesn’t need to go through all that messy changing zoning codes, the staff, consultants and council can just miss the deadline instead and the builder’s get their “remedy.”
Even if you are NOT a fan and can’t stand Rachel Maddow, you have got to listen to the podcast Ultra (it is free) https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-presents-ultra. The absolute first thing I thought as I tuned in was I wished my dad was alive so I could ask him what it was like when the U.S. Senator from Minnesota Ernest Lundeen was killed in a plane crash in 1940 and found to have a speech he was going to give written by a Nazi agent.
The podcast is about the embrace of authoritarianism, support for Nazis and fascism the America First movement, the Christian Front, and the Senators and Congressman involved in the plot and the sedition trial of 1944, and denial that it all happened even though much of this made front page news.
There are so many parallels to today with the embrace of authoritarianism and the growing militias and violence. Even if you don’t listen to Fox, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity or traffic in websites like Parlor, Gab, TheDonald or Truth Social Trump’s website, the conspiracies, hate speech and disinformation spillover and infect school boards, city councils, politics, the media nationwide with the same old tropes recirculating, replacement theory, antisemitism. We have escaped a lot of this in Berkeley, but these far-right movements are present in Southern California and inland and all around us.
Reading about prior attempted coups and the pull back to reason and democracy is not making me feel any better about the upcoming election. Most of us reading this lived through the Assassination of JFK, 1968 and Watergate, but if we look at history, each attempted coup to overthrow the U.S. Government moves closer to success. Smedley Butler blowing the whistle on industrialists trying to pull him in as a war hero to lead a coup to overthrow the U.S. government was in 1933. That is all detailed in the Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire, by Jonathan Katz and precedes the next attempt in 1940 the subject of Ultra by just a few years.
Setting aside the little bit of grandstanding before the camera in Alexandria’s film documenting the actions of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer during the January 6th rampage of the capital, watching it this time brought back how I felt that day, unbelieving this could really happen and at the same time taking in the horror of it all. The push back and slow walking from the Department of Defense on the recorded phone calls in the documentary shows we are only as secure as good people in the right places at the right time.
In closing, Talia Lavin does a much better longer review of Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present than I can do here, but no review can replace what is gained from reading the book. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/corruption-violence-and-toxic-masculinity-what-strongmen-like-trump-have-in-common/2020/12/23/bc58b076-40dc-11eb-9453-fc36ba051781_story.html
Ruth Ben-Ghiat lays out how Trump fits the strongman, authoritarian takeover playbook, demanding loyalty, shuffling and firing staff and cabinet members, giving family members positions of prominence and responsibility, self-dealing, corruption and the repeated embrace of violence and normalization of violence. Think about all those MAGA rally clips with Trump calling on his crowd to “beat him up,” name calling and demonization of the “other.”
Going back to January 6th, Trump’s demand to take him to the capital sounds ever so close to Mussolini’s march on Rome in 1922. Mussolini had his fascist demonstrators and Blackshirt para militaries. Trump didn’t get his wish “I’ll be there with you,” to march to the capital as he declared on the ellipse, but Trump had his MAGA and QAnon demonstrators and the three militias, the Oathkeepers, the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters storming the capital.
If you are prone to nightmares, don’t read the chapter on violence or at least don’t read that chapter at bedtime.
The best time to save a democracy is before it’s gone.
October 2, 2022
In the September 25, 2022 edition of the Activist’s Diary, I ended with a recommendation of the book The Privatization of Everthing by Donald Cohen and Alan Mikaelian. If you watched any of forecasts of hurricane Ian, this was made possible through government funding of the National Weather Service (NWS), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Hurricane Center and the international cooperation of 193 countries to provide free and unrestricted weather each day. It is an amazing feat.
Free access to NOAA, weather forecasts was close to lost if Barry Meyers former CEO of AccuWeather brother to Joel Meyers founder of AccuWeather a private forecasting company had made his way as a Trump appointee to head up NOAA. It was sexual harassment lawsuits that brought Barry Meyers down, but that still hasn’t stopped private companies like AccuWeather from taking free government funded service and monetizing weather forecasts and suing the government to secure profiteering.
Next time you use AccuWeather remember the Meyers brothers, how Barry Meyers in his advisory capacity on the NWS Board in 2017 killed the NWS work on a mobile ap or maybe you will be like me and do your best to avoid AccuWeather. AccuWeather is just a rehash of all that data collected through international cooperation and our own government. Google is filled with accolades for AccuWeather and links to direct you there.
The 3 x 3 Committee (3 council members and 3 Berkeley Housing Authority members) was the only City committee to meet during Rosh Hashanah. All other meetings were pushed to Wednesday Thursday and Friday. Mayor Arreguin announced at the 3 x 3 that five groups have been selected as potential developers for the North Berkeley BART station and mentioned a November 10, 2022 meeting to review the developers, but these days announced meetings get squishy with short notices, cancellations and rescheduling. The previously announced meeting on bolstering oversight for Measure L is now forecast (but not posted) for 4 pm October 11.
Concerned citizens need to keep a finger on the city website https://berkeleyca.gov/ to avoid missing important meetings posted at the last possible minute.
Selection of developers for the Ashby BART station per the mayor is postponed until the Fall of 2023 while air rights and the location of the Ashby Flea Market are worked out. Meetings on planning for the Adeline Corridor Ashby BART Station resume on Monday, October 3 (check Activist’s Calendar or City Website for virtual meeting links).
Once previously settled plans offered up from the City seem to be unraveling.
At the Agenda Committee on Wednesday, Councilmember Hahn with co-sponsor Wengraf submitted, “Reconsideration of the Hopkins Corridor Plan in Light of Newly Available Material Information” for the October 11 City Council meeting. It is posted as Agenda item 23 and puts a hold on the May 10, 2022 City Council action for the street redesign of traffic, parking, and bike lanes on the section of Hopkins from McGee to Gilman. This section of Hopkins contains the shops, Monterey Market and created the public uproar.
Sam Kaplan-Pettus attended the Environment and Climate Commission to request the addition of a Youth appointee to the commission in addition to the nine appointees by the mayor and council. The commission voted to approve the proposal, but the comment that caught my attention was when Sam Kaplan-Pettus said, “I think a lot of the work that commissions do is symbolic, because City Council doesn’t actually have to listen to us.” How true. That insight is one to remember when reviewing whatever is passed by City Council to rescue Measure L.
Later in the Environment and Climate Commission meeting Kurt Hurley (new city employee) gave a presentation on the new building codes and recommendations as to whether council should exceed the new state codes. The recommendation that EV charging parking spaces be set at 5% (minimum state standard) in new construction met with firm resistance that 5% is wholly inadequate. Range anxiety is already an issue in converting to EV. Certainly, requiring the minimum number of spaces be devoted to EV charging stations will not get the City or us to where we need to be in transitioning to EV. Additionally, fewer charging stations pushes bigger heavier batteries to power vehicles longer distances between scarce charging sites.
I’ve lost count of the number of Fire Chiefs and interim chiefs since I started attending the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission. The newest interim Fire Chief is David Sprague. Sprague gave an enthusiastic presentation of using Measure FF funds to expand and reorganize Fire Department services with filling vacancies a continuing challenge. There was not much response from commissioners as they absorbed the overview of the new plans.
Sprague was asked about fire prevention inspections. Sprague answered currently properties are inspected only as far as is visible from the front. Back yards in fire zones are not inspected. This was not the desired answer.
Year-end financial reports were included in the agenda packet for FF and GG. Whatever the voters might have thought Measure FF (2020) wildfire prevention and preparedness and Measure GG (2008) fire protection and emergency response, covered these measures are primarily used for the cost of staffing and related benefit expenses. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/boards-commissions/disaster-and-fire-safety-commission
The Disaster and Fire Safety Commission closed with what is hard to describe as anything more than the two ladies reading rapidly through their power point presentation for meeting number two out of three meetings for creating a Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) https://berkeleyca.gov/safety-health/disaster-preparedness/community-wildfire-protection-plan
Looking at the May 2020 FEMA paper on Creating a Community Wildfire Protection Plan, the three scheduled CWPP meetings for the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission may fulfill some requirement, however, it doesn’t look like this is what the U.S. Fire Administration and FEMA had in mind. https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/publications/creating_a_cwpp.pdf
The Multi-Commission meeting on the Civic Center Vision Plan Project on Thursday morning felt a little thin when it came to commission attendees. Erin Diehm was present from Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission, Lisa Bullwinkel and Liz Ozol from Civic Arts Commission and Steve Finacom from Landmarks Preservation Commission. Susi Mazuola went through her slide presentation stopping after each section (Veterans Building, Maudelle Shirek and Civic Center Park) for comments from commissioners leaving 8 minutes at meeting end for the public comment. The meeting was not recorded which is a shame and typical for the City when minds are made up and public meetings are perfunctory.
There were good suggestions and some definite criticisms. New council chambers are definitely part of the plan.
Should these come up again, the presentation of adding a signal in the middle of the block between Allston and Center for pedestrians was strongly rejected. The suggestion to close Center street to traffic was countered with there needs to be dropoff/pickup at the entrance to the Veterans Building. Allston Way is an important street for east-west bound traffic to and from the downtown and should remain open. External buttressing of the Maudelle Shirek Building is far more desirable than basement bracing which would eliminate the potential for useful community space. The Maudelle Shirek building should be a center for community space, the historical society and community organizations and not city offices. Big trees in the heart of the city should be preserved. Diehm asked for cost comparisons between the levels of seismic stabilization for the buildings. That information was not provided. Lisa Bullwinkel suggested a sculpture garden in front of the Maudelle Shirek Building. Those representing the Arts requested the level of external seismic buttressing of the Veterans Building be upped to BPON+.
A number of members of the public requested exploration of daylighting the creek, which Diehm described as magical. And, I learned that daylighting creeks, an international movement in building resiliency to climate change has roots in Berkeley.
You can see the presentation from the September 29th meeting at the Civic Center Vision Plan Project at https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/our-work/capital-projects/civic-center-vision-plan-project and email your responses to [email protected] Any emails I send will also include [email protected] and [email protected] as all too often comments from meetings and emails on City projects seem to get lost in the ether and never see the light of day if they challenge already determined City decisions.
Lori Droste wrote in her newsletter that IKE Smart Kiosks would not be coming to Elmwood. The members of the Elmwood Business Improvement District Advisory Board voted against the placement of IKEs. So, it was interesting that at the Friday morning Elmwood Business Improvement District Advisory Board meeting, Kieron Slaughter, City of Berkeley Office of Economic Development, announced the planning of placement of an IKE Smart Kiosk at College and Ashby and College and Alcatraz. I checked the map to see if I was imagining that the intersection of College and Ashby was in Elmwood and, of course, Elmwood is plastered right over Ashby and College on the Berkeley online map. So much for neighborhood and business wishes when City minds are made up.
The business improvement district boards across the city are pretty lacking in members. Elmwood has only three members and only two attended on Friday, the chair is on maternity leave.
One of the members was complaining of the difficulty of keeping tree wells cleaned up and free of weeds. I was waiting for the Slaughter from the City Manager’s office to say something, but nothing until after I raised my hand and spoke to the flexi-pav and rubberway product used on University by BodyRox. Then Slaughter mentioned it was also used at the Downtown Y.
For the less than handful of times I have attended any of these business improvement district meetings it is obvious why it is so hard to give up any time to attend one. Why should anyone sit on an advisory board and give up time for a City of Berkeley meeting that blows off business requests (IKE Kiosks) and with city staff that don’t share innovations from other areas (flexi – pav) and don’t offer to connect business owners and representatives to the person (Scott Ferris) in the city that could help solve their problem?
I would love to be writing an Activist’s Diary filled with creative, innovative, engaging, forward thinking actions by City Council and City Administration. Sadly, those actions are few and far between and when something good does come along, sharing doesn’t seem to enter the picture.
The closest we got to City Council listening to the public was Thursday evening at the appeal hearing of 1201 – 1205 San Pablo Use Permit #ZP2021-0070 ZAB. The planned project is a 6-story mixed-use building on a vacant lot with 66 units (including 5 very low income units), 1680 sq ft of commercial space, 2614 sq ft of usable open space, and 17 to 28 ground-level parking spaces. The project takes advantage of California SB 330 which limits the number of public meetings for review to five and exceeds zoning height limits by two floors through including five very low income units. The neighbors limited their appeal to moving the building parking garage entrance to San Pablo and planting 36” box trees as a barrier instead of 24” box trees.
One attendee zoomer complained that holding the hearing was a waste of time, but this time council came through and listened. Council voted that the project proponent shall contact CalTrans to request the garage door open on San Pablo and if that is permissible for the architect to redesign the project to relocate the driveway to San Pablo. The neighbors got their 36” box trees and that negotiations on the solar shaded by the project continue. Robinson’s attempt to limit moving the garage door to only if a traffic study proved it to be safer rather than if CalTrans determined moving the garage door was permissible was quickly slapped down by Arreguin.
Council was sharply criticized for not establishing objective standards to protect solar as neighboring cities have done.
In closing, Holding the Line: Inside the Nation’s Preeminent US Attorney’s Office and Its Battle with the Trump Justice Department by Geoffrey Berman was just released September 13, 2022 and I have already finished the audiobook from the San Francisco public library. The San Francisco library is simply amazing for access to just published books.
There are quite a number of reviews of Berman’s book Holding the Line focusing on Bill Barr and the telling by Berman of how the justice department was weaponized under Trump. You need to read all the way through to the end to get the full picture. Descriptions laying out how Bill Barr threw his weight around to advantage Trump and Trump cronies and attempts to “even things out” was spattered through the book.
Berman paints a picture of the work of SDNY (Southern District of New York) through indictments like how they closed in to end the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sex trafficking operation and Laurence Doud III CEO of Rochester Drug Co-Operative (RDC) in the opioid crisis. There is the back and forth in the Halkbank indictment as Erdogan swung in and out of Trump’s favor. Barr’s involvement in George H. W. Bush’s pardons to dismantle indictments in the Iran Contra affair should leave meddling in justice under Trump as no surprise, but the ending still carries quite a punch.
In the September 25, 2022 edition of the Activist’s Diary, I ended with a recommendation of the book The Privatization of Everthing by Donald Cohen and Alan Mikaelian. If you watched any of forecasts of hurricane Ian, this was made possible through government funding of the National Weather Service (NWS), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Hurricane Center and the international cooperation of 193 countries to provide free and unrestricted weather each day. It is an amazing feat.
Free access to NOAA, weather forecasts was close to lost if Barry Meyers former CEO of AccuWeather brother to Joel Meyers founder of AccuWeather a private forecasting company had made his way as a Trump appointee to head up NOAA. It was sexual harassment lawsuits that brought Barry Meyers down, but that still hasn’t stopped private companies like AccuWeather from taking free government funded service and monetizing weather forecasts and suing the government to secure profiteering.
Next time you use AccuWeather remember the Meyers brothers, how Barry Meyers in his advisory capacity on the NWS Board in 2017 killed the NWS work on a mobile ap or maybe you will be like me and do your best to avoid AccuWeather. AccuWeather is just a rehash of all that data collected through international cooperation and our own government. Google is filled with accolades for AccuWeather and links to direct you there.
The 3 x 3 Committee (3 council members and 3 Berkeley Housing Authority members) was the only City committee to meet during Rosh Hashanah. All other meetings were pushed to Wednesday Thursday and Friday. Mayor Arreguin announced at the 3 x 3 that five groups have been selected as potential developers for the North Berkeley BART station and mentioned a November 10, 2022 meeting to review the developers, but these days announced meetings get squishy with short notices, cancellations and rescheduling. The previously announced meeting on bolstering oversight for Measure L is now forecast (but not posted) for 4 pm October 11.
Concerned citizens need to keep a finger on the city website https://berkeleyca.gov/ to avoid missing important meetings posted at the last possible minute.
Selection of developers for the Ashby BART station per the mayor is postponed until the Fall of 2023 while air rights and the location of the Ashby Flea Market are worked out. Meetings on planning for the Adeline Corridor Ashby BART Station resume on Monday, October 3 (check Activist’s Calendar or City Website for virtual meeting links).
Once previously settled plans offered up from the City seem to be unraveling.
At the Agenda Committee on Wednesday, Councilmember Hahn with co-sponsor Wengraf submitted, “Reconsideration of the Hopkins Corridor Plan in Light of Newly Available Material Information” for the October 11 City Council meeting. It is posted as Agenda item 23 and puts a hold on the May 10, 2022 City Council action for the street redesign of traffic, parking, and bike lanes on the section of Hopkins from McGee to Gilman. This section of Hopkins contains the shops, Monterey Market and created the public uproar.
Sam Kaplan-Pettus attended the Environment and Climate Commission to request the addition of a Youth appointee to the commission in addition to the nine appointees by the mayor and council. The commission voted to approve the proposal, but the comment that caught my attention was when Sam Kaplan-Pettus said, “I think a lot of the work that commissions do is symbolic, because City Council doesn’t actually have to listen to us.” How true. That insight is one to remember when reviewing whatever is passed by City Council to rescue Measure L.
Later in the Environment and Climate Commission meeting Kurt Hurley (new city employee) gave a presentation on the new building codes and recommendations as to whether council should exceed the new state codes. The recommendation that EV charging parking spaces be set at 5% (minimum state standard) in new construction met with firm resistance that 5% is wholly inadequate. Range anxiety is already an issue in converting to EV. Certainly, requiring the minimum number of spaces be devoted to EV charging stations will not get the City or us to where we need to be in transitioning to EV. Additionally, fewer charging stations pushes bigger heavier batteries to power vehicles longer distances between scarce charging sites.
I’ve lost count of the number of Fire Chiefs and interim chiefs since I started attending the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission. The newest interim Fire Chief is David Sprague. Sprague gave an enthusiastic presentation of using Measure FF funds to expand and reorganize Fire Department services with filling vacancies a continuing challenge. There was not much response from commissioners as they absorbed the overview of the new plans.
Sprague was asked about fire prevention inspections. Sprague answered currently properties are inspected only as far as is visible from the front. Back yards in fire zones are not inspected. This was not the desired answer.
Year-end financial reports were included in the agenda packet for FF and GG. Whatever the voters might have thought Measure FF (2020) wildfire prevention and preparedness and Measure GG (2008) fire protection and emergency response, covered these measures are primarily used for the cost of staffing and related benefit expenses. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/boards-commissions/disaster-and-fire-safety-commission
The Disaster and Fire Safety Commission closed with what is hard to describe as anything more than the two ladies reading rapidly through their power point presentation for meeting number two out of three meetings for creating a Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) https://berkeleyca.gov/safety-health/disaster-preparedness/community-wildfire-protection-plan
Looking at the May 2020 FEMA paper on Creating a Community Wildfire Protection Plan, the three scheduled CWPP meetings for the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission may fulfill some requirement, however, it doesn’t look like this is what the U.S. Fire Administration and FEMA had in mind. https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/publications/creating_a_cwpp.pdf
The Multi-Commission meeting on the Civic Center Vision Plan Project on Thursday morning felt a little thin when it came to commission attendees. Erin Diehm was present from Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission, Lisa Bullwinkel and Liz Ozol from Civic Arts Commission and Steve Finacom from Landmarks Preservation Commission. Susi Mazuola went through her slide presentation stopping after each section (Veterans Building, Maudelle Shirek and Civic Center Park) for comments from commissioners leaving 8 minutes at meeting end for the public comment. The meeting was not recorded which is a shame and typical for the City when minds are made up and public meetings are perfunctory.
There were good suggestions and some definite criticisms. New council chambers are definitely part of the plan.
Should these come up again, the presentation of adding a signal in the middle of the block between Allston and Center for pedestrians was strongly rejected. The suggestion to close Center street to traffic was countered with there needs to be dropoff/pickup at the entrance to the Veterans Building. Allston Way is an important street for east-west bound traffic to and from the downtown and should remain open. External buttressing of the Maudelle Shirek Building is far more desirable than basement bracing which would eliminate the potential for useful community space. The Maudelle Shirek building should be a center for community space, the historical society and community organizations and not city offices. Big trees in the heart of the city should be preserved. Diehm asked for cost comparisons between the levels of seismic stabilization for the buildings. That information was not provided. Lisa Bullwinkel suggested a sculpture garden in front of the Maudelle Shirek Building. Those representing the Arts requested the level of external seismic buttressing of the Veterans Building be upped to BPON+.
A number of members of the public requested exploration of daylighting the creek, which Diehm described as magical. And, I learned that daylighting creeks, an international movement in building resiliency to climate change has roots in Berkeley.
You can see the presentation from the September 29th meeting at the Civic Center Vision Plan Project at https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/our-work/capital-projects/civic-center-vision-plan-project and email your responses to [email protected] Any emails I send will also include [email protected] and [email protected] as all too often comments from meetings and emails on City projects seem to get lost in the ether and never see the light of day if they challenge already determined City decisions.
Lori Droste wrote in her newsletter that IKE Smart Kiosks would not be coming to Elmwood. The members of the Elmwood Business Improvement District Advisory Board voted against the placement of IKEs. So, it was interesting that at the Friday morning Elmwood Business Improvement District Advisory Board meeting, Kieron Slaughter, City of Berkeley Office of Economic Development, announced the planning of placement of an IKE Smart Kiosk at College and Ashby and College and Alcatraz. I checked the map to see if I was imagining that the intersection of College and Ashby was in Elmwood and, of course, Elmwood is plastered right over Ashby and College on the Berkeley online map. So much for neighborhood and business wishes when City minds are made up.
The business improvement district boards across the city are pretty lacking in members. Elmwood has only three members and only two attended on Friday, the chair is on maternity leave.
One of the members was complaining of the difficulty of keeping tree wells cleaned up and free of weeds. I was waiting for the Slaughter from the City Manager’s office to say something, but nothing until after I raised my hand and spoke to the flexi-pav and rubberway product used on University by BodyRox. Then Slaughter mentioned it was also used at the Downtown Y.
For the less than handful of times I have attended any of these business improvement district meetings it is obvious why it is so hard to give up any time to attend one. Why should anyone sit on an advisory board and give up time for a City of Berkeley meeting that blows off business requests (IKE Kiosks) and with city staff that don’t share innovations from other areas (flexi – pav) and don’t offer to connect business owners and representatives to the person (Scott Ferris) in the city that could help solve their problem?
I would love to be writing an Activist’s Diary filled with creative, innovative, engaging, forward thinking actions by City Council and City Administration. Sadly, those actions are few and far between and when something good does come along, sharing doesn’t seem to enter the picture.
The closest we got to City Council listening to the public was Thursday evening at the appeal hearing of 1201 – 1205 San Pablo Use Permit #ZP2021-0070 ZAB. The planned project is a 6-story mixed-use building on a vacant lot with 66 units (including 5 very low income units), 1680 sq ft of commercial space, 2614 sq ft of usable open space, and 17 to 28 ground-level parking spaces. The project takes advantage of California SB 330 which limits the number of public meetings for review to five and exceeds zoning height limits by two floors through including five very low income units. The neighbors limited their appeal to moving the building parking garage entrance to San Pablo and planting 36” box trees as a barrier instead of 24” box trees.
One attendee zoomer complained that holding the hearing was a waste of time, but this time council came through and listened. Council voted that the project proponent shall contact CalTrans to request the garage door open on San Pablo and if that is permissible for the architect to redesign the project to relocate the driveway to San Pablo. The neighbors got their 36” box trees and that negotiations on the solar shaded by the project continue. Robinson’s attempt to limit moving the garage door to only if a traffic study proved it to be safer rather than if CalTrans determined moving the garage door was permissible was quickly slapped down by Arreguin.
Council was sharply criticized for not establishing objective standards to protect solar as neighboring cities have done.
In closing, Holding the Line: Inside the Nation’s Preeminent US Attorney’s Office and Its Battle with the Trump Justice Department by Geoffrey Berman was just released September 13, 2022 and I have already finished the audiobook from the San Francisco public library. The San Francisco library is simply amazing for access to just published books.
There are quite a number of reviews of Berman’s book Holding the Line focusing on Bill Barr and the telling by Berman of how the justice department was weaponized under Trump. You need to read all the way through to the end to get the full picture. Descriptions laying out how Bill Barr threw his weight around to advantage Trump and Trump cronies and attempts to “even things out” was spattered through the book.
Berman paints a picture of the work of SDNY (Southern District of New York) through indictments like how they closed in to end the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sex trafficking operation and Laurence Doud III CEO of Rochester Drug Co-Operative (RDC) in the opioid crisis. There is the back and forth in the Halkbank indictment as Erdogan swung in and out of Trump’s favor. Barr’s involvement in George H. W. Bush’s pardons to dismantle indictments in the Iran Contra affair should leave meddling in justice under Trump as no surprise, but the ending still carries quite a punch.
September 25, 2022
Between my former lives as a plein air painter and a home health nurse in the inner city of Los Angeles, I am geared to taking in as much of my surroundings as possible. Last week I wrote about asphalt in tree wells in front of BODYROX. It is always a benefit to pay attention and this time it was a benefit to be wrong as that lead to an extended email exchange with Scott Ferris, Director of Recreation, Parks and Waterfront. It turns out the product around the trees only looks like asphalt and is instead a product that is flexible and porous protecting tree roots and letting water run through.
Ferris didn’t say which of the two manufacturers Rubberway https://sustainablesurfacing.com/pervious-pavement or Flexi-pave https://apaicorp.com/kbi.htm Berkeley is using, but the product used at 3120 Eton in 2017 to save a majestic Redwood from having its roots cut to replace damaged concrete is a much closer blend in color to a concrete sidewalk (see photo in google maps https://goo.gl/maps/H9G3E1zg6J7iDt7VA). It has a nice cushy feel when walking on it.
I’ve already emailed all the information Ferris sent to me to the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) and the Design Review Committee (DRC). Charles Kahn, architect, on ZAB and DRC emailed he is sharing the information with his group. These products have a lot of potential. According to the websites there are a long list of benefits over asphalt. The most pressing need is to reduce runoff so that when we do get rain it soaks into the ground. Rubberway and Flexi-Pav do just that, let the rain water soak through and filter it too, but they are not just a permeable surface for sidewalks, paths, parking lots and roadways, they are durable, non-toxic, divert tires from landfill and more. Seattle and Washington DC are two cities Ferris named that are using these products.
We still need to change our thinking about trees so that what we plant will support local ecosystems and provide the shade we need from large canopies to reduce heat island effect.
The Community for a Cultural Civic Center (CCCC) met twice during the week. Councilmember Hahn attended the Monday noon meeting to pump votes and volunteers for yes on Measure L. According to the Yes on L card dropped on my doorstep, Hahn donated $5000.00 to the Yes on L campaign as did Gordon Wozniak. Jesse Arreguin and Raymond Yep both donated $1000.00. John Caner emphasized community members of CCCC represent a variety of opinions. I stand in strong opposition to Measure L.
At the meeting on Wednesday Susi Marzuola from Siegel & Strain gave a presentation from current meetings the consultants from Siegel & Strain have been having with the City. The presentation will be given at a “multi-commission” (Civic Arts, Landmarks and Public Works – now combined with Transportation) meeting at 11 am on Thursday, September 29. A meeting that is yet to appear on the City website. The zoom link sent by CCCC for that 11 am meeting is https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81499570453?pwd=Qk9tU3BFbml2bFg0TWlmVGVTeHJGZz09.
Marzuola talked through a long list of slides and presented two considerations for construction of a new 270 seat new city council chamber at either the back of the Maudelle Shirek Building (old city hall) or in the Civic Center Park at the location of the parking lot connected to 2180 Milvia. CCCC strongly opposed building new city council chambers in the Civic Center Park months ago.
The external seismic buttressing to the Veterans Building which would have added 8000 square feet of usable “back stage” space making the Veterans Building incredibly versatile as a performance center was also rejected in favor of instead upgrading the Maudelle Shirek building to the seismic standard of IO, Immediate Occupancy, the standard used for hospitals and like buildings. The CCCC recommended seismic bracing to just below IO to BPON+ a standard at lower cost which would leave the Maudelle Shirek and Veterans buildings standing and repairable.
New Council Chambers for 270 is an interesting number. Prior to the pandemic the city council was meeting at 1231 Addison Street in the BUSD Board Room which was remodeled to be used jointly by BUSD and City Council. It has seating for 240 members of the public. Most city council meetings have well under 100 attendees frequently even less than 50. When there are contentious items on the agenda as there was at least once during the pandemic, attendance on zoom swelled to over 350.
The pandemic and zoom have really changed how we attend meetings. It is nice to see people in public, meet new people, reconnect, but the convenience of being able to walk over to a computer or carry a device around at home to watch a meeting instead of being trapped in a room all evening for one or two agenda items is the answer many want. Certainly, parents with young kids or really anyone with caregiving responsibilities appreciate being able to tune in for the agenda items that matter to them and still put their kids to bed on time on school nights and not have to pay for a babysitter.
Attending The Color of Water A Policy Discussion, a meeting hosted by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks was a reminder of why I prefer zoom. I spent 55 minutes in transit (driving and parking) for a four-hour meeting that had almost no new information that could have just as easily with less environmental impact been provided 100% via zoom. Just the plastic bags, throw away cups and plates should make anyone cringe with the waste of it all. And, though city council meetings do not provide food or beverages for the public, long meetings do provide meals for council and staff and the rest of us need to bring rations to make it through the usual long evenings.
It looks like the Rebuttal to Argument in Favor of Measure L got it right, “Future Councils will have the freedom to spend much of this money on vanity projects like new Council chambers as has been proposed!” Vincent Casalaina, who opposes Measure L described it this way, “This is money looking for projects, not projects looking for money.”
Every voter should read the East Bay Times editorial from September 3, 2022 regarding Oakland’s Measure U as it could just as easily have been written about Berkeley’s Measure L.
The paragraph that says it all states, “The issue is not whether the city needs more money to fix its badly dilapidated roads. It does. The issue is that, when city leaders ask for new taxes, they need to come with clear budgets that ensure the money will be wisely spent — and data that demonstrate past tax revenues have been used efficiently.” https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/03/editorial-oakland-voters-should-reject-850-million-measure-u-bond/
It should come as no surprise there is a long list of elected officials endorsing Measure L, as what elected official doesn’t love money coming with an opened ended list of ideas for spending.
Deb Durant said there are huge developments on the Turtle Island Monument/Fountain planning. The whole thing may be considerably delayed. She will share next time. Previous coverage of the Turtle Island Monument in the Activist Diary covered reporting that the project consultants did not want to hear from the Ohlone/Lisjuan Indians the Monument is supposed to honor.
Erin Diehm mentioned daylighting the creek in the Civic Center Park and that arrangements are still being made to schedule a presentation by Ann Riley. Marzuola was quick to brush this aside. Greening cities is a big movement and per Diehm’s research with Riley there is a lot of grant money available for projects. Watch for announcement of a future meeting on daylighting. After spending a morning in Strawberry Park, the park was packed, daylighting the creek sounds incredibly exciting.
This is a week when I feel like why can’t our devices work like a toaster. Put in the bread turn it on and toast. For us older folks, we remember when appliances just worked by turning them on and when they broke, they went to the repair person for a new cord or new switch or some other little part and lasted for many more years. This week I am hearing about emails and messages getting lost, texts requiring new programs, computers breaking down. It is all at a time with the days to the November election are flying away and there are never enough waking hours to fit everything in. At least Tuesday’s City Council meeting ended at around 8:09 pm.
Council moved everything to consent except technical edits and corrections to the Zoning code. Item 16 under action restoring and improving access to City of Berkeley website https://berkeleyca.gov/ was moved to consent cutting off discussion of the mess that has been created for those of us who search history for past city actions. I put in a specific resolution number into records online and got back pages and pages of documents to sift through (I stopped counting after 200) none of which had the document. I tried using the search option in the new City website which in turn spit out a list of unwanted documents, everything except what I requested.
Item 17. for extending existing contracts for services for the poor for another year instead of requesting new proposals with new cost estimates went to consent without even one word of discussion.
Even the City Auditor was relegated to public comment on the clock instead of giving the Audit Status Report presentation.
So while ending early is nice, cutting off needed discussion and debate, especially discussion that points out problems for which the City Manager bears responsibility, that should leave us to question just exactly why such problems are getting a pass instead of transparency.
The 4:00 pm City Council meeting on housing was a work session with no vote taken. The council received a report on adding “middle’ housing which is duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes, these smaller buildings in previous single-family home neighborhoods and recommendations for increasing density in the Southside area for students. The hillside fire zones are exempted from adding density with these smaller multi-unit projects. Evacuating households in the fire zone areas are already a known problem.
Councilmember Harrison asked that housing plans include places for grocery stores instead of more coffee shops and reminded all that the least expensive units are in the buildings we already have (older buildings). Councilmember Hahn focused on that in adding all this lot coverage we need to be looking at green accessible space on the ground open to the public, not just street trees or green roofs that are not accessible at all. There needs to be accessible open green space. Both Hahn and Harrison noted the advantage of creating units inside existing buildings especially older large single-family homes.
The last project reviewed at the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) was 2065 Kittredge which will demolish the Shattuck Cinemas and most of the former Hinks Building.. When an attendee John D. (I didn’t get his last name) who identified himself as being from the building industry raised his hand, I expected a long dissertation on praises for the building. Instead it was a criticism that the developer is not using union labor and workers did not receive health benefits. Bill Shrader the developer for this building and several others downtown said he builds with an open shop and 40% to 60% are union labor.
Charles Kahn, architect and ZAB member responded that ZAB did not have the authority to require union labor and stated, “I would be ashamed to be a developer that health insurance is not provided.” The project was passed out of ZAB to return to the Design Review Committee to reconsider the color palette, removing the west facing wall section that is black, among other things.
In closing I wish to thank Michelle LePaule for the book recommendation The Privatization of Everthing by Donald Cohen and Alan Mikaelian. This book is fabulous and I will never look at privatization or public private partnerships the same way again. It is a solid reminder of all the great important services provided by government especially in the areas of research, weather, public libraries, education, water and that is just for starters. The authors lay out how privatization and the declarations of efficiency are really taking out the “service” and putting in “profit” and how the “profit” steadily drains away the service harming us all.
The authors call the promise of privatization as less costly and more efficient a false myth and go through example after example.
Cohen and Mikaelian go into detail how privatization actually hinders innovation. Innovation means taking risks that may not pan out. Innovation grows from sharing ideas, successes and failures. In privately held companies, when sharing means that some other company, a competitor might make the discovery or find the solution, then the privatized entity is going to keep innovations proprietary even going so far as to require employees to sign non-disclosure contracts. This even extends to examples of charter schools prohibiting teachers from sharing successful lessons.
There is a lot covered in The Privatization of Everything. It is definitely worth your time and the wait at the library. The library could use a couple more copies.
Between my former lives as a plein air painter and a home health nurse in the inner city of Los Angeles, I am geared to taking in as much of my surroundings as possible. Last week I wrote about asphalt in tree wells in front of BODYROX. It is always a benefit to pay attention and this time it was a benefit to be wrong as that lead to an extended email exchange with Scott Ferris, Director of Recreation, Parks and Waterfront. It turns out the product around the trees only looks like asphalt and is instead a product that is flexible and porous protecting tree roots and letting water run through.
Ferris didn’t say which of the two manufacturers Rubberway https://sustainablesurfacing.com/pervious-pavement or Flexi-pave https://apaicorp.com/kbi.htm Berkeley is using, but the product used at 3120 Eton in 2017 to save a majestic Redwood from having its roots cut to replace damaged concrete is a much closer blend in color to a concrete sidewalk (see photo in google maps https://goo.gl/maps/H9G3E1zg6J7iDt7VA). It has a nice cushy feel when walking on it.
I’ve already emailed all the information Ferris sent to me to the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) and the Design Review Committee (DRC). Charles Kahn, architect, on ZAB and DRC emailed he is sharing the information with his group. These products have a lot of potential. According to the websites there are a long list of benefits over asphalt. The most pressing need is to reduce runoff so that when we do get rain it soaks into the ground. Rubberway and Flexi-Pav do just that, let the rain water soak through and filter it too, but they are not just a permeable surface for sidewalks, paths, parking lots and roadways, they are durable, non-toxic, divert tires from landfill and more. Seattle and Washington DC are two cities Ferris named that are using these products.
We still need to change our thinking about trees so that what we plant will support local ecosystems and provide the shade we need from large canopies to reduce heat island effect.
The Community for a Cultural Civic Center (CCCC) met twice during the week. Councilmember Hahn attended the Monday noon meeting to pump votes and volunteers for yes on Measure L. According to the Yes on L card dropped on my doorstep, Hahn donated $5000.00 to the Yes on L campaign as did Gordon Wozniak. Jesse Arreguin and Raymond Yep both donated $1000.00. John Caner emphasized community members of CCCC represent a variety of opinions. I stand in strong opposition to Measure L.
At the meeting on Wednesday Susi Marzuola from Siegel & Strain gave a presentation from current meetings the consultants from Siegel & Strain have been having with the City. The presentation will be given at a “multi-commission” (Civic Arts, Landmarks and Public Works – now combined with Transportation) meeting at 11 am on Thursday, September 29. A meeting that is yet to appear on the City website. The zoom link sent by CCCC for that 11 am meeting is https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81499570453?pwd=Qk9tU3BFbml2bFg0TWlmVGVTeHJGZz09.
Marzuola talked through a long list of slides and presented two considerations for construction of a new 270 seat new city council chamber at either the back of the Maudelle Shirek Building (old city hall) or in the Civic Center Park at the location of the parking lot connected to 2180 Milvia. CCCC strongly opposed building new city council chambers in the Civic Center Park months ago.
The external seismic buttressing to the Veterans Building which would have added 8000 square feet of usable “back stage” space making the Veterans Building incredibly versatile as a performance center was also rejected in favor of instead upgrading the Maudelle Shirek building to the seismic standard of IO, Immediate Occupancy, the standard used for hospitals and like buildings. The CCCC recommended seismic bracing to just below IO to BPON+ a standard at lower cost which would leave the Maudelle Shirek and Veterans buildings standing and repairable.
New Council Chambers for 270 is an interesting number. Prior to the pandemic the city council was meeting at 1231 Addison Street in the BUSD Board Room which was remodeled to be used jointly by BUSD and City Council. It has seating for 240 members of the public. Most city council meetings have well under 100 attendees frequently even less than 50. When there are contentious items on the agenda as there was at least once during the pandemic, attendance on zoom swelled to over 350.
The pandemic and zoom have really changed how we attend meetings. It is nice to see people in public, meet new people, reconnect, but the convenience of being able to walk over to a computer or carry a device around at home to watch a meeting instead of being trapped in a room all evening for one or two agenda items is the answer many want. Certainly, parents with young kids or really anyone with caregiving responsibilities appreciate being able to tune in for the agenda items that matter to them and still put their kids to bed on time on school nights and not have to pay for a babysitter.
Attending The Color of Water A Policy Discussion, a meeting hosted by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks was a reminder of why I prefer zoom. I spent 55 minutes in transit (driving and parking) for a four-hour meeting that had almost no new information that could have just as easily with less environmental impact been provided 100% via zoom. Just the plastic bags, throw away cups and plates should make anyone cringe with the waste of it all. And, though city council meetings do not provide food or beverages for the public, long meetings do provide meals for council and staff and the rest of us need to bring rations to make it through the usual long evenings.
It looks like the Rebuttal to Argument in Favor of Measure L got it right, “Future Councils will have the freedom to spend much of this money on vanity projects like new Council chambers as has been proposed!” Vincent Casalaina, who opposes Measure L described it this way, “This is money looking for projects, not projects looking for money.”
Every voter should read the East Bay Times editorial from September 3, 2022 regarding Oakland’s Measure U as it could just as easily have been written about Berkeley’s Measure L.
The paragraph that says it all states, “The issue is not whether the city needs more money to fix its badly dilapidated roads. It does. The issue is that, when city leaders ask for new taxes, they need to come with clear budgets that ensure the money will be wisely spent — and data that demonstrate past tax revenues have been used efficiently.” https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/03/editorial-oakland-voters-should-reject-850-million-measure-u-bond/
It should come as no surprise there is a long list of elected officials endorsing Measure L, as what elected official doesn’t love money coming with an opened ended list of ideas for spending.
Deb Durant said there are huge developments on the Turtle Island Monument/Fountain planning. The whole thing may be considerably delayed. She will share next time. Previous coverage of the Turtle Island Monument in the Activist Diary covered reporting that the project consultants did not want to hear from the Ohlone/Lisjuan Indians the Monument is supposed to honor.
Erin Diehm mentioned daylighting the creek in the Civic Center Park and that arrangements are still being made to schedule a presentation by Ann Riley. Marzuola was quick to brush this aside. Greening cities is a big movement and per Diehm’s research with Riley there is a lot of grant money available for projects. Watch for announcement of a future meeting on daylighting. After spending a morning in Strawberry Park, the park was packed, daylighting the creek sounds incredibly exciting.
This is a week when I feel like why can’t our devices work like a toaster. Put in the bread turn it on and toast. For us older folks, we remember when appliances just worked by turning them on and when they broke, they went to the repair person for a new cord or new switch or some other little part and lasted for many more years. This week I am hearing about emails and messages getting lost, texts requiring new programs, computers breaking down. It is all at a time with the days to the November election are flying away and there are never enough waking hours to fit everything in. At least Tuesday’s City Council meeting ended at around 8:09 pm.
Council moved everything to consent except technical edits and corrections to the Zoning code. Item 16 under action restoring and improving access to City of Berkeley website https://berkeleyca.gov/ was moved to consent cutting off discussion of the mess that has been created for those of us who search history for past city actions. I put in a specific resolution number into records online and got back pages and pages of documents to sift through (I stopped counting after 200) none of which had the document. I tried using the search option in the new City website which in turn spit out a list of unwanted documents, everything except what I requested.
Item 17. for extending existing contracts for services for the poor for another year instead of requesting new proposals with new cost estimates went to consent without even one word of discussion.
Even the City Auditor was relegated to public comment on the clock instead of giving the Audit Status Report presentation.
So while ending early is nice, cutting off needed discussion and debate, especially discussion that points out problems for which the City Manager bears responsibility, that should leave us to question just exactly why such problems are getting a pass instead of transparency.
The 4:00 pm City Council meeting on housing was a work session with no vote taken. The council received a report on adding “middle’ housing which is duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes, these smaller buildings in previous single-family home neighborhoods and recommendations for increasing density in the Southside area for students. The hillside fire zones are exempted from adding density with these smaller multi-unit projects. Evacuating households in the fire zone areas are already a known problem.
Councilmember Harrison asked that housing plans include places for grocery stores instead of more coffee shops and reminded all that the least expensive units are in the buildings we already have (older buildings). Councilmember Hahn focused on that in adding all this lot coverage we need to be looking at green accessible space on the ground open to the public, not just street trees or green roofs that are not accessible at all. There needs to be accessible open green space. Both Hahn and Harrison noted the advantage of creating units inside existing buildings especially older large single-family homes.
The last project reviewed at the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) was 2065 Kittredge which will demolish the Shattuck Cinemas and most of the former Hinks Building.. When an attendee John D. (I didn’t get his last name) who identified himself as being from the building industry raised his hand, I expected a long dissertation on praises for the building. Instead it was a criticism that the developer is not using union labor and workers did not receive health benefits. Bill Shrader the developer for this building and several others downtown said he builds with an open shop and 40% to 60% are union labor.
Charles Kahn, architect and ZAB member responded that ZAB did not have the authority to require union labor and stated, “I would be ashamed to be a developer that health insurance is not provided.” The project was passed out of ZAB to return to the Design Review Committee to reconsider the color palette, removing the west facing wall section that is black, among other things.
In closing I wish to thank Michelle LePaule for the book recommendation The Privatization of Everthing by Donald Cohen and Alan Mikaelian. This book is fabulous and I will never look at privatization or public private partnerships the same way again. It is a solid reminder of all the great important services provided by government especially in the areas of research, weather, public libraries, education, water and that is just for starters. The authors lay out how privatization and the declarations of efficiency are really taking out the “service” and putting in “profit” and how the “profit” steadily drains away the service harming us all.
The authors call the promise of privatization as less costly and more efficient a false myth and go through example after example.
Cohen and Mikaelian go into detail how privatization actually hinders innovation. Innovation means taking risks that may not pan out. Innovation grows from sharing ideas, successes and failures. In privately held companies, when sharing means that some other company, a competitor might make the discovery or find the solution, then the privatized entity is going to keep innovations proprietary even going so far as to require employees to sign non-disclosure contracts. This even extends to examples of charter schools prohibiting teachers from sharing successful lessons.
There is a lot covered in The Privatization of Everything. It is definitely worth your time and the wait at the library. The library could use a couple more copies.
September 11 and September 18, 2022
Before dipping into the main subject of this Diary, more Ike Kiosks are coming this time to the Gilman District, probably near Tokyo Market on San Pablo and near Gilman and Ninth, also there is interest from Donkey and Goat Winery at Gilman and Fifth for an IKE Kiosk with wifi. Jessica Burton (last name Burton not Brown) and Gaby Ghermezi with IKE have relocated to Hollywood, CA.
The Housing Element Draft Environmental Impact Report is a plan for adding 19,098 housing units in Berkeley not the RHNA 8,934. As stated at the Planning Commission in the presentation, the larger number is to push changing zoning in the City of Berkeley. The Comment Period ends October 17, 2022 at 5 pm. The document including appendices is over 500 pages so don’t wait until the last day to comment.
https://berkeleyca.gov/construction-development/land-use-development/general-plan-and-area-plans/housing-element-update
Mayor Arreguin plans to call a special meeting on September 29 at 5 pm on oversight for the $650,000,000 Bond Measure L. The City of Berkeley has a very poor track record of providing information to commissions to fulfill their oversight responsibilities for current ballot measures. Those opposing Measure L list oversight and reporting a serious issue, but more pressing is the statement in the bond, "These dollar amounts are estimates and are not a commitment or guarantee that any specific amounts will be spent on particular projects or categories of projects.” No amount of declarations or resolutions can cover-up that the Measure L General Obligation Bond has no priority of projects or even defined projects, so it is impossible to hold to account a measure that states it is not a guarantee of anything except, of course, debt for us to pay off.
The Berkeley Neighborhood candidate forums that you missed were recorded and can be reviewed at https://berkeleyneighborhoodscouncil.com/.
The Personnel Board approved all positions, classifications and pay scales as submitted to the Board from Donald E. Ellison, Interim Director Human Resources and LaTanya Bellow, Deputy City Manager.
Leonard Powell is back on the Council agenda in closed session on Monday, September 19. The attack on Leonard Powell looks very much like a city bent on removing ownership of property from a Black homeowner in South Berkeley. From this corner previous reports of suffering caused to Leonard Powell, it looks like the City should be paying Powell damages for the City’s actions instead of fining Powell for over-priced so-called improvements.
The final design for the parking garage at 2213 Fourth Street with 412 parking spaces was not approved at the Design Review Committee (DRC) meeting and it will be coming back again. The developer did not have the final finishes. This parking garage plus 742 Grayson with 325 parking spaces and 600 Addison with 943 parking spaces will add parking for 1683 vehicles in West Berkeley in Council District 2 represented by Councilmember Terry Taplin.
There was exciting news from the DRC. Mark Schwettmann presented the 747 Bancroft Research and Development Project at Fourth Street. The developer team did meet/contact the Audubon Society and this modern dominant glass façade research and development and light manufacturing building is going to be 100% bird safe glass on all sides with 94% native plants and an Ohlone garden.
Erin Diehm is the person who really brought bird safe glass, dark skies and native plants to city commissions, the DRC and ZAB. I’ve learned a lot from her presentations. The two of us have been attending DRC and ZAB for months commenting on how to improve buildings and reduce the impact on the environment especially birds and supporting ecosystems and habitat. The DRC thanked us especially for how our contributions helped the DRC and developer. I never expect a thank you, but it was nice and Erin Diehm certainly earned the recognition with her deep knowledge and thoughtful comments on ecosystems, habitat and the environment.
Glenn Philips, the Executive Director of the Golden Gate Audubon Society joined the DRC meeting for the discussion of the proposed Bird Safe Ordinance. Approximately 1 billion birds die every year in North America from collisions with glass. Forty-four percent of the collisions are with glass in buildings of one to two stories. That includes houses. Fifty-six percent is with glass in three to eleven story buildings. The challenge ahead is getting to the point where bird safe glass windows are readably available and reasonably priced for new smaller buildings like single family homes and replacement windows.
Saturday, I had the privilege of attending the Sierra Club awards dinner as a member of the Citizens of East Shore Parks Board (CESP). When Mayor John Bauters of Emeryville stepped up to receive the inaugural David McCoard Visionary Award as a visionary leader for safe and healthy Bay Area Communities, he spoke about his connection to trees, how his father planted a tree for each child and that his was an oak that has grown to be three stories tall with a magnificent canopy. He told us that on his first day as mayor the Emeryville Planning Commission agenda included approval for PG&E to cut down fifty-five trees on the premise that the trees were next to a gas line.
Bauters had the item pulled to cut down the trees. On further investigation it was learned that the proximity between the gas line and the trees wasn’t what PG&E portrayed and the trees didn’t need to be cut down.
The way Bauters spoke about trees and immersing in nature in solo backcountry hikes to refresh and rejuvenate from the stresses of his day job was incredibly moving.
Forestry and a healthy watershed was the subject of another conversation during the socializing prior to the award presentations. Matt Turner who is running for EBMUD Ward 7 (Castro Valley, Cherryland, Fairview and parts of Hayward and San Leandro) and I talked for a long time on how current forestry practices need to change. Planting trees like the way corn fields are planted does not work.
Saving trees is no small matter. What trees we plant, how we plant them and how we care for them makes a huge difference in their survival, the place of trees in rejuvenating ecosystems and the shade they provide for our own survival in giving relief from extreme heat events.
Because this city, our City of Berkeley is more concerned with how trees fit into the narrow strip between sidewalks and streets rather than how to design our streets, sidewalks, medians and boulevards to support native trees with the generous canopies we need for the future, the street trees we are getting are non-native small trees that provide little shade and little to no habitat for birds and insects in our neighborhoods. There are native trees being planted in parks that will grow to have large canopies, but mature city trees are cut down with barely a blink of an eye.
The even the narrow square of open soil around trees is too much for BODYROX at the corner of California and University. Someone has surrounded these street trees with asphalt right up to the tree trunk so these trees will get no water, no air to roots and will die. This should be a hefty fine and immediate removal of the asphalt.
Friday was the last day to comment on the draft Environmental Impact Report for 2136 San Pablo, a 123 unit 6-story mixed-use building with 3 live-work units, 50 parking spaces and 10 units set aside for very low-income households. The 10 very-low income units makes this a density bonus project with two extra stories over the zoning limit of four and SB 330 qualified which limits the number of public meetings to five for review the project. The west side backs up to George Florence Park and three street trees, mature sycamores, will be cut down with the project. The sycamores grabbed no more attention than a notation.
Karen Hemphill in her first night on ZAB asked about impact of the project on the neighbors and commented on the number of vacancies along San Pablo and the changes to San Pablo with demolishing older one-story buildings.
The colors selected for the 2136 San Pablo development are lots of deep charcoal gray (the “in” color), terra cotta and very little white. Charles Kahn commented he was tired of gray and asked for “happy colors.”
Berkeley Lab studied the difference in energy demand between heat absorbing dark exterior walls and light-colored reflective walls and published “Can’t Take the Heat? ‘Cool Walls’ Can Reduce Energy Costs, Pollution” on July 9, 2019 by Glenn Roberts Jr. https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2019/07/09/cool-walls-can-reduce-energy-costs-pollution/
Charcoal gray is everywhere and exactly the opposite of what is needed for a future of increasing extreme heat events like the one that almost brought down the grid on September 6th. The Office of Emergency Services sent this text alert at 5:48 pm on the 6th,
“Emergency Alert CalOES, Conserve energy now to protect public health and safety. Extreme heat is straining the energy grid. Power interruptions may occur unless you take immediate action. Turn off or reduce nonessential power if health allows, now until 9 pm.”
It was the quick response to the cell phone blast, that plunged power demand by 1.2 gigawatts between 5:50 pm and 5:55 pm saving the grid.
Changing the palate and finishes that are used for buildings may not seem like much especially with the mild bay area weather to which we have grown accustomed, but the cooling San Francisco fog is disappearing. The 2019 updated Berkeley Local Hazard Mitigation Report adopted by Berkeley City Council in December 2019 on B-141 (pdf page 168) gives this warning:
“Extreme heat events will increase in the Bay Area due to climate change in intensity, length, and frequency. By the end of the century, Bay Area residents may average six heat waves annually, which will average a length of ten days. Extreme heat threatens critical infrastructure, air quality, and public health. The urban heat island effect, where built surfaces absorb and retain heat causing higher nighttime temperatures, can exacerbate those health risks.”
The Hazard Mitigation Plan continues with pages B-153, B-154 (pdf page count 180, 181)
“Extreme heat events can be further exacerbated by the urban heat island (UHI) effect, through which densely-built cities like Berkeley experience higher temperatures in comparison to surrounding more rural areas. Factors contributing to the UHI effect include:
· A relative lack of vegetation;
· Reduced air flow;
· An abundance of hard, dark surfaces—such as buildings,[emphasis added] streets, cars and sidewalks— which absorb heat rather than reflect it. These surfaces also slowly release that absorbed heat throughout the night, contributing to warmer nighttime temperatures as well.
The UHI effect can also worsen air quality (particularly ground-level ozone) in urban environments. The UHI effect increases heat-related illnesses and fatalities, particularly after two to three days of extreme heat.”
https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/2022-01/Local-Hazard-Mitigation-Plan-2019.pdf
Walls of six story buildings and taller changing air flow, loss of mature large canopy trees to provide shade and dark surfaces to absorb heat sounds like urban heat island effect on steroids.
The “end of the century” extreme heat event warning is 2019 talk just like the temperature rise of 0.1°C that was supposed to happen each decade was 2011 talk. Instead it is a rise of 0.3°C in one decade. Every science and news report now includes statements about the accelerating speed of glacier melting and the exponential growth of extreme weather events. Lack of emergency action puts the planet on track to cross the temperature rise of 1.5°C by 2030. If what is happening worldwide with global warming of 1.1°C what happens with 1.5°C?
A friend sent this link to an August article in Bloomberg by Brian K. Sullivan, “The World’s Rivers, Canals and Reservoirs Are Turning to Dust Waterways have dried to a trickle thanks to droughts and heat waves that owe their origins to climate change.” If you can open this link the photos are stunning, shocking is probably a better word. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-08-26/why-are-rivers-drying-up-climate-change-turns-waterways-into-dust?srnd=premium&sref=McB70VY0
What really stuck with me from the heat event of September 6 was not the near miss of bringing down the grid, but the opinion piece by Matthew Bossoms three days later on September 9, 2022 in the New York Times titled “What My Family and I Saw When We Were Trapped in China’s Heat Wave.” The scene he described sounded like it could have come straight out of one of the climate books I’ve read like the End of ice or Uninhabitable Earth, or Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Ministry For the Future. Only this scene wasn’t some “future” heated planet it was right now, raging mountain rivers reduced to a trickle, deep swimming holes barely a foot deep, drying landscapes, withered crops, wildfires, heat stroke and restrictions on electricity that left cities scorching hot and normally cooled malls as hot and humid inside as outside.
In closing, I picked up two books which really go well as a pair, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President and Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers.
Trump would be nowhere, just some crazy narcissist on a soap box screaming his perceived victimhood, injustice and being the only person to save us, without his blindly loyal faithful followers and wannabe despots riding his coattails. John Dean and Bob Altemeyer delve into the followers of authoritarians in Authoritarian Nightmare:Trump and His Followers.
My first introduction to Bob Altemeyer and his research is his 2006 book The Authoritarians which you can download for free from his website https://theauthoritarians.org/ While many books I pick up work well as audiobooks, Authoritarian Nightmare really needs to be read as a book in hand (print or ebook) unless you are already familiar with Alemeyer’s research. Altemeyer has a great sense of humor so while reading about RWAs (Right Wing Authoritarians) I was laughing out loud. The appendices include The Power Mad Scale and The Con Man Scale which Altemeyer predicts Trump would achieve a perfect score.
It was listening to a discussion with the editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump Brandy X Lee, M.D., M,Div. and what behavior might be expected from someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Collapse (when the narcissist’s image and false reality collapse) that lead me to the second book. The Foreword to the second edition of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump published in March 2019 starts with “Donald Trump is a profound danger to Americans and to the rest of the world. He will remain a profound danger until he is no longer president…” What we are learning is that Donald Trump continues to be a danger after leaving the presidency. At the rally over the weekend in Ohio Trump stepped into full embrace of QAnon. Pictures of attendees in solidarity to QAnon with their arms up with one finger pointing symbolizing the QAnon pledge, “Where We Go 1 We Go All” (WWG1WGA floated across twitter often juxtaposed with pictures of a crowd in the Nazi Salute.
To quote Ken Burns, “The best time to save a democracy is before it’s lost.” Trump stirring up believers in the QAnon conspiracies is not anything to laugh at or dismiss. We are in very serious times.
Another shoe started to drop this week for Trump as Mazars USA Trump’s former accounting firm started turning over financial documents to the House Oversight Committee. Add this to the most prominent legal jeopardies, the investigations by the Department of Justice (DOJ) of the documents at Mar-a-Lago and January 6th attempted coup, the Georgia Criminal investigation, January 6th Hearings, The New York Attorney General Civil Investigation into the Trump organization, the walls are closing in, but will Trump slip through as he always does? MAGA now equals Make Attorneys Get Attorneys.
Before dipping into the main subject of this Diary, more Ike Kiosks are coming this time to the Gilman District, probably near Tokyo Market on San Pablo and near Gilman and Ninth, also there is interest from Donkey and Goat Winery at Gilman and Fifth for an IKE Kiosk with wifi. Jessica Burton (last name Burton not Brown) and Gaby Ghermezi with IKE have relocated to Hollywood, CA.
The Housing Element Draft Environmental Impact Report is a plan for adding 19,098 housing units in Berkeley not the RHNA 8,934. As stated at the Planning Commission in the presentation, the larger number is to push changing zoning in the City of Berkeley. The Comment Period ends October 17, 2022 at 5 pm. The document including appendices is over 500 pages so don’t wait until the last day to comment.
https://berkeleyca.gov/construction-development/land-use-development/general-plan-and-area-plans/housing-element-update
Mayor Arreguin plans to call a special meeting on September 29 at 5 pm on oversight for the $650,000,000 Bond Measure L. The City of Berkeley has a very poor track record of providing information to commissions to fulfill their oversight responsibilities for current ballot measures. Those opposing Measure L list oversight and reporting a serious issue, but more pressing is the statement in the bond, "These dollar amounts are estimates and are not a commitment or guarantee that any specific amounts will be spent on particular projects or categories of projects.” No amount of declarations or resolutions can cover-up that the Measure L General Obligation Bond has no priority of projects or even defined projects, so it is impossible to hold to account a measure that states it is not a guarantee of anything except, of course, debt for us to pay off.
The Berkeley Neighborhood candidate forums that you missed were recorded and can be reviewed at https://berkeleyneighborhoodscouncil.com/.
The Personnel Board approved all positions, classifications and pay scales as submitted to the Board from Donald E. Ellison, Interim Director Human Resources and LaTanya Bellow, Deputy City Manager.
Leonard Powell is back on the Council agenda in closed session on Monday, September 19. The attack on Leonard Powell looks very much like a city bent on removing ownership of property from a Black homeowner in South Berkeley. From this corner previous reports of suffering caused to Leonard Powell, it looks like the City should be paying Powell damages for the City’s actions instead of fining Powell for over-priced so-called improvements.
The final design for the parking garage at 2213 Fourth Street with 412 parking spaces was not approved at the Design Review Committee (DRC) meeting and it will be coming back again. The developer did not have the final finishes. This parking garage plus 742 Grayson with 325 parking spaces and 600 Addison with 943 parking spaces will add parking for 1683 vehicles in West Berkeley in Council District 2 represented by Councilmember Terry Taplin.
There was exciting news from the DRC. Mark Schwettmann presented the 747 Bancroft Research and Development Project at Fourth Street. The developer team did meet/contact the Audubon Society and this modern dominant glass façade research and development and light manufacturing building is going to be 100% bird safe glass on all sides with 94% native plants and an Ohlone garden.
Erin Diehm is the person who really brought bird safe glass, dark skies and native plants to city commissions, the DRC and ZAB. I’ve learned a lot from her presentations. The two of us have been attending DRC and ZAB for months commenting on how to improve buildings and reduce the impact on the environment especially birds and supporting ecosystems and habitat. The DRC thanked us especially for how our contributions helped the DRC and developer. I never expect a thank you, but it was nice and Erin Diehm certainly earned the recognition with her deep knowledge and thoughtful comments on ecosystems, habitat and the environment.
Glenn Philips, the Executive Director of the Golden Gate Audubon Society joined the DRC meeting for the discussion of the proposed Bird Safe Ordinance. Approximately 1 billion birds die every year in North America from collisions with glass. Forty-four percent of the collisions are with glass in buildings of one to two stories. That includes houses. Fifty-six percent is with glass in three to eleven story buildings. The challenge ahead is getting to the point where bird safe glass windows are readably available and reasonably priced for new smaller buildings like single family homes and replacement windows.
Saturday, I had the privilege of attending the Sierra Club awards dinner as a member of the Citizens of East Shore Parks Board (CESP). When Mayor John Bauters of Emeryville stepped up to receive the inaugural David McCoard Visionary Award as a visionary leader for safe and healthy Bay Area Communities, he spoke about his connection to trees, how his father planted a tree for each child and that his was an oak that has grown to be three stories tall with a magnificent canopy. He told us that on his first day as mayor the Emeryville Planning Commission agenda included approval for PG&E to cut down fifty-five trees on the premise that the trees were next to a gas line.
Bauters had the item pulled to cut down the trees. On further investigation it was learned that the proximity between the gas line and the trees wasn’t what PG&E portrayed and the trees didn’t need to be cut down.
The way Bauters spoke about trees and immersing in nature in solo backcountry hikes to refresh and rejuvenate from the stresses of his day job was incredibly moving.
Forestry and a healthy watershed was the subject of another conversation during the socializing prior to the award presentations. Matt Turner who is running for EBMUD Ward 7 (Castro Valley, Cherryland, Fairview and parts of Hayward and San Leandro) and I talked for a long time on how current forestry practices need to change. Planting trees like the way corn fields are planted does not work.
Saving trees is no small matter. What trees we plant, how we plant them and how we care for them makes a huge difference in their survival, the place of trees in rejuvenating ecosystems and the shade they provide for our own survival in giving relief from extreme heat events.
Because this city, our City of Berkeley is more concerned with how trees fit into the narrow strip between sidewalks and streets rather than how to design our streets, sidewalks, medians and boulevards to support native trees with the generous canopies we need for the future, the street trees we are getting are non-native small trees that provide little shade and little to no habitat for birds and insects in our neighborhoods. There are native trees being planted in parks that will grow to have large canopies, but mature city trees are cut down with barely a blink of an eye.
The even the narrow square of open soil around trees is too much for BODYROX at the corner of California and University. Someone has surrounded these street trees with asphalt right up to the tree trunk so these trees will get no water, no air to roots and will die. This should be a hefty fine and immediate removal of the asphalt.
Friday was the last day to comment on the draft Environmental Impact Report for 2136 San Pablo, a 123 unit 6-story mixed-use building with 3 live-work units, 50 parking spaces and 10 units set aside for very low-income households. The 10 very-low income units makes this a density bonus project with two extra stories over the zoning limit of four and SB 330 qualified which limits the number of public meetings to five for review the project. The west side backs up to George Florence Park and three street trees, mature sycamores, will be cut down with the project. The sycamores grabbed no more attention than a notation.
Karen Hemphill in her first night on ZAB asked about impact of the project on the neighbors and commented on the number of vacancies along San Pablo and the changes to San Pablo with demolishing older one-story buildings.
The colors selected for the 2136 San Pablo development are lots of deep charcoal gray (the “in” color), terra cotta and very little white. Charles Kahn commented he was tired of gray and asked for “happy colors.”
Berkeley Lab studied the difference in energy demand between heat absorbing dark exterior walls and light-colored reflective walls and published “Can’t Take the Heat? ‘Cool Walls’ Can Reduce Energy Costs, Pollution” on July 9, 2019 by Glenn Roberts Jr. https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2019/07/09/cool-walls-can-reduce-energy-costs-pollution/
Charcoal gray is everywhere and exactly the opposite of what is needed for a future of increasing extreme heat events like the one that almost brought down the grid on September 6th. The Office of Emergency Services sent this text alert at 5:48 pm on the 6th,
“Emergency Alert CalOES, Conserve energy now to protect public health and safety. Extreme heat is straining the energy grid. Power interruptions may occur unless you take immediate action. Turn off or reduce nonessential power if health allows, now until 9 pm.”
It was the quick response to the cell phone blast, that plunged power demand by 1.2 gigawatts between 5:50 pm and 5:55 pm saving the grid.
Changing the palate and finishes that are used for buildings may not seem like much especially with the mild bay area weather to which we have grown accustomed, but the cooling San Francisco fog is disappearing. The 2019 updated Berkeley Local Hazard Mitigation Report adopted by Berkeley City Council in December 2019 on B-141 (pdf page 168) gives this warning:
“Extreme heat events will increase in the Bay Area due to climate change in intensity, length, and frequency. By the end of the century, Bay Area residents may average six heat waves annually, which will average a length of ten days. Extreme heat threatens critical infrastructure, air quality, and public health. The urban heat island effect, where built surfaces absorb and retain heat causing higher nighttime temperatures, can exacerbate those health risks.”
The Hazard Mitigation Plan continues with pages B-153, B-154 (pdf page count 180, 181)
“Extreme heat events can be further exacerbated by the urban heat island (UHI) effect, through which densely-built cities like Berkeley experience higher temperatures in comparison to surrounding more rural areas. Factors contributing to the UHI effect include:
· A relative lack of vegetation;
· Reduced air flow;
· An abundance of hard, dark surfaces—such as buildings,[emphasis added] streets, cars and sidewalks— which absorb heat rather than reflect it. These surfaces also slowly release that absorbed heat throughout the night, contributing to warmer nighttime temperatures as well.
The UHI effect can also worsen air quality (particularly ground-level ozone) in urban environments. The UHI effect increases heat-related illnesses and fatalities, particularly after two to three days of extreme heat.”
https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/2022-01/Local-Hazard-Mitigation-Plan-2019.pdf
Walls of six story buildings and taller changing air flow, loss of mature large canopy trees to provide shade and dark surfaces to absorb heat sounds like urban heat island effect on steroids.
The “end of the century” extreme heat event warning is 2019 talk just like the temperature rise of 0.1°C that was supposed to happen each decade was 2011 talk. Instead it is a rise of 0.3°C in one decade. Every science and news report now includes statements about the accelerating speed of glacier melting and the exponential growth of extreme weather events. Lack of emergency action puts the planet on track to cross the temperature rise of 1.5°C by 2030. If what is happening worldwide with global warming of 1.1°C what happens with 1.5°C?
A friend sent this link to an August article in Bloomberg by Brian K. Sullivan, “The World’s Rivers, Canals and Reservoirs Are Turning to Dust Waterways have dried to a trickle thanks to droughts and heat waves that owe their origins to climate change.” If you can open this link the photos are stunning, shocking is probably a better word. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-08-26/why-are-rivers-drying-up-climate-change-turns-waterways-into-dust?srnd=premium&sref=McB70VY0
What really stuck with me from the heat event of September 6 was not the near miss of bringing down the grid, but the opinion piece by Matthew Bossoms three days later on September 9, 2022 in the New York Times titled “What My Family and I Saw When We Were Trapped in China’s Heat Wave.” The scene he described sounded like it could have come straight out of one of the climate books I’ve read like the End of ice or Uninhabitable Earth, or Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Ministry For the Future. Only this scene wasn’t some “future” heated planet it was right now, raging mountain rivers reduced to a trickle, deep swimming holes barely a foot deep, drying landscapes, withered crops, wildfires, heat stroke and restrictions on electricity that left cities scorching hot and normally cooled malls as hot and humid inside as outside.
In closing, I picked up two books which really go well as a pair, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President and Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers.
Trump would be nowhere, just some crazy narcissist on a soap box screaming his perceived victimhood, injustice and being the only person to save us, without his blindly loyal faithful followers and wannabe despots riding his coattails. John Dean and Bob Altemeyer delve into the followers of authoritarians in Authoritarian Nightmare:Trump and His Followers.
My first introduction to Bob Altemeyer and his research is his 2006 book The Authoritarians which you can download for free from his website https://theauthoritarians.org/ While many books I pick up work well as audiobooks, Authoritarian Nightmare really needs to be read as a book in hand (print or ebook) unless you are already familiar with Alemeyer’s research. Altemeyer has a great sense of humor so while reading about RWAs (Right Wing Authoritarians) I was laughing out loud. The appendices include The Power Mad Scale and The Con Man Scale which Altemeyer predicts Trump would achieve a perfect score.
It was listening to a discussion with the editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump Brandy X Lee, M.D., M,Div. and what behavior might be expected from someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Collapse (when the narcissist’s image and false reality collapse) that lead me to the second book. The Foreword to the second edition of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump published in March 2019 starts with “Donald Trump is a profound danger to Americans and to the rest of the world. He will remain a profound danger until he is no longer president…” What we are learning is that Donald Trump continues to be a danger after leaving the presidency. At the rally over the weekend in Ohio Trump stepped into full embrace of QAnon. Pictures of attendees in solidarity to QAnon with their arms up with one finger pointing symbolizing the QAnon pledge, “Where We Go 1 We Go All” (WWG1WGA floated across twitter often juxtaposed with pictures of a crowd in the Nazi Salute.
To quote Ken Burns, “The best time to save a democracy is before it’s lost.” Trump stirring up believers in the QAnon conspiracies is not anything to laugh at or dismiss. We are in very serious times.
Another shoe started to drop this week for Trump as Mazars USA Trump’s former accounting firm started turning over financial documents to the House Oversight Committee. Add this to the most prominent legal jeopardies, the investigations by the Department of Justice (DOJ) of the documents at Mar-a-Lago and January 6th attempted coup, the Georgia Criminal investigation, January 6th Hearings, The New York Attorney General Civil Investigation into the Trump organization, the walls are closing in, but will Trump slip through as he always does? MAGA now equals Make Attorneys Get Attorneys.
August 28 & September 4, 2022
As September begins and the last days of summer slip away, I am wishing I had taken off to some place interesting in August. I took sort of a staycation with good intentions of continuing weekly Diaries, but good intentions slid into combining the last two weeks of August meetings into this one Diary for September 4.
It is going to be a while longer before City Council goes back to hybrid meetings. City Council did meet August 23rd for 20 minutes and voted yes on the singular issue to renew continuing virtual meetings. There were 11 attendees with all, but one speaker requesting a return to hybrid council meetings.
The Mental Health Commission met August 23rd in the evening and it felt more like watching a group therapy session with commissioners filling the role of de-escalation and therapists. Andrea Prichett and Edward Opton were on the agenda for reappointment and in the end the vote was to reappoint both commissioners without dissent, but the reappointment vote came after a rather ugly public grilling. It is unknown to those of us attending what set off the Chair Margaret Fine, but Ed Opton resonded this way, “ Ms Pritchett and I were not prepared for this kind of hostile grilling, nothing in the conversations until tonight [indicated] that Ms Pritchett or myself would be cross examined in this way” Opton went further to call the experience “unduly hostile.” Mary Lee Smith commented, “I feel like a lot of harm has been done, there needs to be repair…”
At the Agenda Committee, Councilmember Taplin’s request for an information report on alternatives to chemical agents for response to violent large-scale crowd scenarios was referred to the Public Safety Committee and his item on an establishing an ordinance allowing efficiency units as small as 150 square feet instead of the current limit of 350 square feet was moved to action. Vision 2050 was removed from the proposed agenda by the City Manager. The final agenda for September 13th includes rezoning for R&D, safe streets, red curbing in fire zones, surveillance reports, homekey and much more.
At the PG&E webinar to reduce wildfire risk, it was learned that PG&E cuts down over a million trees per year near or impinging on power lines. Trees are chipped and then “turned into electricity” which means they are burned. The greenwashing term is biofuel, but there is nothing green about chopping up and burning trees. Between wildfire, beef and toilet paper (Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark and Georgia-Pacific are the worst), we are losing our forests worldwide. And, while thinking about forests being chopped down to flush down the toilet, don’t forget those convenient disposable diapers are made from trees too and take up to 500 years to decompose in landfill. Is it time for cloth again?
The City and Visit Berkeley have plans to add 10 more IKE Kiosks to the Downtown. That is in addition to the five that are already installed. While Councilmember Harrison expressed her enthusiasm for the Ike Kiosks, she objected to adding ten more in the downtown.
Helen Walsh had lots of comments and questions about IKE Kiosks. Walsh, who is a member of the Commission on Disability and low vision herself, commented that Berkeley has a large disabled population and asked, “How does it benefit me?” Walsh likened the IKE to a brick on a corner and asked, who is in charge of the content accessible to a screen reader, are there text changes for low vision, is the content following global accessibility standards, what are the accommodations for users of screen readers? When Jessica Brown representing IKE said they worked with the Federation for the Blind, Walsh responded that Federation for the Blind does not represent all disabilities. From the non-answers to Walsh’s questions by Jessica Brown - IKE, Jeffrey Church – Visit Berkeley and Kirin Slaughter – CoB Office of Economic Development it might be said IKE Kiosks are seriously deficient when it comes to doing the research and providing equity for persons with disabilities.
Walsh also suggested since the IKEs have power, a possible benefit to the public would be an outlet for charging power wheelchairs and devices. Brown responded that had been considered by IKE and rejected, because they decided such charging services would bring loitering. Slaughter said charging stations were being considered for other locations. It seems pretty obvious it is the poor and homeless who could really benefit from access to charging and they are the same people who are not wanted around the electronic billboards except to find the screen on homeless services and shelter bed counts.
The logical places for the Kiosks are at bus/transit stops, but that creates a problem with access for queuing and boarding.
The next Ike Kiosk meeting is virtual on Wednesday, September 7 at 2pm to plan placement for IKE Kiosks in the Gillman District.
Thursday afternoon, September 1, felt like the first honest conversation among WETA (Water Emergency Transportation Authority) board members and staff regarding ferry service and the challenges to attracting riders. People who can work remotely are not returning to the office more than a couple days a week if at all. Commuter riders are not returning. The first and last mile, getting to and from a ferry to the desired destination is a problem. Ferries are just not in convenient locations. To say ridership has returned to 75% of pre-pandemic as reported by staff was challenged by the chair pointing out it is just not supported by the rider charts. Why does this matter? Berkeley is still plowing ahead with plans for ferry service. Last heard the expectation is robust demand. And, WETA just completed a special session on an aggressive plan for expansion which was absent how it would be financed. Financing is supposed to be covered in a later session, but on September 1, they modified their advertising condition as was stated, “we need the money.”
It looks like the involvement of the Housing Advisory Commission (HAC) is making the difference in resolving the complaints from tenants of Harriet Tubman Terrace. In July, tenants brought their complaints about construction work quality, debris, the manner in which tenants were relocated for construction and treatment while their apartments were being refurbished. Not every complaint is resolved yet, but Cassandra Palanza, Asset Manager, for Foundation Housing was able to report the actions taken and there appears to be good progress since July.
The Wildfire Evacuation Workshop: Building Your Fire Weather Plan was rather poorly attended with little more than a handful of attendees, which was unfortunate. The workshop by Khin Chin was really very good. There will be a workshop on home hardening in the coming weeks, watch for it. https://berkeleyca.gov/safety-health/fire/fire-weather-evacuation
Every eight years the State of California projects future population growth and estimates how much new housing is needed to accommodate all those new bodies. The process by which the housing is distributed around the state is called the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA). The Housing Element is the plan each city (or county for rural areas) of where to put all those new housing units.
The topic of speaker Michael Barnes for Community Catalysts for Local Control was “How California’s Sixth Cycle of the RHNA (Regional Housing Needs Assessment) was Rigged.“ Barnes’ message was that the proposed number of housing units cities are assigned to build are deliberately high and unachievable. This sets cities up for failure. When cities aren’t meeting the mandated targets by the fourth year of the RHNA cycle (the next cycle is 2023 – 2031), the review/approval process becomes “streamlined ministerial” AKA by-right. This means the project developer is no longer subject to the public review process.
Some see ministerial / by-right approvals for large multi-unit, mixed-use (apartment buildings with commercial space at street level) as a big step in the right direction. Our state Senator, Nancy Skinner and Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks are on that train. As a regular attendee of the Zoning Adjustment Board and Design Review Committee meetings, there are most often significant positive changes in design from the review process and public input. Two of us Erin Diehm especially and myself have been successful in shifting landscape plans to native plants, increasing permeable paving and other measures that improve habitat and ecosystem survival.
My personal view is this city is not doing enough right now in architectural design, land use and landscape planning requirements to prepare us for a hotter more unpredictable climate future. Those opportunities are missed now with every project and will be even worse with projects skipping over reviews and cutting corners to the extent possible to squeeze out the maximum profit while staying within building and zoning codes.
Since I don’t attend statewide meetings, I can’t report whether or not the projected population growth and resulting allocation of new housing is based in a nefarious scheme. But, it should be asked how do the projections of population growth in California fit with the actual decrease as exemplified by the 2020 census and the loss of a congressional seat?
Many cities have joined in legal action opposing the RHNA allocations. Berkeley did not join. After all, our mayor, Jesse Arreguin is President of the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) the organization tasked with distributing the RHNA allocations for the nine Bay area Counties and Arreguin headed the ABAG Housing Methodology Committee which determined the final housing allocation and the 8934 units assigned to Berkeley to construct in its 10.5 square miles. Our next door neighbor, Richmond with 52.5 square miles and many areas along transit corridors that would benefit from increased density is assigned 3614 units. https://abag.ca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2022-04/Final_RHNA_Methodology_Report_2023-2031_March2022_Update.pdf
The consequences of failing to meet the RHNA allocation is set in California Senate Bill 35 and what makes SB 35 worse is that the ministerial approval kicks in based on the number of units in the building permits that are pulled / exercised, not the number of units in the projects approved. Meaning that a city can approve stacks of new buildings, but if the owner of those projects decides to sit and not build the city falls into failing to meet the assigned RHNA allocation. Barnes hinted to expect a slowdown in building application permits until the halfway mark in the cycle so that the ministerial approval condition is triggered.
Berkeley’s RHNA allocation for the next cycle years of 2023 – 2031 is 8,934 new housing units. Which includes 2446 very low-income units (<50% of Area Median Income – AMI), 1408 low income units (50 - 80% AMI), 1416 moderate income units (80 – 120% AMI) and 3664 above moderate income (>120% AMI). According to these numbers, 43% of new housing is supposed to be for households earning less than 80% of AMI.
Berkeley did not meet the mandated RHNA targets for new very low and low-income household units in the current RHNA cycle (2015 – 2023) and as a consequence is already on the list for ministerial approval of projects with 50% (or more) of the units allocated to household incomes with less than 80% AMI (Area Median Income).
If all these numbers are meaningless check the charts on income by household size and matching “affordable” rents.
Berkeley ran by the RHNA quota for building new market rate housing and escaped ministerial approval for building market rate projects, however, Berkeley is subject to SB 330 from our State Senator Nancy Skinner (signed into law 2019) which limits public review of projects meeting the criteria of SB 330 to 5 meetings. If you attend projects going through the city review process, you will hear staff keeping tabs on the number of meetings. Five meetings is a limiting factor in the review of the 8-story student housing project at 2065 Kittredge with a plan that the Landmarks Preservation Commission found disappointing
WHAT YOU DO NOT SEE on the home page of the Berkeley City website is that the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for the RHNA cycle 2023 – 2031 Housing Element was just released Tuesday, August 30th for public comment/response. We have until October 17, 2022 at 5 pm to make our way through the 441 page report and the 108 pages of Appendices to submit comments. https://berkeleyca.gov/construction-development/land-use-development/general-plan-and-area-plans/housing-element-update
The DEIR underlies the Housing Element, basically where are we going to put the 8934 new units. The DEIR is the singular action item at the Planning Commission on September 7.
Fixing the broken access to city records with the new city website is expected to be on the September 20th City Council regular meeting agenda.
Compiling the list of upcoming city meetings for the Activist’s Calendar means I am in the new city website a lot and that is giving way to emails asking for help in finding city documents. One request was for how to find older council video recordings. After taking a rather circuitous route I found the non-obvious answer, go to “your government” then to “city council” look to the list of choices on the right and go to “participating in City Council meetings” then look for “recorded videos” in the last paragraph under “make a plan to participate.” Click on “recorded videos” and you will have access to council videos for the last 10 years.
Most people in Berkeley don’t care about these things, but for those of us who are monitoring city actions and looking up past history, the new website and “records online” can easily turn into hours lost in record searches and all too often a dead end.
In closing my read of the week was An Immense World: How Animal senses Reveal Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong. It is a dense read in print or ebook, but as an audiobook, I found it absolutely delightful filled with descriptions of how animals, creatures large and small perceive the world. It starts with dogs and how they explore the world through their nose, something any dog owner learns quickly in taking a dog for a walk. That is just the beginning.
The chapters are organized by senses with marvelous stories of how creatures navigate their umwelt (environment) through their special highly developed senses and communication. The book is filled with constant surprises, like whales using echo/sonar low pitched sound that can travel up to 13,000 miles (if measured) to navigate the ocean, male moths with eyes around their penis for mating, the star-nosed mole that explores tunnels through touch with fingerlike extensions from its nose. There is so much to appreciate in the animal world around us.
Edmund Soon-Weng Yong, the author, narrated the book. Yong is a Malaysian-born British Science journalist with, of course, a British accent.
As September begins and the last days of summer slip away, I am wishing I had taken off to some place interesting in August. I took sort of a staycation with good intentions of continuing weekly Diaries, but good intentions slid into combining the last two weeks of August meetings into this one Diary for September 4.
It is going to be a while longer before City Council goes back to hybrid meetings. City Council did meet August 23rd for 20 minutes and voted yes on the singular issue to renew continuing virtual meetings. There were 11 attendees with all, but one speaker requesting a return to hybrid council meetings.
The Mental Health Commission met August 23rd in the evening and it felt more like watching a group therapy session with commissioners filling the role of de-escalation and therapists. Andrea Prichett and Edward Opton were on the agenda for reappointment and in the end the vote was to reappoint both commissioners without dissent, but the reappointment vote came after a rather ugly public grilling. It is unknown to those of us attending what set off the Chair Margaret Fine, but Ed Opton resonded this way, “ Ms Pritchett and I were not prepared for this kind of hostile grilling, nothing in the conversations until tonight [indicated] that Ms Pritchett or myself would be cross examined in this way” Opton went further to call the experience “unduly hostile.” Mary Lee Smith commented, “I feel like a lot of harm has been done, there needs to be repair…”
At the Agenda Committee, Councilmember Taplin’s request for an information report on alternatives to chemical agents for response to violent large-scale crowd scenarios was referred to the Public Safety Committee and his item on an establishing an ordinance allowing efficiency units as small as 150 square feet instead of the current limit of 350 square feet was moved to action. Vision 2050 was removed from the proposed agenda by the City Manager. The final agenda for September 13th includes rezoning for R&D, safe streets, red curbing in fire zones, surveillance reports, homekey and much more.
At the PG&E webinar to reduce wildfire risk, it was learned that PG&E cuts down over a million trees per year near or impinging on power lines. Trees are chipped and then “turned into electricity” which means they are burned. The greenwashing term is biofuel, but there is nothing green about chopping up and burning trees. Between wildfire, beef and toilet paper (Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark and Georgia-Pacific are the worst), we are losing our forests worldwide. And, while thinking about forests being chopped down to flush down the toilet, don’t forget those convenient disposable diapers are made from trees too and take up to 500 years to decompose in landfill. Is it time for cloth again?
The City and Visit Berkeley have plans to add 10 more IKE Kiosks to the Downtown. That is in addition to the five that are already installed. While Councilmember Harrison expressed her enthusiasm for the Ike Kiosks, she objected to adding ten more in the downtown.
Helen Walsh had lots of comments and questions about IKE Kiosks. Walsh, who is a member of the Commission on Disability and low vision herself, commented that Berkeley has a large disabled population and asked, “How does it benefit me?” Walsh likened the IKE to a brick on a corner and asked, who is in charge of the content accessible to a screen reader, are there text changes for low vision, is the content following global accessibility standards, what are the accommodations for users of screen readers? When Jessica Brown representing IKE said they worked with the Federation for the Blind, Walsh responded that Federation for the Blind does not represent all disabilities. From the non-answers to Walsh’s questions by Jessica Brown - IKE, Jeffrey Church – Visit Berkeley and Kirin Slaughter – CoB Office of Economic Development it might be said IKE Kiosks are seriously deficient when it comes to doing the research and providing equity for persons with disabilities.
Walsh also suggested since the IKEs have power, a possible benefit to the public would be an outlet for charging power wheelchairs and devices. Brown responded that had been considered by IKE and rejected, because they decided such charging services would bring loitering. Slaughter said charging stations were being considered for other locations. It seems pretty obvious it is the poor and homeless who could really benefit from access to charging and they are the same people who are not wanted around the electronic billboards except to find the screen on homeless services and shelter bed counts.
The logical places for the Kiosks are at bus/transit stops, but that creates a problem with access for queuing and boarding.
The next Ike Kiosk meeting is virtual on Wednesday, September 7 at 2pm to plan placement for IKE Kiosks in the Gillman District.
Thursday afternoon, September 1, felt like the first honest conversation among WETA (Water Emergency Transportation Authority) board members and staff regarding ferry service and the challenges to attracting riders. People who can work remotely are not returning to the office more than a couple days a week if at all. Commuter riders are not returning. The first and last mile, getting to and from a ferry to the desired destination is a problem. Ferries are just not in convenient locations. To say ridership has returned to 75% of pre-pandemic as reported by staff was challenged by the chair pointing out it is just not supported by the rider charts. Why does this matter? Berkeley is still plowing ahead with plans for ferry service. Last heard the expectation is robust demand. And, WETA just completed a special session on an aggressive plan for expansion which was absent how it would be financed. Financing is supposed to be covered in a later session, but on September 1, they modified their advertising condition as was stated, “we need the money.”
It looks like the involvement of the Housing Advisory Commission (HAC) is making the difference in resolving the complaints from tenants of Harriet Tubman Terrace. In July, tenants brought their complaints about construction work quality, debris, the manner in which tenants were relocated for construction and treatment while their apartments were being refurbished. Not every complaint is resolved yet, but Cassandra Palanza, Asset Manager, for Foundation Housing was able to report the actions taken and there appears to be good progress since July.
The Wildfire Evacuation Workshop: Building Your Fire Weather Plan was rather poorly attended with little more than a handful of attendees, which was unfortunate. The workshop by Khin Chin was really very good. There will be a workshop on home hardening in the coming weeks, watch for it. https://berkeleyca.gov/safety-health/fire/fire-weather-evacuation
Every eight years the State of California projects future population growth and estimates how much new housing is needed to accommodate all those new bodies. The process by which the housing is distributed around the state is called the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA). The Housing Element is the plan each city (or county for rural areas) of where to put all those new housing units.
The topic of speaker Michael Barnes for Community Catalysts for Local Control was “How California’s Sixth Cycle of the RHNA (Regional Housing Needs Assessment) was Rigged.“ Barnes’ message was that the proposed number of housing units cities are assigned to build are deliberately high and unachievable. This sets cities up for failure. When cities aren’t meeting the mandated targets by the fourth year of the RHNA cycle (the next cycle is 2023 – 2031), the review/approval process becomes “streamlined ministerial” AKA by-right. This means the project developer is no longer subject to the public review process.
Some see ministerial / by-right approvals for large multi-unit, mixed-use (apartment buildings with commercial space at street level) as a big step in the right direction. Our state Senator, Nancy Skinner and Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks are on that train. As a regular attendee of the Zoning Adjustment Board and Design Review Committee meetings, there are most often significant positive changes in design from the review process and public input. Two of us Erin Diehm especially and myself have been successful in shifting landscape plans to native plants, increasing permeable paving and other measures that improve habitat and ecosystem survival.
My personal view is this city is not doing enough right now in architectural design, land use and landscape planning requirements to prepare us for a hotter more unpredictable climate future. Those opportunities are missed now with every project and will be even worse with projects skipping over reviews and cutting corners to the extent possible to squeeze out the maximum profit while staying within building and zoning codes.
Since I don’t attend statewide meetings, I can’t report whether or not the projected population growth and resulting allocation of new housing is based in a nefarious scheme. But, it should be asked how do the projections of population growth in California fit with the actual decrease as exemplified by the 2020 census and the loss of a congressional seat?
Many cities have joined in legal action opposing the RHNA allocations. Berkeley did not join. After all, our mayor, Jesse Arreguin is President of the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) the organization tasked with distributing the RHNA allocations for the nine Bay area Counties and Arreguin headed the ABAG Housing Methodology Committee which determined the final housing allocation and the 8934 units assigned to Berkeley to construct in its 10.5 square miles. Our next door neighbor, Richmond with 52.5 square miles and many areas along transit corridors that would benefit from increased density is assigned 3614 units. https://abag.ca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2022-04/Final_RHNA_Methodology_Report_2023-2031_March2022_Update.pdf
The consequences of failing to meet the RHNA allocation is set in California Senate Bill 35 and what makes SB 35 worse is that the ministerial approval kicks in based on the number of units in the building permits that are pulled / exercised, not the number of units in the projects approved. Meaning that a city can approve stacks of new buildings, but if the owner of those projects decides to sit and not build the city falls into failing to meet the assigned RHNA allocation. Barnes hinted to expect a slowdown in building application permits until the halfway mark in the cycle so that the ministerial approval condition is triggered.
Berkeley’s RHNA allocation for the next cycle years of 2023 – 2031 is 8,934 new housing units. Which includes 2446 very low-income units (<50% of Area Median Income – AMI), 1408 low income units (50 - 80% AMI), 1416 moderate income units (80 – 120% AMI) and 3664 above moderate income (>120% AMI). According to these numbers, 43% of new housing is supposed to be for households earning less than 80% of AMI.
Berkeley did not meet the mandated RHNA targets for new very low and low-income household units in the current RHNA cycle (2015 – 2023) and as a consequence is already on the list for ministerial approval of projects with 50% (or more) of the units allocated to household incomes with less than 80% AMI (Area Median Income).
If all these numbers are meaningless check the charts on income by household size and matching “affordable” rents.
Berkeley ran by the RHNA quota for building new market rate housing and escaped ministerial approval for building market rate projects, however, Berkeley is subject to SB 330 from our State Senator Nancy Skinner (signed into law 2019) which limits public review of projects meeting the criteria of SB 330 to 5 meetings. If you attend projects going through the city review process, you will hear staff keeping tabs on the number of meetings. Five meetings is a limiting factor in the review of the 8-story student housing project at 2065 Kittredge with a plan that the Landmarks Preservation Commission found disappointing
WHAT YOU DO NOT SEE on the home page of the Berkeley City website is that the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for the RHNA cycle 2023 – 2031 Housing Element was just released Tuesday, August 30th for public comment/response. We have until October 17, 2022 at 5 pm to make our way through the 441 page report and the 108 pages of Appendices to submit comments. https://berkeleyca.gov/construction-development/land-use-development/general-plan-and-area-plans/housing-element-update
The DEIR underlies the Housing Element, basically where are we going to put the 8934 new units. The DEIR is the singular action item at the Planning Commission on September 7.
Fixing the broken access to city records with the new city website is expected to be on the September 20th City Council regular meeting agenda.
Compiling the list of upcoming city meetings for the Activist’s Calendar means I am in the new city website a lot and that is giving way to emails asking for help in finding city documents. One request was for how to find older council video recordings. After taking a rather circuitous route I found the non-obvious answer, go to “your government” then to “city council” look to the list of choices on the right and go to “participating in City Council meetings” then look for “recorded videos” in the last paragraph under “make a plan to participate.” Click on “recorded videos” and you will have access to council videos for the last 10 years.
Most people in Berkeley don’t care about these things, but for those of us who are monitoring city actions and looking up past history, the new website and “records online” can easily turn into hours lost in record searches and all too often a dead end.
In closing my read of the week was An Immense World: How Animal senses Reveal Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong. It is a dense read in print or ebook, but as an audiobook, I found it absolutely delightful filled with descriptions of how animals, creatures large and small perceive the world. It starts with dogs and how they explore the world through their nose, something any dog owner learns quickly in taking a dog for a walk. That is just the beginning.
The chapters are organized by senses with marvelous stories of how creatures navigate their umwelt (environment) through their special highly developed senses and communication. The book is filled with constant surprises, like whales using echo/sonar low pitched sound that can travel up to 13,000 miles (if measured) to navigate the ocean, male moths with eyes around their penis for mating, the star-nosed mole that explores tunnels through touch with fingerlike extensions from its nose. There is so much to appreciate in the animal world around us.
Edmund Soon-Weng Yong, the author, narrated the book. Yong is a Malaysian-born British Science journalist with, of course, a British accent.
August 21, 2022
A couple of months ago I heard the buzz of saws and found that the magnificent tree with an incredible canopy that provided much appreciated summer shade was coming down. I watched as the large healthy tree with a thick trunk probably near 100 years old, the age of the houses on this block was fed into the chipper. I couldn’t stop thinking about what a waste it was to grind up a trunk that could have been milled into lumber for any number of projects.
Margo Schueler took a different approach when she had to remove what she called a wonderful tree, a canary pine and wrote it up in NextDoor.
“Last month we had a large non-native pine taken down from our West Berkeley home. There were many compelling reasons to remove this wonderful tree but we had struggled with this decision for over decade. Fortunately, we found Mike Hudson on Nextdoor and he was able to mill 5 - 10 foot sections into wonderful lumber now drying in stacks for future building. Cost 65% of the bid to grind and dispose of the tree. Very happy with this direction. Even happier on reading the article below - “Reforestation Hubs” Are Saving Urban Trees From Heading to Landfills Did you know that the US is losing 36 million [urban] trees every year? Several organizations have stepped up with creative solutions to save the wood, reduce carbon emissions and create jobs. “More wood from cities goes into landfills than is harvested from US National Forests,” says J. Morgan Grove, a research forester at Baltimore Field Station, USDA Forest Service. Thank you Mike!” (picture from Margo Scheuler)
I went to see the stacked drying wood for myself, amazing!
The damage and destruction to Peoples Park is still painful no matter how it settles, but if those magnificent trees were turned into wood for housing that would at least be more palatable than piles of wood chips. When I spoke with Margo about milling the tree instead of chipping, she told me Mike Hudson told her he had offered to mill the redwood trees whose roots were destroyed (a condition of the approval was to preserve the trees) by the developer for the 1698 University mixed-use project at McGee. The developer refused the offer, because it would take two days to mill the trees into lumbar so the trees were chipped. That was in August 2018. The project still isn’t finished four years later from all appearances. Something is very wrong with this picture when a developer couldn’t stop for two days out of four years to turn redwood trees into usable lumber. And, something is very wrong with a city and a university that doesn’t have a vision and requirement to change this course and whose only solution is landfill and piles of mulch.
From doing a little reading there is a lot of resistance to turning urban trees into lumbar that are cut down to make way for developments, expansion or to remove them because of their growing size and proximity to existing structures. Berkeley was cutting down trees to rehab streets until neighborhoods rose up in objection.
I wish this were the end of the story. The article referenced by Scheuler has a list of resources, that I have yet to check out. https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/reforestation-hubs-are-saving-urban-trees-from-heading-to-landfills?utm_source=Next+City+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c28eb8580f-DailyNL_2022_05_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fcee5bf7a0-c28eb8580f-44126641 This morning before I could hit fast forward, the ad for Aspiration.com https://www.aspiration.com/ started to play. It is a promotion for a credit card that theoretically offsets destructive anti-environment choices and behavior with planting a tree with a credit card swipe. The message, make all that spending feel good. I might have been taken in by such an ad if I didn’t know most of these programs are a failure as far as the trees go. There is a lot more available on the nature of trees and forests, but a good start is listening to The Daily, The Sunday Read: ‘Can Planting a Trillion New Trees Save the World?’ https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS81NG5BR2NJbA/episode/MTg2MDZjOWMtNzRmMS00NTI1LThjYTMtOTQzOTNjYTUzMGY0?hl=en
Saving the world and planting trees requires more than a swipe of a credit card and sticking seedlings in the ground. If those seedlings even survive at all is a big question. At the top of the list should be whether the location selected is appropriate for trees and does the tree species selected support the local ecosystem, meaning is the tree native to the area and will the tree support native birds and insects. Then there is ongoing care for the first three years or so when a seedling or young tree is taking root.
Even here in Berkeley with a tree planting grant, it is not guaranteed that the trees selected and planted support local ecosystems. The city is following up with care for the critical early years of the newly planted trees, but I wonder about the “younger” trees that are already here that look to be suffering and dying from the drought especially in the Sacramento Street median.
The first project reviewed at the Thursday Design Review Committee (DRC) was a 5-story mixed-use building at 1820 San Pablo between Hearst and Delaware, the location of the former Albatross Bar. To understand how the building is allowed 5 stories when the permitted number for this location is 4 stories, this additional floor is the reward known as a “density bonus” for designating 4 units as very low income in a base project of 33 units. Setting aside four units for very low-income households, the project gained a density bonus of 11 more units and another floor making the total five floors and 44 dwelling units.
Brad Gunkel, the architect, for 1820 San Pablo was trying to add design interest so this 5-story block would not look like just another BUB (big ugly box). What Gunkel thought would be a nice addition to the design, untreated wood starting on the third floor for the northern third of the building facing San Pablo was the subject of considerable objection first noted by West Berkeley resident Phil Allen and then the DRC members. All agreed that the untreated wood would not age nicely as Gunkel described and would instead deteriorate within a few years and require replacement. Charles Kahn DRC member gave his concern stating that, “rather than being a gift to the neighborhood, that this would degrade and would be more a curse…” The DRC voted unanimously to continue review with a list of requested revisions and modifications to be incorporated before proceeding to the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB).
The second DRC project at 2403 San Pablo at Channing, the former Omega Salvage Store, is a co-housing condominium project with 1, 2 and 3-bedroom units for a total of 36 units, with a large communal kitchen and great room and over 10,000 square feet of open space (six times more than required) designed by the people who plan to live there and are looking toward a future of aging in place. It is a lovely project and passed out of committee with an ask to make the San Pablo ground floor exterior more interesting. My vote would be to add a mural.
Committee member Steve Finacom said this about the co-housing project, “I’m very positive about this and I wish we saw more projects like this in terms of massing and setback and height, because all the issues that come up in previous in most of the projects we see the huge buildings built at property line that overshadow neighbors and that don’t have any real open space and that’s all addressed here…”
My neighbor who normally doesn’t follow projects, though he hears a fair amount of complaining about them from me, took a cruise through recent projects approved by ZAB with the two R & D projects in West Berkeley grabbing his attention. He commented, “why are they building parking lots for people to drive to work instead of housing so they can walk, I bet there is a lot of housing that could go up instead of those parking lots…” He is right.
There was a lot of complaining about the parking lots when the projects were being reviewed, but none of us thought to suggest that housing ought to go on the sites instead of cars. That won’t happen next time, but to actually require housing instead of parking lots, that demands city action. And, city action invariably falls into the cycle of referrals to the city manager and the Planning Commission whose agenda is tightly controlled by the Planning Department where little bubbles up.
The Community for a Cultural Civic Center (CCCC) met on Monday with Mayor Arreguin invited to discuss the $650,000,000 general obligation bond that will be on the November ballot. It wasn’t really clear what passing the bond would mean for restoring the Maudelle Shirek (old city hall) and the Veterans Buildings. The mayor started with enthusiasm for raising funds and said the revitalization “could” be funded with the bond, but then diverged to tapping Congresswoman Barbara Lee for $50 million for the Civic Center as being reasonable. It was all pretty “vague” with the list of other things for bond spending like “complete streets” bike and pedestrian plans, sidewalks, waterfront, etc.
Arreguin said the bond package would be spread over 48 years instead of the usual 30 to bring down the cost to $40.91 for each $100,000 of assessed value. This is the projected annual cost to property owners not total cost of paying back the money to investors (the bond holders) as that was estimated to be around $1.2 billion in the August 3 Council meeting discussion and documents. And even that number is in question given the last-minute revisions from the Finance Department (instigated by citizen Lomax finding calculation errors) and all the variables of spreading the bond tranches (sliced portions of the bond) over 20 – 30 years with repayment over 48 years.
The update on the Turtle Island Monument Project is mixed. The project was conceived to remake the fountain as a monument to honor and recognize local Native American history and has close to $1 million in funding, which is all good. But, the current difficulty is the consultants hired to finish the design and implement the project are resistant to participation from the indigenous people who are native to this area, the Lisjan/Ohlone who the project is supposed to honor. The Lisjan/Ohlone have no reservations or protected land. The description of shutting down the voices of the Native Americans made me think of the Sioux Tribe orphan Mose in William Kent Kreuger’s novel, This Tender Land. As a small child Mose was discovered next to his murdered Indian mother with his tongue cut out.
The Water Emergency Transportation Authority (WETA) started on Wednesday morning with a planning workshop that could be titled “Dream Big.” It is a plan for expanding ferry service from 10 terminals and 6 routes to somewhere between 21 terminals and 29 routes with 18 vessels currently and needing 61 vessels for the most expansive proposal and somewhere in between for more moderate dreaming. https://weta.sanfranciscobayferry.com/sites/default/files/weta-public/currentmeeting/b081722aDECK.pdf
The problem is always funding including how to fund WETA for current service. The answer to how to finance expansion, the purchase of all those new vessels and build new facilities is supposed to come sometime this fall in another workshop. As summarized last week fares made up only 16.7% of the revenue for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2022. It is all the other federal, state subsidies, ballot measure J (Contra Costa Transportation Authority) and a share of bridge tolls that supports WETA. Next time you are in a traffic jam at the Bay Bridge, instead of being frustrated, think If all of these cars weren’t driving across the bridge, there wouldn’t be enough money for WETA ferries to stay afloat.
The question which isn’t being asked is how many transfers or modes of transportation are we willing to use to get to a desired location, though the inconvenience of ferry boarding locations does occasionally come up. I live in the flats near the high school. As I drove to the Marina, I thought about what it would be like to use a ferry to commute. Getting to a Berkeley ferry would require a bus, drive or bike ride, then the ferry ride followed with BART, bus or bike on the other end. Ferry locations just aren’t convenient unless you live next door and are maybe headed to a ballgame in SF. In the WETA survey, ferries as a means of transportation for commuting to and from work rated the lowest as desirable and as transportation to an event as the highest. I never considered the ferry when I lived in SF and worked in Oakland after the earthquake. It was bus to BART to shuttle. As soon as the bridge opened I was back in my car for the convenience.
There are always people excited about expansion of ferry service whether it makes sense or not and a city representative from the Hercules area filled that role.
One question on electric ferries was answered. Electric ferries must be small or they are just too slow to compete with other modes of transportation including heavy fuel oil or marine diesel-powered ferries.
In closing, I can’t help thinking about Smedley Butler every time I hear about Haiti and sending Haitian asylum seekers back to Haiti. The U.S. made mess in Haiti started before 1914, but it was in that year that the invasion by the marines was planned and Smedley Butler became the ongoing leader of the occupation.
Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines and the Making and Breaking of America’s of America’s Empire by Jonathan Katz is an absolutely fascinating book looking at history and regime change through the war hero Smedley Butler beginning with his joining the marines at 16 and ending in 1934 when Smedley Darlington Butler blew the whistle and testified before a two-man panel of the Special House Committee on Un-American Activities on the planned fascist putsch by American industrialists.
In 1924 Smedley Butler was granted a leave of absence from the Navy and inducted as director of the Department of Public Safety of the City of Philadelphia, where, Butler introduced war tactics into policing in the city of Philadelphia.
An interesting twist in the 1934 coup in planning is the American Liberty League with founders from the American elite multimillionaires of manufacturing and oil and the losing candidates to FDR and the New Deal. Their declared aim was to “combat radicalism, preserve property rights, uphold and preserve the constitution.” A book I finished a couple of weeks ago One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse picks up in the 1930s where the planned coup ended. Did the elites find religion as the next useful path to sway the public into rejecting social programs? That is for us to decide.
Regime change is our country history and it looks like what goes around comes around. 2022 is a critical election year and who wins this year’s elections will determine the future of democracy. An August 2022 NBC poll of 1000 registered voters found the number one concern is, threats to democracy. It was rated ahead of cost of living, jobs and the economy, immigration, climate change, guns, abortion, crime, other and COVID in that order.
I recommend both books, Gangsters of Capitalism and One Nation Under God and if I can keep up on my reading there will be a stack of interesting suggestions in the coming weeks.
A couple of months ago I heard the buzz of saws and found that the magnificent tree with an incredible canopy that provided much appreciated summer shade was coming down. I watched as the large healthy tree with a thick trunk probably near 100 years old, the age of the houses on this block was fed into the chipper. I couldn’t stop thinking about what a waste it was to grind up a trunk that could have been milled into lumber for any number of projects.
Margo Schueler took a different approach when she had to remove what she called a wonderful tree, a canary pine and wrote it up in NextDoor.
“Last month we had a large non-native pine taken down from our West Berkeley home. There were many compelling reasons to remove this wonderful tree but we had struggled with this decision for over decade. Fortunately, we found Mike Hudson on Nextdoor and he was able to mill 5 - 10 foot sections into wonderful lumber now drying in stacks for future building. Cost 65% of the bid to grind and dispose of the tree. Very happy with this direction. Even happier on reading the article below - “Reforestation Hubs” Are Saving Urban Trees From Heading to Landfills Did you know that the US is losing 36 million [urban] trees every year? Several organizations have stepped up with creative solutions to save the wood, reduce carbon emissions and create jobs. “More wood from cities goes into landfills than is harvested from US National Forests,” says J. Morgan Grove, a research forester at Baltimore Field Station, USDA Forest Service. Thank you Mike!” (picture from Margo Scheuler)
I went to see the stacked drying wood for myself, amazing!
The damage and destruction to Peoples Park is still painful no matter how it settles, but if those magnificent trees were turned into wood for housing that would at least be more palatable than piles of wood chips. When I spoke with Margo about milling the tree instead of chipping, she told me Mike Hudson told her he had offered to mill the redwood trees whose roots were destroyed (a condition of the approval was to preserve the trees) by the developer for the 1698 University mixed-use project at McGee. The developer refused the offer, because it would take two days to mill the trees into lumbar so the trees were chipped. That was in August 2018. The project still isn’t finished four years later from all appearances. Something is very wrong with this picture when a developer couldn’t stop for two days out of four years to turn redwood trees into usable lumber. And, something is very wrong with a city and a university that doesn’t have a vision and requirement to change this course and whose only solution is landfill and piles of mulch.
From doing a little reading there is a lot of resistance to turning urban trees into lumbar that are cut down to make way for developments, expansion or to remove them because of their growing size and proximity to existing structures. Berkeley was cutting down trees to rehab streets until neighborhoods rose up in objection.
I wish this were the end of the story. The article referenced by Scheuler has a list of resources, that I have yet to check out. https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/reforestation-hubs-are-saving-urban-trees-from-heading-to-landfills?utm_source=Next+City+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c28eb8580f-DailyNL_2022_05_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fcee5bf7a0-c28eb8580f-44126641 This morning before I could hit fast forward, the ad for Aspiration.com https://www.aspiration.com/ started to play. It is a promotion for a credit card that theoretically offsets destructive anti-environment choices and behavior with planting a tree with a credit card swipe. The message, make all that spending feel good. I might have been taken in by such an ad if I didn’t know most of these programs are a failure as far as the trees go. There is a lot more available on the nature of trees and forests, but a good start is listening to The Daily, The Sunday Read: ‘Can Planting a Trillion New Trees Save the World?’ https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS81NG5BR2NJbA/episode/MTg2MDZjOWMtNzRmMS00NTI1LThjYTMtOTQzOTNjYTUzMGY0?hl=en
Saving the world and planting trees requires more than a swipe of a credit card and sticking seedlings in the ground. If those seedlings even survive at all is a big question. At the top of the list should be whether the location selected is appropriate for trees and does the tree species selected support the local ecosystem, meaning is the tree native to the area and will the tree support native birds and insects. Then there is ongoing care for the first three years or so when a seedling or young tree is taking root.
Even here in Berkeley with a tree planting grant, it is not guaranteed that the trees selected and planted support local ecosystems. The city is following up with care for the critical early years of the newly planted trees, but I wonder about the “younger” trees that are already here that look to be suffering and dying from the drought especially in the Sacramento Street median.
The first project reviewed at the Thursday Design Review Committee (DRC) was a 5-story mixed-use building at 1820 San Pablo between Hearst and Delaware, the location of the former Albatross Bar. To understand how the building is allowed 5 stories when the permitted number for this location is 4 stories, this additional floor is the reward known as a “density bonus” for designating 4 units as very low income in a base project of 33 units. Setting aside four units for very low-income households, the project gained a density bonus of 11 more units and another floor making the total five floors and 44 dwelling units.
Brad Gunkel, the architect, for 1820 San Pablo was trying to add design interest so this 5-story block would not look like just another BUB (big ugly box). What Gunkel thought would be a nice addition to the design, untreated wood starting on the third floor for the northern third of the building facing San Pablo was the subject of considerable objection first noted by West Berkeley resident Phil Allen and then the DRC members. All agreed that the untreated wood would not age nicely as Gunkel described and would instead deteriorate within a few years and require replacement. Charles Kahn DRC member gave his concern stating that, “rather than being a gift to the neighborhood, that this would degrade and would be more a curse…” The DRC voted unanimously to continue review with a list of requested revisions and modifications to be incorporated before proceeding to the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB).
The second DRC project at 2403 San Pablo at Channing, the former Omega Salvage Store, is a co-housing condominium project with 1, 2 and 3-bedroom units for a total of 36 units, with a large communal kitchen and great room and over 10,000 square feet of open space (six times more than required) designed by the people who plan to live there and are looking toward a future of aging in place. It is a lovely project and passed out of committee with an ask to make the San Pablo ground floor exterior more interesting. My vote would be to add a mural.
Committee member Steve Finacom said this about the co-housing project, “I’m very positive about this and I wish we saw more projects like this in terms of massing and setback and height, because all the issues that come up in previous in most of the projects we see the huge buildings built at property line that overshadow neighbors and that don’t have any real open space and that’s all addressed here…”
My neighbor who normally doesn’t follow projects, though he hears a fair amount of complaining about them from me, took a cruise through recent projects approved by ZAB with the two R & D projects in West Berkeley grabbing his attention. He commented, “why are they building parking lots for people to drive to work instead of housing so they can walk, I bet there is a lot of housing that could go up instead of those parking lots…” He is right.
There was a lot of complaining about the parking lots when the projects were being reviewed, but none of us thought to suggest that housing ought to go on the sites instead of cars. That won’t happen next time, but to actually require housing instead of parking lots, that demands city action. And, city action invariably falls into the cycle of referrals to the city manager and the Planning Commission whose agenda is tightly controlled by the Planning Department where little bubbles up.
The Community for a Cultural Civic Center (CCCC) met on Monday with Mayor Arreguin invited to discuss the $650,000,000 general obligation bond that will be on the November ballot. It wasn’t really clear what passing the bond would mean for restoring the Maudelle Shirek (old city hall) and the Veterans Buildings. The mayor started with enthusiasm for raising funds and said the revitalization “could” be funded with the bond, but then diverged to tapping Congresswoman Barbara Lee for $50 million for the Civic Center as being reasonable. It was all pretty “vague” with the list of other things for bond spending like “complete streets” bike and pedestrian plans, sidewalks, waterfront, etc.
Arreguin said the bond package would be spread over 48 years instead of the usual 30 to bring down the cost to $40.91 for each $100,000 of assessed value. This is the projected annual cost to property owners not total cost of paying back the money to investors (the bond holders) as that was estimated to be around $1.2 billion in the August 3 Council meeting discussion and documents. And even that number is in question given the last-minute revisions from the Finance Department (instigated by citizen Lomax finding calculation errors) and all the variables of spreading the bond tranches (sliced portions of the bond) over 20 – 30 years with repayment over 48 years.
The update on the Turtle Island Monument Project is mixed. The project was conceived to remake the fountain as a monument to honor and recognize local Native American history and has close to $1 million in funding, which is all good. But, the current difficulty is the consultants hired to finish the design and implement the project are resistant to participation from the indigenous people who are native to this area, the Lisjan/Ohlone who the project is supposed to honor. The Lisjan/Ohlone have no reservations or protected land. The description of shutting down the voices of the Native Americans made me think of the Sioux Tribe orphan Mose in William Kent Kreuger’s novel, This Tender Land. As a small child Mose was discovered next to his murdered Indian mother with his tongue cut out.
The Water Emergency Transportation Authority (WETA) started on Wednesday morning with a planning workshop that could be titled “Dream Big.” It is a plan for expanding ferry service from 10 terminals and 6 routes to somewhere between 21 terminals and 29 routes with 18 vessels currently and needing 61 vessels for the most expansive proposal and somewhere in between for more moderate dreaming. https://weta.sanfranciscobayferry.com/sites/default/files/weta-public/currentmeeting/b081722aDECK.pdf
The problem is always funding including how to fund WETA for current service. The answer to how to finance expansion, the purchase of all those new vessels and build new facilities is supposed to come sometime this fall in another workshop. As summarized last week fares made up only 16.7% of the revenue for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2022. It is all the other federal, state subsidies, ballot measure J (Contra Costa Transportation Authority) and a share of bridge tolls that supports WETA. Next time you are in a traffic jam at the Bay Bridge, instead of being frustrated, think If all of these cars weren’t driving across the bridge, there wouldn’t be enough money for WETA ferries to stay afloat.
The question which isn’t being asked is how many transfers or modes of transportation are we willing to use to get to a desired location, though the inconvenience of ferry boarding locations does occasionally come up. I live in the flats near the high school. As I drove to the Marina, I thought about what it would be like to use a ferry to commute. Getting to a Berkeley ferry would require a bus, drive or bike ride, then the ferry ride followed with BART, bus or bike on the other end. Ferry locations just aren’t convenient unless you live next door and are maybe headed to a ballgame in SF. In the WETA survey, ferries as a means of transportation for commuting to and from work rated the lowest as desirable and as transportation to an event as the highest. I never considered the ferry when I lived in SF and worked in Oakland after the earthquake. It was bus to BART to shuttle. As soon as the bridge opened I was back in my car for the convenience.
There are always people excited about expansion of ferry service whether it makes sense or not and a city representative from the Hercules area filled that role.
One question on electric ferries was answered. Electric ferries must be small or they are just too slow to compete with other modes of transportation including heavy fuel oil or marine diesel-powered ferries.
In closing, I can’t help thinking about Smedley Butler every time I hear about Haiti and sending Haitian asylum seekers back to Haiti. The U.S. made mess in Haiti started before 1914, but it was in that year that the invasion by the marines was planned and Smedley Butler became the ongoing leader of the occupation.
Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines and the Making and Breaking of America’s of America’s Empire by Jonathan Katz is an absolutely fascinating book looking at history and regime change through the war hero Smedley Butler beginning with his joining the marines at 16 and ending in 1934 when Smedley Darlington Butler blew the whistle and testified before a two-man panel of the Special House Committee on Un-American Activities on the planned fascist putsch by American industrialists.
In 1924 Smedley Butler was granted a leave of absence from the Navy and inducted as director of the Department of Public Safety of the City of Philadelphia, where, Butler introduced war tactics into policing in the city of Philadelphia.
An interesting twist in the 1934 coup in planning is the American Liberty League with founders from the American elite multimillionaires of manufacturing and oil and the losing candidates to FDR and the New Deal. Their declared aim was to “combat radicalism, preserve property rights, uphold and preserve the constitution.” A book I finished a couple of weeks ago One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse picks up in the 1930s where the planned coup ended. Did the elites find religion as the next useful path to sway the public into rejecting social programs? That is for us to decide.
Regime change is our country history and it looks like what goes around comes around. 2022 is a critical election year and who wins this year’s elections will determine the future of democracy. An August 2022 NBC poll of 1000 registered voters found the number one concern is, threats to democracy. It was rated ahead of cost of living, jobs and the economy, immigration, climate change, guns, abortion, crime, other and COVID in that order.
I recommend both books, Gangsters of Capitalism and One Nation Under God and if I can keep up on my reading there will be a stack of interesting suggestions in the coming weeks.
August 14, 2021
I think I love August with city council on vacation. This coming week looks wonderfully light.
DO NOT MISS Love Letters to the Park This is the absolutely lovely book that is just as the title states a love of a park and the public response to the Berkeley Marina Area Specific Plan (BMASP) from April to July 2022 compiled and edited by Martin Nicolaus. You can read the pdf with this link https://chavezpark.org/new-book-love-letters-to-the-park/
After you read it, sign the Petition for saving Cesar Chavez Park https://chavezpark.org/petition-to-save-chavez-park-from-bmasp/ and send off an email to city council at [email protected] Council needs to hear from you.
After we skate over the news, I’ll get to the main topic of this Diary.
As I start this Diary the country is in a whirl over the FBI descending on Mar-a-Lago, the Espionage Act listed on the search warrant and Trump taking the 5th over 440 times in the Manhattan District Attorney investigation of the Trump business. I confess nothing would make me happier as an end to Trump’s lifetime of criminology (the book Criminology on Trump should drop on my doorstep any day) than to see him in an orange jumpsuit without the hairspray for the combover.
Here in Berkeley it is blessedly quiet now that we have a stay at Peoples Park. It is thanks to the Peoples Park Historic District Advocacy Group that we have the attorney Tom Lippe representing the group and the stay to stop construction. You can bet UCB won’t give up and there are court battles ahead. Everything you need to know to donate to the cause to save Peoples Park is in this link: http://www.peoplesparkhxdist.org/donate-now/ For full disclosure, I dug out those paper checks I rarely use and dropped off my donation.
Nothing of consequence happened at the city meeting I did attend. Two house additions were approved at the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) with the promise of full schedules for the two meetings in September. For those who are finding six and eight story buildings as their new neighbor attending the DRC meeting this coming Thursday would be a very beneficial introduction to the process. All the details are in the Activist’s Calendar.
I lost focus on the rambling Civic Arts Commission Grants Subcommittee meeting Friday morning and exited early.
WETA (Water Emergency Transportation Authority) is meeting on Wednesday at 10 am for planning and 1 pm for the board meeting. Seems the WETA Chair and staff took a trip to Sweden and Norway to check out zero emission ferries. That report should be interesting. I wonder if they did any sightseeing while they were there, like ferry rides to interesting places.
Going through the financials, fares covered only 16.7% of the FY 2022 operating costs. Without Federal COVID-19 rescue funds, WETA would have been deeply underwater. Those funds covered 44.1% of total operating expenses. For June, the last month of the fiscal year 2022 when WETA reached 80% of pre-pandemic ridership, fares covered 19% of the operating cost and federal assistance made of 67%. It is unclear how Berkeley expects WETA to pick of the cost of a Berkeley pier and ferry and contribute to bailing out the Marina fund. It looks more like WETA is looking to Berkeley for the bailing out.
I deviated from my reading plan for the week and picked up This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor by Susan Wicklund with co-author Alan Kesselheim. The title really describes the book; Dr. Wicklund’s personal journey, patient experiences and the threats and harassment that physicians and their families face to provide this critical piece of reproductive health care. Wicklund writes about security escorts, being armed, colleagues who are murdered, the constant danger from anti-abortion extremists and support for her chosen career.
With the Supreme Court ending Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, abortion is on the ballot nationwide either directly with ballot initiatives or indirectly through who is elected. While national survey after national survey places 60% of the population supporting access to abortion, that is not the case for the Republicans who dominate legislatures in 26 states. They are banning abortions where they have the power to do so. If Republicans take over the House and the Senate, they are promising a nationwide abortion ban.
Despite an overwhelming vote in conservative red Kansas by 59% on August 2 to maintain access to abortion, just days later, in Indiana, the state that allowed a pregnant 10-year old from Ohio access to an abortion, Governor Eric Holcomb signed into law a sweeping ban on abortion starting at conception with exceptions only for rape, incest, lethal fetal abnormality or when necessary to prevent severe health risks or death.
This November we will be voting on California Proposition 1, the Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment.
A “yes” vote supports amending the state constitution to prohibit the state from interfering with or denying an individual’s reproductive freedom, which is defined to include a right to an abortion and a right to contraceptives.
A “no” vote opposes this amendment providing a right to reproductive freedom in the state constitution.
The East Bay Times editorial board started their August 14 editorial with this, “In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, it’s essential that California voters amend the state Constitution to ensure reproductive choice.”
No matter how we vote in November, even with an expected overwhelming “yes” to protect reproductive freedom in California, Federal law overrules states. What happens nationally matters.
In all the discussions, books, shows for or against abortion, one thing that is rarely mentioned is the number 39. Thirty-nine is the average number of years between the onset of menstruation and menopause. Later life pregnancies are not that common, but the possibility of pregnancy hovers over all of those years.
Nearly four decades is a long time and there are bound to be birth control, family planning failures. If the desired family size is two children the chart in The Turnaway Study gives the expected number of additional pregnancies which might be anywhere from 0 to 7. The zero is with the Implants and nine would be needed. Withdrawal is the least reliable. If abortion is used as birth control the estimate is 30 early medication abortions or 25 second trimester abortions.
That 39 year time may even be longer in the future. Though the average age is twelve, the onset of menarche (first period) is slowly moving earlier and may start when a child is as young as 8 years old. Some of those most rabidly anti-abortion oppose terminating a pregnancy in a child’s little immature body.
The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women and the Consequences of Having or Being Denied an Abortion by Diana Greene Foster is the only book that really brings fertility, abortion, pregnancy and the impact on women’s lives into the full frame. I picked up the audiobook first from the library, but there is so much information I purchased the book to keep as a reference.
I continually marvel at how access to birth control and access to abortion really changed women’s lives. Women these days have so many opportunities and there are still doors to open, but with the loss of abortion all the gains made since Roe v. Wade in 1973 are slipping away for millions of women in this country.
The Turnaway Study chronicles the differences between women who had or were denied an abortion. Women denied abortion were poorer, stayed in abusive relationships longer, had to give up career and education plans. Their children were also impacted, especially with the higher incidence of poverty. Surprisingly women who continued their pregnancy and gave up the baby for adoption had the poorest emotional outcome. Pregnancy is not without risk. Two women in the study died of complications and this was even when the study deliberately excluded women with life threatening pregnancies.
Managing the national juried art exhibition “Choice” for Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art (NCWCA) in 2013 was really a turning point for me. That is when I learned to start the conversation on reproductive rights, abortion at every opportunity, really anywhere and everywhere I happened to be next to another person long enough to strike up a conversation. The conversations spilled over to friends and I opened up about my own abortions.
I didn’t have a wrenching personal story to tell. I never risked my life for an illegal abortion. I was never conflicted in my decision for any one of my three abortions. I was and am just so grateful abortion was legal when I needed it. It was always the stories from other women that were far more interesting or the stories they wouldn’t tell that I knew about.
I think of one friend who shared she had multiple miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy before her daughter was born. I wonder what kind of care would she get if all this was happening right now if she lived in one of these draconian states that bans abortions. Would she get the medical care she needed or would the doctors be so afraid of losing their license and being sent to prison that they would withhold intervening until her life hung by a thread?
Would those miscarriages be misinterpreted as a self-induced abortion? Would she be in a legal battle instead of a grandmother with a daughter and two grandchildren? These aren’t far-fetched questions to ponder anymore. Even without these post Roe questions according to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women 1300 women were arrested or charged in the U.S. from 2006 to 2020 for their actions during pregnancy.
There is the friend from my childhood who had an illegal abortion when we were about twenty. I wouldn’t have known about it if it hadn’t gone so badly, she nearly died. Her mother told my mother and my mother told me. I had this text exchange with my friend some weeks ago, after a lunch where two of us talked endlessly about the end of Roe and our support for access to abortion while my friend sat silent.
Me: Have you ever talked openly about your own abortion. I was waiting for you to say something when I said I had three.
Friend: No, not going to. Haven’t talked about mother’s either
Me: At one of my public speaking engagements I spoke about all three of you.
I don’t know why she won’t talk about it, maybe it was too traumatic, maybe she has regrets or maybe she is afraid of the repercussions if it got out in her closeknit circle of friends or at her church. After all her mother confessed on her deathbed that she was condemned by her pastor when she revealed to him that she had had an abortion at the onset of WWII.
The “three” in this text message is her younger sister who is also a close friend. One night several years ago when I started a discussion on abortion, my own and her sister’s brush with death from an illegal abortion It never occurred to me that she didn’t know. Oops! These two sisters are incredibly close and shared everything or so I thought. As the evening wore on, we talked about how we are shamed into silence over what is so common for so many of us. We spoke of her mother’s deathbed confession and then she talked with me about her own abortion.
I knew the two sisters spent a week together after the fall of Roe. I called the younger sister and asked if during that week with the end of Roe on the news day and night, did they ever talk about their own abortions or access to abortion. The answer was no.
The question that keeps coming up for me is how is it that three women, a mother and her two daughters, two sisters, all three who love each other very much and are incredibly close couldn’t share and talk with each other about this one thing, abortion and the abortions that each one of them had? We are all in our 70s now and still holding back. Where does that leave us if women who have had abortions and that is around one in three to one in four of us continue to wall ourselves into silence?
We are in the majority and yet, because we have been led to believe that all we need to do is send off another donation and we can or should hide in the closet of silence and abortion shame, we have been outflanked by Concerned Women of America (CWA) the well-organized, evangelical activist group of over 3 million promoting biblical values through advocacy and all the other anti-abortion organizations. It is long past time to learn from the CWA strategies, 98% of them vote, 93% have signed a petition, 77% have boycotted a company, 74% have contacted a public official and nearly half have written a letter to the editor. That is a lot of activism.
How many of us does it take to come out of the closet to talk to family, friends, neighbors, strangers to solidly secure reproductive freedom? How many of us does it take to outdo the activism of CWA and like groups? Certainly, thus far it is not enough of us or we wouldn’t be in this downward, backwards spiral.
Dr. Wicklund writes in her book that she always gives her patients the option of seeing the tissue removed if they want to. She describes one exchange with a young woman, who wanted an abortion and whose extended family was trying to stop her,
“’That’s all?’ She says when I show it to her. She escapes into her own thoughts for a minute and looks at me with hesitation. ‘What is it you’re thinking I prod.’ ‘How can it be that my uncle believes I am less important than that tiny bit of tissue you just took out of me?’”
Abortion was my choice when my method of birth control failed, but choice is not just about having access to abortion. It encompasses all choices, if and when to be a parent, method of contraception and termination of pregnancy. It is about celebrating a wanted pregnancy and weeping over a pregnancy not fulfilled. It is terminating a pregnancy without regret or feeling conflicted with loss wishing circumstances were different. Choice is all of these things. Choice is what each of us must be free to decide for ourselves.
To have that choice we need doctors nurses, midwifes, doulas, pharmacists who are on our side and if things go wrong, complications arise, they must be free to intervene and not hamstrung by abortion bans.
It is up to us where we go from here. And, how we vote is critical
I think I love August with city council on vacation. This coming week looks wonderfully light.
DO NOT MISS Love Letters to the Park This is the absolutely lovely book that is just as the title states a love of a park and the public response to the Berkeley Marina Area Specific Plan (BMASP) from April to July 2022 compiled and edited by Martin Nicolaus. You can read the pdf with this link https://chavezpark.org/new-book-love-letters-to-the-park/
After you read it, sign the Petition for saving Cesar Chavez Park https://chavezpark.org/petition-to-save-chavez-park-from-bmasp/ and send off an email to city council at [email protected] Council needs to hear from you.
After we skate over the news, I’ll get to the main topic of this Diary.
As I start this Diary the country is in a whirl over the FBI descending on Mar-a-Lago, the Espionage Act listed on the search warrant and Trump taking the 5th over 440 times in the Manhattan District Attorney investigation of the Trump business. I confess nothing would make me happier as an end to Trump’s lifetime of criminology (the book Criminology on Trump should drop on my doorstep any day) than to see him in an orange jumpsuit without the hairspray for the combover.
Here in Berkeley it is blessedly quiet now that we have a stay at Peoples Park. It is thanks to the Peoples Park Historic District Advocacy Group that we have the attorney Tom Lippe representing the group and the stay to stop construction. You can bet UCB won’t give up and there are court battles ahead. Everything you need to know to donate to the cause to save Peoples Park is in this link: http://www.peoplesparkhxdist.org/donate-now/ For full disclosure, I dug out those paper checks I rarely use and dropped off my donation.
Nothing of consequence happened at the city meeting I did attend. Two house additions were approved at the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) with the promise of full schedules for the two meetings in September. For those who are finding six and eight story buildings as their new neighbor attending the DRC meeting this coming Thursday would be a very beneficial introduction to the process. All the details are in the Activist’s Calendar.
I lost focus on the rambling Civic Arts Commission Grants Subcommittee meeting Friday morning and exited early.
WETA (Water Emergency Transportation Authority) is meeting on Wednesday at 10 am for planning and 1 pm for the board meeting. Seems the WETA Chair and staff took a trip to Sweden and Norway to check out zero emission ferries. That report should be interesting. I wonder if they did any sightseeing while they were there, like ferry rides to interesting places.
Going through the financials, fares covered only 16.7% of the FY 2022 operating costs. Without Federal COVID-19 rescue funds, WETA would have been deeply underwater. Those funds covered 44.1% of total operating expenses. For June, the last month of the fiscal year 2022 when WETA reached 80% of pre-pandemic ridership, fares covered 19% of the operating cost and federal assistance made of 67%. It is unclear how Berkeley expects WETA to pick of the cost of a Berkeley pier and ferry and contribute to bailing out the Marina fund. It looks more like WETA is looking to Berkeley for the bailing out.
I deviated from my reading plan for the week and picked up This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor by Susan Wicklund with co-author Alan Kesselheim. The title really describes the book; Dr. Wicklund’s personal journey, patient experiences and the threats and harassment that physicians and their families face to provide this critical piece of reproductive health care. Wicklund writes about security escorts, being armed, colleagues who are murdered, the constant danger from anti-abortion extremists and support for her chosen career.
With the Supreme Court ending Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, abortion is on the ballot nationwide either directly with ballot initiatives or indirectly through who is elected. While national survey after national survey places 60% of the population supporting access to abortion, that is not the case for the Republicans who dominate legislatures in 26 states. They are banning abortions where they have the power to do so. If Republicans take over the House and the Senate, they are promising a nationwide abortion ban.
Despite an overwhelming vote in conservative red Kansas by 59% on August 2 to maintain access to abortion, just days later, in Indiana, the state that allowed a pregnant 10-year old from Ohio access to an abortion, Governor Eric Holcomb signed into law a sweeping ban on abortion starting at conception with exceptions only for rape, incest, lethal fetal abnormality or when necessary to prevent severe health risks or death.
This November we will be voting on California Proposition 1, the Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment.
A “yes” vote supports amending the state constitution to prohibit the state from interfering with or denying an individual’s reproductive freedom, which is defined to include a right to an abortion and a right to contraceptives.
A “no” vote opposes this amendment providing a right to reproductive freedom in the state constitution.
The East Bay Times editorial board started their August 14 editorial with this, “In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, it’s essential that California voters amend the state Constitution to ensure reproductive choice.”
No matter how we vote in November, even with an expected overwhelming “yes” to protect reproductive freedom in California, Federal law overrules states. What happens nationally matters.
In all the discussions, books, shows for or against abortion, one thing that is rarely mentioned is the number 39. Thirty-nine is the average number of years between the onset of menstruation and menopause. Later life pregnancies are not that common, but the possibility of pregnancy hovers over all of those years.
Nearly four decades is a long time and there are bound to be birth control, family planning failures. If the desired family size is two children the chart in The Turnaway Study gives the expected number of additional pregnancies which might be anywhere from 0 to 7. The zero is with the Implants and nine would be needed. Withdrawal is the least reliable. If abortion is used as birth control the estimate is 30 early medication abortions or 25 second trimester abortions.
That 39 year time may even be longer in the future. Though the average age is twelve, the onset of menarche (first period) is slowly moving earlier and may start when a child is as young as 8 years old. Some of those most rabidly anti-abortion oppose terminating a pregnancy in a child’s little immature body.
The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women and the Consequences of Having or Being Denied an Abortion by Diana Greene Foster is the only book that really brings fertility, abortion, pregnancy and the impact on women’s lives into the full frame. I picked up the audiobook first from the library, but there is so much information I purchased the book to keep as a reference.
I continually marvel at how access to birth control and access to abortion really changed women’s lives. Women these days have so many opportunities and there are still doors to open, but with the loss of abortion all the gains made since Roe v. Wade in 1973 are slipping away for millions of women in this country.
The Turnaway Study chronicles the differences between women who had or were denied an abortion. Women denied abortion were poorer, stayed in abusive relationships longer, had to give up career and education plans. Their children were also impacted, especially with the higher incidence of poverty. Surprisingly women who continued their pregnancy and gave up the baby for adoption had the poorest emotional outcome. Pregnancy is not without risk. Two women in the study died of complications and this was even when the study deliberately excluded women with life threatening pregnancies.
Managing the national juried art exhibition “Choice” for Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art (NCWCA) in 2013 was really a turning point for me. That is when I learned to start the conversation on reproductive rights, abortion at every opportunity, really anywhere and everywhere I happened to be next to another person long enough to strike up a conversation. The conversations spilled over to friends and I opened up about my own abortions.
I didn’t have a wrenching personal story to tell. I never risked my life for an illegal abortion. I was never conflicted in my decision for any one of my three abortions. I was and am just so grateful abortion was legal when I needed it. It was always the stories from other women that were far more interesting or the stories they wouldn’t tell that I knew about.
I think of one friend who shared she had multiple miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy before her daughter was born. I wonder what kind of care would she get if all this was happening right now if she lived in one of these draconian states that bans abortions. Would she get the medical care she needed or would the doctors be so afraid of losing their license and being sent to prison that they would withhold intervening until her life hung by a thread?
Would those miscarriages be misinterpreted as a self-induced abortion? Would she be in a legal battle instead of a grandmother with a daughter and two grandchildren? These aren’t far-fetched questions to ponder anymore. Even without these post Roe questions according to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women 1300 women were arrested or charged in the U.S. from 2006 to 2020 for their actions during pregnancy.
There is the friend from my childhood who had an illegal abortion when we were about twenty. I wouldn’t have known about it if it hadn’t gone so badly, she nearly died. Her mother told my mother and my mother told me. I had this text exchange with my friend some weeks ago, after a lunch where two of us talked endlessly about the end of Roe and our support for access to abortion while my friend sat silent.
Me: Have you ever talked openly about your own abortion. I was waiting for you to say something when I said I had three.
Friend: No, not going to. Haven’t talked about mother’s either
Me: At one of my public speaking engagements I spoke about all three of you.
I don’t know why she won’t talk about it, maybe it was too traumatic, maybe she has regrets or maybe she is afraid of the repercussions if it got out in her closeknit circle of friends or at her church. After all her mother confessed on her deathbed that she was condemned by her pastor when she revealed to him that she had had an abortion at the onset of WWII.
The “three” in this text message is her younger sister who is also a close friend. One night several years ago when I started a discussion on abortion, my own and her sister’s brush with death from an illegal abortion It never occurred to me that she didn’t know. Oops! These two sisters are incredibly close and shared everything or so I thought. As the evening wore on, we talked about how we are shamed into silence over what is so common for so many of us. We spoke of her mother’s deathbed confession and then she talked with me about her own abortion.
I knew the two sisters spent a week together after the fall of Roe. I called the younger sister and asked if during that week with the end of Roe on the news day and night, did they ever talk about their own abortions or access to abortion. The answer was no.
The question that keeps coming up for me is how is it that three women, a mother and her two daughters, two sisters, all three who love each other very much and are incredibly close couldn’t share and talk with each other about this one thing, abortion and the abortions that each one of them had? We are all in our 70s now and still holding back. Where does that leave us if women who have had abortions and that is around one in three to one in four of us continue to wall ourselves into silence?
We are in the majority and yet, because we have been led to believe that all we need to do is send off another donation and we can or should hide in the closet of silence and abortion shame, we have been outflanked by Concerned Women of America (CWA) the well-organized, evangelical activist group of over 3 million promoting biblical values through advocacy and all the other anti-abortion organizations. It is long past time to learn from the CWA strategies, 98% of them vote, 93% have signed a petition, 77% have boycotted a company, 74% have contacted a public official and nearly half have written a letter to the editor. That is a lot of activism.
How many of us does it take to come out of the closet to talk to family, friends, neighbors, strangers to solidly secure reproductive freedom? How many of us does it take to outdo the activism of CWA and like groups? Certainly, thus far it is not enough of us or we wouldn’t be in this downward, backwards spiral.
Dr. Wicklund writes in her book that she always gives her patients the option of seeing the tissue removed if they want to. She describes one exchange with a young woman, who wanted an abortion and whose extended family was trying to stop her,
“’That’s all?’ She says when I show it to her. She escapes into her own thoughts for a minute and looks at me with hesitation. ‘What is it you’re thinking I prod.’ ‘How can it be that my uncle believes I am less important than that tiny bit of tissue you just took out of me?’”
Abortion was my choice when my method of birth control failed, but choice is not just about having access to abortion. It encompasses all choices, if and when to be a parent, method of contraception and termination of pregnancy. It is about celebrating a wanted pregnancy and weeping over a pregnancy not fulfilled. It is terminating a pregnancy without regret or feeling conflicted with loss wishing circumstances were different. Choice is all of these things. Choice is what each of us must be free to decide for ourselves.
To have that choice we need doctors nurses, midwifes, doulas, pharmacists who are on our side and if things go wrong, complications arise, they must be free to intervene and not hamstrung by abortion bans.
It is up to us where we go from here. And, how we vote is critical
August 7, 2021
This Diary is going to cover a lot of territory. It’s August and at least things look quiet for the week ahead. Looking back, there is so much that happened.
The Berkeley City Council is finally on summer recess through September 12th. Thank goodness! I so hope they stay away for the remainder of the summer. We could use weeks of peace to recover from CoB (City of Berkeley) WHIPLASH.
July 27, 2022 was the date, City Council was supposed to leave town or at least close up shop until mid-September, but Mayor Arreguin scheduled a special council meeting for August 3 dedicated to ballot initiatives. The mayor must have reconsidered how he handled the Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance Ballot measure from the 4 x 4 Committee at July 26th council meeting. By Monday afternoon Arreguin had resurrected it placing it as the last item on the August 3 special council meeting agenda.
On Tuesday afternoon the day before the meeting, I received an email from someone I don’t know Geoff Lomax (evidently my email is being shared – thank you and I mean that sincerely) that the total debt service payment (the expected cost for property owners) in the City documents for the General Obligation Bond ballot measure was off by as much as 50%. And, that wasn’t in the good direction, meaning that any of us who are property owners would be paying almost double what the City initially estimated. https://womberkeley.blogspot.com/2022/08/wom-berkeley-identifies-flawed.html
I heard more about the error at National Night Out. It all fell into place when I saw the “Revised material – Finance (Supp 2)” from Henry Oyekanmi, Director of Finance with the document header, “Revised tax statement figures for both $600 million and $650 million tax statements.” https://berkeleyca.gov/city-council-special-meeting-eagenda-august-3-2022
Lomax’s analysis pushed the revision, but can we rely on the 22% adjustment as the final answer when there was so little time to review the package? That was the next question posed in the blog.
The council debated for nearly three hours whether the bond should be $600 million or $650 million and whether the “median” should be used instead of “average” to help property owners calculate the impact to their property tax bill. At times it felt they were almost giddy with the prospect of the big spending bond package.
The bigger question for me is; Does a $650,000,000 General Obligation Bond that residents of Berkeley are going to be paying for either directly or indirectly for the next 48 years with fuzzy spending and numbers even make sense? And even if it did make sense, can we really expect commission oversight to keep the funds away from sloshing around to cover budget overruns or pet projects when right now commissions that are assigned oversight responsibility for much smaller ballot measures complain that they are not provided the financial information, the documentation they need to fulfill their responsibilities.
The council finally ended discussion at 12:05 pm. Droste was absent for the entire day leaving the unanimous vote count as eight in favor of the bond. Arreguin, Hahn, Wengraf and Kesarwani will author the argument in support of bond.
After a brief break next up was Vice Mayor Harrison’s ballot initiative to tax residential units vacant for more than 182 days. This is a ballot measure that I have supported from the beginning. Berkeley has more than its share of housing that has been vacant for years and some for decades. It is past time for these vacant units to be brought back for housing or if they stay vacant for the owners to pay a tax on that vacancy.
Arreguin signed on to the revision which brought a sigh of relief as Wengraf, Taplin, Kesarwani and Droste all stood on the other side to sink a tax on vacant residential units. Taplin was a little cagey in his move to sink it by suggesting the ballot measure should go to committee for further review. Hahn was always a question of which way she would land. Hahn spoke earlier in the meeting by phone that she was in favor of the measure, but I’ve seen her say one thing and vote the opposite so many times that I sat on the edge of my chair when her name was called not once but six times. Her vote would determine the outcome of whether the ballot measure would pass or fail. It was unclear if she had just dropped off or changed her mind, finally, Hahn was able to unmute her phone, voted yes and the ballot measure passed with Wengraf as a resounding no and Kesarwani and Taplin abstaining.
The Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance Ballot measure from the 4 x 4 Committee was the last agenda item of the day. By the time that discussion started at 2:37 pm, we had all been on zoom since 9 am. Hahn, who could only connect by phone, dropped off after the Vacancy Tax passed so when the vote came to support the option of designating units in new construction as rent-controlled when they are created as the result of demolishing a building with rent-controlled units, it lost with one vote short of the needed five. Bartlett, Harrison, Robinson and Arreguin all voted for the option of designating the new units as rent-controlled (one new for one rent-controlled demolished). Kesarwani and Taplin abstained. Wengraf voted no.
The section on Eviction for Good Cause for the Golden Duplexes did not come up for a vote (lack of support). The only vote that held was the vote to suspend the current ordinance that ends rent control if the annual average rate of vacant units exceeds 5% over a six-month period. We should still keep an eye on this as with all the massive construction of large multi-unit buildings we may soon reach this threshold. I wouldn’t be surprised if that condition arises, pressure would come from the big international investors like Blackrock to end rent control.
In the end Soli Alpert representing the Rent Board said the cost of a ballot initiative could not be justified with only one section of the Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance measure being passed by council and the rest failing.
This is a good time to pay attention to Kesarwani’s comments and watch how she votes. Elisa Mikiten just announced she is running against Rashi Kesarwani in District 1. Mikiten is currently chair of the Planning Commission and was previously on the Police Review Commission.
Wednesday meetings finished with Carol L. Rice, Wildlife Resource Management and Cheryl Miller, Registered Landscape Architect giving a well-practiced presentation that they defined as the first of three meetings on the Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) at the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission. It sounded as if they were hired as consultants and their presentation along with the two meetings to follow one in September and one in December is to fulfill some State mandate.
As far as meeting the goal to better prepare the community for the growing threat of wildfire, I would classify the presentation as 1 on a scale of 10. I can’t comment on this year’s meeting by councilmembers Wengraf and Hahn on wildfire in urban wildland interface, but prior year presentations from councilmembers were so much better than this run through a power point, but then I haven’t fully explored the new CWPP page to the city website. This may all be better than first appearances. https://berkeleyca.gov/safety-health/disaster-preparedness/community-wildfire-protection-plan
The Hillside Fire Safety Group showed up in generous numbers for the CWPP presentation and is still fixated on eucalyptus trees.
I saw the text on suspending the prohibition of the use of pepper spray and teargas just as the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission closed and found the post for another City Council Special meeting at 8:15 pm Thursday evening (the posting notice went up at 8:14 pm) with the AGENDA: 1. Discussion and possible action regarding the temporary suspension of the June 9, 2020 policy prohibiting the use of tear gas, smoke and pepper spray for the duration of the City Council recess [emphasis added] From: City Manager.
This is all about Peoples Park and UC Police marching in donned in riot gear to clear the park of people and then trees.
The mayor must have gotten a flood of pushback as the cancellation notices started to appear Thursday morning. Relief was the word of the day, but let’s not forget how we got here.
The destruction of Peoples Park is another chapter in this ugly history. This was decades in the making. The entire scene smacks of an institution determined to exercise its hold on this city and Peoples Park; to leave no doubt who has the hands of power. There are absolutely other places to build, but that wasn’t the point for UCB. It is power and the graveling of our elected at its feet that got us here. It all adds another layer of bitterness to the scene. https://www.peoplespark.org/wp/
And just in case your memory is short you might want to reread Mayor Jesse Arreguin: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2021-08-01/article/49330?headline=Mayor-Jesse-Arreguin-Snatching-Defeat-from-the-Jaws-of-Victory-br-or-br-Follow-the-Money-or-Lack-of-Money-in-the-UC-Settlement-Deal--Leila-H.-Moncharsh-attorney-for-Berkeley-Citizens-for-a-Better-Plan-bc4bp.com-
I walked up to see for myself the damage wrought by UCB. Words can hardly describe the heartbreaking scene and even the pictures don’t capture the impact of standing in the middle of the park surrounded by felled giant tree trunks lying like corpses amidst piles of branches with shriveling leaves. Towers of mulch fill empty spaces and when I looked up, a flock of birds circled overhead as if lost searching for the stately oaks and redwoods that once were their refuge. Devastating!
The Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) on Thursday evening was less than stunning as was the commission’s assessment of the new 8 story student housing project with 188 units at 2065 Kittridge. There can be no more than 5 meetings to review a project (SB 330) so the LPC was essentially stuck with approving a project that all of them found lacking in appeal and design. Bill Shrader, developer is still whining that he can’t have natural gas in the new building though I do agree with him that an open café/coffee shop on Allston across from the Y will have more traffic and a better chance of success than moving it to the corner of Harold Way and Kittridge across from the library as was requested by Commissioner Denise Hall Montgomery. The Shattuck Cinemas will soon be demolished to make way for the project. And, the LPC dismissed the request from Commissioner Finacom who was unable to attend, but sent written notes including a request that pictures be taken and preserved of the murals and artwork in the Shattuck Cinema theaters before they are demolished.
Before I picked up the book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perloth, I had never heard the term zero-day. Of course, I understood that systems can be hacked and read about cities and companies held hostage in the press. I’ve had my credit card hacked and replaced numerous times and shudder when I need to use my old computer with the operating system that can no longer be updated. I just didn’t know the word for a hole in security, a vulnerability in software that can be used for malicious intent like the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline in May 2021 is called zero-day.
I have my reservations about how much spyware I bring into the house. I certainly would never have an Alexa to collect personal data or put appliances or devices on the internet just for convenience. It is bad enough that my iPhone tracks me everywhere and now my data can be picked up by IKE as I stroll through Berkeley commercial areas. These are the little things that those of us not skilled in coding can recognize.
Perloth’s book is about so much more. In her epilogue she writes her intended audience is for those of us not deep into cyber security.
The cyber invasions by Russia take up a lot of writing space. It was a huge surprise that some of the most skilled hackers are coming out of Argentina. Seems that being in a country that lacks broad digital access is actually a motivator for teenagers to learn how to hack into systems. Another piece of news was that two decades ago American teams from Berkeley, Harvard, and MIT dominated the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), the oldest and most prestigious contest of its kind with over a hundred countries represented. These days US teams don’t even make the top ten finalists. The winners are Russian, Polish, Chinese, South Korean and Taiwanese.
Perloth doesn’t hold any punches. Section VII. Boomerang chronicles how withholding notification from companies like Microsoft of zero-days discovered by the US NSA came back to bite us.
If you wish to pick up This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, it is available as an ebook at all the local libraries (Oakland, Contra Costa, Alameda County, San Francisco) except Berkeley.
One more thing, I heard at National Night Out that Charles Clarke is moving out of the area. If you don’t attend City Council meetings then you missed Charles Clarke’s dry sense of humor as he detailed points on issues, always in wonderfully entertaining ways as he dove into the heart of the matter. Even when I found myself on the other side, which was most of the time, I always admired Clarke’s incredible research and tenacity. I will miss him and hope he puts all his talent to good use wherever he lands. If you know Charles personally, I don’t, please pass on a thank you for me.
This Diary is going to cover a lot of territory. It’s August and at least things look quiet for the week ahead. Looking back, there is so much that happened.
The Berkeley City Council is finally on summer recess through September 12th. Thank goodness! I so hope they stay away for the remainder of the summer. We could use weeks of peace to recover from CoB (City of Berkeley) WHIPLASH.
July 27, 2022 was the date, City Council was supposed to leave town or at least close up shop until mid-September, but Mayor Arreguin scheduled a special council meeting for August 3 dedicated to ballot initiatives. The mayor must have reconsidered how he handled the Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance Ballot measure from the 4 x 4 Committee at July 26th council meeting. By Monday afternoon Arreguin had resurrected it placing it as the last item on the August 3 special council meeting agenda.
On Tuesday afternoon the day before the meeting, I received an email from someone I don’t know Geoff Lomax (evidently my email is being shared – thank you and I mean that sincerely) that the total debt service payment (the expected cost for property owners) in the City documents for the General Obligation Bond ballot measure was off by as much as 50%. And, that wasn’t in the good direction, meaning that any of us who are property owners would be paying almost double what the City initially estimated. https://womberkeley.blogspot.com/2022/08/wom-berkeley-identifies-flawed.html
I heard more about the error at National Night Out. It all fell into place when I saw the “Revised material – Finance (Supp 2)” from Henry Oyekanmi, Director of Finance with the document header, “Revised tax statement figures for both $600 million and $650 million tax statements.” https://berkeleyca.gov/city-council-special-meeting-eagenda-august-3-2022
Lomax’s analysis pushed the revision, but can we rely on the 22% adjustment as the final answer when there was so little time to review the package? That was the next question posed in the blog.
The council debated for nearly three hours whether the bond should be $600 million or $650 million and whether the “median” should be used instead of “average” to help property owners calculate the impact to their property tax bill. At times it felt they were almost giddy with the prospect of the big spending bond package.
The bigger question for me is; Does a $650,000,000 General Obligation Bond that residents of Berkeley are going to be paying for either directly or indirectly for the next 48 years with fuzzy spending and numbers even make sense? And even if it did make sense, can we really expect commission oversight to keep the funds away from sloshing around to cover budget overruns or pet projects when right now commissions that are assigned oversight responsibility for much smaller ballot measures complain that they are not provided the financial information, the documentation they need to fulfill their responsibilities.
The council finally ended discussion at 12:05 pm. Droste was absent for the entire day leaving the unanimous vote count as eight in favor of the bond. Arreguin, Hahn, Wengraf and Kesarwani will author the argument in support of bond.
After a brief break next up was Vice Mayor Harrison’s ballot initiative to tax residential units vacant for more than 182 days. This is a ballot measure that I have supported from the beginning. Berkeley has more than its share of housing that has been vacant for years and some for decades. It is past time for these vacant units to be brought back for housing or if they stay vacant for the owners to pay a tax on that vacancy.
Arreguin signed on to the revision which brought a sigh of relief as Wengraf, Taplin, Kesarwani and Droste all stood on the other side to sink a tax on vacant residential units. Taplin was a little cagey in his move to sink it by suggesting the ballot measure should go to committee for further review. Hahn was always a question of which way she would land. Hahn spoke earlier in the meeting by phone that she was in favor of the measure, but I’ve seen her say one thing and vote the opposite so many times that I sat on the edge of my chair when her name was called not once but six times. Her vote would determine the outcome of whether the ballot measure would pass or fail. It was unclear if she had just dropped off or changed her mind, finally, Hahn was able to unmute her phone, voted yes and the ballot measure passed with Wengraf as a resounding no and Kesarwani and Taplin abstaining.
The Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance Ballot measure from the 4 x 4 Committee was the last agenda item of the day. By the time that discussion started at 2:37 pm, we had all been on zoom since 9 am. Hahn, who could only connect by phone, dropped off after the Vacancy Tax passed so when the vote came to support the option of designating units in new construction as rent-controlled when they are created as the result of demolishing a building with rent-controlled units, it lost with one vote short of the needed five. Bartlett, Harrison, Robinson and Arreguin all voted for the option of designating the new units as rent-controlled (one new for one rent-controlled demolished). Kesarwani and Taplin abstained. Wengraf voted no.
The section on Eviction for Good Cause for the Golden Duplexes did not come up for a vote (lack of support). The only vote that held was the vote to suspend the current ordinance that ends rent control if the annual average rate of vacant units exceeds 5% over a six-month period. We should still keep an eye on this as with all the massive construction of large multi-unit buildings we may soon reach this threshold. I wouldn’t be surprised if that condition arises, pressure would come from the big international investors like Blackrock to end rent control.
In the end Soli Alpert representing the Rent Board said the cost of a ballot initiative could not be justified with only one section of the Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance measure being passed by council and the rest failing.
This is a good time to pay attention to Kesarwani’s comments and watch how she votes. Elisa Mikiten just announced she is running against Rashi Kesarwani in District 1. Mikiten is currently chair of the Planning Commission and was previously on the Police Review Commission.
Wednesday meetings finished with Carol L. Rice, Wildlife Resource Management and Cheryl Miller, Registered Landscape Architect giving a well-practiced presentation that they defined as the first of three meetings on the Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) at the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission. It sounded as if they were hired as consultants and their presentation along with the two meetings to follow one in September and one in December is to fulfill some State mandate.
As far as meeting the goal to better prepare the community for the growing threat of wildfire, I would classify the presentation as 1 on a scale of 10. I can’t comment on this year’s meeting by councilmembers Wengraf and Hahn on wildfire in urban wildland interface, but prior year presentations from councilmembers were so much better than this run through a power point, but then I haven’t fully explored the new CWPP page to the city website. This may all be better than first appearances. https://berkeleyca.gov/safety-health/disaster-preparedness/community-wildfire-protection-plan
The Hillside Fire Safety Group showed up in generous numbers for the CWPP presentation and is still fixated on eucalyptus trees.
I saw the text on suspending the prohibition of the use of pepper spray and teargas just as the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission closed and found the post for another City Council Special meeting at 8:15 pm Thursday evening (the posting notice went up at 8:14 pm) with the AGENDA: 1. Discussion and possible action regarding the temporary suspension of the June 9, 2020 policy prohibiting the use of tear gas, smoke and pepper spray for the duration of the City Council recess [emphasis added] From: City Manager.
This is all about Peoples Park and UC Police marching in donned in riot gear to clear the park of people and then trees.
The mayor must have gotten a flood of pushback as the cancellation notices started to appear Thursday morning. Relief was the word of the day, but let’s not forget how we got here.
The destruction of Peoples Park is another chapter in this ugly history. This was decades in the making. The entire scene smacks of an institution determined to exercise its hold on this city and Peoples Park; to leave no doubt who has the hands of power. There are absolutely other places to build, but that wasn’t the point for UCB. It is power and the graveling of our elected at its feet that got us here. It all adds another layer of bitterness to the scene. https://www.peoplespark.org/wp/
And just in case your memory is short you might want to reread Mayor Jesse Arreguin: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2021-08-01/article/49330?headline=Mayor-Jesse-Arreguin-Snatching-Defeat-from-the-Jaws-of-Victory-br-or-br-Follow-the-Money-or-Lack-of-Money-in-the-UC-Settlement-Deal--Leila-H.-Moncharsh-attorney-for-Berkeley-Citizens-for-a-Better-Plan-bc4bp.com-
I walked up to see for myself the damage wrought by UCB. Words can hardly describe the heartbreaking scene and even the pictures don’t capture the impact of standing in the middle of the park surrounded by felled giant tree trunks lying like corpses amidst piles of branches with shriveling leaves. Towers of mulch fill empty spaces and when I looked up, a flock of birds circled overhead as if lost searching for the stately oaks and redwoods that once were their refuge. Devastating!
The Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) on Thursday evening was less than stunning as was the commission’s assessment of the new 8 story student housing project with 188 units at 2065 Kittridge. There can be no more than 5 meetings to review a project (SB 330) so the LPC was essentially stuck with approving a project that all of them found lacking in appeal and design. Bill Shrader, developer is still whining that he can’t have natural gas in the new building though I do agree with him that an open café/coffee shop on Allston across from the Y will have more traffic and a better chance of success than moving it to the corner of Harold Way and Kittridge across from the library as was requested by Commissioner Denise Hall Montgomery. The Shattuck Cinemas will soon be demolished to make way for the project. And, the LPC dismissed the request from Commissioner Finacom who was unable to attend, but sent written notes including a request that pictures be taken and preserved of the murals and artwork in the Shattuck Cinema theaters before they are demolished.
Before I picked up the book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perloth, I had never heard the term zero-day. Of course, I understood that systems can be hacked and read about cities and companies held hostage in the press. I’ve had my credit card hacked and replaced numerous times and shudder when I need to use my old computer with the operating system that can no longer be updated. I just didn’t know the word for a hole in security, a vulnerability in software that can be used for malicious intent like the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline in May 2021 is called zero-day.
I have my reservations about how much spyware I bring into the house. I certainly would never have an Alexa to collect personal data or put appliances or devices on the internet just for convenience. It is bad enough that my iPhone tracks me everywhere and now my data can be picked up by IKE as I stroll through Berkeley commercial areas. These are the little things that those of us not skilled in coding can recognize.
Perloth’s book is about so much more. In her epilogue she writes her intended audience is for those of us not deep into cyber security.
The cyber invasions by Russia take up a lot of writing space. It was a huge surprise that some of the most skilled hackers are coming out of Argentina. Seems that being in a country that lacks broad digital access is actually a motivator for teenagers to learn how to hack into systems. Another piece of news was that two decades ago American teams from Berkeley, Harvard, and MIT dominated the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), the oldest and most prestigious contest of its kind with over a hundred countries represented. These days US teams don’t even make the top ten finalists. The winners are Russian, Polish, Chinese, South Korean and Taiwanese.
Perloth doesn’t hold any punches. Section VII. Boomerang chronicles how withholding notification from companies like Microsoft of zero-days discovered by the US NSA came back to bite us.
If you wish to pick up This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, it is available as an ebook at all the local libraries (Oakland, Contra Costa, Alameda County, San Francisco) except Berkeley.
One more thing, I heard at National Night Out that Charles Clarke is moving out of the area. If you don’t attend City Council meetings then you missed Charles Clarke’s dry sense of humor as he detailed points on issues, always in wonderfully entertaining ways as he dove into the heart of the matter. Even when I found myself on the other side, which was most of the time, I always admired Clarke’s incredible research and tenacity. I will miss him and hope he puts all his talent to good use wherever he lands. If you know Charles personally, I don’t, please pass on a thank you for me.
July 31, 2022
I wrote in one of the many Activist’s Calendars that I sent, that Mayor Arreguin couldn’t get the job done on July 26 so council is meeting again this coming Wednesday morning, August 3 at 9 am. And, not getting the job done meant those of us dedicated to sit through until the end had a council marathon day starting at 3 pm and running until 11 pm.
It is unknown just exactly when the mayor decided to stiff the 4 x 4 Committee, but it most certainly happened well in advance of July 26th. Arreguin scheduled a special meeting on ballot measures for 3 pm on July 26th, but left the Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance on the Council regular meeting agenda at 6 pm as the second to last item with a strategy to kill it.
Here is how the maneuver played out.
As you read through the steps know that Arreguin is a member of the 4 x 4 Committee and voted for the measure he decided to tank. The 4 x 4 Committee consists of four councilmembers and four Rent Board members with the mission to work collaboratively on housing issues of mutual concern. The four council members are: Arreguin, Taplin, Harrison, Robinson and 4 rent board members: Simon-Weisberg, Alpert, Johnson, Kelley.
By leaving the Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance on the regular evening agenda instead of moving to take it up with the other ballot measures at the 3 pm special meeting, Arreguin could run out the clock using the hard stop at 11 pm to kill the ballot measure without so much as even bringing it up for discussion let alone a vote.
It was a plan that a friend and I missed as we were texting earlier in the evening groaning about how Councilmember Kesarwani was allowed to blather on and on when there were still items on the agenda for action and not a peep from Arreguin to bring the meeting discussion under control.
It was getting close to the goal of running out the clock, but not quite there, when Arreguin skipped over the ballot measure and pulled Hahn’s item on the City website out of order to finish the job. Hahn can always be counted on to talk endlessly. Arreguin used the excuse that Hahn was going to travel the next day.
At 10:58 pm when it was obvious the clock was about to run out without action on the ballot measure, it was Robinson, not Arreguin who asked for a vote to extend the meeting to 11:45 pm. Kesarwani, Taplin, Wengraf and Droste all voted against extending the meeting. A super majority is required to extend the meeting so with four “no” votes in the bag and Arreguin with the last vote in the roll call, he could vote for the extension giving the appearance of wanting to take up the ballot measure for action without any actual risk of having to follow through.
Agenda items that are not addressed automatically go to the Agenda Committee for rescheduling. The Agenda Committee won’t meet again until the last week of August to plan the September 13 council meeting. Ballot measures have deadlines that must be met to be included in the November 8 election which means that pushing off the Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance Ballot measure until September kills it.
All this to avoid sending a ballot measure to the voters that contained eviction protections for tenants in “Golden duplexes” (owner-occupied as a principal residence) and to add an equal number of rent controlled units in new construction when that construction project demolished existing rent-controlled units.
You might be asking why go through all this to block a measure that offered protections to tenants? Berkeley is 57% renters and this ballot measure which the chamber, the real estate industry and Golden duplex owners gathered to protest at the July 12, 2022 council meeting would very likely pass and therefore must be kept out of the hands of the voters.
Evidently Arreguin decided he needed a way out to keep the real estate industry happy and what better way than to kill the Ballot Measure Amending the Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance than by running out the clock after most of the City had given up for the evening and gone to bed. You probably wouldn’t know what happened unless I took the time to write about it.
You can go the July 26 Regular meeting agenda item 31 to read the full ballot measure and supplement responding to the July 12 council discussion. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/city-council/city-council-agendas
Back in the day during the “Tax the Rich” rallies, we used to talk about politics, candidates for office and the difficulty of sorting through all the BS to figure out who actually had values, a moral core that wasn’t hollowed out with ambition. We never did have an answer, but following behavior is a good clue.
The Police Equipment and Community Impact Statements was moved earlier in the evening to be considered in September. And, the parcel tax to fix the roads and sidewalks was killed in the 3 pm meeting in favor of having one big General Obligation Bond ballot initiative to send to the voters
As for the City website, it is a mess with no action taken before the council meeting abruptly ended. The city manager, Dee Williams-Ridley compared the complaints about the new city website to objections to a new business logo. This kind of trivialization of links that are broken and documents that are lost into the ether is not like seeing a different picture (logo) associated with a business. Endless searches in Records Online to find documents that used to be a couple of keystrokes away is not somehow the same as a new logo for a familiar business. Such a comment demonstrates a complete disregard for legislative staff and the public; an unfitness for doing the job for which this city council gave this city manager a 28.11% raise of $84,732. That fact also demonstrates the unfitness of Mayor Arreguin who proposed that raise for the Berkeley City Manager; the manager of the smallest city in land mass and 11th in population of thirteen city and county administrators surveyed.
I took a break and watched the PBS Frontline special Facing Eviction. Emily Benfer from the Eviction Lab described eviction this way, “Housing is foundational to resiliency the same way education and employment are, but if you knock out that one pillar, your housing, your home, then you can’t access any of the others.”
The Thursday presentations at the Mental Health Commission: Achieving an Adequate Standard of Living for People with Serious Mental Illness and/or Substance Use Issues and Disorders, especially for people experiencing homelessness really dove into the impacts of homeless camp sweeps. It’s not just the few sentimental items that get tossed with the sweeps, the very documents the homeless need to get assistance end up in the belongings carted away by the City as trash. Medications are lost too. Most important sweeps break the contact, the link, case managers have with the homeless person.
Sweeps are a major setback for caseworkers and the homeless. It is probably difficult more like impossible for those of us reading this Diary in comfort to think of encampments that are seen as squalor as home and community for anyone, but when the most important pillar of resiliency, housing, is pulled away, even what we may consider trash becomes precious for someone who has nothing.
Margaret Fine described sweeps as a “horrible thing.” Andrea Pritchett gave three solid suggestions: 1) provide cell phones so the homeless could maintain contact with the case workers who were trying to help them, 2) provide staff with tablets so they could instantly update records when in the field and 3) council to identify safe/safer encampment locations where service providers can regularly provide services.
The Ballot Initiative to Tax Vacant Residential Units should come back on Wednesday. This time I hope council can see clear to pass it so we as voters can decide in November. There is an apartment building near me that has been vacant for decades. This city that likes to call itself progressive should be doing everything possible to get these older buildings back on the market as available housing. They certainly will be cheaper than $3397 for a 461 sq ft studio at the BLAKE. https://www.blakeatberkeley.com/floorplans/a4
And all that we can do to stabilize the most important pillar of resiliency, ought to be on the top of the list. It certainly wasn’t last Tuesday evening at 11 pm.
Nicole Kurian, Legislative Director, Californians Against Waste gave an update for the Zero Waste Commission of bills to watch SB 1046 regulates the pre-checkout bags (the plastic bags used for fruit, vegies, bulk goods, etc, AB 2046 reduces packaging in all those online orders delivered to our doors and SB 1013 requires a redemption payment for every beverage container. They all sound good, but like all bills at the end of the session, we shall see what passes.
The Transportation and Infrastructure Commission grant application turned out to be for the Marina and it didn’t require a vote from the newly blended commission of what used to be the separate Transportation Commission and the Public Works Commission. The application only required a presentation, not approval by the commission.
This is a sorry state of affairs. The least functional side of these two commissions is now in charge. The Public Works Commission turned out incredible work and analysis. The few times I tuned into the Transportation Commission, I was struck by the capacity of the commission to be at the same time dysfunctional and oblivious to the fact that not everyone is going to bicycle everywhere. Some of us like our intact bodies and others of us can’t bicycle for a wide variety of reasons.
I like listening to the Thom Hartmann podcasts. In a normal week there is usually a one-hour segment with someone from Congress taking questions from callers. The slot is often filled with Mark Pocan from Wisconsin or Ro Khanna from Silicon Valley. It’s always interesting and then there are the callers from all over the country making comments on the politics and the discussions of the day. Most often when I listen to the people calling in, I think, “you need to read more books.” It is why I like to finish my Diary with what I just finished reading including the audiobooks read to me.
Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell by Tim Miller just released in June is the kind of book with enough substance, but not too heavy to play while doing mindless tasks or to fill time while travelling. All of the five libraries I use have it and San Francisco just added 31 copies of the audiobook. As the title suggests it is entertaining, but the underlying questions of why people stuck with Trump and then ran back to him are answered with proximity to power, job, money, ambition and being in the club or really the cult.
The book I read with substance which drove me to take pages of notes in my reading journal is One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse, published in 2015.
This book is absolutely fascinating as Kruse pulls together how the invention of a Christian America took hold in the 1930s and 1940s with James W. Fifield the minister for the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles leading the charge catering to the LA millionaires. Fifield started the College of Life, radio programs and speaker series to send the message wealth is a sign of God’s blessing. His messaging success covered his generous salary, butler, cook and chauffer.
Fifield placed an ad in the LA times decrying the New Deal with the Chamber, Wall Street, Norman Vincent Peale, California Institute of Technology, UC, Stanford, U of Florida, Princeton Theological Seminary all jumping on the bandwagon. Hollywood joined in with Cecile B. DeMille, Disney and others promoting the selective religious message.
President Eisenhower and Evangelist Abraham Vereide started the national prayer breakfast in 1953 which continues to this day. Evangelist Billy Graham hovered through several administrations. Falwell, Robertson and others followed threading religiosity through our government. And, J. Walter Thompson the Madison Avenue ad agency was an early promoter of the new rituals.
The mythology of the United States founded as a Christian Nation was meticulously debunked in the Supreme Court decision of Engel v. Vitale on school prayer June 25, 1962 in the opinion by Justice Hugo L. Black. But that meticulous historical opinion from sixty years ago blocking prayer in schools did not stop the Christian Nation myth nor did it stop the recent opinion from Justice Gorsuch in the 6 to 3 decision Kennedy v. Bremerton School District on June 27, 2022 when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a high school coach leading post-game school prayers at the 50 yard line.
Christian Nationalism has taken root and the tentacles are visible in the January 6th Insurrection, the Trump cult, the Tucker Carlson show, the Supreme Court decisions and the adulation of Viktor Orban for starters.
Next in my stack is the Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart.
I wrote in one of the many Activist’s Calendars that I sent, that Mayor Arreguin couldn’t get the job done on July 26 so council is meeting again this coming Wednesday morning, August 3 at 9 am. And, not getting the job done meant those of us dedicated to sit through until the end had a council marathon day starting at 3 pm and running until 11 pm.
It is unknown just exactly when the mayor decided to stiff the 4 x 4 Committee, but it most certainly happened well in advance of July 26th. Arreguin scheduled a special meeting on ballot measures for 3 pm on July 26th, but left the Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance on the Council regular meeting agenda at 6 pm as the second to last item with a strategy to kill it.
Here is how the maneuver played out.
As you read through the steps know that Arreguin is a member of the 4 x 4 Committee and voted for the measure he decided to tank. The 4 x 4 Committee consists of four councilmembers and four Rent Board members with the mission to work collaboratively on housing issues of mutual concern. The four council members are: Arreguin, Taplin, Harrison, Robinson and 4 rent board members: Simon-Weisberg, Alpert, Johnson, Kelley.
By leaving the Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance on the regular evening agenda instead of moving to take it up with the other ballot measures at the 3 pm special meeting, Arreguin could run out the clock using the hard stop at 11 pm to kill the ballot measure without so much as even bringing it up for discussion let alone a vote.
It was a plan that a friend and I missed as we were texting earlier in the evening groaning about how Councilmember Kesarwani was allowed to blather on and on when there were still items on the agenda for action and not a peep from Arreguin to bring the meeting discussion under control.
It was getting close to the goal of running out the clock, but not quite there, when Arreguin skipped over the ballot measure and pulled Hahn’s item on the City website out of order to finish the job. Hahn can always be counted on to talk endlessly. Arreguin used the excuse that Hahn was going to travel the next day.
At 10:58 pm when it was obvious the clock was about to run out without action on the ballot measure, it was Robinson, not Arreguin who asked for a vote to extend the meeting to 11:45 pm. Kesarwani, Taplin, Wengraf and Droste all voted against extending the meeting. A super majority is required to extend the meeting so with four “no” votes in the bag and Arreguin with the last vote in the roll call, he could vote for the extension giving the appearance of wanting to take up the ballot measure for action without any actual risk of having to follow through.
Agenda items that are not addressed automatically go to the Agenda Committee for rescheduling. The Agenda Committee won’t meet again until the last week of August to plan the September 13 council meeting. Ballot measures have deadlines that must be met to be included in the November 8 election which means that pushing off the Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance Ballot measure until September kills it.
All this to avoid sending a ballot measure to the voters that contained eviction protections for tenants in “Golden duplexes” (owner-occupied as a principal residence) and to add an equal number of rent controlled units in new construction when that construction project demolished existing rent-controlled units.
You might be asking why go through all this to block a measure that offered protections to tenants? Berkeley is 57% renters and this ballot measure which the chamber, the real estate industry and Golden duplex owners gathered to protest at the July 12, 2022 council meeting would very likely pass and therefore must be kept out of the hands of the voters.
Evidently Arreguin decided he needed a way out to keep the real estate industry happy and what better way than to kill the Ballot Measure Amending the Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance than by running out the clock after most of the City had given up for the evening and gone to bed. You probably wouldn’t know what happened unless I took the time to write about it.
You can go the July 26 Regular meeting agenda item 31 to read the full ballot measure and supplement responding to the July 12 council discussion. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/city-council/city-council-agendas
Back in the day during the “Tax the Rich” rallies, we used to talk about politics, candidates for office and the difficulty of sorting through all the BS to figure out who actually had values, a moral core that wasn’t hollowed out with ambition. We never did have an answer, but following behavior is a good clue.
The Police Equipment and Community Impact Statements was moved earlier in the evening to be considered in September. And, the parcel tax to fix the roads and sidewalks was killed in the 3 pm meeting in favor of having one big General Obligation Bond ballot initiative to send to the voters
As for the City website, it is a mess with no action taken before the council meeting abruptly ended. The city manager, Dee Williams-Ridley compared the complaints about the new city website to objections to a new business logo. This kind of trivialization of links that are broken and documents that are lost into the ether is not like seeing a different picture (logo) associated with a business. Endless searches in Records Online to find documents that used to be a couple of keystrokes away is not somehow the same as a new logo for a familiar business. Such a comment demonstrates a complete disregard for legislative staff and the public; an unfitness for doing the job for which this city council gave this city manager a 28.11% raise of $84,732. That fact also demonstrates the unfitness of Mayor Arreguin who proposed that raise for the Berkeley City Manager; the manager of the smallest city in land mass and 11th in population of thirteen city and county administrators surveyed.
I took a break and watched the PBS Frontline special Facing Eviction. Emily Benfer from the Eviction Lab described eviction this way, “Housing is foundational to resiliency the same way education and employment are, but if you knock out that one pillar, your housing, your home, then you can’t access any of the others.”
The Thursday presentations at the Mental Health Commission: Achieving an Adequate Standard of Living for People with Serious Mental Illness and/or Substance Use Issues and Disorders, especially for people experiencing homelessness really dove into the impacts of homeless camp sweeps. It’s not just the few sentimental items that get tossed with the sweeps, the very documents the homeless need to get assistance end up in the belongings carted away by the City as trash. Medications are lost too. Most important sweeps break the contact, the link, case managers have with the homeless person.
Sweeps are a major setback for caseworkers and the homeless. It is probably difficult more like impossible for those of us reading this Diary in comfort to think of encampments that are seen as squalor as home and community for anyone, but when the most important pillar of resiliency, housing, is pulled away, even what we may consider trash becomes precious for someone who has nothing.
Margaret Fine described sweeps as a “horrible thing.” Andrea Pritchett gave three solid suggestions: 1) provide cell phones so the homeless could maintain contact with the case workers who were trying to help them, 2) provide staff with tablets so they could instantly update records when in the field and 3) council to identify safe/safer encampment locations where service providers can regularly provide services.
The Ballot Initiative to Tax Vacant Residential Units should come back on Wednesday. This time I hope council can see clear to pass it so we as voters can decide in November. There is an apartment building near me that has been vacant for decades. This city that likes to call itself progressive should be doing everything possible to get these older buildings back on the market as available housing. They certainly will be cheaper than $3397 for a 461 sq ft studio at the BLAKE. https://www.blakeatberkeley.com/floorplans/a4
And all that we can do to stabilize the most important pillar of resiliency, ought to be on the top of the list. It certainly wasn’t last Tuesday evening at 11 pm.
Nicole Kurian, Legislative Director, Californians Against Waste gave an update for the Zero Waste Commission of bills to watch SB 1046 regulates the pre-checkout bags (the plastic bags used for fruit, vegies, bulk goods, etc, AB 2046 reduces packaging in all those online orders delivered to our doors and SB 1013 requires a redemption payment for every beverage container. They all sound good, but like all bills at the end of the session, we shall see what passes.
The Transportation and Infrastructure Commission grant application turned out to be for the Marina and it didn’t require a vote from the newly blended commission of what used to be the separate Transportation Commission and the Public Works Commission. The application only required a presentation, not approval by the commission.
This is a sorry state of affairs. The least functional side of these two commissions is now in charge. The Public Works Commission turned out incredible work and analysis. The few times I tuned into the Transportation Commission, I was struck by the capacity of the commission to be at the same time dysfunctional and oblivious to the fact that not everyone is going to bicycle everywhere. Some of us like our intact bodies and others of us can’t bicycle for a wide variety of reasons.
I like listening to the Thom Hartmann podcasts. In a normal week there is usually a one-hour segment with someone from Congress taking questions from callers. The slot is often filled with Mark Pocan from Wisconsin or Ro Khanna from Silicon Valley. It’s always interesting and then there are the callers from all over the country making comments on the politics and the discussions of the day. Most often when I listen to the people calling in, I think, “you need to read more books.” It is why I like to finish my Diary with what I just finished reading including the audiobooks read to me.
Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell by Tim Miller just released in June is the kind of book with enough substance, but not too heavy to play while doing mindless tasks or to fill time while travelling. All of the five libraries I use have it and San Francisco just added 31 copies of the audiobook. As the title suggests it is entertaining, but the underlying questions of why people stuck with Trump and then ran back to him are answered with proximity to power, job, money, ambition and being in the club or really the cult.
The book I read with substance which drove me to take pages of notes in my reading journal is One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse, published in 2015.
This book is absolutely fascinating as Kruse pulls together how the invention of a Christian America took hold in the 1930s and 1940s with James W. Fifield the minister for the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles leading the charge catering to the LA millionaires. Fifield started the College of Life, radio programs and speaker series to send the message wealth is a sign of God’s blessing. His messaging success covered his generous salary, butler, cook and chauffer.
Fifield placed an ad in the LA times decrying the New Deal with the Chamber, Wall Street, Norman Vincent Peale, California Institute of Technology, UC, Stanford, U of Florida, Princeton Theological Seminary all jumping on the bandwagon. Hollywood joined in with Cecile B. DeMille, Disney and others promoting the selective religious message.
President Eisenhower and Evangelist Abraham Vereide started the national prayer breakfast in 1953 which continues to this day. Evangelist Billy Graham hovered through several administrations. Falwell, Robertson and others followed threading religiosity through our government. And, J. Walter Thompson the Madison Avenue ad agency was an early promoter of the new rituals.
The mythology of the United States founded as a Christian Nation was meticulously debunked in the Supreme Court decision of Engel v. Vitale on school prayer June 25, 1962 in the opinion by Justice Hugo L. Black. But that meticulous historical opinion from sixty years ago blocking prayer in schools did not stop the Christian Nation myth nor did it stop the recent opinion from Justice Gorsuch in the 6 to 3 decision Kennedy v. Bremerton School District on June 27, 2022 when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a high school coach leading post-game school prayers at the 50 yard line.
Christian Nationalism has taken root and the tentacles are visible in the January 6th Insurrection, the Trump cult, the Tucker Carlson show, the Supreme Court decisions and the adulation of Viktor Orban for starters.
Next in my stack is the Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart.
July 24, 2022
I only take the print edition of the Chronicle one day a week though I really miss having the full paper in hand every day. Reading the e-edition of my various subscriptions is not the same and it’s too easy to miss them altogether. Some say the Chronicle isn’t worth reading at all, but today on the front page is Mono Lake drying up from the drought and on the back the temperature map of the entire continental U.S. is in deep orange (90 – 100 degrees and above) with a tiny sliver on the west in yellow (60 degrees) where we live. This week more than 100 million in the US were under an excessive heat warning and Europe is burning up.
Maybe the investors of units sitting vacant about town with many if not all priced out of reach for those of us with income under the area median (AMI) are holding out for migration back to the Bay Area. A two-bedroom 1079 square foot unit at the Blake is available for $5410/month or maybe a 461 square foot studio at $3397/month is more in your price range. Neither are in my affordability range.
At a neighborhood gathering in District 8 last week, the conversation moved to apartments pulled from the market and turned into AirBnBs. Just a few blocks from me is an apartment building that has been vacant for decades. And I am surrounded by for rent/lease signs in the downtown and cranes of more buildings under construction. Meanwhile the homeless can be seen throughout the flats with their carts of belongings and tents.
Vacant units throughout Berkeley are the subject of the Vacancy Tax authored by Councilmember Kate Harrison. It is item 6 at the 3 pm (new time) City Council Special meeting on Tuesday July 26 on ballot initiatives for the November 8 election. Whether council members will do what is right for the community or bow to the real estate industry which they look to to support their elections and feather the PAC (political action committee) money to bolster “candidate friendly” campaigns is the big question.
The Empty Homes Tax (Vacancy Tax) was before council on June 14th with the usual suspects voting against moving it forward for the November election. Councilmembers Kesarwani, Wengraf, Droste and Taplin voted yes on a motion to move the Empty Homes Tax to the Council Land Use Committee where it would certainly languish until the deadline passed to approve a Vacancy Tax as a November ballot initiative. The second motion on June 14th referred the Empty Homes Tax to the City Attorney and City Manager for review to bring it back for the special meeting on ballot initiatives. That motion did pass with yes votes by Taplin, Bartlett, Harrison, Hahn, Robinson and Mayor Arreguin. Arreguin said he was only voting to bring it back and that his vote was not indicating support.
As someone who put in countless hours in Arreguin’s campaign for mayor in 2016 and to everyone who is as disappointed as I am with his performance as mayor, I am sorry, so very very sorry for all those miles walked and doors knocked.
It’s hard to know if council will come through to put the Vacant Residential Units Tax on the November Ballot for the voters to decide. I certainly hope so. I do know for certain that holding units off the market should be a badge of shame and that what is being built, all this “market rate” housing is out of reach for so many of us. The Vacancy Tax is a win all the way around for our community by giving a push to bring units back for occupancy or at the very least making investors pay for withholding housing. You can read the measure at https://berkeleyca.gov/city-council-special-meeting-eagenda-july-26-2022 and please make your voice heard.
Vacant buildings, vacant units, monthly rental prices that push people out of housing is not unique to Berkeley. The manipulation of housing is nationwide and international. It is the subject of the film PUSH, the 2019 documentary on Housing Crisis in Modern Cities and multi-national investing in housing. You can start with the 16-minute clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4-VORQZ1-Q and when you find time watch the full film.
And, it isn’t just the big multi-unit buildings that are attractive to real estate investors like Blackstone. They are gobbling up single family homes and smaller unit buildings too.
On to last week’s City meetings.
The Council Land Use Committee on Tuesday voted to refer Robinson’s Ordinance “Keep Innovation in Berkeley” to the Planning Commission and the City Manager. This ordinance expands the zoning districts where research and development would be allowed. It includes Telegraph and the Downtown. Research and development is currently prohibited in these districts. Referrals to the Planning Commission languish for months and years before action, though this may move a little faster since it is City staff who determine the Planning Commission agenda. In other commissions, the chair and commissioners determine the agenda.
The Council Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment & Sustainability Committee (FITES) voted to send Taplin’s “Regulation of Autonomous Vehicles” (driverless cars) to the City Attorney to assess the City Council’s “opportunity” to regulate operation, sale and testing in Berkeley.
The last meeting of the week was the Design Review Committee (DRC) at 7 pm Thursday evening; the last hour of the eighth January 6 hearing (thank goodness for hearing recordings). There was only one project up for review 2440 Shattuck.
In my initial non-agenda comment, I spoke to the current heatwave, heat island effect and how we really need to think about designing buildings differently, planning cities differently, top buildings with solar or green roofs (plants covering rooftops) and providing space between buildings for greenery, habitat and ecosystems. Cities with buildings backed up next to each other absorb and retain heat making cities up to 10 to 20 degrees hotter than more rural areas.
There isn’t time to say everything in non-agenda items, but I was certainly thinking of Thom Hartmann’s July 6 edition of the Hartmann Report reminding us that the last time our planet saw CO2 at 420 parts per million, sea levels were 60 feet higher and trees were growing in Antarctica. In the same edition, Hartmann also gives an excellent description of how to understand what is happening to the Polar Jet Stream, something I watch religiously in the weather maps. https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-climate-emergency-we-worried
This climate crisis we are living in now is with a temperature rise of just 1.16°C and CO2 at 420 ppm. And, we just keep flying by adding more carbon to the atmosphere and living like nothing has changed.
When the redesign of 2440 Shattuck came back with walls of deep dark brown brick, I commented that the dark brown would absorb more heat. Charles Kahn, Berkeley architect on the DRC, said he is yet to be convinced that color has any impact on heat absorption and heat island effect, but said he is open to proof.
If you see me out of the street with a clipboard and thermometers know that I am gathering data to duplicate the experiments by Benjamin Franklin from the 1700s and the exercises I found online written for school children to understand color and absorption and reflection of sunlight and the resulting difference in temperature of dark and light surfaces.
Bird safe glass was another request. Bill Shrader, project developer, insisted he couldn’t find any source for bird safe glass. I don’t know where he was looking, but Mountain View, Oakland and San Francisco all have bird safe glass ordinances and San Francisco’s ordinance was passed in 2011.
I am still trying to set up a time with neighbor Josiah who is an architect for high-rises in Oakland. In a street side conversation, Josiah said bird safe glass was no big deal and was in disbelief that Berkeley didn’t have a bird safe ordinance in place.
Janet Tam, architect on the DRC, said she has had projects with bird safe glass.
Looking at the planet heating up it is beginning to feel like we are stepping into Kim Stanley Robinson’s book The Ministry For the Future with some scientists suggesting the controversial geoengineering to dim sunlight in an unbearably hot world. In Robinson’s science fiction book it worked, but that is science fiction. In Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2021 book Under A White Sky she leads us through all the manmade catastrophes of trying to manipulate nature before ending the book with possibilities of the unknown of what could go wrong with geoengineering.
There is a correction from last week. The corrected link to Busting Myths Around Creating Defensible Space with the subdivision from southern California that burned to the ground and left the Eucalyptus surrounding it intact is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4JpOdS9ffI
There is a piece of happy news on which to close.
Governor Newsom signed $36 million in the budget for the East Bay Regional Park District for acquisition and cleanup of Point Molate. The members of Citizens for East Shore Parks (CESP) have been working on this for years. Those who were involved from the beginning might say decades. https://www.richmondcommunitynews.com/ The work to turn Point Molate into a park isn’t over, but this is really a thrill.
I am a member of CESP and cannot take even a sliver of credit for this accomplishment. All the credit goes to the members who were there long before I joined and continue in their amazing work to expand and preserve our parks. Sally Tobin and Pam Stello have been organizing an incredible series on Mondays from 6 – 7 pm Speaking Up for Point Molate YouTube Channel:https://tinyurl.com/bdfrywys.
I only take the print edition of the Chronicle one day a week though I really miss having the full paper in hand every day. Reading the e-edition of my various subscriptions is not the same and it’s too easy to miss them altogether. Some say the Chronicle isn’t worth reading at all, but today on the front page is Mono Lake drying up from the drought and on the back the temperature map of the entire continental U.S. is in deep orange (90 – 100 degrees and above) with a tiny sliver on the west in yellow (60 degrees) where we live. This week more than 100 million in the US were under an excessive heat warning and Europe is burning up.
Maybe the investors of units sitting vacant about town with many if not all priced out of reach for those of us with income under the area median (AMI) are holding out for migration back to the Bay Area. A two-bedroom 1079 square foot unit at the Blake is available for $5410/month or maybe a 461 square foot studio at $3397/month is more in your price range. Neither are in my affordability range.
At a neighborhood gathering in District 8 last week, the conversation moved to apartments pulled from the market and turned into AirBnBs. Just a few blocks from me is an apartment building that has been vacant for decades. And I am surrounded by for rent/lease signs in the downtown and cranes of more buildings under construction. Meanwhile the homeless can be seen throughout the flats with their carts of belongings and tents.
Vacant units throughout Berkeley are the subject of the Vacancy Tax authored by Councilmember Kate Harrison. It is item 6 at the 3 pm (new time) City Council Special meeting on Tuesday July 26 on ballot initiatives for the November 8 election. Whether council members will do what is right for the community or bow to the real estate industry which they look to to support their elections and feather the PAC (political action committee) money to bolster “candidate friendly” campaigns is the big question.
The Empty Homes Tax (Vacancy Tax) was before council on June 14th with the usual suspects voting against moving it forward for the November election. Councilmembers Kesarwani, Wengraf, Droste and Taplin voted yes on a motion to move the Empty Homes Tax to the Council Land Use Committee where it would certainly languish until the deadline passed to approve a Vacancy Tax as a November ballot initiative. The second motion on June 14th referred the Empty Homes Tax to the City Attorney and City Manager for review to bring it back for the special meeting on ballot initiatives. That motion did pass with yes votes by Taplin, Bartlett, Harrison, Hahn, Robinson and Mayor Arreguin. Arreguin said he was only voting to bring it back and that his vote was not indicating support.
As someone who put in countless hours in Arreguin’s campaign for mayor in 2016 and to everyone who is as disappointed as I am with his performance as mayor, I am sorry, so very very sorry for all those miles walked and doors knocked.
It’s hard to know if council will come through to put the Vacant Residential Units Tax on the November Ballot for the voters to decide. I certainly hope so. I do know for certain that holding units off the market should be a badge of shame and that what is being built, all this “market rate” housing is out of reach for so many of us. The Vacancy Tax is a win all the way around for our community by giving a push to bring units back for occupancy or at the very least making investors pay for withholding housing. You can read the measure at https://berkeleyca.gov/city-council-special-meeting-eagenda-july-26-2022 and please make your voice heard.
Vacant buildings, vacant units, monthly rental prices that push people out of housing is not unique to Berkeley. The manipulation of housing is nationwide and international. It is the subject of the film PUSH, the 2019 documentary on Housing Crisis in Modern Cities and multi-national investing in housing. You can start with the 16-minute clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4-VORQZ1-Q and when you find time watch the full film.
And, it isn’t just the big multi-unit buildings that are attractive to real estate investors like Blackstone. They are gobbling up single family homes and smaller unit buildings too.
On to last week’s City meetings.
The Council Land Use Committee on Tuesday voted to refer Robinson’s Ordinance “Keep Innovation in Berkeley” to the Planning Commission and the City Manager. This ordinance expands the zoning districts where research and development would be allowed. It includes Telegraph and the Downtown. Research and development is currently prohibited in these districts. Referrals to the Planning Commission languish for months and years before action, though this may move a little faster since it is City staff who determine the Planning Commission agenda. In other commissions, the chair and commissioners determine the agenda.
The Council Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment & Sustainability Committee (FITES) voted to send Taplin’s “Regulation of Autonomous Vehicles” (driverless cars) to the City Attorney to assess the City Council’s “opportunity” to regulate operation, sale and testing in Berkeley.
The last meeting of the week was the Design Review Committee (DRC) at 7 pm Thursday evening; the last hour of the eighth January 6 hearing (thank goodness for hearing recordings). There was only one project up for review 2440 Shattuck.
In my initial non-agenda comment, I spoke to the current heatwave, heat island effect and how we really need to think about designing buildings differently, planning cities differently, top buildings with solar or green roofs (plants covering rooftops) and providing space between buildings for greenery, habitat and ecosystems. Cities with buildings backed up next to each other absorb and retain heat making cities up to 10 to 20 degrees hotter than more rural areas.
There isn’t time to say everything in non-agenda items, but I was certainly thinking of Thom Hartmann’s July 6 edition of the Hartmann Report reminding us that the last time our planet saw CO2 at 420 parts per million, sea levels were 60 feet higher and trees were growing in Antarctica. In the same edition, Hartmann also gives an excellent description of how to understand what is happening to the Polar Jet Stream, something I watch religiously in the weather maps. https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-climate-emergency-we-worried
This climate crisis we are living in now is with a temperature rise of just 1.16°C and CO2 at 420 ppm. And, we just keep flying by adding more carbon to the atmosphere and living like nothing has changed.
When the redesign of 2440 Shattuck came back with walls of deep dark brown brick, I commented that the dark brown would absorb more heat. Charles Kahn, Berkeley architect on the DRC, said he is yet to be convinced that color has any impact on heat absorption and heat island effect, but said he is open to proof.
If you see me out of the street with a clipboard and thermometers know that I am gathering data to duplicate the experiments by Benjamin Franklin from the 1700s and the exercises I found online written for school children to understand color and absorption and reflection of sunlight and the resulting difference in temperature of dark and light surfaces.
Bird safe glass was another request. Bill Shrader, project developer, insisted he couldn’t find any source for bird safe glass. I don’t know where he was looking, but Mountain View, Oakland and San Francisco all have bird safe glass ordinances and San Francisco’s ordinance was passed in 2011.
I am still trying to set up a time with neighbor Josiah who is an architect for high-rises in Oakland. In a street side conversation, Josiah said bird safe glass was no big deal and was in disbelief that Berkeley didn’t have a bird safe ordinance in place.
Janet Tam, architect on the DRC, said she has had projects with bird safe glass.
Looking at the planet heating up it is beginning to feel like we are stepping into Kim Stanley Robinson’s book The Ministry For the Future with some scientists suggesting the controversial geoengineering to dim sunlight in an unbearably hot world. In Robinson’s science fiction book it worked, but that is science fiction. In Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2021 book Under A White Sky she leads us through all the manmade catastrophes of trying to manipulate nature before ending the book with possibilities of the unknown of what could go wrong with geoengineering.
There is a correction from last week. The corrected link to Busting Myths Around Creating Defensible Space with the subdivision from southern California that burned to the ground and left the Eucalyptus surrounding it intact is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4JpOdS9ffI
There is a piece of happy news on which to close.
Governor Newsom signed $36 million in the budget for the East Bay Regional Park District for acquisition and cleanup of Point Molate. The members of Citizens for East Shore Parks (CESP) have been working on this for years. Those who were involved from the beginning might say decades. https://www.richmondcommunitynews.com/ The work to turn Point Molate into a park isn’t over, but this is really a thrill.
I am a member of CESP and cannot take even a sliver of credit for this accomplishment. All the credit goes to the members who were there long before I joined and continue in their amazing work to expand and preserve our parks. Sally Tobin and Pam Stello have been organizing an incredible series on Mondays from 6 – 7 pm Speaking Up for Point Molate YouTube Channel:https://tinyurl.com/bdfrywys.
July 17, 2022
Councilmember Hahn had hoped to move the Fair Work Week ordinance out of the City Council Health, Life Enrichment, Equity & Community Committee on Monday, but it was stalled once again. With Council summer recess starting on July 27th, it is unlikely that anything will happen before the fall. Councilmember Kesarwani is probably hoping it can be stalled until after the November election so it can be one more thing to skate around. She can stand with businesses without coming out against employees. We still don’t know if anyone will be running against her in the November 8th election.
Hahn is on the right (correct) side of the issue along with Councilmember Harrison and the Commission on Labor. Hahn described the current situation as “employees are bearing 100% of the burden of last minute changes and those changes mostly come from changes beyond the employers’ control, the pandemic being just one of many things … the question here is who bears the cost … right now employees bear the whole cost and if I had to pick between who is in a better position of who is able to bear the cost, I think the employers are in a better position…”
What is the Fair Work Week about? It is paying a shift cancellation fee – one hour of pay—and a four hours if called in to work and sent home.
Who is resisting? The Chamber of Commerce, businesses and the City of Berkeley administration. The Directors reporting to the City Manager are showing up at meetings throwing in road blocks to the Fair Work Week ordinance. Scott Ferris, Director of Recreation, Parks and Waterfront, expressed his concern that offering shifts to existing recreation part-time employees could force having to fill a position with an unqualified person.
Wednesday, July 20, at 7 pm the Fair Work Week ordinance is on the agenda at the Commission on Labor
Little time was left for discussion of the Re-Entry Employment and Guaranteed Income Programs authored by Councilmember Taplin and supported by Councilmembers Harrison, Hahn and Robinson. It will come back in September. The type of job being described for re-entry employment is cleaning up the city. There is nothing wrong with these jobs, but I continue to ask why California prisoners risk their lives to fight fires and there is no re-entry support program to join the Berkeley Fire Department in the proposal. The support would be key given what looks like deep seeded bias against giving the prison fire fighters a second chance.
Early in the City Council meeting Tuesday evening it was beginning to look like a short night, when Mayor Arreguin preempted discussion and moved Taplin’s revision on Warrantless Searches of Individuals on Supervised Release Search Conditions to consent. Taplin withdrew from Droste’s proposal and wrote his own. I heard third hand there was more to this split, so Droste’s play of asking Taplin during the meeting to be added as a co-sponsor when Taplin couldn’t say no without looking petty carried a bit of a sting. Nathan Mizell, Vice-Chair of the Police Accountability Board (PAB) expressed his objections to the handling of the revision and side-stepping the PAB.
The item which took up most of the evening was the Rent Board Ballot initiative that included a section to end the owner occupied Golden Duplex exemption from just cause evictions and rent control. Both motions on the Golden Duplexes failed. Councilmember Bartlett lives in a Golden Duplex so he had to recuse himself from participating. That left an even number with a four to four split on motions. It will all come back again on July 26th at the 6 pm meeting. The other ballot initiatives are scheduled for 4 pm on July 26th, the special meeting which is not yet posted.
Over 100 attended the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission on Wednesday evening to speak against developing the Berkeley Marina into a commercial venture with an outdoor events pavilion in Cesar Chavez Park. The comments were in addition to the many personal letters plus letters from the Citizens for East Shore Parks and the Sierra Club. There were so many wonderful moving comments that I wish the meeting had been recorded. Here is one from Julia Cato:
“The parks at the Berkeley Marina are Berkeley’s greatest treasure. I am appalled that the City wants to commercialize Ceasar Chavez Park and make that serene setting into something like an amusement park complete with zip lines and venue for music. That is not the purpose of a park, particularly a park that is beloved by so many for the peace and beauty that it offers us, a place to restore our balance, to pause and be thankful that there is such beauty in the world, a place that is also a wildlife refuge that was built to protect various vulnerable species which we have the privilege of observing from a distance. Now we are supposed to share this with zip lines, loud music and crowds that don’t care about where they are but only what they are doing. Those of us who love this place, and there are thousands of us who visit over the span of a few weeks, care greatly about where we are when we are at the park. It is where we get, for free, some of the best views in the bay area, the bay the bridge, Mt. Tam and the hills with their ever-changing hues of light and shadow. And above all, living things, plants, seabirds,
shorebirds, baby owls, and other little rock critters-- and we like knowing they have a safe home here and will be protected and there when we come back the next day or the next week.
City parks were created to provide this kind of environment of open space, beauty and nature –things most of us have little access to where we live. The park is my real yard, my real open space. The city has already taken the pier from us, where we walked to watch the sunset and the moonrise, where fishermen of diverse ethnicity spent their weekends and their children played along its length. They are seen no more at our park. Now the city is going after the very heart of the park. What will be left? Do you know that hundreds of people come to the park just to watch the sunset each day? It is a lovely experience sitting on a bench or in your car with all these other people watching the sun go down into the water, it’s like a ritual -- something spiritual, almost holy. And it is quiet, very quiet.”
Not one of the speakers was in support of the proposed development plan. Support came from commissioner Brennan Cox, who stated that he did not think of the marina as thriving. Cox went on in his derogatory description of the Marina and then moved into his positive comments about the consultants and development.
Cox failed to disclose, in his complimentary remarks about the plan from the consultants for development of the Berkeley Marina, that he has a business relationship with those very consultants, Hargreaves Associates, and even lists them in his bio page at Groundworks Office website. https://www.groundworksoffice.com/bc-cv
In the letter from Citizens for East Shore Parks (I am a Board member), it is noted that Cesar Chavez Park was originally intended to be part of the McLaughlin Eastshore Sate Park. If that had happened, instead of the City of Berkeley deciding to maintain it as a municipal park, we wouldn’t be looking at a plan to turn it into a commercial enterprise. And that should be a lesson.
I do not believe it is being overly cynical to observe that the Marina fund was set up to fail, to fall short to maintain infrastructure. The pier deteriorated through sheer City neglect. All this and the deliberate shifting of revenue generated in the Marina through the hotel tax (TOT-Transient Occupancy Tax) to fatten the general fund produced the current setting whereby the City declares consultants must be hired to the tune of $1,101,000 to turn the park into a moneymaking enterprise with this fantasy entertainment development as the answer to save it.
It is another ugly City action in the making. And for all that money that is supposed to be made, if the past gives a hint of the future, will go into overtime pay for the Berkeley Police to provide protection for the park events.
I signed the petition to save the park. You can too.
https://chavezpark.org/petition-to-save-chavez-park-from-bmasp/
The week closed with the Climate Emergency Mobilization Task Force Virtual Summit Ecological Protection, a long title for three speaker subjects, Militarism and Climate, Petrochemicals PFAS often called forever chemicals and Wildfires. The last two were my favorites.
Carol Kwaitkowski, the first speaker on PFAS, is with the Green Science Policy Institute. She introduced her talk by mentioning the film Dark Waters, the true story of Robert Bilott, the attorney who sued DuPont for contaminating land and drinking water with PFOA, used in the production of Teflon. The 2019 film is terrific in case you missed it, showing the conversion of Bilott from protecting corporations to going after them for decades for the harm caused to employees and the community. It also covers what these forever chemicals do to our bodies and the environment.
The website for contaminants in our environment, food, water is one to save and look at often. https://greensciencepolicy.org/ The other website which Kwaitkowski did not mention, but it is in her bio, https://tedx.org/interactive-tools/pfas-test , is no longer supported which is unfortunate as it provides more information on PFAS and promises only to be available until September 2022.
Ben Schleifer from Center for Environmental Health, https://ceh.org/ followed Kwaitkowski and spent much of his time talking about PFAS in single-use food ware, the disposable trays used for school lunches around the country and the program to replace this toxic laden throwaway with reusables.
I don’t know how lunches are served to Berkeley students, but I came away from the presentation that serving children food on disposable trays coated with PFAS – hormone disrupters is completely unnecessary and unconscionable as is sending hundreds of thousands of single-use trays and containers to landfill.
Maya Khosla the last speaker focused on Wildfire featuring nature returning to the forest, the snags, after fire. Khosla’s talk was filled with lovely pictures of birds nesting in burned out trees Khosla also hit on the myth that biomass facilities are somehow “green” energy.
If you are unfamiliar with Biomass facilities, as I was not so long ago, this is cutting down of trees / forests and burning them instead of coal or natural gas in large energy plants. In other words instead of burning coal, forests are burned up. You can get a deeper explanation in the documentary Burned https://burnedthemovie.com/streaming-and-screening/
If you happened to watch the film Planet of the Humans which created an enormous uproar and unending attacks on Michael Moore, there is an interview clip in the film with Bill McKibben justifying biomass fuel plants as “green.” Watching him squirm in the interview is quite an interesting contrast to his continual portrayal as a climate hero.
Clearing the forest after fires for salvageable wood is a moneymaker for the logging industry. With solid lobbying power, perpetuation of myths and legislators captured to keep the business going, snags are cleared, forests are thinned, cleared and severely damaged.
The Berkeley Hillside Fire Safety Group, which has been showing up at the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission and City Council to secure public funding for clearing Eucalyptus groves in the Berkeley Hills, probably won’t let go of their hysteria over Eucalyptus trees, but the rest of us would do well to watch the Myth Busting Defensible Space video in the list below.
The Home Hardening for Wildfire: Vents and Property Clean Up webinar on Wednesday evening provided by the Berkeley Fire Department was not recorded. The video list here from Maya Kholsa covers the same territory on fire prevention. I watched all three. We live in a high risk fire city. These are worth your time and you would do well to watch and share.
The first two videos are the best
If your home doesn’t ignite it can’t burn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL_syp1ZScM
Fire Chief Debunks Defensible Space - Myth Busting Defensible Space 20:44. This video is excellent and includes eucalyptus tress
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4JpOdS9ffI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqKFDDBGd5o
Protecting Your Home From Wildfire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW4ojYJtGbA
More are available at https://firesafemarin.org/
If you want to learn more about snags and rejuvenation of nature after wildfire Chad Hanson’s book Smokescreen is highly recommended. You can find it as an ebook from the San Francisco library.
Councilmember Hahn had hoped to move the Fair Work Week ordinance out of the City Council Health, Life Enrichment, Equity & Community Committee on Monday, but it was stalled once again. With Council summer recess starting on July 27th, it is unlikely that anything will happen before the fall. Councilmember Kesarwani is probably hoping it can be stalled until after the November election so it can be one more thing to skate around. She can stand with businesses without coming out against employees. We still don’t know if anyone will be running against her in the November 8th election.
Hahn is on the right (correct) side of the issue along with Councilmember Harrison and the Commission on Labor. Hahn described the current situation as “employees are bearing 100% of the burden of last minute changes and those changes mostly come from changes beyond the employers’ control, the pandemic being just one of many things … the question here is who bears the cost … right now employees bear the whole cost and if I had to pick between who is in a better position of who is able to bear the cost, I think the employers are in a better position…”
What is the Fair Work Week about? It is paying a shift cancellation fee – one hour of pay—and a four hours if called in to work and sent home.
Who is resisting? The Chamber of Commerce, businesses and the City of Berkeley administration. The Directors reporting to the City Manager are showing up at meetings throwing in road blocks to the Fair Work Week ordinance. Scott Ferris, Director of Recreation, Parks and Waterfront, expressed his concern that offering shifts to existing recreation part-time employees could force having to fill a position with an unqualified person.
Wednesday, July 20, at 7 pm the Fair Work Week ordinance is on the agenda at the Commission on Labor
Little time was left for discussion of the Re-Entry Employment and Guaranteed Income Programs authored by Councilmember Taplin and supported by Councilmembers Harrison, Hahn and Robinson. It will come back in September. The type of job being described for re-entry employment is cleaning up the city. There is nothing wrong with these jobs, but I continue to ask why California prisoners risk their lives to fight fires and there is no re-entry support program to join the Berkeley Fire Department in the proposal. The support would be key given what looks like deep seeded bias against giving the prison fire fighters a second chance.
Early in the City Council meeting Tuesday evening it was beginning to look like a short night, when Mayor Arreguin preempted discussion and moved Taplin’s revision on Warrantless Searches of Individuals on Supervised Release Search Conditions to consent. Taplin withdrew from Droste’s proposal and wrote his own. I heard third hand there was more to this split, so Droste’s play of asking Taplin during the meeting to be added as a co-sponsor when Taplin couldn’t say no without looking petty carried a bit of a sting. Nathan Mizell, Vice-Chair of the Police Accountability Board (PAB) expressed his objections to the handling of the revision and side-stepping the PAB.
The item which took up most of the evening was the Rent Board Ballot initiative that included a section to end the owner occupied Golden Duplex exemption from just cause evictions and rent control. Both motions on the Golden Duplexes failed. Councilmember Bartlett lives in a Golden Duplex so he had to recuse himself from participating. That left an even number with a four to four split on motions. It will all come back again on July 26th at the 6 pm meeting. The other ballot initiatives are scheduled for 4 pm on July 26th, the special meeting which is not yet posted.
Over 100 attended the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission on Wednesday evening to speak against developing the Berkeley Marina into a commercial venture with an outdoor events pavilion in Cesar Chavez Park. The comments were in addition to the many personal letters plus letters from the Citizens for East Shore Parks and the Sierra Club. There were so many wonderful moving comments that I wish the meeting had been recorded. Here is one from Julia Cato:
“The parks at the Berkeley Marina are Berkeley’s greatest treasure. I am appalled that the City wants to commercialize Ceasar Chavez Park and make that serene setting into something like an amusement park complete with zip lines and venue for music. That is not the purpose of a park, particularly a park that is beloved by so many for the peace and beauty that it offers us, a place to restore our balance, to pause and be thankful that there is such beauty in the world, a place that is also a wildlife refuge that was built to protect various vulnerable species which we have the privilege of observing from a distance. Now we are supposed to share this with zip lines, loud music and crowds that don’t care about where they are but only what they are doing. Those of us who love this place, and there are thousands of us who visit over the span of a few weeks, care greatly about where we are when we are at the park. It is where we get, for free, some of the best views in the bay area, the bay the bridge, Mt. Tam and the hills with their ever-changing hues of light and shadow. And above all, living things, plants, seabirds,
shorebirds, baby owls, and other little rock critters-- and we like knowing they have a safe home here and will be protected and there when we come back the next day or the next week.
City parks were created to provide this kind of environment of open space, beauty and nature –things most of us have little access to where we live. The park is my real yard, my real open space. The city has already taken the pier from us, where we walked to watch the sunset and the moonrise, where fishermen of diverse ethnicity spent their weekends and their children played along its length. They are seen no more at our park. Now the city is going after the very heart of the park. What will be left? Do you know that hundreds of people come to the park just to watch the sunset each day? It is a lovely experience sitting on a bench or in your car with all these other people watching the sun go down into the water, it’s like a ritual -- something spiritual, almost holy. And it is quiet, very quiet.”
Not one of the speakers was in support of the proposed development plan. Support came from commissioner Brennan Cox, who stated that he did not think of the marina as thriving. Cox went on in his derogatory description of the Marina and then moved into his positive comments about the consultants and development.
Cox failed to disclose, in his complimentary remarks about the plan from the consultants for development of the Berkeley Marina, that he has a business relationship with those very consultants, Hargreaves Associates, and even lists them in his bio page at Groundworks Office website. https://www.groundworksoffice.com/bc-cv
In the letter from Citizens for East Shore Parks (I am a Board member), it is noted that Cesar Chavez Park was originally intended to be part of the McLaughlin Eastshore Sate Park. If that had happened, instead of the City of Berkeley deciding to maintain it as a municipal park, we wouldn’t be looking at a plan to turn it into a commercial enterprise. And that should be a lesson.
I do not believe it is being overly cynical to observe that the Marina fund was set up to fail, to fall short to maintain infrastructure. The pier deteriorated through sheer City neglect. All this and the deliberate shifting of revenue generated in the Marina through the hotel tax (TOT-Transient Occupancy Tax) to fatten the general fund produced the current setting whereby the City declares consultants must be hired to the tune of $1,101,000 to turn the park into a moneymaking enterprise with this fantasy entertainment development as the answer to save it.
It is another ugly City action in the making. And for all that money that is supposed to be made, if the past gives a hint of the future, will go into overtime pay for the Berkeley Police to provide protection for the park events.
I signed the petition to save the park. You can too.
https://chavezpark.org/petition-to-save-chavez-park-from-bmasp/
The week closed with the Climate Emergency Mobilization Task Force Virtual Summit Ecological Protection, a long title for three speaker subjects, Militarism and Climate, Petrochemicals PFAS often called forever chemicals and Wildfires. The last two were my favorites.
Carol Kwaitkowski, the first speaker on PFAS, is with the Green Science Policy Institute. She introduced her talk by mentioning the film Dark Waters, the true story of Robert Bilott, the attorney who sued DuPont for contaminating land and drinking water with PFOA, used in the production of Teflon. The 2019 film is terrific in case you missed it, showing the conversion of Bilott from protecting corporations to going after them for decades for the harm caused to employees and the community. It also covers what these forever chemicals do to our bodies and the environment.
The website for contaminants in our environment, food, water is one to save and look at often. https://greensciencepolicy.org/ The other website which Kwaitkowski did not mention, but it is in her bio, https://tedx.org/interactive-tools/pfas-test , is no longer supported which is unfortunate as it provides more information on PFAS and promises only to be available until September 2022.
Ben Schleifer from Center for Environmental Health, https://ceh.org/ followed Kwaitkowski and spent much of his time talking about PFAS in single-use food ware, the disposable trays used for school lunches around the country and the program to replace this toxic laden throwaway with reusables.
I don’t know how lunches are served to Berkeley students, but I came away from the presentation that serving children food on disposable trays coated with PFAS – hormone disrupters is completely unnecessary and unconscionable as is sending hundreds of thousands of single-use trays and containers to landfill.
Maya Khosla the last speaker focused on Wildfire featuring nature returning to the forest, the snags, after fire. Khosla’s talk was filled with lovely pictures of birds nesting in burned out trees Khosla also hit on the myth that biomass facilities are somehow “green” energy.
If you are unfamiliar with Biomass facilities, as I was not so long ago, this is cutting down of trees / forests and burning them instead of coal or natural gas in large energy plants. In other words instead of burning coal, forests are burned up. You can get a deeper explanation in the documentary Burned https://burnedthemovie.com/streaming-and-screening/
If you happened to watch the film Planet of the Humans which created an enormous uproar and unending attacks on Michael Moore, there is an interview clip in the film with Bill McKibben justifying biomass fuel plants as “green.” Watching him squirm in the interview is quite an interesting contrast to his continual portrayal as a climate hero.
Clearing the forest after fires for salvageable wood is a moneymaker for the logging industry. With solid lobbying power, perpetuation of myths and legislators captured to keep the business going, snags are cleared, forests are thinned, cleared and severely damaged.
The Berkeley Hillside Fire Safety Group, which has been showing up at the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission and City Council to secure public funding for clearing Eucalyptus groves in the Berkeley Hills, probably won’t let go of their hysteria over Eucalyptus trees, but the rest of us would do well to watch the Myth Busting Defensible Space video in the list below.
The Home Hardening for Wildfire: Vents and Property Clean Up webinar on Wednesday evening provided by the Berkeley Fire Department was not recorded. The video list here from Maya Kholsa covers the same territory on fire prevention. I watched all three. We live in a high risk fire city. These are worth your time and you would do well to watch and share.
The first two videos are the best
If your home doesn’t ignite it can’t burn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL_syp1ZScM
Fire Chief Debunks Defensible Space - Myth Busting Defensible Space 20:44. This video is excellent and includes eucalyptus tress
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4JpOdS9ffI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqKFDDBGd5o
Protecting Your Home From Wildfire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW4ojYJtGbA
More are available at https://firesafemarin.org/
If you want to learn more about snags and rejuvenation of nature after wildfire Chad Hanson’s book Smokescreen is highly recommended. You can find it as an ebook from the San Francisco library.
July 10, 2022
Last Thursday and Friday there were seven IKE Phase II Location Community Meetings, three in person and four via zoom. In case you missed them, no announcement was posted by the City on the City website. Councilmember Hahn did send an announcement to her email list and that is how most of us learned of the meetings.
If you never heard of an IKE (Interactive Kiosk Experience) kiosk, you can see the oversize 8-foot tall digital advertising billboard thing by the curb in front of Pegasus Books on Shattuck.
The City Council voted in 2018 to install up to 31 of these “things” called IKE kiosks in commercial areas around the city and authorized a 15-year contract with the agreement that no IKE kiosks can be removed in the first two years. After two years, one kiosk can be removed or two relocated per year with a signature of 30 residents and businesses within 1000 feet and the designation of two other sites in proximity.
Denny Abrams (the developer of the extremely successful 4th Street shopping district) didn’t take to kindly to an installation of an IKE kiosk on 4th Street. Abrams said there was nothing on the IKE kiosk that couldn’t be found on our smart phones. He described the kiosks as intrusive, and a blight to any retail location that would negatively impact the value of the retail space in proximity. He said they had no place on 4th Street; none of the businesses there wanted them. Abrams reminded Kieron Slaughter(Chief Community Development Officer of the City of Berkeley Office of Economic Development and host of the meeting) multiple times that 4th Street is the most successful retail corridor in Berkeley and 4th Street doesn’t want and doesn’t need IKE. Several other business owners at the 2 pm Friday meeting joined in with their objections.
After my own visit to an IKE kiosk, I would say they are less useful than the information on my iPhone. Understandably, they are not fully set up with all the ads they promise to carry, but even then, who wants to stand around looking at a giant digital billboard?
And, the last thing I want is my data to be collected as I walk by (IKE is said to be able to capture phone/device data within 75 feet)and/or ads to pop up on my iPhone. The cameras are supposed to be turned off (one rep said the cameras that are part of the system were not installed for Berkeley) and then pointed out the locations where cameras could be installed. We can hope we aren’t filmed as our data is collected, like in Miami (DeSantis country).
Now that I’ve seen this IKE thing in person it is hard to imagine how anyone on Council could be excited about IKE and eager to have these devices taking space on our sidewalks. I remember when the Ike Smart City Kiosks hit the council agenda and Councilmember Bartlett barely contained himself in his enthusiasm for them, describing his recent experience with them on his trip to Denver.
Maybe the mayor’s and council’s enthusiasm is greased by the vision of getting a cut of the revenue. According to council meeting documents dating back to 2018, the City of Berkeley gets a cut of the IKE kiosk advertising revenue through a handoff from Visit Berkeley (formerly the Berkeley Convention & Visitors Bureau).
Here is language from Ordinance No. 7,626-N.S defining how the City of Berkeley gets its cut.
Section 2. The City Manager is hereby authorized to enter into a 15 year franchise agreement, which may be extended upon mutual consent with IKE Smart City LLC, as operator of the wayfinding kiosks program. As a contracting agent to the City for marketing, wayfinding and other information, Visit Berkeley is an appropriate party to administer and oversee the IKE kiosk program. The proposed revenue allocation is that IKE will provide 10% of gross revenues to Visit Berkeley in the first two years of the program and 25% in subsequent years of the term. Visit Berkeley may retain the lesser amount of 25% of the revenue share or $100,000, for its costs for administration of the program, and will distribute the remainder of the revenue share to the City of Berkeley. The revenue will be distributed to the City within 30 days of Visit Berkeley receiving it and preliminary projections anticipate approximately $829,361 per year in General Fund revenue to the City of Berkeley once the program is fully deployed, or approximately $26,754 per year per kiosk that is deployed.
From its web site: “Visit Berkeley has become the voice of the hospitality and tourism industry in Berkeley. Governed by a Board of Directors comprised of Berkeley tourism and hospitality professionals, Visit Berkeley operates as a 501c(6) private, not for profit, mutual benefit corporation.
It takes a little high school algebra to calculate the total cost to businesses for the City of Berkeley to add $829,361 to revenue collections. At year three that would be around $3,717,444 in gross advertising revenue.
Not everyone fell for the sales pitch. Former Councilmember Cheryl Davilla abstained on all votes and Councilmember Sophie Hahn finally came around to voting no on the 2nd reading of the ordinance.
I heard second hand that at one of the IKE meetings I missed, someone suggested community activism of knitting covers for the kiosks. These things are huge; a cover would be a lot of yarn and knitting. Oh well, maybe someone has a better idea of how to get out of the contract.
So far there are 37 letters opposing the data-mining ugly, intrusive, useless, invasive, polluting, offensive, eyesore IKE kiosks that create a stain on the City of Berkeley and clutter on the sidewalk attached to the July 26 City Council meeting. You might want to add your own comments to the ones I read, if you haven’t written already.
There are also a whole string of letters opposing developing Cesar Chavez Park, which I will write about in my next Diary.
The neighbors to the mixed-use project at 1201-1205 San Pablo approved by ZAB on April 28, 2022 joined the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council meeting on Saturday. Their appeal is scheduled for September 29, 2022. After participating in two appeals and observing others, I don’t give them much hope and said as much: “it’s over.” They haven’t given up and still hold hope they can lower the height and size of the project and secure other changes.
Out of the 66 units in the 1201 – 1205 San Pablo project, five will be for households with very low income. For this little offering to financially strapped households, the developer gets a bonus to exceed area height limits. This project’s bonus award for those 5 units is two more full floors, bringing the total to six stories. The little one-story house next door will sit in the shadow of their new towering neighbor. Another loses solar access.
The shock of learning your new neighbor is a tower taking away your sunshine, light, privacy, solar access is repeated over and over in full display when you attend the Design Review Committee (DRC) and Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) meetings. The difficulty for the DRC and ZAB is that they have very little power any more. State legislation took away much of local control and Berkeley City Council dropped the ball on the rest.
Fighting against the lobbyists for high-density high-rise housing requires an all-out effort and even then it is a nail bitter. Just look at the years soaked up to limit the height of the planned housing projects for the North Berkeley and Ashby BART Stations to seven stories. And the effort is still ongoing to maximize affordable housing and put a lid on density bonuses.
If the California YIMBYs (lobbying organization for high density housing) and developers and investors who support them get their way, the experience of the neighbors of 1201-1205 San Pablo story will spread across the State. Of course, it doesn’t end there, as the developers set their sights on demolishing single family homes and packing the lots with multiple units. The lobbyists have helping hands from Senators Nancy Skinner (Berkeley), Scott Wiener (San Francisco) and Toni Atkins (San Diego). Don’t count on Berkeley’s Assemblymember Buffy Wicks to vote no either. A site to check for good and bad housing legislation is Livable California https://www.livablecalifornia.org/livable-california-priority-bills-position-letters/
The City Council Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment & Sustainability Committee continued the agenda items on plastic bags to the Fall. Greenhouse gas emissions and the City Climate Action plan will return on July 20th along with with autonomous vehicles / driverless cars.
The City Council Land Use, Housing & Economic Development Committee approved a referral to the City Manager and the Planning Commission to establish standards for efficiency units. The current minimum unit size is 350 square feet per occupant. An efficiency unit is decidedly smaller. If you have ever spent a mindless evening looking at tiny house plans on YouTube as I did some months ago, you would find there are a lot of very innovative imaginative tiny houses. A place to start is Living Big in a tiny house https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLZyTlbuG9A.
If more architects, councilmembers and commissioners spent a little time on these sites, we would have better designed smaller ADUs. Don’t expect anything to happen soon with efficiency units; this is after all going to the Planning Commission where they project they will finish the bird safe glass ordinance in October 2022, three years after receiving the referral from the City Council.
The Planning Commission did meet, and had a discussion following the staff presentation on an affordable housing overlay and local density bonus. Nothing was decided, and it will come back again to consider accepting an in-lieu fee versus requiring all affordable units to be built on site (inclusionary affordable housing). Commissioner Ghosh asked if we are doing more segregation with 100% affordable buildings, and what are we trying to accomplish with objective design standards? Commissioner Twu said he worked on a couple of projects under California Affordable Housing bill AB 1763 and sometimes height isn’t an issue as costs go up with height; going wider would be more usefl.
A good deal of time at the Housing Advisory Commission (HAC) was devoted to reports of violations of ADA guidelines and standards, health and safety and sub-standard renovations / ”upgrades,” harassment and retaliation against tenants at Harriet Tubman Terrace. The 91 unit mid-rise building of affordable housing for adults 62 or older and for adults with disabilities is described by Affordable Housing online as “luxurious apartment living at an affordable price.”
The film produced by the tenants of repairs and their treatment, being relocated out of their apartments for construction and then moved back in, is a better fit to the submission from District 8 Commissioner Mari Mendonca. Cassandra Palanza, the Harriet Tubman Terrace Project Manager, wrote a 9-page response, including an offer to provide the City Inspection Log. The HAC voted to send a letter to the City Council to request a directive to the City Manager to investigate. Nothing from a commission seems to work its way through the system in a hurry. If the process is normal, this might appear on the Council agenda by November.
At the same HAC meeting, City Staff requested a one-year extension to Community Agency Contracts and to postpone RFPs, because the City doesn’t have the staff bandwidth to do the RFPs. Only two service providers were present. The representative from the Center for Independent Living spoke to the issue of inflation and the impact of contracts being extended without a new bid. It would mean not being able to serve as many clients because of the cost of materials. The HAC voted to support the extension with a request to Council to consider Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) for the one-year extension.
It is hard to defend the importance of commissions when dysfunction is in plain view. Such was the case of the Commission on Disability last week. Nearly 40 minutes (checked my watch) were wasted in a back and forth discussion of the order of the agenda. In the time that was wasted, a good part of the agenda could have been covered making any rearranging of the order of the agenda items irrelevant. We need a robust Commission on Disability to bring forward issues needing attention. Filling commission vacancies and retaining commissioners requires councilmembers to make their commissioner appointments and a functional commission to get work done. Currently six of the nine Commission on Disability commissioner positions are vacant.
In the commission reorganization initiated by Councilmember Droste, there consideration was given to merging the Commission on Aging and the Commission on Disability. They were left separate with discussion that not all older adults are disabled and certainly people with disabilities are of all ages. Each has unique contributions to make.
Some months ago as plans for the Marina were starting to roll starting with the pier and ferry, Mayor Arreguin said at a public meeting on the Marina that the opposition wasn’t representative of Berkeley.
Local does matter. So far it looks like the mayor and council are NOT representative of the community. Too often it is one councilmember standing alone against the rest. That we need to change. Sending your opinion to [email protected] is a start.
Last Thursday and Friday there were seven IKE Phase II Location Community Meetings, three in person and four via zoom. In case you missed them, no announcement was posted by the City on the City website. Councilmember Hahn did send an announcement to her email list and that is how most of us learned of the meetings.
If you never heard of an IKE (Interactive Kiosk Experience) kiosk, you can see the oversize 8-foot tall digital advertising billboard thing by the curb in front of Pegasus Books on Shattuck.
The City Council voted in 2018 to install up to 31 of these “things” called IKE kiosks in commercial areas around the city and authorized a 15-year contract with the agreement that no IKE kiosks can be removed in the first two years. After two years, one kiosk can be removed or two relocated per year with a signature of 30 residents and businesses within 1000 feet and the designation of two other sites in proximity.
Denny Abrams (the developer of the extremely successful 4th Street shopping district) didn’t take to kindly to an installation of an IKE kiosk on 4th Street. Abrams said there was nothing on the IKE kiosk that couldn’t be found on our smart phones. He described the kiosks as intrusive, and a blight to any retail location that would negatively impact the value of the retail space in proximity. He said they had no place on 4th Street; none of the businesses there wanted them. Abrams reminded Kieron Slaughter(Chief Community Development Officer of the City of Berkeley Office of Economic Development and host of the meeting) multiple times that 4th Street is the most successful retail corridor in Berkeley and 4th Street doesn’t want and doesn’t need IKE. Several other business owners at the 2 pm Friday meeting joined in with their objections.
After my own visit to an IKE kiosk, I would say they are less useful than the information on my iPhone. Understandably, they are not fully set up with all the ads they promise to carry, but even then, who wants to stand around looking at a giant digital billboard?
And, the last thing I want is my data to be collected as I walk by (IKE is said to be able to capture phone/device data within 75 feet)and/or ads to pop up on my iPhone. The cameras are supposed to be turned off (one rep said the cameras that are part of the system were not installed for Berkeley) and then pointed out the locations where cameras could be installed. We can hope we aren’t filmed as our data is collected, like in Miami (DeSantis country).
Now that I’ve seen this IKE thing in person it is hard to imagine how anyone on Council could be excited about IKE and eager to have these devices taking space on our sidewalks. I remember when the Ike Smart City Kiosks hit the council agenda and Councilmember Bartlett barely contained himself in his enthusiasm for them, describing his recent experience with them on his trip to Denver.
Maybe the mayor’s and council’s enthusiasm is greased by the vision of getting a cut of the revenue. According to council meeting documents dating back to 2018, the City of Berkeley gets a cut of the IKE kiosk advertising revenue through a handoff from Visit Berkeley (formerly the Berkeley Convention & Visitors Bureau).
Here is language from Ordinance No. 7,626-N.S defining how the City of Berkeley gets its cut.
Section 2. The City Manager is hereby authorized to enter into a 15 year franchise agreement, which may be extended upon mutual consent with IKE Smart City LLC, as operator of the wayfinding kiosks program. As a contracting agent to the City for marketing, wayfinding and other information, Visit Berkeley is an appropriate party to administer and oversee the IKE kiosk program. The proposed revenue allocation is that IKE will provide 10% of gross revenues to Visit Berkeley in the first two years of the program and 25% in subsequent years of the term. Visit Berkeley may retain the lesser amount of 25% of the revenue share or $100,000, for its costs for administration of the program, and will distribute the remainder of the revenue share to the City of Berkeley. The revenue will be distributed to the City within 30 days of Visit Berkeley receiving it and preliminary projections anticipate approximately $829,361 per year in General Fund revenue to the City of Berkeley once the program is fully deployed, or approximately $26,754 per year per kiosk that is deployed.
From its web site: “Visit Berkeley has become the voice of the hospitality and tourism industry in Berkeley. Governed by a Board of Directors comprised of Berkeley tourism and hospitality professionals, Visit Berkeley operates as a 501c(6) private, not for profit, mutual benefit corporation.
It takes a little high school algebra to calculate the total cost to businesses for the City of Berkeley to add $829,361 to revenue collections. At year three that would be around $3,717,444 in gross advertising revenue.
Not everyone fell for the sales pitch. Former Councilmember Cheryl Davilla abstained on all votes and Councilmember Sophie Hahn finally came around to voting no on the 2nd reading of the ordinance.
I heard second hand that at one of the IKE meetings I missed, someone suggested community activism of knitting covers for the kiosks. These things are huge; a cover would be a lot of yarn and knitting. Oh well, maybe someone has a better idea of how to get out of the contract.
So far there are 37 letters opposing the data-mining ugly, intrusive, useless, invasive, polluting, offensive, eyesore IKE kiosks that create a stain on the City of Berkeley and clutter on the sidewalk attached to the July 26 City Council meeting. You might want to add your own comments to the ones I read, if you haven’t written already.
There are also a whole string of letters opposing developing Cesar Chavez Park, which I will write about in my next Diary.
The neighbors to the mixed-use project at 1201-1205 San Pablo approved by ZAB on April 28, 2022 joined the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council meeting on Saturday. Their appeal is scheduled for September 29, 2022. After participating in two appeals and observing others, I don’t give them much hope and said as much: “it’s over.” They haven’t given up and still hold hope they can lower the height and size of the project and secure other changes.
Out of the 66 units in the 1201 – 1205 San Pablo project, five will be for households with very low income. For this little offering to financially strapped households, the developer gets a bonus to exceed area height limits. This project’s bonus award for those 5 units is two more full floors, bringing the total to six stories. The little one-story house next door will sit in the shadow of their new towering neighbor. Another loses solar access.
The shock of learning your new neighbor is a tower taking away your sunshine, light, privacy, solar access is repeated over and over in full display when you attend the Design Review Committee (DRC) and Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) meetings. The difficulty for the DRC and ZAB is that they have very little power any more. State legislation took away much of local control and Berkeley City Council dropped the ball on the rest.
Fighting against the lobbyists for high-density high-rise housing requires an all-out effort and even then it is a nail bitter. Just look at the years soaked up to limit the height of the planned housing projects for the North Berkeley and Ashby BART Stations to seven stories. And the effort is still ongoing to maximize affordable housing and put a lid on density bonuses.
If the California YIMBYs (lobbying organization for high density housing) and developers and investors who support them get their way, the experience of the neighbors of 1201-1205 San Pablo story will spread across the State. Of course, it doesn’t end there, as the developers set their sights on demolishing single family homes and packing the lots with multiple units. The lobbyists have helping hands from Senators Nancy Skinner (Berkeley), Scott Wiener (San Francisco) and Toni Atkins (San Diego). Don’t count on Berkeley’s Assemblymember Buffy Wicks to vote no either. A site to check for good and bad housing legislation is Livable California https://www.livablecalifornia.org/livable-california-priority-bills-position-letters/
The City Council Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment & Sustainability Committee continued the agenda items on plastic bags to the Fall. Greenhouse gas emissions and the City Climate Action plan will return on July 20th along with with autonomous vehicles / driverless cars.
The City Council Land Use, Housing & Economic Development Committee approved a referral to the City Manager and the Planning Commission to establish standards for efficiency units. The current minimum unit size is 350 square feet per occupant. An efficiency unit is decidedly smaller. If you have ever spent a mindless evening looking at tiny house plans on YouTube as I did some months ago, you would find there are a lot of very innovative imaginative tiny houses. A place to start is Living Big in a tiny house https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLZyTlbuG9A.
If more architects, councilmembers and commissioners spent a little time on these sites, we would have better designed smaller ADUs. Don’t expect anything to happen soon with efficiency units; this is after all going to the Planning Commission where they project they will finish the bird safe glass ordinance in October 2022, three years after receiving the referral from the City Council.
The Planning Commission did meet, and had a discussion following the staff presentation on an affordable housing overlay and local density bonus. Nothing was decided, and it will come back again to consider accepting an in-lieu fee versus requiring all affordable units to be built on site (inclusionary affordable housing). Commissioner Ghosh asked if we are doing more segregation with 100% affordable buildings, and what are we trying to accomplish with objective design standards? Commissioner Twu said he worked on a couple of projects under California Affordable Housing bill AB 1763 and sometimes height isn’t an issue as costs go up with height; going wider would be more usefl.
A good deal of time at the Housing Advisory Commission (HAC) was devoted to reports of violations of ADA guidelines and standards, health and safety and sub-standard renovations / ”upgrades,” harassment and retaliation against tenants at Harriet Tubman Terrace. The 91 unit mid-rise building of affordable housing for adults 62 or older and for adults with disabilities is described by Affordable Housing online as “luxurious apartment living at an affordable price.”
The film produced by the tenants of repairs and their treatment, being relocated out of their apartments for construction and then moved back in, is a better fit to the submission from District 8 Commissioner Mari Mendonca. Cassandra Palanza, the Harriet Tubman Terrace Project Manager, wrote a 9-page response, including an offer to provide the City Inspection Log. The HAC voted to send a letter to the City Council to request a directive to the City Manager to investigate. Nothing from a commission seems to work its way through the system in a hurry. If the process is normal, this might appear on the Council agenda by November.
At the same HAC meeting, City Staff requested a one-year extension to Community Agency Contracts and to postpone RFPs, because the City doesn’t have the staff bandwidth to do the RFPs. Only two service providers were present. The representative from the Center for Independent Living spoke to the issue of inflation and the impact of contracts being extended without a new bid. It would mean not being able to serve as many clients because of the cost of materials. The HAC voted to support the extension with a request to Council to consider Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) for the one-year extension.
It is hard to defend the importance of commissions when dysfunction is in plain view. Such was the case of the Commission on Disability last week. Nearly 40 minutes (checked my watch) were wasted in a back and forth discussion of the order of the agenda. In the time that was wasted, a good part of the agenda could have been covered making any rearranging of the order of the agenda items irrelevant. We need a robust Commission on Disability to bring forward issues needing attention. Filling commission vacancies and retaining commissioners requires councilmembers to make their commissioner appointments and a functional commission to get work done. Currently six of the nine Commission on Disability commissioner positions are vacant.
In the commission reorganization initiated by Councilmember Droste, there consideration was given to merging the Commission on Aging and the Commission on Disability. They were left separate with discussion that not all older adults are disabled and certainly people with disabilities are of all ages. Each has unique contributions to make.
Some months ago as plans for the Marina were starting to roll starting with the pier and ferry, Mayor Arreguin said at a public meeting on the Marina that the opposition wasn’t representative of Berkeley.
Local does matter. So far it looks like the mayor and council are NOT representative of the community. Too often it is one councilmember standing alone against the rest. That we need to change. Sending your opinion to [email protected] is a start.
July 3, 2022
As the Supreme Court hands out one frightening decision after another, I am finding my way into reading and rereading that little 5 ¼ by 3 ½ inch 38-page booklet “The Constitution of the United States of America” that I received years ago
As the Supreme Court hands out one frightening decision after another, I am finding my way into reading and rereading that little 5 ¼ by 3 ½ inch 38-page booklet “The Constitution of the United States of America” that I received years ago