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Support grows for ousted disability commissioner

By Daniela Mohor Daily Planet staff
Friday August 24, 2001

A group of the city’s disabled people are organizing to protest Councilmember Linda Maio’s decision to remove Commissioner Karen Craig from the Commission on Disability earlier this month. 

Maio’s office has received half a dozen electronic messages, one fax and several phone calls requesting the councilmember reconsider her decision. Members of the disabled community are also planning other initiatives. 

After serving on the commission for four years, Craig, one of Berkeley’s most vocal advocates on disability issues, received a letter Aug. 6, informing her that she had been replaced. In the letter that she sent shortly before going on vacation, Maio blamed Craig for creating dissension by opposing some of Easy Does It policies. EDI is the company that the city contracts with to provide disabled people with emergency services.  

“Regarding EDI, I see some fundamental main differences between us,” Maio wrote. “I want to stop browbeating EDI and instead help them be successful.” Maio also criticized Craig for her aggressive attitude. 

“We do our cause and ourselves a great disservice when we are caustic, doctrinaire, inflexible, and accusatory,” she wrote. “People don’t come away with the message of the cause, they come away with a wound or at best a bad taste.” 

Craig’s supporters, however feel that her removal is unjust. In their letters they praise her accomplishments, including recent progress made with EDI, and suggest that the decision is the result of a political deal. 

“This action is both highly unfair and totally unwarranted, and smacks of political cronyism,” Blane Beckwith wrote in an e-mail to Maio. “I am appalled at the type of “machine politics” you and Councilmember Dona Spring are apparently engaged in plotting in Karen (Craig)’s ouster.” Beckwith, like others, believes that Spring, who openly advocated Craig’s removal, feels threatened by Craig’s leadership in the disabled community. 

The letter campaign is only one of the several initiatives Craig’s supporters plan to take. Miya Rodolfo Sioson, chair of the commission, anticipates Craig’s replacement will be one of the items on the agenda at the next meeting. She also said she and others are planning to start a petition drive and to demonstrate at the first City Council meeting in September. 

Maio’s office received only two calls in support of Craig’s removal, and one e-mail congratulating the new appointee, Robert Allamand, according to Maio aide Calvin Fong. 

But according to Councilmember Dona Spring, others like her, are pleased with Craig’s replacement. 

“I was not the only person to advocate Craig’s removal,” she said. “There were several others but they don’t want to come out. They are people who don’t like conflict and who would rather stay out of this.” 

Craig, meanwhile, does not plan to take any specific action on the matter. Even removed from the commission, she said, she will keep working on disability issues. But people’s support cheers her up, she added. 

“As I’m going around in the city I was getting some support from people I had never seen before,” she said. “That is more important to me than anything else.” 

Maio continues to be out of town and Fong declined to defend her position in her absence.