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KEVIN LEE FREEMAN, pictured in a 1999 arrest photo, a well known Telegraph transient, was killed last Friday in his Santa Rita jail cell.
KEVIN LEE FREEMAN, pictured in a 1999 arrest photo, a well known Telegraph transient, was killed last Friday in his Santa Rita jail cell.
 

News

Killing of Berkeley Man Raises Questions About County’s Prison Policies

By JOHN GELUARDI
Friday May 16, 2003

For the last 25 years, Kevin Lee Freeman, who was murdered allegedly by his cell mate at Santa Rita Jail last Friday, was a fixture on Telegraph Avenue where he panhandled, kept to himself and collected dozens of citations for alcohol-related misdemeanors.  

As news of his death spread around Telegraph Avenue Wednesday, those who knew him — the homeless, store employees and beat cops — said they were stunned. 

“I was shocked when I heard,” said Berkeley Police Officer John Jones, who has arrested and cited Freeman many times since 1983. “He has been around here for so long, I thought he was going to outlive me.” 

Freeman’s murder, the second of an inmate at the jail in 13 months, has raised concerns about Santa Rita’s policies and procedures for classifying prisoners and has sparked an outcry by homeless advocates and substance abuse counselors who question the wisdom of jailing alcoholics alongside violent criminals. 

Freeman, 55, was murdered in his cell in Santa Rita’s psychiatric ward while serving a 30-day sentence for being drunk in public. His cell mate, Ryan Lee Raper, 20, a resident of the unincorporated town of Copperopolis in Calavaras County, was being held for allegedly attacking a stranger with a knife in front of a Union City restaurant on March 2, according to Union City Police Lt. Rob Romano. 

After Freeman was found dead, Raper was transported to John George Psychiatric Pavilion in San Leandro where he is being held without bail while the Alameda County District Attorney decides whether to charge him with Freeman’s murder.  

According to Lt. Greg Ahern of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Investigations Unit, the circumstances that led to Freeman’s murder are being investigated and a report will be submitted to the Alameda County District Attorney in the coming days.  

“We’re going to look at everything, medical history, criminal history as well as current charges,” Ahern said. “We’ll also look at the medical screening and jail classification for the two inmates.” 

 

Longtime Presence 

 

By most accounts, Freeman kept to himself and rarely spoke to anyone. Many of Telegraph Avenue’s denizens said they often saw him, a gaunt and bearded figure, eating alone during the evening meal at Trinity United Methodist Church or hanging out on the sidewalk in front of Shakespeare and Company Books near People’s Park. Freeman, who was a chronic alcoholic and possibly suffered from mental illness, apparently had no close friends or family in the area.  

A homeless man who gave his name as Mike said he’d seen Freeman around for years. “I never saw him bother anybody,” he said. “He was always walking around by himself, just surviving.” 

Perhaps Freeman’s most significant human contact in recent years was with the police who had arrested or cited him more than 50 times, according to Berkeley Police Public Information Officer Mary Kusmiss. She said Freeman could become belligerent when he was very drunk, but most often he was friendly, cooperative and even charming. 

 

The Final Arrest 

 

On April 22, University of California Police officers arrested Freeman around midnight on Telegraph Avenue near Blake Street.  

According to the police report, he was intoxicated and had difficulty walking. He was charged with public drunkenness and violation of a court order to stay away from an area known as “the box,” which is enclosed by Bancroft Way, Ellsworth Street, College Avenue and Parker Street. The area includes People’s Park and a section of Telegraph Avenue that Freeman frequented for at least twenty years. 

On April 24, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Carol Brosnahan sentenced Freeman to 30 days in Santa Rita Jail for both charges, according to court documents. 

All Santa Rita inmates are psychologically evaluated by a licensed mental health care clinician, according to Barbara Majak, deputy director of Alameda County Behavioral Health Services.  

The clinician then makes recommendations for jail classifications to deputy sheriffs. Once classified, the deputies assign inmates to various housing units such as the general population, minimum or maximum security. 

Both Freeman and Raper were evaluated and assigned to a two-person cell in the Behavioral Health Unit, where inmates who suffer from mental illness or are mentally disturbed can better be monitored. 

However, the reason why Freeman, an older man with no history of violence, was put in a cell with Raper, a younger man suspected of committing an unprovoked knife attack on a stranger, is under investigation.  

“I can’t say why the decision was made,” Ahern said. “But so far there was no indication that there would have been a problem by putting the two men in the same cell.” 

 

A Grisly Scene 

 

Around 3 a.m. last Friday, several inmates, including Raper, called unit guards on intercoms to report a disturbance. When guards arrived at Freeman’s cell, they found a grisly scene. According to some reports, Freeman’s brain matter and internal organs had been smeared on the walls of the cell.  

Ahern would not confirm or deny those reports. “All I can say is that the victim died of severe blunt trauma,” he said.  

Another inmate was allegedly killed by a cell mate in the Behavioral Health Unit in April 2002. James Mitchell, 24, died from a skull fracture after a fight with his cell mate, Daniel Beltran, 22, who was later ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment. Mitchell, who had ties to Berkeley, also had a substance abuse problem and suffered from mental illness, according to Tom Gorham, a senior counselor at the 12-step program Options Recovery Services. 

 

“Outraged” 

 

Osha Neuman, a Berkeley attorney and homeless advocate, said Freeman should have been treated as a person with a disease and not as a criminal. “I’m outraged and disgusted that something like this has happened,” he said. 

He added that city and county officials should reevaluate how the criminal justice system deals with the mentally ill homeless who are severe substance abusers.  

“There are a lot of questions to ask the Alameda County sheriff about why a chronic alcoholic was sent to Santa Rita and, appallingly, put in a cell with a violent criminal,” he said. “But more than that this should be occasion for us to do a searching inventory of how we deal with this problem.” 

Gorham said Alameda County has a dire need for a detox center. 

“The way it is now, we drive local homeless people with substance abuse problems from the courts, jails and Alta Bates Hospital to San Mateo or Marin County where they can be treated at county-run detox centers,” he said.  

“Both Mitchell and Freeman’s deaths could possibly have been avoided if there was appropriate care for substance abusers in Alameda County.” 

Besides his extensive arrest record, not much is known about Kevin Lee Freeman.  

He was from Indiana where, an acquaintance said, he had been a state champion swimmer.  

He is survived by a daughter, Rasa-Lila Christina Lagaras, who lives in Cumberland County, Pa. 


Berkeley This Week

Friday May 16, 2003

COMMUNITY MEETINGS 

 

FRIDAY, MAY 16 

 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. wibberkeley@yahoo.com 

548-6310, 845-1143. 

 

Meditation, Peace Vigil and Dialogue, gather at noon on the grass close to the West Entrance to UC Berkeley, on Oxford St. near University Ave. People of all traditions are welcome. Sponsored by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. 496-6000, ext. 135. www.bpf.org 

 

 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon Series 

“How Stars Are Made,” with Steven Stahler, PhD, Professor, Dept. of Astronomy, UC Berkeley. Luncheon 11:45 a.m. $11.50 - $12.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925, 665-9020. 

 

SATURDAY, MAY 17 

 

20th Annual Himalayan Fair 

Authentic Himalayan crafts, arts, music, dance, foods, antiques to benefit grassroots projects in Tibet, Nepal, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Mongolia, at Live Oak Park, 1300 Shattuck Ave., starting at 10 a.m. $5 donation. 869-3995. www.himalayanfair.net 

 

Berkeley Association of Neighborhood Associations meets at 9:15 a.m. in the Fireside Room, St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 587-3257. www.berkeleycna.com 

 

Walk Across America 

Peace-by-Peace, a talk by four of the seven Berkeley women who walked across America for peace last year, at 7 p.m. at Redwood Gardens, 2951 Derby St. Donation sliding scale $5-$10, no one will be refused. Call Laura 925-828-8184 for more information. Benefit for Wo- 

men’s International League for Peace and Freedom. 

 

The 43rd Annual Walden Center and School Spring Fair, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 2446 McKinley Ave., corner of Dwight and McKinley. 

Proceeds will support the scholarship and building funds.  

 

Disaster First Aid Class offered by the City of Ber- 

keley’s Emergency Operations Center, from 1 to 4 p.m. at 997 Cedar St. For more information call 981-5605.  

 

Berkeley Historical Society Walking Tour, “The Westbrae Commons,” led by John Dennis and Karl Linn. 10 a.m. $5 members, $10 non-members. For reservations call 848-0181. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/histsoc 

 

Strawberry Tastings at the Berkeley Farmers Market from 10 a.m. - 3 p.m., Center St. at MLK, Jr. Way, sponsored by the Ecology Center. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

 

Dominos Tournament in San Pablo Park on the new tables installed by Friends of San Pablo Park, at noon. Call 649-9874 for information. 

 

Know Your Rights Training, a free workshop presented by CopWatch, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. For information call 548-0425. 

 

California Spring Wildflower Walk, with Nathan Smith, horticulturist and California natives expert, for a stroll through the Garden’s collection of native wildflowers, from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $10, members free. Registration recommended. UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755.  

 

Drip Irrigation:  

Do-it-yourself, Save Water 

A class covering the benefits and limitations of drip irrigation and basic tools and supplies needed to install your own drip irrigation system. Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave., near Dwight Way, from 10 a.m. - 1 p.m. Cost is $10 for Ecology Center members, $15 others, no one turned away for lack of funds. 548-2220 ext. 233. 

 

Cordonices Creek Water Quality Monitoring Day, sponsored by Friends of Five Creeks. Call 848-9358 for more information. 

 

Asian Pacific Islander Festival from noon to 4 p.m. at Martin Luther King, Jr. Civic Center Park. Enjoy community booths, cultural food and entertainment. asianfestival@hotmailcom. 289-4452. 

 

Child Safety Day at Habitot Children’s Museum. Free car seat checks, $5 toddler tricycle helmets. 10 a.m. to noon at 2065 Kittredge St. 647-1111, ext. 11. 

 

The American Cancer  

Society 24-hour “Relay for Life” from 10 a.m. Saturday, May 17 until Sunday, May 18 at the El Cerrito High School track. All El Cerrito, Kensington, Albany and Berkeley residents are invited to take part in this community event that raises money to fight cancer. To get involved contact Joann Steck-Bayat at 524-9464. www.cancer.org or 1-800-ACS-2345. 

Palestine: Between Iraq’s Occupation and the Roadmap to Peace, with speakers Marc Ellis, Professor of American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University, Texas and Dr. Mustafa Abu Swai, General Director of the Islamic Research Center, Al-Quds University, at 7 p.m. in 110 Barrows Hall, UC Campus.  

 

California Horticultural  

Society’s Annual Plant Sale 

Preview Sale and Party, 6 to 9 p.m. $5 Members only; memberships available at the door, $40 includes a free plant. General Sale on Sunday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. County Fair Bldg, Strybing Arboretum, Golden Gate Park at 9th & Lincoln Ave. For in- 

formation call 800-884-0009.  

 

Spring Cleaning Help from Berkeley High School 

Donate twice-read books or slightly worn blue jeans to our huge May Garage Sale to benefit the CAS program’s trip to Mexico this summer. 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 1639 Ashby, between King & California, 2 1/2 blocks be- 

low the Ashby BART Station, near Malcolm X School. 

531-5225. 

 

SUNDAY, MAY 18 

 

20th Annual Himalayan Fair 

See listing Sat. May 17 

 

Auditions for Oliver! with Berkeley Musical Theater, at 1 p.m. and May 19 at 7 p.m. at Grace North Church at Cedar and Oxford. Children ages 7 to 13, and adults of all ages. Bring sheet music with a Broadway song. For more information call 524-1224. 

 

Hidden Gems of Berkeley Bike Ride Meet at Halcyon Commons at Prince St., one block west of Telegraph at 10 a.m. for a bike tour of special gardens, fanciful sculptures, a daylighted creek and much more. Bring lunch and water. 549-7433.  

 

King Jr HS Track Clean-up  

There is lots of weeding and ivy whacking, so bring your gloves, loppers and clippers, and water to drink. Meet at the Hopkins St. entrance at 10 a.m. This is an opportunity to give back to the Track, to help BUSD. 526-5130. 

 

Eckhart Tolle’s Talks on Video, free gatherings, at 7:30 p.m. to hear the words of the author of “The Power of Now” at the Feldenkrais Ctr., 830 Bancroft Way. Will meet on the first and third Sunday of each month. 547-2024. EdShorelin@aol.com 

 

California Horticultural  

Society’s Annual Plant Sale 

10 a.m. to 2 p.m. See listing May 18. 

 

MONDAY, MAY 19 

 

Malcolm X Day 

City Offices Are Closed  

 

League of Women Voters Annual Meeting, from 4:30 to 8 p.m. Business meeting and light supper at 5 followed by talk at 7 p.m., Rita Maran, Ph.D. on “The Future of the United Na-tions.” At the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Call 843-8824 for dinner reservations at $15, and further information.  

 

Berkeley Gray Panthers Homeowners Support Group 

holds a discussion on How to Keep Your Title Clear and Deal with Liens and Other Problems, at 3 p.m. at 1403 Addison St. 548-9696. graypanthersberk@aol.com 

 

Berkeley CopWatch meets at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. 

Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

 

TUESDAY, MAY 20 

 

Strawberry Tastings at the Berkeley Farmers Market, from 2 - 7 p.m., sponsored by the Ecology Center. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter. 

org/farmers_mrkts/ 

 

Berkeley Garden Club presents a lecture on Container Gardening with Keeyla Meadows at 1 p.m. at the Epworth United Methodist Church, 1953 Hopkins St. 524-4374. 

 

Let’s End Bullying and Name-Calling, a preview of a new film from the Women’s Educational Media and in-formation about the Respect for All Project, at 6:30 p.m. at Willard Middle School, 2425 Stuart St. Pot-luck dinner, door prizes. For information call 547-8080 or BerkeleySafeSchools@hotmail.com 

 

Identity Theft, a presentation by the Berkeley Police De- 

partment at 11:15 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190. 

 

Kathy Kelly, founder of Iraq Peace Teams, speaks about her eyewitnessing the bombing of Baghdad, at 7:30 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets $20, benefit for Voices in the Wilderness. Wheelchair accessible and ASL-interpreted. 548-0542. www.vitw.org 

 

Azmi Bishara, Palestinian Member of Israeli Knesset, and recipient of the Global Exchange 2003 Human Rights Award, in conversation with Dennis Bernstein at 7:30 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2501 Harrison St., Oakland. Sponsored by KFPA Radio 94.1 and Global Exchange. Tickets $10 in advance, $12 at the door. Tickets available at independent bookstores or phone orders at 415-255-7296 ext. 200. For more information call 415-575-5542, or www.globalexchange.org 

 

Berkeley Camera Club, meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 525-3565.  

www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

 

Networking as Relationship Building, a brown bag career  

talk with Kate Dey, noon to 1 p.m., at YWCA Turning Point Career Center, 2600 Bancroft Way. 848-6370. 

 

WEDNESDAY, MAY 21 

 

South Berkeley Mural Project. Community members in South Berkeley are coming together to create a mural on the side of the Grove Liquor Store on the corner of Ashby Ave. and MLK, Jr. Way, at 7 p.m. at Epic Arts Studios at 1923 Ashby Ave. For further information call 644-2204. 

 

Amnesty International Berkeley Community Group 

meets the first and third Wednesdays of the month at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 1606 Bonita Ave., at Cedar St. 872-0768. 

 

 

Community Dances in Berkeley, traditional English and American dances, 8 p.m. every Wednesday, $9. 7 p.m. first Sunday, $10. Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St., 233-5065. www.bacds.org 

 

 

CITY MEETINGS 

 

City Council meets Tuesday, May 20, at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers. Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/citycouncil 

 

Community Meetings on the City Budget 

The public is invited to learn more about the budget de- 

ficit and how the city plans to address the issue. May 22 at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-CITY.  

 

Parks and Recreation Commission meets Monday, May 19 at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center.  

Deborah Chernin, 981-6715. 

www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/parksandrecreation 

 

Citizens Humane Commission meets Wednesday, May 21, at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center. 

Katherine O’Connor, 981-6601. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/humane 

 

Commission on Aging meets 

Wednesday, May 21, at 1:30 p.m. in the South Berkeley Senior Center. Lisa Ploss, 981-5200. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/aging 

 

Commission on Labor meets 

Wednesday, May 21, at 6:30 p.m. at Berkeley WorkSource, 1950 Addison St., Suite 105. Delfina M. Geiken, 644-6085. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/commissions/labor 

 

Human Welfare & Community Action Commission meets Wednesday, May 21, at 7 p.m. in the South Berkeley Senior Center. Marianne Graham, 981-5416. www.ci.- 

berkeley.ca.us/commissions/ 

welfare 

 

Rent Stabilization Board meets Thursday, May 22, at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center. Pam Wyche 644-6128 ext. 113. www.ci.- 

berkeley.ca.us/rent 

 

West Berkeley Project Area Commission meets Thursday, May 22, at 7 p.m. at 1900 Sixth St. Iris Starr, 981-7520. 

www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/westberkeley 

 

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thursday, May 22, at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/zoning  

  

School Board meets Wednesday, May 21, at 7:30 p.m. in the City Council Chambers. Queen Graham 644-6147 or Mark Coplan 644-6320.


Letters to the Editor

Friday May 16, 2003

A USEFUL TOOL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

While I share Dr. Schiffenbauer’s dismay with the results of the April 15 New York Times /CBS News poll, I do not share the belief that this (and other polls by the reputable agencies that he lists) was constructed and conducted in a manner designed to shape public opinion. 

First, of course, it might be useful to question the assumption that publication of polling results has any detectable lasting impact on public opinion whatsoever. 

Second, it is worth noting the predictive utility of well-conducted polling. Although readers may be familiar with the relative accuracy of voter preference predictions, there are many other areas where this technique has proven to be quite accurate. These include such diverse topics as drinking behavior by college students and charitable giving by individuals. Polling is useful because, from a properly drawn sample, using reliable and valid indicators, it is possible to obtain an accurate description of a large population from a relatively few observations. 

Dr. Schiffenbauer is mistaken when he asserts “each of the 898 people polled was ... a proxy for ... 240,000 U.S. residents.” Careful reading of the sample design, available by contacting the polling organization, will reveal there was never any representation that the sample was representative of all U.S. residents. 

Dr. Schiffenbauer may be correct, however, when he implies that journalists pick and choose elements of a survey to support a particular point or to make an article more interesting. These are journalistic and editorial decisions, of course, and not polling decisions at all. 

I agree that it is always wise to consume mass media products with great care and am grateful that Dr. Schiffenbauer has attempted to show others how this might be done in the analysis of public opinion based on polling. But I do believe his readers would benefit if he was a bit more rigorous in his own writing for the Daily Planet. 

David Nasatir 

• 

BATES IN CUBA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Mayor Bates has withdrawn from a friendship visit to Cuba citing recent acts of repression by Fidel Castro’s government. Repression in Cuba impressed me on my two weeks there with a Mexican cultural group in 1993. At the airport at the end of the stay, I could not wait for the airplane to get me off that island.   

With that said, I wish our mayor would go. To stay here he wastes a chance to push forward peaceful reforms. In a 1993 Cuban/Mexican dialog many reforms were discussed, and I subsequently learned that many were implemented, such as informal farmers markets.   

On my 1993 trip the one large positive memory was the eagerness of Cubans for ideas for peaceful change. For instance, the possibility of a movement for “affirmative action” to redress the tendency of light-skinned Cubans to hold all the good jobs was discussed. 

Mayor Bates should go. He should politely tell his hosts he is concerned with repression. And he should act the friendly guy that I hear he is. Thus he can further continue peaceful reform. The likely alternative is the fall of Fidel and Havana turned into a Baghdad. Who wants that? 

       Ted Vincent 

 

• 

ETHICAL CONCERNS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I was thrilled when I saw the headline in the Portland newspaper declaring that The New York Times had admitted one of its reporters was guilty of professional ethics violations. Finally, I thought, Judith Miller is being called to task. Imagine my disappointment when I found out that the culprit was a staff reporter who simply faked interviews. 

The Times has made lots of noise about the hapless Jayson Blair, but I think it is time to look at the real miscreants. Ms. Miller has opened a new page on journalistic complicity with government in her Pentagon-led stories. First, of course, there was the “leaked” story from the White House that claimed that some aluminum tubes had been sent to Iraq and these could be part of a nuclear program. When this failed to pan out, she was the one who filed a report, published on the front page, that claimed to be the evidence given by an Iraqi scientist.  

Ms. Miller admitted openly that she allowed the Pentagon to vet the story. And the whole piece was fed to her by the military and based on one source. Ms. Miller did not even interview the scientist, instead being satisfied with a staged performance where she watched him from a few hundred yards as he pointed to a spot in the sand where weapons had supposedly been stored in the past. 

With the incredible work of Judith Miller, The New York Times has abandoned any independence of the fourth estate. The paper has become a shameless mouthpiece and official government organ for the U.S. government as it launches new and preposterous imperial missions. 

Rick Ayers 

 

• 

AN ANCIENT CRIME 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Imagine if the Saudis had built several large bases in our country, manned by thousands of soldiers who were armed with everything from rifles to nuclear-tipped missiles. And imagine if the Saudi forces were supporting an illegitimate American government. Hmm. Would we be a bit resentful? 

In 1776, we declared our independence from the English King George the Third. We attacked and killed his British Redcoat troops at every opportunity. We fired at them from behind trees and rocks (tactics considered extremely unfair at the time). We dressed up as Indians and in darkness boarded British ships in Boston harbor and vandalized their tea shipments. We destroyed the homes and crops of Tories (supporters of British colonial rule in America); we even stole their horses and cattle.  

The English have been imperialists and colonists since 1620, about 380 years to date. We Americans have been imperialists and colonists since 1898, only 105 years to date.  

We began our modern colonialism and imperialism by winning the Spanish-American war in 1898. As spoils, we seized Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippine Islands. The residents of these islands were not consulted in this matter. The residents of the Philippines in particular did not wish to be ruled by Americans. We slaughtered thousands of them and didn’t leave until 1946.  

In the early 1920s, after the collapse of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, the British, the French, the Dutch and the Americans divided up Iraq’s oil reserves, with each country getting about one-fourth of the Iraqi oil reserves. The Iraqis and the Kurds fought valiantly against the superior military technology of the British and finally lost. In 1925, the British dropped poison gas from airplanes on the town of Sulamnaiya in Kurdish Iraq. This was the first use of a “weapon of mass destruction” in Iraq.  

American imperialism and colonialism in the 21st century? Do Bush and Company think that they can get away with this ancient crime? Yankee come home.  

James K. Sayre 

Oakland 

 

• 

BUS ROUTE IN QUESTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Today, Monday morning, May 12, I walked my dog down Seventh Street and found bright green posters yelling, “Save Our Buses,” or something like that. They appear to have been posted by neighbors, wanting to prevent the cancellation of full-size 52 AC Transit buses up Cedar Street. They say their opposition is a “small group of anti-bus people.” 

I doubt it’s either small or anti-bus; I grew up on Cedar Street, and watched while neighboring streets one by one bollarded and diverted traffic off their streets onto our unlucky “conduit” — then watched as our parents and neighbors petitioned City Council and AC Transit to limit diesel trucks and full-size buses so that the “small group” of taxpayers who live the length of Cedar Street and beyond could walk to the BART station without gagging. 

The “small inefficient vans” were an ideal solution to address both transportation and residential needs.  

Who is behind these posters, and where do they get their information? How many people ride the buses, and how do they feel? If the vans are not efficient, why should we expect large buses to be? Is it a scheduling issue? 

Thanks for any light you can shed on this situation. 

Jenny Cole 

 

• 

UNJUST EDICT 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Chancellor Robert Berdahl’s edict regarding SARS is rather like forbidding people who use wheelchairs from coming to campus to stop the spread of neurological conditions and spinal infirmities.  

After this, the world is entitled to a low opinion indeed of the state of science at the University of California. 

Carol Denney


Exhibitions

Friday May 16, 2003

ACCI Gallery  

“Into the Fire,” the works of nine Bay Area Masters of Glass: Jeff Benrotch, Michael Sosin, Melodie Beylik, Pam- 

ina Traylor, Bill Burch, Holly Wallace, Erik Eiserling, Dan Woodell and David Hering. April 25 - May 23. 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. acciart@aol.com, www.accigallery.com 

 

Art of Living Center “Watercolors” by William Webb. Runs May 17 through July 18, Tues., Wed., Sat., noon - 5 p.m., Fri. 1 - 5 p.m. 2905 Shattuck Ave. 848-3736. 

 

Bancroft Library 

Student Photographs of the Berkeley Campus, through July 18. Mon. - Fri. 9 a.m - 5 p.m., Sat. 1 - 5 p.m. 642-3781. 

Conversations with Myself  

May 15 to August 15, 2003 

 

Berkeley Historical Society, “Focus on Berkeley,” a photoraphy exhibit by the Berkeley Camera Club, Berkeley High School students, and community photographers in celebration of the City’s 125th Anniversary. Exhibit runs May 18 to Sept. 13. Berkeley History Center, 1931 Center St. Sponsored by the Berkeley Historical Society, 848-0181. Admission is free. 

 

Berkeley Art Museum 

The 33rd Annual UC Ber- 

keley Masters of Fine Art Graduate Exhibition, May 15 - July 28, Admission $8, free for UC staff, faculty and students. 643-6494. 

rmacneil@uclink.berkeley.edu 

“The Black Panthers 1968” 

Photographs by Ruth-Mario Baruch and Pirkle Jones, March 26 - June 29. 

Roger Ballen, “Photographs” 

May 12 - August 15. 

“Everything Matters: Paul Klos, A Retrospective,” April 2 - July 20. 

“A Brush with Truth,” 13th c. 

Chinese ink paintings, “Haboku” Japanese landscape paintings, to June 29. 

Fred Wilson’s “Aftermath” selected objects on war and conflict from the museum’s collection. Through July 20. 

“Turning Corners,” an exhibition of five centuries of innovative art, through the summer of 2004. The UC Berkeley Art Museum is open Wed. - Sun., 11 a.m. - 7 p.m. Cost is $5 - $8, and free the first Thursday of every month, 2626 Bancroft Way, 642-0808.                   www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

 

Graduate Theological  

Union Library 

Hand-crafted books by Bay Area artists: Zea Morwitz, Mary Eubank, Nance O'Banion, Ted Purves, Susanne Cockrell, Karen Sjoholm, and Lisa Kokin. The books are accompanied by a statement addressing the issues and process involved in the creation of the works. May 12 through Sept. 30. 

“The Sorrows of War,” an exhibition of prints from the collection of David and Eva Bradford by Käthe Kollwitz, with German Expressionists Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Erich Heckel. Through May 31. Graduate Theological Union Library, 2400 Ridge Rd. 649-2541. 

 

Kala Art Institute 

Water World presents photographically-based images of water by a diverse group of artists. Photography, digital imaging and video reveal perspectives on the ways we see and think about water. Gallery Reception May 22, Visit with the artists, June 17. Runs May 22 to June 21. Call for more information and exhibit hours, 549-2977. www.kala.org  

 

Lawrence Hall of Science 

Lego Ocean Adventure 

The underwater world comes to life through role play and hands-on activities. Children learn how people eat, sleep, and work while living underwater as well as how scientists explore the ocean depths using unmanned rovers. May 17 – Sept. 7, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. Cost is $8 adults, $6 for youth 5-18, seniors and disabled, $4 for children 3-4, free for children under 3. 

Lawrence Hall of Science, Centennial Drive, above the UC Campus. 642-5132. www.lawrencehallofscience.org 

 

Phoebe S. Hearst Museum of Anthropology 

“Photographs from the Great Age of Exploration, 1865-1915,” through March 2004. “A Century of Collecting” Exploring the variety of art and culture across the globe from ancient times to the present. Phoebe S. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, Kroeber Hall, UC Campus is open Wed. - Sat., 10 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. Sun., noon - 4 p.m. Free for museum members, UC students, staff and faculty/free to the public on Thursdays. 643-7648. http://hearstmuseum. 

berkeley.edu/outreach 

 

Red Oak Realty Gallery 

Prints by Barbara de Groot, Runs untilJuly 26. at 1891 Solano Ave. 848-3965. 

 

Townsend Center Gallery 

“Obsolescence and Rele- 

vance,” recent work by John Jenkins and Eric Theise, through May 30. 220 Ste- 

phens Hall, UC Campus. Mon.- Fri., 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. 643-9670. 

 

Women’s Cancer Resource Center Gallery 

Bibiana Lai, “Painted Blessings,” painted breast castings. Runs May 23 - July 3. reception with the artist May 23, 7-9 p.m. 5741 Telegraph Ave. 601-4040, x 111. www.wcrc.org  

 

Worth Ryder Gallery 

“Senior Show,” by UC Department of Art Practice Seniors, May 12 - 16, 1 - 4 p.m. weekdays. 116 Krober Hall, UC Campus.


Arts Calendar

Friday May 16, 2003

FRIDAY, MAY 16 

 

FILM 

 

Heroic Grace: Martial Arts 

Blood Brothers, at 7 and 9:20 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-1412. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

 

Jack Hirschman, poet, painter and activist will be featured at the Fellowship Café and Open Mike at 7:30 p.m. Donation of $5-$10. 1924 Cedar St. 540-0898. 

 

Carroll Spinney reflects on his life as a puppeteer in “The Wisdom of Big Bird (and the Dark Genius of Oscar the Grouch): Lessons From a Life in Feathers,” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

 

Todd Gitlin reads from “Letters to a Young Activist,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

 

Richard Mahler discusses his book, “Stillness,” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

 

Berkeley Ballet Theater Children’s Division and Youth Company present “Seasons,” an opportunity for dance-lovers of all ages to enjoy ballet. The program includes Sally Street’s “Mon Parasol” and two world 

premieres by Sonya Delwaide, “Au Revoir” and “Au Pas,” plus a restaging of “Les Patineurs,” by Artistic Director Corinne Jonas, at 7 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets are $16, available from the ballet box office 843-4689. www.berkeleyballet.org 

 

Dances for Peace presented by the Isadora Duncan Project, Inc., at 8 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $13 in advance, $16 at the door. For reservations call 548-2259 or e-mail nncogley@sbcglobal.net 

 

Young People’s Symphony Orchestra performs Holst’s “The Planets” at the Dean Lesher Center in Walnut Creek at 8 p.m. Tickets are $6-$13. For information call 665-5607. www.ypsomusic.org 

 

Los Mocoscos, a Latin funk-rock group from SF’s Mission District, performs at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

 

Bay Area Latin Jazz Legacy Series, an Afro-Latin eve- 

ning with John Calloway and Diaspora and O-Maya in a program of jazz, hip hop, funk, soul and salsa. Panel at 7:30 p.m. and show at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12 in ad- 

vance, $15 at the door. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

 

The Kathy Kallick Band performs hot bluegrass, cool originals at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761 www.freightandsalvage.org 

 

Asylum Street Spankers, at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $14. 841-2082.  

 

Ludicra, Insidious, The Vanishing, Skarp, Desolation perform at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Stroke 9, Beth Champion Band perform Rock at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8. 848-0866. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

 

SATURDAY, MAY 17 

 

CHILDREN 

 

Kids on the Block Puppet Show, promoting acceptance and understanding of physical and cultural differences, at 2 p.m. at the Hall of Health, 2230 Shattuck Ave. (lower level). Suggested donation $3, children under 3 free. 549-1564. 

 

How Ground Hog’s Garden Grew, a story about gardening at 11 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

 

FILM 

 

Heroic Grace: Martial Arts 

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, at 2:15 and 7 p.m. and Return to the 36th Chamber, at 4:30 and 9:15 p.m., at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-1412. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

 

Mary Ford-Grabowsky reads from her new anthology of women’s sacred poetry, with local contributing authors Janine Canan, Christina Hutchins, Stephanie Marohn, Betty McAfee, Michelle Lynn Ryan, Jan Steckel and Dorothy Walters reading as well. At 7:30 p.m. at Boad- 

ecia’s Books, 398 Colusa Ave., Kensington. Free, refreshments served. 559-9184. www.bookpride.com. 

 

Jonathan Schell on “The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

 

Berkeley Ballet Theater 

Children’s Division and Youth Company present “Seasons,” an opportunity for dance-lovers of all ages to enjoy ballet. The program includes Sally Street’s “Mon Parasol” and two world 

premieres by Sonya Delwaide, “Au Revoir” and “Au Pas,” plus a restaging of “Les Patineurs,” by Artistic Director Corinne Jonas, at 2 and 7 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets are $16 available from the ballet box office 843-4689. www.berkeleyballet.org 

 

Dances for Peace presented by the Isadora Duncan Project, Inc., at 8 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $13 in advance, $16 at the door. For reservations call 548-2259.  

 

Youth Musical Theater Commons presents “Les Miserables,” performed by students of King, Longfellow, Willard, BHS, and Albany High. This school edition is shorter than the Broadway version, but not short on talent. At 7:30 p.m. in the Longfellow Auditorium, 1500 Derby St. Tickets at the door, $5-$8. 848-1797. http://busduse.org/lesmiz  

 

Cecilia Long, vocalist, at 2:30 p.m. at Walnut Square, at Vine. 204-9228. www.walnutsquarecenter.com 

 

Lunar Heights, Malika Madre Mana, Mother Earth, Ujima Youth Poets, music and spoken words, at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Music over Murder, a con- 

cert by Hip Hop for the Soul, in tribute to the 114 lives lost in Oakland last year, at 8 p.m. at the Mandela Arts Village, 1357 5th St., Oak- 

land, behind the West Oak- 

land BART Station. 891-0247 ext. 19. 

 

Robin Flower and Libby McLaren, Celtic and old-time music at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $17.50 in ad- 

vance, $18.50 at the door. 

548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

 

Kairos Youth Choir performs a musical revue featuring the music of Rogers and Hammerstein at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Montessori School Auditorium, 1581 Le Roy. Tickets are $10, children under 12 $5. 

 

Sacred Drums of India, featuring Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri, tabla; T.H. Subash Chandran, ghatam and konnokol; Ganesh Kumar, kanjira; with Jim Santi Owen, drumset and Indian percussion; and Tim Witter, tabla, at 7:30 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $15-$25. For information and reservations call 836-6936.  

www.jimsantiowen.com  

 

Kenny Endo Taiko Ensemble, with Somei Yoshino Taiko Ensemble, will perform a blend of taiko music and jazz. Reception is at 5 p.m., with concert at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $25 in advance, $30 at the door. 835-2003. www.taikoarts.com 

 

Hausmusik presents Carnival of Florence, a program of music from late 15th and early 16th-century Florence, at 8 p.m. at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington Ave., Albany. Advance tickets, $15 and $18, are recommended. Reservations 524-5661. 

 

Naked Barbies, Kevin Welch, at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082.  

 

Kellye Gray performs at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Tickets are $12-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

 

Kofy Brown and Subterraneanz perform Hip Hop at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0866. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

 

Zydeco Flames performs at 9:30 p.m., with a Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054.  www.ashkenaz.com 

 

Lungfish, The Embalmers, The Shivering, Once a Hero, perform at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

 

SUNDAY, MAY 18 

 

CHILDREN 

 

Family Show with Asheba, reggae music and stories at 3 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $3 for children, $5 for adults. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

 

FILM 

 

Arguing the World, a look at the lives of some of this century’s greatest thinkers, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe and Irwing Kristal and their controversial role in the McCarthy era, at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Com- 

munity Center, 1414 Walnut St. Suggested donation $2. 848-0237. 

Nicholas Ray: They Live by Night, at 5:30 p.m. and A Woman's Secret at 7:25 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-1412. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

 

Poetry Flash with Margo Stever and Monica Youn, at 7:30 p.m. at Cody's Books, $2 donation. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com, www.poetryflash.org 

 

Marilyn Gordon discusses her new book, “Extra- 

ordinary Healing,” at 3:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

 

Berkeley Ballet Theater 

Children’s Division and Youth Company present “Seasons,” an opportunity for dance-lovers of all ages to enjoy ballet. The program includes Sally Street’s “Mon Parasol” and two world 

premieres by Sonya Delwaide, “Au Revoir” and “Au Pas,” plus a restaging of “Les Patineurs,” by Berkeley Ballet Theater’s Artistic Director Corinne Jonas, at 2 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets are $16, available from the ballet box office 843-4689. www.berkeleyballet.org 

 

7th Annual Jazz on 4th Street Festival, from 12:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., on 4th St., between Hearst and Virginia. Proceeds benefit the Berkeley High Performing Arts and Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble. Presented by KCSM/Jazz 91, Fourth Street merchants and Yoshi’s. Featuring Dave Ellis Quartet, John Santos Quartet with Orestes Vilato, Johnny Nitro and the DoorSlammers, and The Berkeley High Jazz En-semble and Combos. 644-3002.  

 

Youth Musical Theater Commons presents “Les Miserables,” performed by students of King, Longfellow, Willard, BHS, and Albany High. At 3 p.m. in the Longfellow Auditorium, 1500 Derby St. Tickets at the door, $5-$8. 848-1797. http://busduse.org/lesmiz 

 

Kingdom Travelers, Inspired Catholic Voices and Sons of the Soul Revivers sing tradtional and contemporary gospel at 3 p.m. at Kimball’s East, 6005 Shellmound St., Emeryville. Benefits the Cal-Pac Scholarship Fund. Tickets $20 in advance, $25 at the door. 835-8453.  

 

Latin American Children’s Ensemble Los Mapeches in a journey through the Amer- 

icas at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8 for adults, $4 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

 

Kairos Youth Choir performs a musical revue featuring the music of Rogers and Hammerstein at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Montessori School Auditorium, 1581 Le Roy. Tickets are $10, children under 12 $5. 

 

New Millenium Strings, Laurien Jones, conductor, performs Handel, Bach, Mozart and Hayden at 7 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way at Ellsworth. Suggested donation $10, seniors and students $7, children under 12 free. 526-331.  

 

Wafi Gad, Luna Angel and Shashamani Soundsystem, reggae music at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  www.ashkenaz.com 

 

Mary Freeberg and Trio, jazz standards at 11:30 a.m. at Walnut Square, at Vine. 204-9228. www.walnutsquarecenter.com 

 

Pine Valley Boys, with Butch Waller, David Nelson and Herb Pederson, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $16.50 in advance, $17.50 at the door.  

548-1761 www.freightandsalvage.org 

 

Vocalist Molly Holm performs “Right Here, Right Now” at 8 p.m. at the Jazz- 

school. Tickets are $12-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

 

MONDAY, MAY 19 

 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

 

Jane Smiley reads from “Good Faith,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

 

Andrew Schelling, teacher of  

poetry, Sanskrit, and wilderness writing, at Moe’s Books 2467 Telegraph Ave., at 7:30 p.m. 

 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

 

Richard Shindell, leading modern folk singer and songwriter at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

 

TUESDAY, MAY 20 

 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

 

Gina Kolata discusses her new book, “Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health,” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

 

Suzan-Lori Parks reads from, “Getting Mother’s Body: A Novel,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

 

Tanya Shaffer discusses her new narrative, “Somebody’s Heart is Burning: A Tale of a Woman Wanderer in Africa,” at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave., entrance on Rose St. 843-3533. www.easygoing.com 

 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

 

Berkeley Chamber Perfor- 

mances presents the San Francisco Saxophone Quar- 

tet, with David Schrader, soprano saxophone, Bill Aaron, alto saxophone, David Henderson, tenor saxophone, Kevin Stewart, baritone saxophone at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $20, $15 for students and seniors. 525-5211. www.sfsax.com 

 

Creole Belles, perform at 8:30 p.m., at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson with Cheryl McBride at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

 

Richard Shindell, leading modern folk singer and songwriter at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

WEDNESDAY, MAY 21 

 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

 

Rafe Esquith reads from “There Are No Shortcuts,” about working as a teacher in inner-city Los Angeles, at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

 

Lou Marinoff looks at “The Big Questions: How Philo- 

sophy Can Change Your Life,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

 

Mokai, guitarist/lyricist blending elements of folk, jazz and blues at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $5-$15 sliding scale. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

 

Moh Alileche, Algerian singer and mondol player performs at 8 p.m. at Ash- 

kenaz. Cost is $11. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

 

Crowden School Spring Concert featuring string orchestra and choral music pefor-med by students age nine to 14, at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church at the corner of Dana and Durant Sts. Tickets are $10, students and seniors, $5. 559-2941, www.thecrowdenschool.org 

 

The 2003 California Music Awards Pre-party & Band Competition, where one band is picked to perform at this year’s awards on May 25 in Oakland, at 9 p.m. at  

Blakes On Telegraph, 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

 

THURSDAY, MAY 22 

 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

 

Tom Robbins reads from his new novel, “Villa Incognito,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

 

An Evening of New Books by Men, with authors Joe Sutton, Geourg Dzul, Ches- 

ter Aaron and Lawrence Howard, at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

 

Jennifer Leo, editor, and a panel of women travel writers read from “Sand in My Bra & Other Misadventures: Funny Women Write From the Road,” at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave., entrance on Rose St. 843-3533. www.easygoing.com 

 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

 

Portraits of Peace, concert with Hollee Farmer accompanied by Dennis Monaghan at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cul- 

tural Center. Donation re- 

quested. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

 

Dr. Masseuse, Colin Blades,  

Woman, Oswald, at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

 

Jenna Mammina, jazz vocal innovator, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org


Morning Bomb Scare Clears Civic Center

By JOHN GELUARDI and AL WINSLOW
Friday May 16, 2003

The Berkeley Police Department’s Bomb Squad detonated a suspicious cardboard package on the steps of the Civic Center Thursday after evacuating the first two floors and closing down traffic in front of the building.  

“The package did not contain anything of note, really, just more folded up cardboard boxes,” police spokesman Mary Kusmiss said after the package was detonated by the bomb squad.  

Police arrested the man who was carrying the Fed Ex box, Ronald Rigoberto, 39, on suspicion of making terrorist threats and disturbing the peace, according to Kusmiss. She added that Rigoberto had been arrested in April for making a similar threat at a Knight Ridder Office in San Jose. 

Kusmiss said Rigoberto arrived at the Civic Center shortly before 9 a.m. and told city staff at the lobby check-in counter that he had to deliver a package but was uncertain to which department. He finally decided on the city attorney’s office on the fourth floor.  

Moments later he walked into the Housing Department on the second floor and began to disrupt staff by making statements about civil liberties. A staffer called police and Rigoberto was detained minutes later on the steps of the Civic Center.  

When the officer asked him what was in the box, Rigoberto said, “It will take the full extent of the law to open this box,” and “It’s going to go ‘poof.’” 

At that point the bomb squad was called in, traffic closed off and the first two floors of the Civic Center evacuated.  

Bomb Squad Officer John Jones, a FBI-trained bomb squad technician, took about half an hour to suit up in several layers of protective armor. He then placed an explosive charge next to the box, which was sitting atop a concrete balustrade at the top of the Civic Center steps.  

When detonated, the charge blew the cardboard contents


Avert Budget Crisis For Public Library; Adjust Parcel Tax

By JOSEPHINE ARASTEH
Friday May 16, 2003

We all take the Berkeley Public Library for granted. The Central Library and branches are open Monday through Thursday until 9 p.m., with shorter hours Friday and Saturday, and open on Sunday at Central. It’s all there for us — the ever helpful reference section, the book information desk, great book collections, both technical and casual, magazines, newspapers, an extensive collection of videos, CDs and musical scores; not to mention easy access to computers. And there are special events to please everyone — storytelling for children, live musical events, timely lectures and meetings. Library access is free to everyone, including the unemployed who are trying to get their lives back together.  

Library use has surged. Since it reopened in 2002, the greatly expanded and elegant Central Library has attracted many more patrons (at least 30 percent more). It’s a favorite site for nearby Berkeley High School students to do homework assignments and use the Internet. The branches are also serving increasing numbers of adults and children. Indeed, the branches bring library service to all corners of Berkeley, as patrons can request that materials be sent to their neighborhood branch.  

These resources may well diminish in the coming months. The looming budget crisis has not spared the library system: the library is faced with a shortfall of almost $2 million in the next two fiscal years, beginning July 2003. Beyond the strict hiring freeze now in place, the library would have to cut the materials budget (for books, magazines, CDs, etc.) and reduce the hours of library service.  

Maybe you remember the 1980s, when library hours and service were strictly limited until Berkeley passed the Library Parcel Tax in 1988. That measure allowed the library to hire additional staff and extend hours of service. It also gave City Council the option of adjusting the parcel tax in line with either the very conservative Consumer Price Index (CPI) or the more generous Personal Income Growth Index (PIGI). Thus far, the council has followed only the CPI index in making yearly adjustments. However, if the council chooses to follow the PIGI, the budget crisis can be averted. Under this plan, homeowners with a house of 1600 square feet would pay an additional $65 a year. (Very low-income homeowners are exempt from the parcel tax.) 

How much do you value the Berkeley Public Library? In these times of economic difficulty and political uncertainty, the library offers us a quiet oasis to browse the varied collections and to come away refreshed and ready to face future challenges. And it provides our school-age children an additional resource when teacher layoffs and larger class sizes might stymie their academic progress.  

Please contact your City Councilmembers and the mayor to express your support for a parcel tax adjustment.  

Josephine Arasteh is a Berkeley resident.


Where Italian Buffalo Tread

By DAVID D. DOWNIE Featurewell
Friday May 16, 2003

"Bambola! Rossa! Tragedia! Veloce! Come on, gals, it's time to be milked..." The water buffalo milkman coaxed and wheedled his charges in a rich Neapolitan accent. It sounded like surreal poetry. "If you don't call them by name they won't come," he said. "They're gentle, lovable creatures." Soon, big-lashed Bambola and her sister water buffaloes sauntered from their wading pool to be relieved of their afternoon's milk, the makings of what might just be the world's best mozzarella. 

We were standing in the middle of the ultra-modern Vannullo water buffalo dairy and cheese factory half an hour south of Naples, famous throughout Italy for the quality of its wholly organic products: mozzarella and ricotta fresh or smoked, provola cheese and yogurt. But the scene could have been straight out of Antiquity: the ruined temples of Paestum rise across emerald fields and national park land a mere mile and a half away from the facility. 

Water buffaloes like Bambola have thrived in this lush swath of southern Italy — the birthplace of mozzarella — since time immemorial. No one is sure just when they arrived from India, via the Middle East, though many historians think bubalus bubalis may have trudged behind Hannibal's elephants into Italy around 216 B.C. If they arrived later, it was probably with hordes of invaders around 600 A.D. 

In either case, following the fall of the Roman Empire the land around Paestum slowly turned into a swamp, fed by the Sele and Alento rivers. The inhabitants fled but the water buffaloes stayed on, ranging freely among the ruins. For centuries, local cowboys, known as butteri, would round up the wild animals, rough-and-ready milkmen would milk them and cheese makers would transform the milk into the elastic, white balls found today in every supermarket in the world. 

The region's swamps were drained in the earlier 20th century. The water buffaloes survive in captivity on farms, like Vannullo, equipped with pools or crossed by rivers. In order to regulate their body temperature, they must be able to submerge themselves in water several times a day. There are an estimated 80,000 head of buffalo in Italy now, all of them on diary farms. 

Like the 400 females and dozen males at the Vannullo farm, most Italian buffaloes live in the hot, humid lowlands of the Campania region, between Naples, Salerno, Caserta, Benevento, Battipaglia, Eboli and Capaccio. The area has its own DOC and DOP quality-control appellations. 

Vannullo is the brainchild of dapper Antonio Palmieri, a former banker who in 1988 gave up his career to take over the buffalo ranch his grandfather had started in 1900. It took Palmieri about eight years to embellish the family's 18th-century farmhouse, plant espaliered lemons and roses along handsome stone walls, and transform the ranch into a model organic farm, dairy and cheese factory. It was officially certified in 1996. What that means, explained Palmieri, is that all the fodder — corn, wheat, rye, oats, alfalfa, sorghum and grass — is grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers on the estate's 225 acres. No hormones are given, there's no artificial insemination and only homeopathic medicine is used to treat animals. Everything is done by hand, from the cheese making to the weeding. 

And the petting: the buffaloes get first-class treatment and are practically pets (except the mature males, who behave like the bulls they are). Their ample pens are swept several times a day. The place is uncommonly clean and orderly. I glanced up from bashful Bambola to the snowy peaks east of the farm and thought, "this could be Switzerland." In Italy "mozzarella" refers only to cheese made from buffalo milk (cow's milk mozzarella is called fior di latte). It's richer (9 percent fat and 5 percent protein) and more flavorful than cow's milk (4 percent fat and 3 protein). The name derives from the verb mozzare, to pinch off into bits. At the Vannullo cheese factory you can arrange for a private tour as I did and watch the long, complex and artful process of making this delicacy. 

First, said the head cheese-maker, you add rennet to the fresh milk and heat it to about 100 degrees F. After 90 minutes, you break the curds up and let them mature in the whey another three hours. Then you cut them into 35-pound chunks, mince them and put them in a tub with whey and nearly boiling water. You stir with a wooden paddle until the pieces bind and form a soft lump that you can pull into long, stretchy threads. These are what the cheese-maker pinches off into bits, keeping them constantly submerged. After soaking in a saline solution for another few hours, the glistening round balls are bagged in their own liquid and sold as thimble-sized cardinali, bite-sized bocconcini, normal mozzarelle or giant aversane weighing about a pound. The real test of the mozzarella-maker's art, though, is the intricately plaited treccia, my personal favorite when it comes to flavor and texture. I watched a treccia was made with sweeping, graceful underwater motions. 

Genuine mozzarella is rich, flavorful and delicate: it should be eaten the day it is made, at most a few days later (smoked mozzarella lasts longer). That's why, said Palmieri as we approached the sales counter, his cheese is sold exclusively on-site and not even in local restaurants. "We sell out every day," he admitted, as we battled our way through lines of customers. "People drive all the way down from Rome to get it." I popped a still-warm bocconcino into my mouth, tasting an explosion of tangy cream with hazelnut highlights, and instantly understood why. 

 

Caseificio Vannulo 

 

10 Via Galileo Galilei 

 

84040 Capaccio Scalo (Salerno) 

 

Tel: 011 39 0828/724765 

 

Fax: 011 39 0828/725245 

 

 

Daaid D. Downie is the author of "Cooking the Roman Way : Authentic Recipes from the Home Cooks and Trattorias of Rome."


Davis Holds Line at UC Cuts — For Now

By DAVID SCHARFENBERG
Friday May 16, 2003

Four months after proposing a $300 million cut for the University of California, Gov. Gray Davis spared UC from further reductions this week in the May revision of his annual budget. 

“I think we owe [Davis] a round of applause and gratitude,” said Larry Hershman, UC vice president for budget. 

The move eased some fears among UC students, who likely face a $795 fee hike next year, that they will have to dish out even more for fees. 

But UC officials said they are still concerned about a Republican plan to add $400 million in cuts to the governor’s $300 million proposal. 

“That would be devastating,” said Hershman, suggesting that student fees would skyrocket if the Republicans have their way. 

Peter DeMarco, spokesman for Assembly Republican Leader Dave Cox (R-Fair Oaks), said heavy cuts for the university and many other state-funded programs are necessary when the only alternative is the $8.3 billion in new taxes Davis proposed this week to help close an estimated $38 billion state budget shortfall. 

“The tax increases are a non-starter for us,” he said. 

Hans Hemann, chief of staff for state Assemblywoman Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley), said Hancock was shocked by the Republicans’ $400 million additional cuts, released April 29. 

“It would have wiped out a university the size of [UC] Berkeley,” he said, arguing that voters will never stand for such a huge cut.  

California law requires a two-thirds vote in the state Legislature to pass a budget, giving Republicans, the minority party, significant leverage in the debate. The legislature has until June 15 to pass a final budget, but has traditionally ignored the deadline. 

The $300 million in UC cuts that Davis proposed in January include a $25 million reduction in student services, a $29 million cut in research dollars and a $33 million cut to outreach programs designed to prepare poor, minority students for the UC system.  

The January proposal also called for a $795, or 24 percent, fee hike for undergraduate students. The UC Board of Regents is set to vote on the $795 increase in June or July. If approved, the increase would come on top of a 10 percent, $405 mid-year hike, bringing the average annual fee on UC’s nine campuses to $5,082. 

Graduate students systemwide would face an $855 hike next year, on top of a $405 mid-year jump, bringing average fees to $6,196.  

Dozens of students, from as far away as the University of California Los Angeles, showed up at the Board of Regents meeting in San Francisco Wednesday to protest the proposed hike, arguing that it will price thousands out of an education. 

“You raise my fees, you cripple our communities,” said Leon Arellano, a UC Davis student who warned that he will have to spend more time working and less time studying if the hike passes. “Release your hands from my neck.” 

“Fee increases should be a last resort,” added Stephen Klass, a UC San Diego student and chair of the University of California Student Association. “If you raise fees you will not only be failing students, you will be failing the state of California.” 

UC officials said the alternatives — cutting classes or slashing faculty salaries that already lag 9 percent behind the market — are unacceptable. 

“Taking students and not offering [a full range of ] classes is not a solution,” said Hershman. “We have resisted that.” 

Tempers peaked when the regents, after one extension of the public comment session, declined to hear more speakers. Students, who said they had skipped classes and driven all night to attend the meeting, refused to back down, and board chairman John Moores called a recess.  

Moments later, UC police declared an unlawful assembly and escorted the students out of the auditorium as they chanted, “Whose university? Our university.” 

There were no arrests. 

Protesters called on the regents to vote on fee increases by the end of May, so students can be present, rather than wait for the summer when campuses empty. But officials said they will have to delay the vote until June or July when the state passes a final budget. 

“We cannot take an action until there is something to be acted on,” said Regent Judith Hopkinson. 

University officials said financial aid will cover the full fee increase for 40 percent of all UC students, including most of those from families that earn less than $60,000 per year. 

But students said the fee hikes will still hurt. 

“People will have to work more, to take out student loans, to put their children in day care,” said UC Berkeley student Camilo Romero.


Californians Must Engage In Battle for Fair Tax Plan

By WILMA CHAN
Friday May 16, 2003

With the war winding down, focus is shifting to the home front, to a sagging national economy and state deficits that threaten basic human services, and the need for an effective plan to restore our economy in a way that is fair to all taxpayers.  

President George W. Bush has proposed a half-trillion dollars in tax cuts as the centerpiece of his plan to achieve this. However, the Bush tax cuts are too large, poorly designed and highly inequitable. We are now engaged in a battle for a fair tax plan both for America and for California, and our new target is injustice. 

It is unjust to propose tax cuts that would divert $2.5 trillion dollars over the next decade from health care, Social Security, education and public safety, for tax cuts that would mainly benefit the wealthiest Americans.  

It is unjust that under the Bush plan the wealthiest 1 percent of Californians will get a tax cut averaging almost $36,000, while middle-income working families will average only $305. It is unjust that four million Californians will get nothing from this plan and nearly seven million will get less than $100.  

It is unjust that three-quarters of the elderly will get absolutely nothing from Bush’s proposed stock dividend tax exemption, because only one in four seniors receives even a dollar in taxable dividends. 

It is unjust and morally irresponsible to give ourselves tax cuts and leave future generations with an even higher tax and debt burden. These tax cuts will likely increase the total national debt, including what is owed to Social Security to $10 trillion dollars. Tax cuts financed by perpetual deficits will eventually slow the economy even more.  

President George Bush didn’t hesitate to invest $70 billion in the war in Iraq. Now he needs to show the same resolve — and the funding to go with it — to address the needs of working families and their children. 

Since the legislative session began in January, I have been seeking to define a balanced approach to our state’s $38 billion budget crisis. I support solutions that balance painful reductions with prudent revenue increases in the form of equitable tax and fee increases. To that end I introduced Assembly Bill 4, which will reinstate slightly higher tax rates for the state’s very top earners. This approach is nothing new — previously, Governors Wilson and Reagan adopted higher tax rates on a short-term basis to deal with budget crises during their administrations. The impact of the tax reinstatement on the state’s top earners would be completely offset by the last round of income tax reductions by the federal government.  

To encourage involvement, I initiated a letter writing campaign in the East Bay. The response has been overwhelming. Over the course of four Saturdays, 150 volunteers collected over 3,000 postcards calling on Congress to stop the Bush tax plan. Within the state, the postcards call for support of Assembly Bill 4, and for cuts in spending on state prisons at a time when state-funded programs in education, health care, public safety, senior services and the disabled face drastic reductions.  

Congress will make its decision on the federal tax cut later this month and Assembly Bill 4 is awaiting action in the Assembly. It is unacceptable to mortgage our children’s futures to pay for tax breaks for the wealthiest today. Now is the time for all taxpayers to join the battle for economic justice.  

State Assemblywoman Wilma Chan represents Oakland, Alameda and Piedmont and serves as Majority Leader. To get involved in the effort for a fair tax plan, call Raymond Ehrlich in Wilma Chan’s office at 510-286-1670. 

 

 

 

 

 


UC Regents Oppose Connerly Race Initiative

By DAVID SCHARFENBERG
Friday May 16, 2003

The University of California Board of Regents dealt a symbolic blow to one of its own Thursday, coming out in formal opposition to Regent Ward Connerly’s controversial Racial Privacy Initiative. 

The initiative, which will go before California voters in March 2004, would prevent state and local government from collecting data on race. Supporters say the ballot measure marks an important step toward a color-blind society, but opponents say it would block vital research and erase any evidence of racial discrimination in public health, housing and education. 

“We cannot create a color-blind society by making government blind to discrimination,” said California Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson (D-Culver City), who is an ex officio member of the board. 

Connerly, the leading force behind the voter-approved Proposition 209, which dismantled many of the state’s affirmative action programs, dismissed the regents’ vote as inconsequential. 

“The University of California, with all due respect, is irrelevant,” he said, predicting victory at the ballot box in March. 

A recent, independent Field Poll found 48 percent of voters in favor of the initiative and 33 percent opposed, with 19 percent undecided. 

Jay Ziegler, co-director of the Campaign Against the Information Ban, a coalition of health care, education and civil rights groups opposed to the Racial Privacy Initiative, said he is not concerned about the poll numbers. 

“The debate hasn’t been joined yet,” he said. “The more voters learn about this initiative, the more the playing field dips in our favor.” 

Some regents expressed regret that the board, which voted 15-3 to oppose the initiative, was weighing in on such a politically charged issue. 

“The regents are not a debating society,” said Regent George Marcus, adding that he was baffled that UC President Richard Atkinson had placed the resolution, opposing the Racial Privacy Initiative, on the board’s agenda. 

Regent John Davies said the board’s action will have no bearing on the voters’ decision next March and argued that it will only alienate those who support the ballot measure. 

But others said Connerly, as a regent, has inevitably linked the Racial Privacy Initiative to the university, forcing the board to take a stand. 

“We have been drawn into this,” said Regent Alfredo Terrazas. “We have to clear our name.”  

The initiative, formally known as “Classification By Race, Ethnicity, Color or National Origin” (CRECNO), has sparked concern among UC professors and students who fear that it will restrict their ability to conduct policy-shaping research on education and health care. 

“A whole lot of the state databases that our researchers utilize would disappear,” said Gayle Binion, chair of the UC Academic Senate, which voted unanimously to oppose the Racial Privacy Initiative. “No appropriate information should ever be taboo.” 

But San Diego State biology professor Stuart Hulbert, who supports Connerly’s initiative, said academic research focused on race only divides the nation. 

“Business as usual has been bad business,” said Hulbert. 

Critics say it is naive to brush aside race when it still plays a major role in American society. 

“It is not good to be blind,” said student Regent Dexter Ligot-Gordon, who attends UC Berkeley. “We need to be cognizant of the issues we deal with. We need to be cognizant of the people we serve.” 

But Connerly rejected the critique, arguing that the state must take the lead in changing the national “obsession” with race. 

“I concur with those who say California will not become a color-blind society just because we wish it so,” he said. But “by its decrees and conduct, government charts the course for its people to follow.” 

Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, an ex officio regent who frequently clashes with Connerly, said the initiative threatens medical research which has demonstrated, for example, that Hispanics suffer disproportionately from diabetes and Vietnamese women have the highest incidence of cervical cancer of any ethnic group in the nation. 

“This is about identifying people at risk,” he said. 

But Connerly, pointing to an exemption for “medical research subjects and patients,” said Bustamante was using scare tactics. 

“This goes beyond the pale,” Connerly said. “It’s irresponsible to frighten the people of California and the people of the nation.” 

Critics, including Kaiser Permanente and the California Medical Association, say the exemption is vaguely worded and may not protect all medical research. 

“Because California is one of the most racially diverse states, physicians and health officials need data on race and national origin to help them make critical decisions,” said Ron Lopp, spokesman for the California Medical Association. 

In addition to the medical exemption, the initiative protects information on prisoners’ race and any data collection required by the federal government. 

Washington, D.C., requires public universities to keep tabs on the race of enrolled students, but does not require records on applicants. Opponents of CRECNO say the applicant data is vital in monitoring the successes and failures of UC’s outreach programs for underachieving communities. Without the data, they argue, UC will not be accountable. 

“They removed our bodies from the campus,” said UC Berkeley graduate student Mo Kashmiri, referring to Proposition 209’s ban on affirmative action in admissions. “Now they want to remove the evidence.” 

But Connerly said the university’s constant focus on the plight of “underrepresented minorities” — black, Hispanic and Native American students — sends the wrong message. 

“We instill in students the notion that underrepresented minorities can’t help but underachieve,” he said. 

About 100 UC students, who spoke out against the initiative over the course of the board’s two-day meeting and hissed at Connerly’s arguments, hailed the final vote. 

“It was a resounding victory,” said Cintya Molina, a UC Berkeley graduate student. “It really showed the power of the students to put on pressure.” 

Diane Schacterle, spokesman for the Sacramento-based American Civil Rights Coalition, which favors the Racial Privacy Initiative, said the university, which sometimes uses racial data to win funding for research grants, was simply protecting its interests. 

“It’s not surprising,” she said. “The university is too vested in the research monies.”


Lab Officials Use ‘Science Fair’ to Avoid Foundry Issue

By JANICE THOMAS
Friday May 16, 2003

The stage was set for chaos and confusion to be followed by anger and grief. Concerned citizens had been told by Mayor Tom Bates that the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory would hold a public meeting to discuss the proposed molecular foundry. Citizens were skeptical because they had received invitations for a broadly conceived “Conversation about Lab Activities” to discuss the proverbial kitchen sink including not only “Nanoscience and the Molecular Foundry” but “Energy Efficiency and the Berkeley Lamp, other Scientific Initiatives, Fire Protection and Vegetation Management, and Science Education Programs.”  

Meanwhile hardy citizens found their way to the Strawberry Canyon Recreation Area, where the room in the Haas Club House was set up like a science fair with tables and posters, but no chairs for people to sit in. Director Shank made introductory remarks introducing interns who had won a prestigious prize. Mayor Bates thanked the lab for holding the meeting.  

And then all hell broke loose when one of the foundry directors started giving a presentation on nanotechnology. Concerned citizens wanted to know when they could speak. No answer was given to the first questioner.  

Then a second person asked. And before long there was a chorus of people asking when they could ask questions. Finally, the community relations officer did what she should have done in the first place and told the audience what they should have known, i.e. the agenda for the evening.  

As concerned citizens began to speak, the community relations officer directed them to ask their questions. It was unfriendly and poorly timed given the evening’s billing as a conversation.  

Concerned citizens have been blamed when these meetings go awry but it should be clear that the unfriendly circumstances were engineered by the lab. As  

concerned citizens were trying to make public statements, lab employees were talking at their booths that were located at the perimeter of the room, effectively ignoring the speakers and successfully distracting from what the speakers had to say.  

Concerned citizens felt set up, just as the room had been set up for small group conversations rather than for a large group conversation. The lab employees probably knew not what we were told, and meanwhile, we knew not what the lab employees were told. It was a needless collision of the two groups, and they as we were innocent bystanders.  

Meanwhile, the proposed six-story building and molecular foundry go forward for approval from the UC Regents without benefit of an Environmental Impact Report.  

Less than one-third of a mile from a neighborhood, even closer to the intercollegiate rugby and softball fields, in endangered Alameda Whipsnake habitat, competing with flora and fauna for every inch of space in Strawberry Canyon, spilling construction debris into No Name Creek, it is obvious that a real public meeting would have caused great peril to an expedient completion of the lab’s replacement to the Cyclotron, i.e. the well-funded National Nanotechnology Institute otherwise known as the molecular foundry. 

Janice Thomas is a Berkeley resident.


City Expedites Permit Process But Cannot Save Doyle House

By ANGELA ROWEN
Friday May 16, 2003

A plan brokered between Mayor Tom Bates, developer Patrick Kennedy and preservationists to move the 19th-century home of Berkeley pioneer John M. Doyle to another location appeared to be dead this week when organizers discovered that moving the structure would require a 20-day waiting period. 

Preservationists with the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA) have been struggling to save the Doyle House, located behind the Darling Flower Shop on University Avenue, from demolition by Kennedy, who wants to build a 35-unit housing project on the site. A lawsuit filed by BAHA against Kennedy argues that demolition of the house, which BAHA says is a historical resource, requires an environmental impact report. BAHA lost the suit earlier this month. 

Shortly after BAHA gave up its legal battle against Kennedy, Bates began talking with the developer, BAHA members and resident Ian Faircloth, who wants to move the house to his property. BAHA, Faircloth and the developer agreed to cover the cost of the move, with Faircloth donating $25,000, BAHA putting in $15,000 and Kennedy contributing $10,000. 

Bates and city councilmembers expedited the permitting approval process necessary to get PG&E and the telephone company moving on the project. The last minute scramble appeared to be paying off, with BAHA announcing that it was rapidly approaching its $15,000 goal through aggressive fund-raising efforts. But earlier this week, it was discovered that the city requires a use permit, which calls for a 20-day waiting period before moving a structure to give the public an opportunity to appeal the decision. 

Kennedy had said he needed the move to happen before June 1 because of contractual agreements that require him to start work on the project by then. With the waiting period, Bates said, the deal seems to have fallen through.  

Bates said he wished the disputing parties would have considered the compromise months ago, instead of continuing to battle it out in court. “It was a wasted opportunity,” Bates said. “I hope in the future I can get involved earlier. We need to look for the win-win situation rather than fighting it out to the death in court.” 

Kennedy has already secured the demolition permit for the project, but it isn’t clear when he will begin demolishing the building. BAHA board member Austene Hall said members of her organization have called Kennedy to ask him to extend the June 1 deadline, but have received no word. 

Kennedy did not return calls for comment for this story.


Fifty Teachers Rehired, Two Top Posts Left Open

By DAVID SCHARFENBERG
Friday May 16, 2003

Fifty pink-slipped teachers got their jobs back Wednesday and 18 to 20 more may have their layoff notices rescinded by June, schools Superintendent Michele Lawrence announced this week. 

Lawrence also said the Berkeley Unified School District will not replace Associate Superintendent of Human Resources David Gomez and Associate Superintendent of Educational Services Christine Lim when they leave this summer to take jobs as superintendents in two other districts. 

“I can’t see filling them financially at this point,” said Lawrence, who estimated that the district will save more than $300,000 next year by leaving the positions vacant. 

The district, which faces a $4 million to $8 million budget shortfall next year, gave 220 teachers pink slips by a state-mandated March 15 deadline. But officials hoped to restore as many as 145 as the budget picture cleared up. With this week’s move, about 90 of the 220 teachers have received assurances that they will be back in the classroom next year.  

Lawrence said it could be “a couple of years” before the district replaces Gomez and Lim. 

“It’s going to hurt,” she said. 

Lawrence said she will pick up some of the slack herself and call on other managers to play a larger administrative role. 

Berkeley’s Associate Superintendent of Business and Operations Jerry Kurr is also leaving this spring, but the district has already replaced him with a new business chief, Eric Smith. 

Union officials have argued that the administration has not made enough cuts from the central office. But Lawrence said the decision to leave Gomez’s and Lim’s positions vacant is proof that belt-tightening is happening at the upper levels. 

“I think leaving these positions open is evidence that everything is going to be up for grabs,” she said. 

Union officials did not immediately return calls for comment Thursday afternoon. 

Gomez will become superintendent of the Santa Paula High School District in Ventura County and Lim will serve as schools chief in nearby San Leandro.


Commission Roundup

Friday May 16, 2003

PEACE AND JUSITCE (5/5) 

 

Approved a waiver of Berkeley's nuclear free zone ordinance for Hewlitt Packard, a corporation involved in the nuclear industry which is seeking a city contract. 

 

PERSONNEL (5/5) 

 

Recommended making a non-officer Piolce Department business manager.  

The city auditor last year recommended placing otherwise qualified non-officers in police management positions that don't require police police training. 

 

YOUTH (5/5) 

Discussed recent program aimed at youth violence . The program at Berkeley Alternative High School was in response to recent killings of youths in South Berkeley. 

 

STATUS OF WOMEN (5/7) 

Continued ongoing discussion of homeless women and children, domestic violence, and infant mortality and low birth weight. 

 

PEOPLE'S PARK COMMUNITY ADVISORY BOARD (5/8) 

Discussed recent removal of a People's Park tree deemed to be dangerous and steps toward possible future removals, including ipublic comment and independent evaluations. 

— Al Winslow 

 

 


Berkeley Residents Will Walk for Cancer Fundraiser this Weekend

— David Scharfenberg
Friday May 16, 2003

They will walk all night in a fight against cancer. 

Dozens of Berkeley residents will be part of a group of 280 people from the East Bay in a 24-hour “Relay for Life” at the El Cerrito High School track this weekend, hoping to raise $40,000 for the American Cancer Society. 

The walk will begin with a 24-minute stroll by cancer survivors at 10 a.m. Saturday and will conclude with a 24-minute survivors’ walk Sunday morning. 

Berkeley resident and cancer survivor Marisa Saunders said helping to organize the event has been a healing process. 

“It puts me in a position to be surrounded by others I have a connection to,” said Saunders. “I have a feeling I’m doing something positive.” 

Saunders has organized a 15-member team, including Berkeley Board of Education Director Terry Doran and Alameda County Superintendent Sheila Jordan, to participate. Three other Berkeley teams will also participate. 

The American Cancer Society has sponsored similar events, all over the country, since 1985. Last year, the relays raised $200 million for cancer prevention, research, detection and treatment, including $35,000 from the East Bay event. 

For information, go to www.cancer.org or call Joann Steck-Bay at at (510) 524-9464. El Cerrito High School is located at 540 Ashbury Ave. in El Cerrito. 

 

— David Scharfenberg


Police Blotter

By JOHN GELUARDI
Friday May 16, 2003

Daylight Beating 

Monday around 11 a.m., a 20-year-old UC student was walking toward campus on the 2100 block of Center Street when two teenage girls walking in the opposite direction tried to grab her backpack. When the victim resisted, the two girls were joined by two more teenage girls and the four began punching the suspect in the face and head until she was knocked to the ground where they continued to beat her.  

Two witnesses ran out from a nearby coffee shop to intervene and the four suspects ran west on Center Street without the victim’s backpack. The four girls were described as Asian, about 16 to 17 years old and wearing jeans, dark clothing and each had their hair pulled back.  

 

Creepy Camera Guy 

Police have received two reports on Friday of an approximately 20-year-old man who was walked behind two young women, knelt down and took pictures up their dresses.  

The first incident was reported to police just before 4:30 p.m. by three young women who were standing in line to purchase frozen yogurt on Bancroft Way when one noticed a flash.  

One of her companions told her a man had just pointed a small camera up her dress and apparently taken a picture. The women chased the suspect until losing him in a crowd on Bancroft Way.  

A half hour later at 5 p.m., three other women who were shopping at a clothes store on Bancroft Way, reported a similar incident. The suspect is described as an Asian male about 5.4 with a “buzz haircut” and wearing a navy-blue T-shirt and khaki shorts.  

Police are asking the community’s help in identifying the suspect. Anyone with any information, or any women who may have had a similar experience are asked to call the Sex Crimes Unit at (510) 981-5735. 

 

An Oakland Man has been indicted by a federal grand jury in connection with allegedly stealing technology trade secrets and attempting to sell them to a competitor, announced the U.S. Department of Justice today. 

Brent Alan Woodward, 32, is accused of allegedly stealing trade  

secrets stored on computer backup tapes from his former employer, Lightwave Microsystems Inc., and trying to sell them to JDS Uniphase, which competes with Lightwave, said the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California. 

The maximum statutory penalty for each count that Woodward faces is 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. 

— Bay City News Service


UnderCurrents

From J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday May 16, 2003

 

And so now we have another horrific, high-speed East Oakland auto accident and the death of a young African-American woman, and Oakland Police are once more blaming it on Oakland’s “sideshows.” 

Forgive me if I reserve judgment on the cause until all of the facts come in.  

A little over a year ago, a 22-year-old popular former Oakland High School cheerleader, U’Kendra Johnson, was killed in an auto accident on Seminary Avenue that the Oakland Police called “sideshow related.” What the police failed to say (and what court testimony, an amateur video and analysis of police files later revealed) was that a high-speed police chase preceded the U’Kendra Johnson accident. 

Late last Saturday night, a 24-year-old mother of three, Breeonna Mobley, was killed when the car in which she was riding crashed into a tree on the southern side of Hegenberger Road near International Boulevard. The driver of the vehicle, 22-year-old Terrell Woods, is expected to be charged with vehicular manslaughter and felony drunk driving.  

Oakland Police spokesmen told the Oakland Tribune that Woods sped off after police rolled up “sideshow-related activity” (an undefined term) on Hegenberger. Although they did not specify the location on Hegenberger, sideshows traditionally have taken place near the Pac N’ Save parking lots, which is several blocks away and not within sight of the accident location. And according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “in both [the Mobley and the Johnson accidents], police said that they were not in pursuit.” 

Which leads us to something of a puzzlement. If police were not in pursuit of Woods, how do they know he was driving one of the cars that sped off from the “sideshow-related activity”? Did they just happen upon the accident later and make a detective’s guess, or did they ask the driver or one of the three remaining passengers in the car? (I’m not suggesting the police are not telling the truth here — frankly, I don’t know — but it’s just one of those odd sort of questions that stick out in a story like this and bug you until they get answered, if they ever get answered.)  

Also, too, if police were not in pursuit of Woods, why did he speed off, for several blocks, at speeds which the Chronicle reported to be in excess of 100 mph? If Woods was, indeed, running from the police breakup of the Pac N’ Save area activity, why not just slow down to a decent speed once he saw he was not being chased? Within a half a block of the accident scene is the intersection of International, and you’ve got to be crazy to run that at any speed at any time of night. If Woods was planning on stopping or even slowing down at International, he didn’t give any indication. There are no skid marks at the accident scene. 

Maybe Woods was crazy, or crazy drunk. Or maybe he was being chased. Or maybe all three. These are questions to be answered, before one starts drawing conclusions. 

And conclusions, my friends, are necessary. They won’t bring back Breeonna Mobley, or U’Kendra Johnson, either, but if we know what caused their deaths, we might be able to take steps that will keep other young people from dying as they did. 

The conclusions, and the resulting solutions, that some Oakland Police officials want to be drawn are implicit in the way this story is being framed. 

Frame Breeonna Mobley’s death as a sideshow-death story — by putting the term “sideshow” prominently at the front of the first Tribune and Chronicle articles and by linking it to the death of U’Kendra Johnson, which is already linked in the public’s mind to sideshows — and the solution is obvious: We need a crackdown on sideshows. 

But spin the story a different way — place prominently the possible police chase aspect and drop the “sideshow-related activity” part to the end of the story (both of them are equally speculative at this point), and you have a conclusion/solution that points in the opposite direction: Maybe it’s the manner in which police are cracking down on sideshows that is causing these deaths, and, therefore, a different ... and safer means of dealing with sideshows might be in order. 

Or ...  

Emphasize that the drivers in both the Mobley and Johnson deaths were alleged to have been drinking at the time of the accidents — add in the numerous other drunk-driving deaths that have taken place in our community over the years, including those schoolchildren who were struck on International near 29th Avenue a couple of years ago — and suddenly your conclusion might be that we need to hike the penalties on drinking and driving, as well as shut down some of the many liquor stores which proliferate the International Boulevard corridor. 

It’s all in how you frame it. 

This is a hard time, I know, for the public to figure out what’s in our best interests. What with war and terror and the economy collapsing and the schools being hijacked and democracy disappearing before our eyes, we don’t have much time for thoughtful investigation these days. We want someone (the media? our leaders?) to identify the good guys and the bad guys right off, so we can know who to go after without having to bother with all the tedious details. But incomplete information mostly leads to erroneous conclusions, leads to incorrect solutions, which means the same situations keep arising again and again. 

What exactly led to the death of Breeonna Mobley on that long stretch of Hegenberger Road? We don’t yet know, because all of the facts aren’t yet in. 

J. Douglas Allen-Taylor is an Oakland resident.


President Uses Al Qaeda As Scapegoat for Violence

By WILLIAM O. BEEMAN Pacific News Service
Friday May 16, 2003

President Bush characterized the May 12 suicide bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as being carried out by “killers whose only faith is hate.” In fact, the devastating attack was a calculated, political act that was probably not orchestrated by al Qaeda and not directed primarily against the United States. 

A thorough understanding of the incident — a repeat of a similar attack that took place in 1995 — might help the United States to act in a responsible and measured manner. 

Both the recent bombings and the 1995 attack were made against the same target. This was the Vinnell Corp., a Fairfax, Va., company recently acquired by Northrop-Grumman that trains the 80,000-member Saudi Arabian National Guard under the supervision of the U.S. Army. 

Why Vinnell?  

The Vinnell operation represents everything that is wrong with the U.S.-Saudi relationship in the eyes of anti-monarchist revolutionaries. The corporation, which employs ex-military and CIA personnel, has close connections with a series of U.S. administrations, including the current one. It has had a contractual relationship to train the Saudi Arabian National Guard since 1975. The corporation was instrumental in the American “Twin Pillars” strategy, whereby both the Saudi Arabian regime and the Shah of Iran would serve as U.S. surrogates in the Gulf region to protect American interests against the possible incursion of the Soviet Union. 

Even before the first Gulf War, when the United States established a formal military presence in Saudi Arabia, Vinnell was a “stealth” military presence in the kingdom. It was seen as a military colonizing force. The Saudi Arabian National Guard, by extension, was seen as a de-facto American military force.  

Additionally, the guard has the specific duty of protecting the Saudi Royal Family, which the revolutionaries see as corrupt. Without the National Guard, the family would be weakened, perhaps to the point of dissolution. 

Thus, since the Vinnell operation looks to revolutionaries like a body of United States-sponsored mercenaries shoring up the National Guard, and by extension, the royal family, striking the Vinnell operation is a logical strategy to damage the Saudi regime. 

There is another reason for attacking Vinnell. The dissidents know that the United States has agreed to withdraw the 5,000 troops stationed at the Saudi Arabian Prince Sultan Air Force Base. However, the withdrawal would not cover the Vinnell contract employees, who presumably will stay in Saudi Arabia and keep propping up the regime. Since the revolutionaries want all Americans out of Saudi Arabia, they are looking to the ouster of this group as well as the troops based at the Prince Sultan base. 

Furthermore, the compound that was bombed was a relatively easy target. It was not as heavily defended as an embassy or ministry. 

This is not the first attack involving Vinnell. In 1995, the terrorists attacked the Saudi National Guard Headquarters, where the guard was trained by Vinnell. The bomb killed six people and injured many more. Among the dead were five U.S. citizens, including two soldiers. Two Saudi opposition groups took responsibility for the blast, the Tigers of the Gulf and the Islamic Movement for Change. Both have previously criticized the ruling Saudi monarchy and U.S. military presence. 

The facts of this earlier attack call into question the theory that the al Qaeda operation was responsible for the May 12 bombing. Ali al-Ahmed, executive director of the Washington-based Saudi Institute for Development and Studies, said on the PBS NewsHour of May 13 that this was a “home-grown operation” that borrowed ideas from al Qaeda but was not directed by Osama bin Laden. 

Americans have become used to thinking of al Qaeda as the primary terrorist opponent of the United States. The Bush administration has encouraged a public view of al Qaeda as a highly organized group with omnipotent, worldwide reach. This has led to a general view that every group espousing violent political change is an emanation of Osama bin Laden’s machinations. The view is inaccurate. Insofar as it has a structure at all, al Qaeda is a group of loosely affiliated cells, many of which have no knowledge of the operations of the others. 

Groups opposed to the Saudi regime have been in continual existence for decades, predating bin Laden’s activities. As soon as their leaders are arrested or killed, they regroup and renew their attack. It is more likely that al Qaeda, a relatively new organization, sprung from these earlier groups, rather than the other way around. 

Currently the United States is wedded to a bipolar, black-and-white view of the world. On one side are the United States and its friends. On the other are the dark forces of terrorism. 

So strong is this formulation, and so self-centered the American worldview, that Washington no longer seems able to entertain the thought that there might be revolutionary groups that have entirely local reasons for their actions. This tragic attack might well have taken place if the United States had not had a presence in Saudi Arabia. However, the existence of a quasi-military command force in the form of the Vinnell Corp. virtually guaranteed that Americans would be caught in the cross fire of what was arguably a local revolutionary action. 


After Years Waiting, Our First Walk in the Park

From Zac Unger
Friday May 16, 2003

The balcony of my apartment overlooks a Berkeley park with swings, a grassy field and a jungle-gym. Every day it’s packed with happy parents, and the laughter of kids filters up through the windows into our living room. For three years my wife and I have been looking down on that park, wishing we could be there with the rest of the normal families. 

Now, after six miscarriages, we’ve finally had our baby. And, after 139 days in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, our daughter, Percy, is healthy and home with us, ready to take up her rightful spot in the sandbox. 

There’s a nice, normal way to be a preemie. You get born scarily early, you have some ups and downs, maybe get an infection or two, but pretty soon you start packing the weight on and, in most cases, you end up going home a few weeks before your due date. By the time we left the NICU, Percy was the senior baby on the ward, having overstayed her expected date of release by almost two and a half months. She never had any of the normal preemie complications, not the brain bleeds or the lung disease or the eye damage. 

But she did develop a choking problem that stymied all of the professionals; once a day or so she’d gag on a bit of milk and her heart rate would dip into the twenties and her face would turn blue. A dozen vigorous back blows usually did the trick, and within seconds of coming out of her spell Percy would be back to smiling and cooing, ready for another shot at the bottle. In the end the doctors decided that we were as adept as anyone at reviving her and since being in the hospital obviously wasn’t doing her any good, they sent us home with their best wishes. Now that we’ve been home for two months Percy’s choking still keeps us on our toes but, apart from the fact that it makes it a little tough to find babysitters, we haven’t had much trouble dealing with the problem. 

People always talk about how exhausting it is to have a new baby at home, but compared to the NICU, this seems like a breeze. Like any new parents we could use a few more hours of sleep, but emotionally it feels like we’ve been released from prison. When I wake up my baby is right there next to me in a basket on the floor. No more 3 a.m. dashes to Alta Bates just to see if my daughter is doing all right. Everybody at the hospital was fantastic, but I hated leaving her there; that sterile nursery full of steel cribs and Plexiglas incubators isn’t the right place for a person to spend her first months in the world. 

Being in the NICU was like having 10,000 mother-in-laws. Everyone from the head neonatologist to the newest nursing student had a hundred helpful tips on how to be a better parent. Too much advice — even the best-intentioned advice — starts to feel like criticism before too long. Now it’s just my wife and me. We’re probably making a million mistakes, but they’re our mistakes and we’ll stumble along like anybody else.  

On our second day home we took Percy on a stroller ride through the Gourmet Ghetto in Berkeley, where everyone lounging around the French Hotel and Black Oak Books is 30 years old and has a baby in a stroller. Nobody seemed to find us the least bit interesting and I wanted to shake strangers by the shoulders and shout, “You don’t understand! This isn’t just any baby — this is a superhero!” 

One woman did stop to admire her — she is astoundingly beautiful after all — but when she asked me how old my baby was, I found myself momentarily struck stupid. “Five months?” I said, unsure how to answer. It must have been the wrong thing to say because she gave me a look that could have curdled breast milk and stalked off, probably to report me to Child Protective Services for malnourishing my child. The next time someone asked I gave Percy’s “adjusted age” of six weeks. Of course then they wanted to know how much she weighed at birth, and when I said “one pound, 15 ounces” I had to launch into the whole prematurity story anyway. 

Actually, with us shoving food in her face every time she opens her mouth she’s been laying on the fat like a seal getting ready for winter. She’s got chubby arms and pink, round cheeks and she was a massive 11 pounds at her last weigh-in. 

When my wife naps I carry Percy down to the park almost every day. She couldn’t care less about the place — life for her is about eating, sleeping and giggling at the wooden goose that hangs over her changing table. But for me, sitting on the swings with a baby in my arms is an incomparable high. I finally get to be what I’ve always wanted, just a normal, boring dad who thinks his daughter is going to grow up to be the best person on Earth.  

 

 

 


Five-Story Complex Set for Edge of Downtown

By JOHN KENYON Special to the Planet
Friday May 16, 2003

Longtime Berkeley-area residents surely are familiar with the old 1950’s strip mall at Martin Luther King, Jr. Way and University Avenue, popularly known as Grand Auto (for its former tenant) — that long facade of glass and aluminum set back behind parking which signals, driving south, the transition from residential tree-lined Old Grove to the busy commercial arterial. Few, however, are aware of a project in the pipeline that will replace that innocuous one-story frontage with a five-floor cliff of stores and apartments sited right up against the Martin Luther King, Jr. Way sidewalk. 

If you haven’t already guessed, this is yet another Patrick Kennedy “smart growth” project, i.e., designed to accommodate more people with fewer cars in central Berkeley. But alas, in this case it’s “super smart.” His giant problematic Gaia Building on Allston Way contains 91 apartments. This one will have 190, sitting on two to three levels of parking and with lavish retail space wrapped around the University Avenue corner. A good half of the residential units will look directly out at busy car-filled streets, or into a 27-foot-wide “garden” court that would drive any middle-class hill dweller into claustrophobic despair. 

As architecture (read “facade design”) it ranks Pretty Good. Indeed, judging from drawings, the proposed structure would have a pleasing-enough public image, albeit in one of Kennedy’s preferred eclectic styles. “Respectablized” by Dan Solomon, a talented, award-winning local architect, the building could fairly be labeled Maybeckian Chalet Style. The top is boarded and set back under generous Alpine eaves. Windows are cleverly grouped, vertically, second-floor apartments over shop fronts, etc., to soften the impact of the five story wall, which, in fact, drops down to four halfway along Martin Luther King, Jr. Way frontage in deference to Berkeley Way and the old houses thereabouts. This is a welcome concession to neighborhood scale. 

The other concession is splitting the building mass into rather narrow vertical pavilions, presumably to suggest the additive character of a traditional Main Street created over time. This device looks more charming on the elevational drawing than it probably will in reality, for the separating breaks, as the bird’s eye block plan reveals, are just shallow indentations. The one exception is Building B, tucked around the corner on Berkeley Way. Separated from the main block by an alley — real space — with its four stories squashed a little and the overhanging Alpine roof emphasized by supporting outriggers, this modest annex promises to be the friendliest bit of the ambitious complex, which, in spite of clever facade design, remains yet another developer intrusion. 

We need to ask ourselves, why can’t an old one-story strip mall become attractive shops and cafes under, say, two or three floors of apartments, somewhat like the wood-shingled, low-key building immediately north of the Longs Drugs parking lot on upper Shattuck Avenue? Are we to be allowed only blockbusters in fancy dress? Through the 1950s and early 1960s, crude shoebox apartments replaced nice old shingled houses on handsome streets like Benvenue and Hillegass, until finally banned by neighborhood outrage. Big fortresses of soulless apartments now threaten the overall small-city ambiance. 

We should also ask ourselves why one developer, Patrick Kennedy, can take the basically intelligent concept of mixed-use, in this case apartments over commercial, and run with it until he becomes the Baron Haussmann of Berkeley. True, he sometimes employs real architectural talent — Kirk Peterson, Dan Solomon, Kava Massih — but often the results seem less distinguished and less adventurous than such people’s best, more independent work. Meanwhile, opinionated, cantankerous, but eminently livable Berkeley needs more environmental variety than one ambitious developer — even with the best intentions — can provide. 

So what should be our response to this proposed urban intruder? Well, there is no easy answer. There are, and will be, all kinds of arguments for more affordable apartments, but not much discussion of quality of life. For those interested, it is still quite early in the approval process, and most of the critical meetings are open to the public. The Zoning Adjustments Board will have its say, and city staff must decide whether to require an Environmental Impact Report. Without doubt, there will be strong neighborhood concern.


City Manager Will Hold Public Meetings to Answer Citizens’ Budget Questions

By JOHN GELUARDI
Friday May 16, 2003

The City Manager presented his proposed biennial budget to the City Council on Tuesday complete with plans to deal with an expected $4.7 million deficit next year and a possible $7.6 million next year. 

In addition, the proposed plan has contingency plans in case the state assembly approves a budget sometime next fall that further shrinks expected state funding. 

The council will hold two public hearings on the proposed budget and, in an unusual step, the city manager is holding several community meetings to answer questions about his budget proposal because of the expected cuts. The council is scheduled to adopt the budget, perhaps with some alterations, on June 24 

For the coming year, the city manager’s proposes to balance the $4.7 million deficit by the elimination of 23 city staff positions, 16 of which are already vacant, and raising parking fines from $23 to $30.  

If the state approves a more draconian budget, the city manager’s contingency plan still calls for the increased parking fines and the elimination of 29 city jobs. 

In addition the city will reduce spending by continuing a selective hiring freeze, reducing travel and restricting cell phones and pagers.  

The budget proposal also calls for the reorganization of certain city departments and functions. One measure will be having non-sworn police department employees carry out duties that are currently the responsibility of sworn officers. Other departments that could be effected are Health and Human Services, the Office of Information Technology and the Office of Economic Development.  

Public hearings on the budget will be held in the City Council Chambers on May 20 and June 17. For information about the city manager sponsored community meetings call (510) 981-7041. 

 

Community Grants Approved 

At the meeting, the council also approved $4.4 million in Community Development Block Grants, which will fund numerous nonprofits organizations that serve the most vulnerable people in the community including the homeless, at risk teenagers and substance abusers.  

The adopted grant allotments held some good news for several nonprofits. A Better Way received an extra $15,000 for an office expansion, the West Campus Pool received extra money to stabilize it’s roof and the Berkeley Food and Housing Project received an additional $24,000.  

 

De-chroming the skate park 

The council unanimously approved $57,000 to get the Skate Park up and rolling again. The money will go to a geotechnical consultant who will devise a permanent solution to the persistent, and expensive problem of contaminated water bubbling up into the park’s concrete skate bowls.  

During construction of the park in 2000. Contractors who were excavating the nine-foot-deep skate bowls struck groundwater that was laden with the carcinogen hexavalent chromium, or chrome 6. Construction was halted while the city spent thousands of dollars to clean up the site and devise a new design that would prevent the contaminated groundwater from seeping into the bowls.  

However, last December, just four months after the park opened to rave reviews from skaters and skater magazines, chrome 6 was discovered in small pools of water that had formed at the bottom of two of the park’s skate bowls.  

The park was immediately closed to the public — although many skate boarders continue to use the park.  

A report from the Department of Parks and Waterfront does not include an estimate for when the park might possibly be reopened, but so far the second discovery of chrome 6 has cost another $102,000, which brings the total expenditure on the skate park to $850,000. Originally, construction of the park was estimated at $380,000.


Migrants Risk Death Daily Seeking Jobs in United States

By MARY JO McCONAHAY Pacific News Service
Friday May 16, 2003

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico — In this crowded, bustling town, migrants gather to collect their strength and make connections that will take them across the watery border and safely by road — they hope — to work or join family and friends in the United States. The horrific discovery of a trailer truck filled with dead and dying undocumented migrants near Victoria, Texas, about four hours north, is a vivid picture of the risks they face. Yet, even images of blue-gloved officers picking about for evidence as bodies of the suffocated lay still on the ground — photos running in newspapers throughout Latin America — are unlikely to deter the kind of expectant travelers who reach this town. Future Victorias loom. 

“It’s unfair — the professionals migrate without danger,” said 22-year-old Raul just days before the Victoria incident. A jobless El Salvadoran, Raul said he traveled for weeks fending off predatory Mexican police and gangs of youths his own age to reach this crossing point. He was headed for New York, where he believed an uncle lived. Once he crossed the Rio Grande, Raul figured the hired coyote — a human smuggler — would lead him across the desert until “some kind of transport” collected him and others for the ride to the central Houston bus terminal, from which the undocumented fan out across the country. Coyote cost: $1,500. 

Hundreds of young men wait here nervously every day in sight of the tantalizing “line,” a shallow strip of the Rio Grande or grassy leap from many points in town, with a gigantic U.S. flag visible flapping widely over the sister city of Laredo on the other side. To talk to some of them is to hear so many stories of determination that it’s hard to believe another Victoria will not happen. 

“We can give (our children) a life if we cross,” said Antonio, one of three Honduran fathers taking a break installing windows at a shelter run by Roman Catholic nuns. An out-of-work sewing machine operator, Antonio knew the dangers of crossing the border clandestinely, but said factory jobs at home paid just $15 a week. His new Honduran friends, met on the migrants’ trail, nodded in assent. “He might not recognize me now,” said Antonio of a two-year-old at home, “but we have slept in the streets and suffered other terrible things to get this far. When he grows up, he will know what a father does.” 

The packed trailer outside Victoria claimed 18 lives, including a young boy reportedly found in his father’s arms. It was the highest single death toll in an immigrant smuggling incident in recent memory. Less visible along the Rio Grande and in the flat, hot desert between here and Victoria is the painfully regular incidence of individual migrant fatalities, averaging almost one a day in the last few years according to one attempted counting. 

Drowning, dehydration, extreme weakness that draws attacks of wild animals — all are causes of the deaths noted by researchers at the University of Houston’s Center for Immigration Research. 

“For every body found there is certainly one that isn’t,” said the center’s co-director, Nestor Rodriguez. Bodies decompose quickly in the water, and the sun and animals make short work of other remains. In his Houston office recently, Rodriguez pulled out a file of photos and spread some across his desk. A middle-aged woman smiled in a hammock on a porch, a teen-age boy mugged for the camera and a young man held aloft a baby boy. Once word got out that the center was tracking the nameless border deaths, families sent photos and descriptions of sons and even mothers gone missing. 

With summer coming, temperatures among the nopal cactus and low scrub bushes will top 100 degrees. “The desert has the upper hand right now,” said Rodriguez. Yet the factors that push Mexicans and Central Americans north at the rate of hundreds of thousands a year are not diminishing: the economic slowdown that costs jobs in the United States echoes in the south, with even some Mexican border region “maquila” factories cutting their labor forces; the unfulfilled promise of economic stability at the end of the Central American wars of the l980s; and decades of more open migration that means innumerable Mexican and Central American families are now firmly transnational, their undocumented members moving in and out of the United States at risk. 

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when hijackers were discovered to be undocumented foreigners, border enforcement nationwide has been strengthened. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge met April 24 in San Diego with Mexican Interior Minister Santiago Creel to reinforce commitment to a “Smart Border” utilizing “progressive technology.” Migrant advocates and repeat undocumented migrants here confirm the crossing is “tighter” than ever. Yet without a new, clear-eyed look at the force and inevitability of migration from the south, more trailer trucks stuffed with dead and dying will certainly be found, and more individual desert and river fatalities will continue to be tabulated in the researchers’ border death watch. 

Unscrupulous human smugglers cannot take all the blame for the serial tragedy taking place on the U.S. side of the line. 

McConahay is a journalist and filmmaker with long experience in the Americas. 

Reporting was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. 

 


Students Charge Coca-Cola with Persecution

By ANGELA ROWEN
Friday May 16, 2003

A group of UC Berkeley staff and students, concerned about the persecution of Latin American trade unionists, confronted a Coca-Cola Company representative this week at a campus meeting about the abuses. 

The Atlanta-based multinational beverage conglomerate has drawn protests from human rights advocates who say managers at some of the company’s bottling plants in Colombia collude with paramilitaries to intimidate and murder union leaders fighting for improved working conditions. 

S’bu Mngadi, director of media relations for Coca Cola, spoke Wednesday night at the monthly meeting of the Store Operations Board of the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC). The board, which consists of six students and five faculty and staff members, oversees campus stores, the Student Union, the ASUC Art Studio and other income-producing activities. 

Wednesday’s meeting marks the first time that Coca Cola has visited a university specifically to address the situation at its Colombian factories.  

In an interview after the discussion, which was punctuated by challenges from human rights activists, Mngadi said he “appreciated the opportunity to present our side of the story” and reiterated Coca Cola’s position that all “allegations are completely false.” 

The board invited the Coca Cola representative to come to campus after student groups pressured the ASUC last year to take a more active role in opposing the company’s alleged involvement in human rights abuses in Colombia. Members of the Colombian Support Network and other campus groups say UC Berkeley, which has a 10-year contract with Coca Cola, should use their leverage to pressure the company to stop the human rights abuses occurring at their factories abroad. 

The groups have said they will consider calling for the university to sever its contract with Coca Cola and are encouraging students to take part in the worldwide boycott of Coca Cola products that will begin in July. 

A lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Miami two years ago by the United Steelworkers of America and SINALTRAINAL, a trade union representing 15 percent of all workers of Coca Cola’s Colombian plants, alleges that the company and its Colombian bottlers used paramilitary forces to assassinate, abuse and intimidate union leaders at several Coca Cola plants between 1995 and 1996. 

In April, District Judge Jose Martinez dismissed the case against the Coca Cola Company, but allowed the case to proceed against the other defendants named in the suit, including Panamco, Coca Cola’s main Latin American bottler, and Bebidas y Alimentos, which owns the plant at which several trade unionists have been killed. Coca Cola owns 25 percent of the Panamco stock and several of its employees sit on Panamco’s board of directors. Bebidas y Alimentos produces solely Coca Cola products. 

At the board meeting Wednesday, Mngadi said that the claims against Coca Cola were politically motivated and that “the allegations are being used for shock value for furthering the objectives of groups who oppose multinational corporations.” 

Mngadi said Coca Cola, far from colluding with paramilitaries to commit human rights abuses, is actually a victim of paramilitary violence, which he described as widespread in a country plagued by a breakdown of law and order and not limited to trade unionists. 

“We are also at the receiving end of the murders,” he said. “Our senior managers have died. One manager was kidnapped for 15 months.” 

Mngadi went over a list of protections and benefits that Coca Cola, its bottlers and the Colombian and U.S. government provide to workers who face threat from paramilitaries, including body guards, armored transportation to and from work, loans to improve safety of union offices, and loans to help threatened workers relocate to safer areas.  

He added that Coca Cola has “extensive normal relations” with all 12 of its Colombian unions, which represent 3,000 employees at 20 Coca Cola bottling plants throughout the country. 

“Only one trade union of the 12 unions representing Coca Cola workers in Colombia have made these allegations,” Mngadi said, referring to the plaintiff in the lawsuit, SINALTRAINAL. “There is a tiny fraction of workers employed by Coca Cola that is making these allegations. It’s not as if the workers are continually raising these questions.” 

He said one of the unions, SINALTRAINBEC, has publicly rejected the allegations made by SINALTRAINAL, and said some branches of SINALTRAINAL oppose the central office’s stance against Coca Cola. 

Some Store Operation Board members and most people in the audience said they weren’t convinced by Mngadi’s presentation. One audience member took issue with Coca Cola’s repeated insistence that there is no evidence inculpating the company in trade unionist murders. 

“There are ongoing monthly payments from John Ordonez, an official of Panamco, to paramilitary leaders. There have been recent meetings between Panamco and Carlos Castano of ... a paramilitary group,” said Jeremy Blasi, an Oakland resident and UC Berkeley graduate student. “These are specific allegations of human rights abuse, not just flippant remarks by radical groups.” 

Blasi, who sat on the committee that drafted the University of California’s anti-sweatshop policy, said Mngadi’s assertion that the claims against the company are simply allegations that have yet to be proven in a court of law shouldn’t stop the university from taking a stand against Coca Cola.  

“We don’t wait for a lawsuit to go to completion before we express our concern over human rights abuses,” he said. “Nike was never convicted of using sweatshops in its apparel shops throughout the world but that hasn’t stopped the University of California from taking action to protect Nike workers in factories in Mexico and elsewhere.” 

Mngadi said the allegations have been dismissed by the Colombian justice system on two occasions. 

Board member Jessica Quindel said she appreciated Coca Cola’s willingness to speak to students, but was not yet convinced that Coca Cola was completely innocent or doing enough to stop the human rights abuses. 

“I’m really grateful that they came out, that they realize that this is a big enough issue that they came to campus,” she said. “But I am not satisfied with some of their responses and would like to see them use their privilege more responsibly and not just say, ‘Oh that’s just how it is down there.’ They need to take a role in changing the situation.”  

Likewise, Quindel said, students have an obligation to take the issue seriously as well. 

“We have a million dollar contract with Coca Cola on this campus,” she said. “And on one hand that’s funds coming into the university, but on the other hand it’s blood money.” 


Summer Noon Concerts in Downtown Berkeley

Friday May 16, 2003

The Downtown Berkeley Association (DBA) presents Summer Noon Concerts 2003, a unique series of nine free concerts, Thursdays at noon in June & July, beginning June 5th. From Rhythm & Blues to Brazilian capoeira, these concerts at the Downtown Berkeley BART Plaza (Shattuck Ave. at Center St.) are a showcase of the culturally rich performing arts in Berkeley. This outdoor summer celebration of Berkeley-based musicians & dancers is just a small sampling of the performing arts happening nightly in clubs, cafes, schools, theaters and concert halls in Downtown Berkeley. 

 

On Thursday, June 5th, our concert series opens with Rhonda Benin and Soulful Strut performing some of the best in R & B, with a splash of jazz and a solid helping of the blues. Soulful Strut appears regularly at many Bay Area nightspots such Enricos Sidewalk Café and Restaurant. 

 

On Thursday, July 31st, our concert series closes with SoVoSó, a highly visual and imaginative a capella ensemble that sings a compelling mix of jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, world, pop, and improvisational music. The ensemble is made up of former members of Bobby McFerrin’s Voicestra, and McFerrin says, “SoVoSó is tight, soulful, and a whole lotta fun.” 

 

This event is easily accessible by transit and there is one hour free parking daily from 9 am to 5 pm in Center Street Garage. Seating will be available. 

 

For a complete schedule of entertainers for the Downtown Berkeley Summer Noon Concerts 2003 visit the Downtown Berkeley Association website at www.downtownberkeley.org. 


Proposal Cuts Pay To Save Teachers

By DAVID SCHARFENBERG
Tuesday May 13, 2003

With nearly 200 Berkeley public school teachers facing layoffs, union leaders are rejecting a call for all district employees to take a 10 percent pay cut to save the jobs. 

“We will not accept any cuts in pay or benefits,” said Stephanie Allan, a union official with Local 39, which represents bus drivers and food service workers. “We are not going to fund the [deficit] on the backs of our members.” 

Board of Education Director Shirley Issel called for the wage reduction Friday in an interview with the Daily Planet. 

“Our solutions have to come out of our paychecks,” she said. “There are no solutions in Sacramento. There are no solutions in council chambers or at school board meetings.”  

About 85 percent of the district’s $99 million budget is wrapped up in salaries and benefits. Unless workers accept a pay cut, Issel said, the schools, which face a $4 million to $8 million deficit next year, must proceed with heavy layoffs. 

The district issued pink slips to 220 of Berkeley’s 652 teachers by a preliminary, state-mandated deadline of March 15, hoping to rescind as many as 145 by the end of the year as the budget picture cleared up. 

The district has taken back a handful of notices since then and watched an administrative law judge toss out several more on technical grounds, leaving about 180 teachers eligible for layoffs.  

According to state law, the Berkeley Unified School District must issue a final round of pink slips by May 15 to any teachers it cannot guarantee a job next year. With the state budget still in flux and California $34.6 billion in debt, the schools have no choice but to give all 180 teachers notices at a special Board of Education meeting Tuesday night, said district spokesman Mark Coplan. 

“If we don’t have the funds allocated for these people, we have to lay them off,” he said. 

District officials say they hope to take back as many as 100 of the 180 notices by the start of the next school year and plan to take back 30 to 40 as early as Tuesday or Wednesday. 

Barry Fike, president of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, said the numbers don’t add up. If the district only plans to lay off 80 to 100 teachers, he argues, it should not give notices to all 180. He said it will only leave more teachers worried their futures and seeking jobs elsewhere. 

Fike, who declined to take a public position on the 10 percent pay cut, ripped Issel for suggesting the reduction, calling it inappropriate and potentially illegal to negotiate contracts in public. 

Robert Thompson, general counsel for the state’s Public Employment Relations Board, said the case law is unclear on whether a public call for a wage cut violates negotiating rules. 

Officials from several unions said the district administration had not proposed a pay cut at the bargaining table and criticized Issel for stepping into the process. 

“It’s preposterous,” said Richard Hemann, a field representative for a California Federation of Teachers union that represents 350 secretaries and teachers’ aides. “If Mrs. Issel might like to join the bargaining team at the table and see what’s going on, it might be edifying.” 

“I don’t think the unions will support it,” added Associate Superintendent of Human Resources David Gomez.  

Board director John Selawsky said it would be difficult to extract a 10 percent wage cut from district employees, but defended the idea as a worthy one. 

“It’s certainly something we should all consider,” he said.  

Issel said the proposal marked a genuine attempt to save the jobs of dozens of teachers and other employees. 

“This is Berkeley, for heaven’s sake, we’re supposed to care for each other,” she said, arguing that the layoffs have had devastating impacts on schools like Washington Elementary, which saw 14 of its 19 teachers receive pink slips, two of them rescinded at this point. 

One union official said he is willing to discuss a possible pay cut. 

“We’re open to anything the district wants to negotiate,” said John Santoro, president of the Union of Berkeley Administrators, which represents 37 principals, assistant principals and other managers.


Berkeley This Week

Tuesday May 13, 2003

COMMUNITY MEETINGS 

 

TUESDAY, MAY 13 

 

Constitutional Rights Teach-In, covering the Patriot Act and the proposed Patriot Act II. Nancy Nadel, Oakland City Council, Keynote Speaker. At 6:30 p.m. at the First Unitarian Church, 685 Fourteenth St., Oakland. 533-8358. 

 

Lead-Safe Painting and Remodeling, a free class on how to detect and remedy  

lead hazards in your home, offered by Alameda County lead Poisoning Prevention Program, at 6 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. 567-8280.  

 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 525-3565. www.berkeleycam 

eraclub.org 

 

Personal and Professional Portfolios, a brown bag career talk with Mary Robbins, noon to 1 p.m, at YWCA Turning Point Career Center, 2600 Bancroft Way. 848-6370.  

 

Poetry Book Club, meets at the Claremont Branch Library, at 7:30 p.m. at 2940 Benvenue Ave. This month we will discuss the works of Rumi, the 13th century poet and mystic. 981-6280. 

 

WEDNESDAY, MAY 14 

 

 

Youth and the Military: Your Rights & Your Options, a panel discussion with veterans, conscientious objectors, conscientious objector counselors, and a school representative followed by questions from high school youth. A light dinner will be served. Contributions are welcome. From 6 to 8:30 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2501 Harrison St., at 27th St., Oakland. For information call Ying, 841-4755. www.PNVRC.net.  

 

Uplifting Spirit through Education, panel discussion with His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, spiritual theologian Matthew Fox, and other thinkers in an evening of discussion on education and how to empower youth. Sponsored by the International Association for Human Values. At Zeller- 

bach Hall, UC Campus, at 7 p.m. Cost is $12, $8 for students. (800) 454-9857. www.iahv.org,  

symposium@iahv.org 

 

Berkeley Poetry Slam, with host Charles Ellik at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough, 3101 Shattuck Ave. $90 cash prizes. Cost is $7 at the door, $5 with student i.d. 841-2082. 

 

Community Dances in Berkeley, traditional English and American dances, 8 p.m. every Wednesday, $9. 7 p.m. first Sunday, $10. Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St., 233-5065. www.bacds.org 

 

THURSDAY, MAY 15 

 

Bike to Work Day Annual Celebration. Look for energizer stations around town, from 6 to 9 a.m. Registration and more information at www.btwd.org 

 

Berkeley Adult School Annual Career Day. Meet employers, get job leads and have your resume critiqued for free. From 9 a.m to noon, in the cafeteria, 1222 University Ave. 644-9868. 

 

South Berkeley Mural Project. Community members in South Berkeley are coming together to create a neighborhood mural on the side of the Grove Liquor Store on the corner of Ashby Ave and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. At 7 p.m. at Epic Arts Studios at 1923 Ashby Ave. For further information on ways to get involved please call 644-2204.  

 

San Pablo Park Community Discussion on new design for the park, at 6:30 p.m. at the Frances Albrier Recreation Center, San Pablo Park.  

 

Berkeley Liberation Radio 104.1 FM, holds public meetings for all interested people first and third Thursdays, 7 p.m. at the Long Haul Info Shop, 3124 Shattuck Ave. 595-0190.  

 

Truth: Exposing Israeli Apartheid, a documentary  

by local film-maker Wendy Campbell, will be shown at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. The screening will be preceeded by a talk by long-time activist Dave Kersting on the topic of “What is Zionism?” Suggested donation is $20, no one turned away for lack of funds. Proceeds to benefit Americans for Justice in Palestine-Israel projects. 849-2568. americansforjustice 

@earthlink.net  

 

FRIDAY, MAY 16 

 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. wibberkeley@yahoo.com 

548-6310, 845-1143. 

 

Meditation, Peace Vigil and Dialogue, gather at noon on the grass close to the West Entrance to UC Berkeley, on Oxford St. near University Ave. People of all traditions are welcome to join us. 496-6000, ext.135. Sponsored by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship www.bpf.org 

 

Poet Jack Hirschman featured at Fellowship Café 

& Open Mike on Friday, May 16, at Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar St. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Poets, singers, musicians, and performance artists are invited to sign up for the open mike. A donation of $5-10 is requested. Coffee, tea, and snack bar are available all evening. The Hall is wheelchair accessible. The café series is sponsored by the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists. 

 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon Series 

“How Stars Are Made,” with Steven Stahler, PhD, Professor, Dept of Astronomy, UC Berkeley. Luncheon 11:45 a.m. $11.50 - $12.50, Speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations 526-2925, 665-9020. 

 

SATURDAY, MAY 17 

 

20th Annual Himalayan Fair 

Authentic Himalayan crafts, arts, music, dance, foods, antiques to benefit grassroots projects in Tibet, Nepal, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Mongolia, at Live Oak Park, 1300 Shattuck Ave., starting at 10 a.m. $5 donation. 869-3995. www.himalayanfair.net 

 

Berkeley Association of Neighborhood Associations meeting at 9:15 a.m. in the Fireside Room, St. John's Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 587-3257. www.berkeleycna.com 

 

Walk Across America 

Peace-by-Peace 

Four of the seven Berkeley women who walked across America for peace last year will discuss their experience at a benefit for the Womens International League for Peace and Freedom at 7 p.m. at Redwood Gardens, 2951 Derby St. Donation sliding scale $5 - $10, no one will be refused. Call Laura Santina, 925-828-8184 for more information.  

 

The 43rd Annual Walden Center and School Spring Fair, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 2446 McKinley Ave., corner of Dwight and McKinley. Proceeds will support the scholarship and building funds.  

 

Disaster First Aid Class offered by the City of Ber- 

keley’s Emergency Operations Center, from 1 to 4 p.m. at 997 Cedar St. For more information call 981-5605. TDD: 981-5799. 

 

Berkeley Historical Society Walking Tours: “The Westbrae Commons,” led by John Dennis and Karl Linn. 10 a.m. $5 members, $10 non-members. For reservations call 848-0181. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/histsoc 

 

Strawberry Tastings at the Berkeley Farmers Market, from 10 a.m. - 3 p.m., Center St. at MLK, Jr. Way, sponsored by the Ecology Center. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

 

Dominos Tournament in San Pablo Park, on the new tables installed by Friends of San Pablo Park, at noon. Call 649-9874 for information. 

 

Know Your Rights Training, a free workshop presented by Copwatch, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. For information call 548-0425. 

 

California Spring Wildflower Walk, with Nathan Smith, horticulturist and California natives expert, for an informative stroll through the Garden's magnificent collection of native wildflowers. You'll learn to recognize many of the wildflowers found around the state in spring and discover which of these are suitable for planting in your home garden, from 10 a.m. to noon. Fee $10, includes admission; Members free. Registration recommended. UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755.  

 

Drip Irrigation: Do-it-yourself, Save Water 

This class will cover such topics as: what are the benefits and limitations of drip irrigation; what are the basic tools and supplies needed to install your own drip irrigation system; how much does a drip irrigation system cost. Taught by Jon Bauer, longtime irrigation system ins- 

taller and gardener. Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave., near Dwight Way, from 10 am - 1 pm. Cost is $10 Ecology Center members, $15 others, no one turned away for lack of funds. For information 548-2220 x 233. 

 

Cordonices Creek Water Quality Monitoring Day, sponsored by Friends of Five Creeks. Call 848-9358 for more information. 

 

The American Cancer  

Society 24-hour "Relay for Life" from 10 a.m. Saturday, May 17 until Sunday, May 18 at the El Cerrito High School track. All El Cerrito, Kensington, Albany and Berkeley residents are invited to take part in this fourth annual community event that raises money to fight cancer through research, education, advocacy and service. To get involved contact Joann Steck-Bayat at 524-9464. www.cancer.org or 1-800-ACS-2345. 

 

California Horticultural Society’s Annual Plant Sale 

Thousands of rare and unusual plants. Preview Sale and Party, 6 to 9 p.m. $5 Members only; Memberships available at the door, $40 includes a free plant. 

General Sale on Sunday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. County Fair Bldg, Strybing Arboretum, Golden Gate Park at 9th & Lincoln Ave. For more information: (800) 884-0009.  

 

Spring Cleaning Help from Berkeley High School 

Donate those twice read books or slightly worn blue jeans to our huge May 

Garage Sale. 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. 

at 1639 Ashby, between King & California, 2 1/2 blocks below the Ashby BART Station, near Malcolm X School. 

531-5225. 

 

Child Safety Day at Habitot Children’s Museum. Free car seat checks, $5 toddler tricycle helmets. 10 a.m. to noon at 2065 Kittredge St. 647-1111, ext. 11. 

 

SUNDAY, MAY 18 

 

20th Annual Himalayan Fair 

(see Sat. May 17 listing) 

 

Hidden Gems of Berkeley Bike Ride Meet at Halcyon Commons at Prince, one bock west of Telegraph at 10 a.m. for a bike tour of special gardens, fanciful sculptures, a daylighted creek and much more. Bring lunch and water. Sponsored by Bicycle Friendly Berkeley Coalition, 549-7433.  

 

Eckhart Tolle's Talks on Video, free gatherings, at 7:30 p.m. to hear the words of the author of "The Power of Now" at the Feldenkrais Ctr., 830 Bancroft Way. Will meet on the first and third Sunday of each month. 547-2024. EdShorelin@aol.com 

 

California Horticultural  

Society’s Annual Plant Sale 

10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Plant experts will be on hand. County Fair Bldg, Strybing Arboretum, Golden Gate Park at 9th & Lincoln Ave., San Francisco For information call 800-884-0009.  

 

CITY MEETINGS 

 

Community Meetings on the City Budget. The public is invited to four meetings to learn more about the budget deficit and City plans to address the issue. The first meeting will be held May 15 at 7 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center. For information call 981-CITY.  

 

Council Agenda Committee meets Monday, May 12, at 2:30 p.m. in the Redwood Room, 6th Floor, 2180 Milvia St. Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk 

981-6900. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/citycouncil/agenda-committee 

 

Landmarks Preservation Commission Special Meeting  

on Monday, May 12 at 7:30 p.m. to discuss revisions to the Landmarks Preservations Ordinance and the Zoning Ordinance, in the North Ber- 

keley Senior Center. Greg Powell, 981-7414. www.ci.ber 

keley.ca.us/commissions/landmarks 

 

City Council meets Tuesday, May 13, at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers. Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/citycouncil 

 

Commission on Disability  

meets Wednesday, May 14, at 6:30 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center. Paul Church, 981-6342. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/commissions/disability 

 

Homeless Commission 

meets Wednesday, May 14 at 

7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jane Micallef, 981-5426. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/homeless 

 

Planning Commission 

meets Wednesday, May 14 at 

7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center. Ruth Grimes, 981-7481. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/planning 

 

Police Review Commission 

meets Wednesday, May 14 at  

7:30 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center. Barbara Attard, 981-4950. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/commissions/ 

policereview 

 

Waterfront Commission 

meets Wednesday, May 14 at 

7 p.m. at 201 University Ave. 

Cliff Marchetti, 644-6376 x 224. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/waterfront 

 

Design Review Committee  

meets Thursday, May 15 at 

7:30 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center. Anne Burns, 981-7415. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/commissions/ 

designreview  

 

Fair Political Practices Commission meets Thursday, May 15 at 7:30 p.m. in the  

North Berkeley Senior Center. Prasanna Rasaih, 981-6950. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/faircampaign 

 

Transportation Commission  

meets Thursday, May 15 at  

7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center. Peter Hillier, 981-7000. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/transportation


Arts Calendar

Tuesday May 13, 2003

TUESDAY, MAY 13 

 

FILM 

 

The Inquiring Camera: In Order Not to Be Here at 7:30 p.m at the Pacific Film Ar- 

chive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-1412. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

 

Michael Lewis on “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

 

Rebecca Lawton reads from her new book, “Reading Water,” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

 

Courtableu, performing Cajun/zydeco at 8:30 p.m., with a dance lesson with Diana Castillo at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054.  www.ashkenaz.com 

 

The Matt Flinner Quartet 

mandolin virtuoso and his band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

 

WEDNESDAY, MAY 14 

 

FILM 

 

Video: I Found It at the Movies, Body Double X at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-1412. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

 

Tanya Shaffer’s “Somebody’s Heart is Burning,” book release celebration at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15, which includes a copy of the book. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

 

Eric Schosser describes “Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Mar- 

ket,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

 

Joyce Bueker discusses an ancient holist health system from India in her new book, “Ayurvedic Balancing,” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

 

Brenda Boykin and Home Cookin’ perform West Coast swing at 9 p.m., swing dance lesson with Nick and Shanna at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

 

Matt Haimovitz, virtuoso cellist, performs at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761 www.freightandsalvage.org 

 

The Pin Up Motel, The Love Makers, Superlarry perform Indie Rock, Electro Clash, and Post Pardem Rock at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $6. 848-0866. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

 

THURSDAY, MAY 15 

 

FILM 

 

Heroic Grace: Martial Arts 

Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan, at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-1412. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

 

Truth: Exposing Israeli Apartheid, 50 min. documentary by Wendy Campbell. The screening will be preceded by a talk by Dave Ker- 

sting on What is Zionism? At 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. $20 donation requested. $10 for students with i.d. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

 

Jane Juska reads from “A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex & Romance,” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

 

Jack Foley and Richard Silberg talk about the poetic consciousness of the Bay Area in their book, “The Fallen Western Star Wars,” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

 

Tom Russell, roots country troubadour, performs at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761 www.freightandsalvage.org 

 

Rogue Wave, Ebb and Flow, 

Venison Book, at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082.  

 

FRIDAY, MAY 16 

 

FILM 

 

Heroic Grace: Martial Arts 

Blood Brothers, at 7 and 9:20 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-1412. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

 

Jack Hirschman, poet, painter, activist will be featured at the Fellowship Café and Open Mike at 7:30 p.m. Donation of $5-$10. 1924 Cedar St. 540-0898. 

 

Carroll Spinney reflects on his life as a puppeteer in “The Wisdom of Big Bird (and the Dark Genius of Oscar the Grouch): Lessons From a Life in Feathers,” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

 

Todd Gitlin reads from “Letters to a Young Activist,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

 

Richard Mahler discusses his book, “Stillness” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

 

Berkeley Ballet Theatre Children's Division and Youth Company present “Seasons,” an opportunity for dance-lovers of all ages to enjoy ballet. The program includes Sally Street’s “Mon Parasol” and two world 

premieres by Sonya Delwaide, “Au Revoir” and “Au Pas,” plus a restaging of “Les Patineurs,” by Artistic Director Corinne Jonas, at 7 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets are $16, available from the Ballet box office 843-4689. www.berkeleyballet.org 

 

Dances for Peace presented by the Isadora Duncan Project, Inc., at 8 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $13 in advance, $16 at the door. For reservations call 548-2259 or email nncogley@sbcglobal.net 

 

Young People’s Symphony Orchestra performs Holst’s “The Planets” at the Dean Lesher Center in Walnut Creek at 8 p.m. Tickets are $6 - $13. For information call 665-5607. www.ypsomusic.org 

 

Los Mocoscos, a Latin funk-rock group from SF’s Mission District, performs at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054.  www.ashkenaz.com 

 

Bay Area Latin Jazz Legacy Series, an Afro-Latin eve- 

ning with John Calloway and Diaspora and O-Maya in a program of jazz, hip hop, funk, soul and salsa. Panel at 7:30 p.m. and show at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12 in ad- 

vance, $15 at the door. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

 

The Kathy Kallick Band performs hot bluegrass, cool originals at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761 www.freightandsalvage.org 

 

Asylum Street Spankers, at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $14. 841-2082.  

 

Ludicra, Insidious, The Vanishing, Skarp, Desolation perform at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

 

Stroke 9, Beth Champion Band perform Rock at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8. 848-0866. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

 

SATURDAY, MAY 17 

 

CHILDREN 

 

Kids on the Block Puppet Show, promoting acceptance and understanding of physical and cultural differences, at 2 p.m. at the Hall of Health, 2230 Shattuck Ave. (lower level). Suggested donation $3, children under 3 free. 549-1564. 

 

How Ground Hog’s Garden Grew, a story about gardening at 11 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

 

FILM 

 

Heroic Grace: Martial Arts 

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, at 2:15 and 7 p.m. and Return to the 36th Chamber, at 4:30 and 9:15p.m., at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-1412. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

 

Mary Ford-Grabowsky reads from her new anthology of women's sacred poetry, with local contributing authors Janine Canan, Christina Hutchins, Stephanie Marohn, Betty McAfee, Michelle Lynn Ryan, Jan Steckel and Dorothy Walters reading as well. At 7:30 p.m. at Boad- 

ecia's Books, 398 Colusa Ave., Kensington,. Free, refreshments served. 559-9184. www.bookpride.com. 

 

Jonathan Schell on “The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

 

Berkeley Ballet Theatre Children's Division and Youth Company present “Seasons,” an opportunity for dance-lovers of all ages to enjoy ballet. The program includes Sally Street’s “Mon Parasol” and two world 

premieres by Sonya Delwaide, “Au Revoir” and “Au Pas,” plus a restaging of “Les Patineurs,” by Artistic Director Corinne Jonas, at 2 and 7 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets are $16 available from the Ballet box office 843-4689. www.berkeleyballet.org 

 

Dances for Peace presented by the Isadora Duncan Project, Inc., at 8 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $13 in advance, $16 at the door. For reservations call 548-2259.  

 

Youth Musical Theater Commons presents “Les Miserables,” performed by students of King, Longfellow, Willard, BHS, and Albany High. This school edition is shorter than the Broadway version, but not short on talent. At 7:30 p.m. in the Longfellow Auditorium, 1500 Derby St. Also on Sun. May 18 at 3 p.m. Tickets at the door, $5-$8. 848-1797. http://busduse.org/lesmiz  

 

Cecilia Long, vocalist, at 2:30 p.m. at Walnut Square, at Vine. 204-9228. www.walnutsquarecenter.com 

 

Lunar Heights, Malika Madre Mana, Mother Earth, Ujima Youth Poets, music and spoken words, at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

 

Music over Murder, a con- 

cert by Hip Hop for the Soul, in tribute to the 114 lives lost in Oakland last year, at 8 p.m. at the Mandela Arts Village, 1357 5th St., Oak- 

land, behind the West Oak- 

land BART Station. 891-0247 x 19. 

 

Robin Flower and Libby McLaren, Celtic and old-time music at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $17.50 in ad- 

vance, $18.50 at the door. 

548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

 

Kairos Youth Choir performs a musical revue featuring the music of Rogers and Hammerstein at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Montessori School Auditorium, 1581 Le Roy. Tickets are $10, children under 12 $5. 

 

Kenny Endo Taiko Ensemble, with Somei Yoshino Taiko Ensemble, will perform a blend of taiko music and jazz. Reception is at 5 p.m., with concert at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $25 in advance, $30 at the door. 835-2003. www.taikoarts.com 

 

Hausmusik presents Carnival of Florence, a program of music from late 15th and early 16th century Florence, at 8 p.m. at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington Ave., Albany. Advance tickets, $15 and $18, are recommended. Reservations 524-5661. 

 

Naked Barbies, Kevin Welch, at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082.  

 

Kellye Gray performs at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Tickets are $12-$ 18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

 

Kofy Brown and Subteraneanz perform Hip Hop at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0866. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

 

Zydeco Flames performs at 9:30 p.m., with a Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054.  www.ashkenaz.com 

 

Lungfish, The Embalmers, The Shivering, Once a Hero, perform at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

 

SUNDAY, MAY 18 

 

CHILDREN 

 

Family Show with Asheba, reggae music and stories at 3 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $3 for children, $5 for adults. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

FILM 

 

Arguing the World, a look at the lives of some of this century’s greatest thinkers, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Iving Howe and Irwing Kristal and their controversial role in the McCarthy era, at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Com- 

munity Center, 1414 Walnut St. Suggested donation $2. 848-0237. 

 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

 

Poetry Flash with Margo Stever and Monica Youn, at 7:30 p.m. at Cody's Books, $2 donation. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com, www.poetryflash.org 

 

Marilyn Gordon discusses her new book, “Extra- 

ordinary Healing,” at 3:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

 

FILM 

 

Nicholas Ray: They Live by Night, at 5:30 p.m. and A Woman's Secret at 7:25 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4 members, UC students, $5 UC faculty, staff, seniors, disabled, youth, $8 adults. 642-1412. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

 

Berkeley Ballet Theatre Children's Division and Youth Company present “Seasons,” an opportunity for dance-lovers of all ages to enjoy ballet. The program includes Sally Street’s “Mon Parasol” and two world 

premieres by Sonya Delwaide, “Au Revoir” and “Au Pas,” plus a restaging of “Les Patineurs,” by Berkeley Ballet Theater's Artistic Director Corinne Jonas, at 2 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets are $16, available from the Ballet box office 843-4689. www.berkeleyballet.org 

 

7th Annual Jazz on 4th Street Festival, from 12:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., on 4th St., between Hearst and Virginia. Raffle prizes donated by Fourth St. merchants, Yoshi’s and others. Proceeds benefit the Berkeley High Performing Arts and the award-winning Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble. Presented by KCSM/Jazz 91, 4th Street Merchants and Yoshi's. Featuring Dave Ellis Quartet, John Santos Quartet with Orestes Vilato, Johnny Nitro and the DoorSlammers, and The Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble and Combos. For information 644-3002.  

 

Latin American Children’s Ensemble Los Mapeches in a journey through the Amer- 

icas at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8 for adults, $4 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

 

Kairos Youth Choir performs a musical revue featuring the music of Rogers and Hammerstein at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Montessori School Auditorium, 1581 Le Roy. Tickets are $10, children under 12 $5. 

Wafi Gad, Luna Angel and Shashamani Soundsystem, reggae music at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  www.ashkenaz.com 

 

Mary Freeberg and Trio, jazz standards at 11:30 a.m. at Walnut Square, at Vine. 204-9228. www.walnutsquarecenter.com 

 

Pine Valley Boys, with Butch Waller, David Nelson and Herb Pederson, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $16.50 in advance, $17.50 at the door.  

548-1761 www.freightandsalvage.org 

 

Vocalist Molly Holm performs “Right Here, Right Now” at 8 p.m. at the Jazz- 

school. Tickets are $12-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

 

OPENINGS 

 

Arts First Oakland opens with exhibits by textile artist Deborah J. Hamouris; the youth artists of Art Esteem; performances by Lara Bruckmann, Ensemble Mars, Tigris, and The Bridge and Tunnel Boys, on Friday, May 16th, from 6 to 8:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2501 Harrison Street, Oakland. Wheelchair accessible. Admission is free, donations happily encouraged. For more information call 444-8511 x15 or email artsfirst@ 

firstoakland.org, www.artsfirstoakland.org 

 

Berkeley Historical Society, “Focus on Berkeley,” a photo exhibit by the Berke- 

ley Camera Club, Berkeley High School students, and community photographers, in celebration of the City’s 125th Anniversary, on Sunday, May 18th, from 3 to 5 p.m. at the Berkeley His- 

tory Center, 1931 Center St. Exhibit runs May 18 to Sept. 13. sponsored by the Berke- 

ley Historical Society, 848-0181. Admission is free.  

 

OTHER GALLERIES 

 

ACCI Gallery “Into the Fire,” A Glass Exhibition at 1652 Shattuck Ave. Nine Bay Area Masters of Glass will display a collection of hand blown treasures. April 25 - May 23. 843-2527.  

www.accigallery.com 

 

 

Graduate Theological Union Library: “The Sorrows of War,” an exhibition of prints. Through May 31. 2400 Ridge Rd. 649-2541. 

 

Annual Quilt Show at the Berkeley Public Library North Branch, 1170 The Alameda, at Hopkins.  

April 1 - May 14. 981-6250.


Letters to the Editor

Tuesday May 13, 2003

AN AGENCY IN NEED 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

I am grateful to have the Berkeley Daily Planet back on the streets and on the Web to cover the local stories that the media outside our community ignores. One of those stories was City Council’s hearing on the distribution of Community Development Block Grant funds (CDBG). I was disappointed that John Geluardi’s article did not mention Jobs Consortium, one of the agencies that received the most significant cuts. 

The city manager is recommending that Jobs Consortium receive no funding for the coming year. As a staff person, I did not speak before the council, but I listened as a dozen of our clients made an eloquent case for supporting the program. Mr. Geluardi cited agencies’ lack of need or mismanagement as possible reasons for the recommended cuts. If that is the reasoning behind the loss of Jobs Consortium’s CDBG funding, no one has told us that.  

At the end of our presentation, City Councilmember Dona Spring commended us for the work we are doing in the community. The only reason we have been given is that we should be working harder to get money from private foundations. In fact, we have worked very hard to win foundation grants and have received grants in the past from foundations set up by the Clorox Company and the Haas family. Unfortunately, times are as hard on foundations now as they are on state and local governments. Shrinking stock portfolios have shrunk the amount of money that foundations can award.  

We understand that times are tough, and the staff is already doing more with less by taking significant pay cuts in February. We will do all we can to maintain the current level of services to our clients.  

Time is running out. I urge those who have benefited from our services in the past to call Mayor Bates and members of the council. Let them know how much Jobs Consortium helped you gain employment and stable housing. Without Jobs Consortium, the benefits you received will not be available to those who need us in the future. Think of what you would have done without Jobs Consortium there to help.  

Tom Yamaguchi  

 

• 

LONG-TERM SOLUTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In Bud Hazelkorn’s article (Daily Planet, May 9-12 edition) on the student protest in Sacramento against education cuts, Mayor Tom Bates, bidding bye-bye to the buses as they left Berkeley, “insisted” that the state needed to raise income taxes as well as vehicle license fees to meet the current shortfall.  

Bates’ failure to specify that only the top 10 percent income level and license fees for vehicles costing more than $20,000 ought to face stiffer rates makes me feel I’m hearing the same old, same old. 

The budget deficits Berkeley and the state are facing call for more long-term solutions than increasing the financial burden for middle- and lower- income earners. I propose the following: Cancel the (unneeded) Delano II prison, $124,000,000. Adopt the Legislative Analyst Office’s options making better use of parole, $375,500,000. Reduce the number of parolees returned to prison on technicalities (returned without new convictions), $888,354,177.  

These measures will save California more than $1.3 billion a year, every year. In addition, if tax loopholes that California oil companies enjoy were plugged, the state would also reap huge amounts every year. 

It’s more than time for Berkeley’s elected officials to exhibit some creative political leadership, step outside the Democratic Party line and pro-actively advocate for some fundamental reforms. If they can’t or won’t, then they are simply party hacks working to save their own jobs and status.  

Maris Arnold 

• 

LANDLORD’S EXPENSE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I’m sure “Name Withheld” (Letters to the Editor, May 6-8) is unaware how costly his “run-down” apartment is to the owner (mortgage, water, insurance, multiple taxes and fees, and the only expense which can be delayed — maintenance). If these expenses are higher than Mr. Withheld’s rent (and they almost certainly are), the landlord is in part supporting him. People naturally resent having dependents who are not family members. 

The tenants I know who’ve had rent-controlled apartments for 20 years (including lawyers and computer programers) aren’t heard from in the local press not due to fear of their landlords, but because they are embarrassed to have people know about their incredible deals. 

Judy Johnston 

 

• 

TRUE MEASURE OF TESTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Lauren Kayed (Letters to the Editor, May 6-8 edition) doesn’t understand what Michael Larrick meant by “traditional scholarship” and the “psychological, social worker model of education” in his earlier opinion piece. A reading of the piece makes it perfectly obvious. 

Traditional scholarship to Mr. Larrick means the “three Rs” of the conservative educational movement: rote, repetition and regurgitation. The psychological, social worker model of education means any recognition that children are individuals who have different ways of learning and develop them at different rates. Since teachers (at least at the elementary school level) can’t help but notice that the latter is true, conservatives are constantly shopping for “teacher-proof” curricula. 

I can’t speak to Mr. Larrick’s presumptions about 100 years ago, but I do know that when I was in school in the 1940s and 1950s, fewer than half of those who entered high school in the United States graduated. In California, half of Latino students had been pushed out by the eighth grade. U.S. students consistently lagged behind those of other industrialized countries in math and science. 

Unfortunately, every attempt to correct this has been vehemently opposed by the rote learning fans. When math teachers developed a curriculum which would teach children vital estimating skills, the regurgitators screamed that our children were being taught “to guess” rather than memorize formulae. Kids from countries like South Korea and Japan where they teach “guessing” naturally do better on math tests than rote-bound Americans. 

The “drill and kill” testing ideology has two foundations. The first is that learning consists of mastering a body of received truth and the function of teachers is to memorize that truth, then pass it on to their students so that they can regurgitate it onto test papers. This essentially religious idea is joined to the 18th-century enlightenment notion that children are just small adults, differing from us only in that they don’t know as much. The function of the schools is to fill them with measured doses of knowledge. The function of tests is to measure whether the schools are pumping the goo in fast enough. 

In reality, of course, what tests like the SAT measure best is how good you are at taking tests. (I speak as one who scored in the 99th percentile nationally on both parts of the SAT I. Give me multiple choices, and I can usually pass tests in subjects about which I know nothing.) 

Tom Condit 

 

• 

TRAGEDY AT HOME 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

During the past two months we lost over 200 Americans who fought for freedom in Iraq. This is a tragedy; one life is too much to loose. But the price of freedom and world peace is high, and we must always be diligent and ready to fight for liberty, freedom and world peace. 

What is even more tragic is the loss of young American lives that occurred right here in the Berkeley-Oakland Congressional District of Dellums and Barbara Lee. During the past 12 years, since the Gulf War, we have lost 1,723 Americans to brutal homicides right here in our own neighborhoods. 

Barbara Lee, Don Perata, Loni Hancock and Tom Bates ignore this tragic brutality and badmouth President Bush and rave about our 200 American losses in Iraq, but they don’t give a damn about our brutal 1,723 murders right here in our own neighborhoods. I’m afraid to go out at night, while our local politicians do nothing except condemn President Bush, who has overwhelmingly proved himself to be one of our greatest presidents and who will be known as one of the greatest world leaders of this century. 

Ella Jensen 

El Cerrito 

 

• 

ALTERNATIVE NEWS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

When George Bush was selected president, it was observed by some that only twice in our history have a father and son become president of the United States. I found myself cynically thinking, “Yes, the Adams father and son at the beginning of our democracy and the Bush father and son at the end of it.” 

Remember that the first casualty of war is truth, so beware of propaganda out of Washington, D.C. For a true alternative to the corporate-owned media, we in Berkeley are lucky to have listener-sponsored, free-speech radio, KPFA, 94.1 FM. Try catching “Democracy Now” at 6 and 9 a.m. and “Flashpoint” at 5 p.m. for a different news exposure. 

Ann Middleton 

Albany


Planning Commission Considers Clearing Path To Second Housing Unit

By ANGELA ROWEN
Tuesday May 13, 2003

The Planning Commission on Wednesday will consider amendments to the city’s zoning ordinance that would make it easier for property owners to create accessory dwelling units, also known as secondary, or in-law, units.  

Under the proposed amendments, developers would no longer be required to get a use permit to build accessory dwelling units in most residentially zoned areas that conform to a certain set of standards. 

The city is required to make the changes under a state law, passed in 2002, that was intended to increase the number of secondary units throughout the state. The city is also compelled to ease the establishment of accessory residential units under its own general plan, which contains a policy to encourage property owners to develop secondary units on properties with single-family homes as a way to increase housing stock. 

Under the current system, property owners seeking to establish a secondary unit must get approval from the Zoning Adjustment Board, which determines whether to approve a use permit after conducting a public hearing and considering whether to approve the project based on both subjective and objective factors. The new ordinance would simply require an issuance of a zoning certificate and a building permit if the developer has complied with all of the standards outlined in the ordinance. 

Those standards include requirements that the total floor area of the secondary unit not exceed 25 percent of the main dwelling unit and that the total floor area of the secondary unit be no less than 300 square feet and no more than 640 square feet. The law would also make it illegal for a property owner to sell any part of the accessory unit separate from the main unit or for accessory units to be built on streets that lack sufficient room for emergency response, as specified in the California Fire Code. 

Secondary units that do not comply with any of the base standards may still get approved through a slightly more restrictive process. In that case, an officer of the zoning department must issue an administrative use permit which, unlike a use permit, does not automatically trigger a public hearing, but does require the approving zoning officer to post his or her decision in the neighborhood. Neighbors are then free to appeal the administrative use permit and demand a public hearing. 

The ordinance also eliminates the requirement that a developer who wants to convert a portion of a main unit into an accessory unit, thereby reducing the floor space of the main unit, get the permission of any tenant occupying the main unit. 

Senior planner Janet Homrighausen said the city has no estimate of how many housing units the new ordinance will create. “Most cities have yet to relax their requirements and still require use permits for accessory units,” she said. “So we have no other examples to look to to come up with an idea of how many units will be created.” 

The Planning Commission is also scheduled to discuss proposed revisions to the Southside Plan, which specifies the city’s long-term policies and goals for housing, land use, traffic, urban design, economic development and traffic in the area south of UC Berkeley campus. The plan is a joint project of the city and the university, which owns about one-third of the land in the southside area. 

The plan was approved by the commission last June and was set to undergo the required environmental impact review, but has since been stalled due to the university’s reluctance to sign on to certain aspects of the plan and because of the city’s own lack of funds. 

At the meeting on Wednesday, commissioners will respond to a letter sent by Thomas Lollini, assistant vice chancellor of physical and environmental planning, which requests that the city delete a portion of the plan that calls for the consideration of a proposal to reduce or eliminate automobile traffic on Bancroft, Telegraph and Durant to help speed up AC Transit bus flow along those corridors and calm traffic for the benefit of bicyclists and pedestrians. The university is also taking issue with a part of the plan that says the university should make housing development the highest development priority for the southside neighborhood. 

In addition, the letter asks the plan be amended to allow for the expansion of the areas in the Southside that are zoned for office use. 

The commission is also expected to respond to a letter from staff dated March 26 that states that the city no longer has sufficient funds to finance an environmental impact report for the plan, which has been in the works for five years. 

 

The Planning Commission meets Wednesday, May 14, at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst St.


Rush to Meet Deadline Ought Not Prevent Review Of ADU Rules Proposal

By BARBARA GILBERT
Tuesday May 13, 2003

In a prior column that ran on the Daily Planet Web site, I wrote about the genesis of state law mandating an easier local process for the development of in-law units in single-family homes, and about some of the factors to be considered in Berkeley as we implement the state-mandated changes. 

The Planning Department and Planning Commission, working with unusual speed (to meet the purported state deadline of July 1, 2003), have produced a draft of proposed changes and are holding a public hearing on May 14.  

Following are some comments and questions with respect to the proposed changes for accessory dwelling units (ADUs). 

Under current zoning rules, all habitable accessory space that is rented, contains cooking facilities, or is used as a dwelling unit is effectively subject to the use permit/public hearing process. Under the proposed ADU rules, the standard of review will, for the most part, move down to an administrative use permit (AUP)/zoning officer level. There will be some instances when all that is involved is a by-right zoning certificate (issued with the building permit). 

However, under the current Berkeley permitting process, the AUP itself is potentially subject to appeal, ZAB review, public hearings and City Council. But, given the existence, mandate and direction of the mayor’s Permitting Task Force, the AUP process may well change in the direction of little or no opportunity for appeal. 

Parking! Under current ADU rules, one goal of the strict set of parking requirements is to avoid the worsening of parking problems and to reduce the amount of on-street parking. But larger city parking policy is in a cycle of change and we have no way now of knowing how the larger city parking policy will interact with old and new ADU rules. For example, are we going to establish auto limits per residential dwelling or per registered driver? Are we going to encourage more parking off-street and in garages? And so on. The proposed ADU rules call for a determination by the fire department that the new ADU is located on an “unconstricted street.” What does this mean now and what will it mean in the future? Hypothetically, we could ban all cars, then all streets would be unconstricted. Or we could force everyone to actually park in their garages—but then this would diminish the opportunity for garage conversion to an ADU! Although I personally support some reasonable limit on the number of cars per household, my nightmare is the elimination of a homeowner’s right to either own a car or to park it gratis in front of their highly taxed home. 

While the proposed ADU procedure for approval of “tandem parking” is explicit, there is also a provision for a complete “parking waiver.” I believe that a parking “waiver” is an entirely new ADU concept and one not required by AB1866. This certainly needs more discussion. 

The draft ADU rules appear to contain no reference to any findings of “detriment” to neighbors. Does this mean that an ADU is now entirely exempt from review of detriment (i.e. impairment of light and air for neighbors)? There is also no larger reference or citywide policy context for the ADUs. For example, will the new ADUs be subject to regular rental safety inspections or simply treated as a private adjunct to the private home? What about rent control and ADA requirements? 

I have noted that the state Legislature is having some second thoughts about the various new laws limiting local control of “development” and promoting state-imposed superceding guidelines, all in the name of “affordable housing” and all supported by a cozy but not necessarily unholy alliance of developers and advocates for increased population density. In fact, the timetable for the new ADU rules may have been moved back by another year. This should be carefully researched by our planning personnel before we rush pell-mell into new rules.  

Barbara Gilbert is a Berkeley resident and occasional contributor to the Planet’s Commentary Page.


Council Faces City Manager’s Budget; 23 Positions Lost in Deficit Crunch

By JOHN GELUARDI
Tuesday May 13, 2003

The City Council will hold a regular meeting for the first time since it began its spring break on April 8. The critical item on the agenda is the budget.  

The city manager on Monday submitted his proposed budget for fiscal year 2004 and 2005, and council will have to approve reduced grant allocations for as many as 93 nonprofit programs that serve the city’s most vulnerable. The council will also consider another request for money to redesign the troubled Harrison Street Skate Park, which has been closed since January, and a recommendation to amend the city’s election law to allow larger campaign contribution limits. 

Bad News Budget 

City Manager Weldon Rucker has completed his proposed biennial budget for 2004 and 2005. The budget attempts to deal with a $4.7 million deficit by not filling approximately 23 staff positions (most of which are currently vacant) and increasing parking ticket fines.  

City Council will hold two public hearings, May 20 and June 17, prior to approving a final budget on June 24.  

According to Deputy City Manager Phil Kamlarz, the budget was designed to be flexible because the city won’t know how much state funding to rely on until the state Assembly approves its budget, which might not be until the fall.  

The budget deficit has long been expected, and the city manager began working with the City Council, city commissions and labor unions as early as last January.  

In his draft budget, Rucker braces the city for additional cuts facing staff and programs next year when the estimated deficit is expected to soar to $7.6 million. 

“My proposed budget addresses the immediate fiscal year 2004 funding gap and potential impacts from the state budget. However, many more difficult choices lie ahead as we look to address the remaining projected fiscal year 2005 shortfall,” he writes. 

Council to approve grants 

City Council will approve about $8.1 million in federal, state and local moneys for as many as 93 nonprofits. Due to the economic downturn and sagging state and local budgets, available grant money was reduced this year by more than $700,000. 

During a public hearing last week about 70 people asked the council not to make reductions to the nonprofit programs.  

Skate Park  

The Parks and Waterfront Department is asking for $57,000 to hire Geomatrix Consulting, Inc. to develop a permanent solution to prevent the carcinogen hexavalent chromium from seeping into the popular but troubled Harrison Street Skate Park.  

The skate park has been plagued by problems relating to Hexavalent Chromium, or chrome 6, since construction began in 2000. Work was halted on the project in November 2000, when chrome 6 was discovered in groundwater that had seeped into nine-foot-deep holes being dug for the skate bowls. The city was saddled with hazardous waste treatment costs as well as the cost of hiring groundwater engineers to design a concrete base that would prevent chrome 6 contaminated groundwater from seeping into the bowls.  

Construction began anew and the skate park opened to rave reviews in September 2002. However the cost had risen from $380,000 to about $750,000. 

Then in January, after a heavy rain, the city discovered small amounts of chrome 6 in the base of the park’s concrete bowls. The park was immediately closed to the public and has remained closed since.  

Revising the election process 

Mayor Tom Bates and City Councilmembers Kriss Worthington and Gordon Wozniack are asking the city manager to explore revisions to the city’s election process. One suggestion is increasing campaign contribution limits. Currently individuals and organizations are limited to $250 contributions to individual candidates or ballot measure committees, according to the Berkeley Election Reformation Act of 1974. 

According to the recommendation, the cost of political campaigns has soared in the last decade and there has been no inflation adjustment since 1974. 

The recommendation does not include new contribution limits but suggests allowing different limits for council district elections and citywide elections. 

Saving the Bancroft vendors 

Councilmember Kriss Worthington is recommending that a license application deadline for two food cart vendors who operate on Oxford Street at Telegraph Avenue be extended through December. 

Currently there are four vendors who sell lunches from rollaway carts.  

City Council approved an ordinance in February that began to phase the carts out. Only two were approved for licenses last year, and the two remaining carts are currently operating without a license. If approved, the two unlicensed carts would be allowed to operate until the end of the year, but it is uncertain if they would qualify for licensing under the new ordinance. 


Fair Process and Public Notice: A Wish for a Better Neighbor

By ANNE WAGLEY
Tuesday May 13, 2003

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), which sits on the hill overlooking Berkeley is planning to build a six-story, 94,000-square-foot molecular foundry in Strawberry Canyon for the study of nanoscience. If such a construction was to take place elsewhere in the city, we would all be pouring over plans, discussing it with neighbors, attending public hearings, and writing to our mayor and councilmembers to make sure that the concerns of increased traffic and noise, environmental impacts and infrastructure degradation were adequately addressed. 

But this has not happened. There has been very little public notice on this specific development, and even less fair public process. 

The molecular foundry is not a recent idea of LBNL or the Department of Energy, yet Berkeley residents only learned of it this past winter. The draft report on the development was dated Dec. 9, 2002, and was received by the Panoramic Hill Neighborhood Association in mid-December.  

The lab’s press release was dated Dec. 18, announcing a public comment period from Dec. 10 to Jan. 21. During much of this time the Berkeley City Council was on winter recess, and the public remained in the dark about the project. 

The lab’s first request to meet with neighbors of the adjacent Panoramic Hill was on Jan. 13. The lab’s first presentation to the City Council was on Jan. 14.  

This is inadequate public notice, and the inadequacy is compounded by the fact that the lab insisted they did not have to hold any formal public hearing on the environmental impacts of the proposed development. A building of this size is a construction that merits public review. The potential impacts, from traffic and noise to environmental degradation in the canyon could be severe. The public and the city should have been working with the lab on this for years, not against it for months. 

The lab’s Dec. 9 “Draft Tiered Initial Study and Proposed Mitigated Negative Declaration” was available on the lab’s Web site, but not the documents that were the basis for the “tiered” report. Compounding the problem, these underlying documents were old and out-of-date environmental impact reports. In addition to violating California Environmental Quality Act guidelines, this lack of access to documentation, and lack of current documentation is inappropriate public notice, and unfair public process. 

Given the above problems with notice and access to documents, how much do the people of Berkeley know about the proposed molecular foundry development, and how much should we know? It is too late at this point to stop or move the molecular foundry. The project is going ahead without an environmental impact report. 

What can be done in the future to help mend the relationship between the lab and the community? How can we become better neighbors? Here are some ideas: 

As promised several years ago, the lab will produce its 2002 — yes, 2002 — long range development plan, with adequate notice and public comment and input from both city staff and neighbors. This should give neighbors some advance warning as to future developments, and perhaps the chance to participate early on in the planning process. 

On the molecular foundry development, the lab will work with environmentalists and creek advocates to design a building that respects the environmental integrity of Strawberry Canyon Watershed, and will continue this process on future developments. Another design idea would be to incorporate green building techniques to enhance energy conservation. 

The whole hill area where the lab sits has evolved into an industrial park. That doesn’t sound too bad for a cash-strapped city needing a healthy business environment. But the lab and UC Berkeley pay no property taxes to the City of Berkeley. Another wish would be for the lab and the university to incorporate a cost of doing business into their federal grants as a payment to the city in lieu of taxes. This is not a novel idea, and is done by other universities. 

The lab will work with neighbors and the city to develop a public transportation system that will mitigate the impact of increased car traffic through our neighborhoods. This could include shuttle buses from locations outside of Berkeley. 

Another way to be a good neighbor would be to use local labor and local companies in construction projects, and even if they are not the lowest bidder, factor in the benefits to Berkeley in the bid. The revenues to Berkeley may just come in handy when our aging infrastructure, the sewers and roads that the lab requires, needs money for repairs.  

The lab should be encouraged to get active in our public schools. Given the talent at UC Berkeley and LBNL, Berkeley should have the most advantaged science and math students in the country. Assistance should not be limited to bringing in the best and the brightest as interns. The challenge is to get all students excited about math and science. How many of the lab’s glossy posters on genomics were distributed to the science classrooms at Berkeley High? Don’t worry, I took two from the lab’s May 8 presentation, and will get them to the AP biology teacher tomorrow. 

The wish list could go on. It is essentially a plea to be a good neighbor. Neighbors have a right to know.  

 

Anne Wagley is the calendar editor for the Berkeley Daily Planet. She serves on the City of Berkeley’s Housing Advisory Commission and Peace and Justice Commission.


UC Softens SARS Ban; Policy Still Draws Ire

By DAVID SCHARFENBERG
Tuesday May 13, 2003

Critics of the UC Berkeley decision to bar summer students from SARS-affected countries said Monday that the university did not go far enough this weekend when it partially lifted the ban. 

“We are pleased that the university had a willingness to re-evaluate its wholesale ban,” said Diane Chin, executive director of the San Francisco-based Chinese for Affirmative Action. “We still take issue with what amounts to exclusion based on national origin.” 

University officials say they hope to lift the ban entirely as the summer progresses, but can only do so if they identify enough special housing to isolate students who show signs of severe acute respiratory syndrome.  

“It isn’t as easy as some people have suggested,” said UC Berkeley spokesman Marie Felde. 

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that any traveler from a SARS-afflicted area who gets a fever or suffers from respiratory problems within 10 days of arrival be isolated until the illness passes.  

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl announced Saturday that the university would allow an estimated 80 students from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan to attend its Summer Sessions program, which provides a range of university courses for academic credit. An initial group of 30 Asian students will arrive May 27, with the remaining 50 cycling through over the course of the summer. 

The university has set aside housing on its Clark Kerr campus, four blocks south of the main campus, for isolation, if needed. 

UC Berkeley, the only U.S. university to ban students from SARS-affected areas, is still blocking about 500 students from attending English as a Second Language courses that begin in July at UC Extension.  

Civil rights advocates say the policy is contributing to an unwarranted SARS hysteria in the United States. 

“I think it is contributing to a disproportionate level of panic,” said Ivy Lee, president of the Sacramento-based Chinese American Political Action Committee. 

An April 29 public opinion survey by the Harvard School of Public Health found that the SARS story has impacted American behavior. Seventeen percent of citizens who have traveled outside of the United States in the past year have avoided international air travel recently due to reports about SARS, according to the survey, and 14 percent are avoiding Asian restaurants or stores. 

But Robert Blendon, professor of health policy and political analysis with the Harvard School of Public Health, said the survey shows Americans are relatively well informed about the disease’s limited impact on the United States. 

Blendon said the UC Berkeley policy, in this environment, has probably had a mild effect on public opinion.  

“You hear Berkeley and it heightens their concern,” he said. “People say it’s a smart university and they might know something here. But, at the moment, people know that there aren’t a lot of cases.” 

As of Monday, the World Health Organization (WHO) had reported 64 SARS cases in the United States and no deaths. Worldwide, WHO reported 7,447 cases and 168 deaths. 

The Alameda County Health Care Services Agency reported four suspected and two probable SARS cases Monday, none of them in Berkeley. 

Felde said the university is exploring all the options for special, isolated housing, including off-campus facilities owned by other entities.  

Part of the problem with on-campus housing, she said, is that the university must supply not only a room, but also a bathroom, for each person who may be infected with SARS. Many of UC Berkeley’s dormitories, she said, have only one bathroom per floor. 

Public health experts have split on the UC Berkeley policy, first announced May 2. Some, including Berkeley’s Director of Public Health Dr. Poki Namkung, have backed the university’s decision. Others, like Diana Bonta, director of the California Department of Health Services, have argued that it goes too far. 

University of Michigan professor of epidemiology Arnold S. Monto said the issue is a difficult one for public entities like UC Berkeley which must weigh complicated medical, legal and public relations issues when it comes to making decisions on SARS. 

“The risk of an individual coming who is incubating SARS is relatively low,” he said. “On the other side, one case is really going to hurt you.” 

 

 

CORRECTION 

A May 6-8 story (“Doyle House Set to Fade Into History”) stated that Patrick Kennedy was formerly the president of the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association. In fact, he is a former member of the board of directors of the organization. 


Foundry Opponents Claim Berkeley Lab Skirted Public Process

By JOHN GELUARDI
Tuesday May 13, 2003

A meeting sponsored by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) was nearly derailed before it began Thursday night when a group of vocal citizens protested the meeting’s format, which they called a “dog and pony show.” 

The meeting, which was billed as “A Conversation about Lab Activities,” was scheduled at the request of City Council to inform the public about LBNL’s plans to construct a six-story, 94,000-square-foot molecular foundry in Strawberry Canyon. 

The construction of the foundry is estimated at $85 million, which will be funded by the Department of Energy. The foundry will be devoted to the study of nanoscience, the manipulation of materials at the molecular level. 

The UC Regents approved the molecular foundry in March, and opponents contend they did so with insufficient public process and without an environmental impact report (EIR), which would have required a thorough examination of the plan and more lab response to community concerns. 

Prior to the meeting, which was held in the Haas Clubhouse, about 25 opponents of the foundry held a press conference to call attention to what they described as LBNL’s unwillingness to include the public during the approval process. They also raised concerns about consequences of nanotechnology research. 

Attending the press conference were members of the Community Environmental Advisory Group, the Peace and Justice Commission, the Committee to Minimize Toxic Waste and City Councilmember Dona Spring.  

Lab officials argued that the environmental review that they did complete, known as a mitigated negative declaration, was sufficient and that the public had ample opportunity to comment on the foundry project prior to its approval.  

To supplement the meeting, which began at 7:30 p.m., a series of information booths were set up to provide information about various lab projects such as energy efficiency research, canyon vegetation management and science education programs. The meeting’s focus, however, was the construction of the foundry and the nanoscience research that will be carried out there.  

The evening began with the presentation of science achievement awards to three Berkeley High School students by Mayor Tom Bates and LBNL Director Charles Shank. Then, as discussion got under way, the proceedings were abruptly stopped by foundry opponents who demanded an opportunity to ask lab officials about the project. After several minutes of confrontation, the lab’s Community Relations Director Terry Powell assured the group they would have the chance to speak later during a question and answer period. 

During the question and answer period, foundry opponent Janice Thomas expressed her concerns about lack of public process and the lab’s apparent reluctance to perform an ERI. 

Her charges were challenged by LBNL attorney Nancy Ware. 

“We made the negative declaration available on the Web and at public libraries and we extended the public comment period to 58 days when an EIR only requires 40,” Ware said. “An EIR would have been absurd, especially when we have an environmental document that says we don’t need one.” 

Several people challenged Ware on the need for an EIR, saying the six-story foundry will have a huge impact on Strawberry Canyon, which is a habitat for the endangered Alameda Whip Snake and a watershed to city creeks. 

“So, sue us,” Ware said.


Woolf’s Rich Prose Style Lost in Stage Adaptation

By BETSY M. HUNTON Special to the Planet
Tuesday May 13, 2003

Berkeley’s newest theater group, the two-year-old Transparent Theater, is closing its second season with the world premier of “Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day” by Tom Clyde. The multi-talented — and clearly energetic — Clyde is also the theater’s artistic director and co-founder, and has directed three out of four of the season’s plays, including the current one. 

The theater sees its mission as turning out “innovative, unusual, thought-provoking world premier theater,” according to their publicity handout. “This is a theater where you are free to think, again.” (There are some of us who may be a bit surprised to find out that we haven’t had that freedom previously.) However, despite the vigor and enthusiasm with which Clyde and his co-founder, Coley Lally, are addressing both the establishment of a new theater and, apparently, a new concept of theater, it may not be surprising if they don’t always hit the mark.  

This looks like the case with the current production, Clyde’s adaptation of Woolf’s second novel, “Night and Day.” Despite the success of movies based on Woolf herself, there’s a good argument that her work is just not fertile material for theater. The novel form is inherently much more akin to cinema than it is to the stage. (Just think how the two media differ in their limits on the presentation of space and time.) And Woolf is a particularly multilayered novelist.  

The cards were stacked against Clyde in the first place.  

It isn’t necessary to read much more than a few pages from Woolf’s novel to see how much more is developed there than can be presented on stage. Despite the efforts of some fine actors (Lucy Owen and Chloe Bronzan give particularly effective performances) the play is curiously unmoving. In his efforts to boil Woolf’s novel down to a structure for the stage, Clyde seems to have wandered into a form that could be described as an unfunny farce. The whole second act focuses on who will marry which person — and if one doesn’t work out, then another one will do quite nicely. And within a couple of minutes, too. 

But it isn’t funny. It can’t be. Woolf isn’t a funny writer. Clyde is simply attempting an impossible task.  

The switching back and forth between potential spouses is done so rapidly, and so casually, that it soon becomes the point of the play’s action, a technique of the farce that the play fails to deliver. 

In fact, the only sense of any real warmth between male and female in “Night and Day” occurs in a brief unelaborated scene between two cousins.  

It would be less than fair to fail to mention that the play contains some traces of early feminist thinking. Lucy Owen’s character, Katherine Hilberry, conceals her interest in mathematics as if it were a shameful secret; she plans her life around her marital prospects despite her lack of enthusiasm for the men in her life. Chloe Bronzan’s character, Mary Datchet, is forced to work by her economic circumstances and finds it a satisfying way of life. But the theme is not well developed and the play’s focus remains on the various efforts at romance. 

The technical aspects of the production present some interesting issues. The theater’s resident set designer, Anne Goldschmidt, has extremely long cords hanging from the top of the semi-circular set. At the end of a scene, they are frequently moved by one of the actors and tied down at a different place. The immediate explanation would seem to be that they designate different locations for the ensuing scenes. But there is enough inconsistency to suggest there may be some other meaning intended.  

The explanation given for Goldschmidt’s rounded set is that it is to “emphasize the characters’ sense of being watched at all times as they forge their identities in a world gone awry.” 

But, then, why does the play feel like nothing more than an unsuccessful comedy? 


Where Fennel Grows, There Dance Butterflies

By JOE EATON Special to the Planet
Tuesday May 13, 2003

I didn’t intend to raise butterflies when I planted the fennel. It was decorative enough, and figured in a few Italian recipes I had. It did entirely too well, propagating like crazy and muscling into the rest of the garden; and it tended to get woody and inedible before I harvested it. Weeding was complicated by its tenacious rootmass. But every year it produced a fine crop of anise swallowtails. 

The green-and-black-banded caterpillars showed up early in the summer, chomping away on the fennel plants. I don’t recall having seen the chrysalis stage, but at least some went through their metamorphosis in my garden: I’d see freshly emerged adults clinging to the living room windowsill while their black-and-yellow wings dried and expanded. Then they’d be off in search of mates, which is pretty much the whole agenda of a butterfly’s brief airborne existence. 

Hilltops are an anise swallowtail’s equivalent of singles bars. Males claim a likely spot and wait for females to wander by. They’re picky about their location; some have found their way back to their preferred summit from up to three miles away after being experimentally transferred by entomologists. “Hilltopping” males pursue passing females but ignore other males, who have a distinctive perfume-like smell. 

After mating, the females head for the nearest fennel patch to lay their round, cream-colored eggs. There are lots of those patches to choose from. A Mediterranean native, fennel (also called finocchio, like the late North Beach club) came to California with Italian kitchen gardeners and found the climate congenial. You’ll see it in head-high stands in vacant lots and on open slopes and roadsides. 

What did the swallowtail larvae do for food before there was fennel? They ate its wild relatives, plants called umbellifers in the family that includes parsley, celery and carrots: plants like cow parsnip, lovage, rangers button, yampah and lomatium. The native umbellifers grew in a variety of habitats, and there wasn’t a lot of competition for them from other plant eaters. 

In the ancient arms race between plants and insects, the umbellifers evolved chemical defenses. The plants contain toxins called furanocoumarins, lethal to most insects. But a few species of swallowtail butterflies developed an enzyme that detoxifies the chemicals. Other substances in the plants actually stimulate the caterpillars’ appetites: a drop of anisic aldehyde will give them the raging munchies. 

So when fennel came along, it tasted right and the butterflies switched to the new host. Cultivated fennel has less of a chemical load than wild umbellifers, and the caterpillars, not having to counter the toxins, grew up to 25 percent faster. And the rapid spread of fennel gave the swallowtail access to new habitats, like urban gardens and weed patches. It’s one of the rare cases of a native species benefiting from changes we’ve made to the environment. 

There’s a downside, though. To a caterpillar, the anisic aldehyde in a fennel leaf and the methyl chavicol in a citrus leaf taste just about the same. Anise swallowtails hopped from fennel patch to fennel patch in the coastal lowlands until they hit the orange groves of the San Joaquin Valley. Here was a bonanza of tasty stuff. Although they haven’t reached plague proportions, swallowtail caterpillars are now considered a pest by citrus growers.  

In the Bay Area there’s definitely fennel to spare, so we can enjoy these big showy butterflies without worrying about their economic impact (unless there’s a Meyer lemon or other hardy citrus in your yard). I’m not in the swallowtail business any more, having moved away from my ineradicable fennel. And the butterflies haven’t found my kaffir lime tree yet.


Summer Noon Concerts in Downtown Berkeley

Tuesday May 13, 2003

The Downtown Berkeley Association (DBA) presents Summer Noon Concerts 2003, a unique series of nine free concerts, Thursdays at noon in June & July, beginning June 5th. From Rhythm & Blues to Brazilian capoeira, these concerts at the Downtown Berkeley BART Plaza (Shattuck Ave. at Center St.) are a showcase of the culturally rich performing arts in Berkeley. This outdoor summer celebration of Berkeley-based musicians & dancers is just a small sampling of the performing arts happening nightly in clubs, cafes, schools, theaters and concert halls in Downtown Berkeley. 

 

On Thursday, June 5th, our concert series opens with Rhonda Benin and Soulful Strut performing some of the best in R & B, with a splash of jazz and a solid helping of the blues. Soulful Strut appears regularly at many Bay Area nightspots such Enricos Sidewalk Café and Restaurant. 

 

On Thursday, July 31st, our concert series closes with SoVoSó, a highly visual and imaginative a capella ensemble that sings a compelling mix of jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, world, pop, and improvisational music. The ensemble is made up of former members of Bobby McFerrin’s Voicestra, and McFerrin says, “SoVoSó is tight, soulful, and a whole lotta fun.” 

 

This event is easily accessible by transit and there is one hour free parking daily from 9 am to 5 pm in Center Street Garage. Seating will be available. 

 

For a complete schedule of entertainers for the Downtown Berkeley Summer Noon Concerts 2003 visit the Downtown Berkeley Association website at www.downtownberkeley.org. 


Opinion

Editorials

With In-Law Units Easier To Build, Some Complain Of Crowded Neighborhoods

By ANGELA ROWEN
Friday May 16, 2003

The Planning Commission, prompted by concerns aired by community members and government officials during a public hearing on Wednesday, asked department staff to examine the possibility of reducing the minimum size allowed for accessory dwelling units, also known as in-law or secondary units, to encourage the development of more such units. 

Staff was also instructed to study the possibility of restricting the height allowed for secondary units to and increasing the rear and side space required for such units to prevent the encroachment of secondary units on neighbors. 

The hearing was held to discuss proposed amendments to the city ordinance that will make it easier to establish accessory dwelling units. The changes are necessary to comply with a state law passed last year that requires cities to eliminate discretionary review and public hearing requirements for the development of secondary units. The city must formulate its own revised ordinance within certain parameters by July, or simply adopt the state guidelines verbatim. 

Accessory dwelling units are those created as an addition to a main dwelling unit, either within a main structure, or built separately from the main building. The city’s proposed amendments would allow developers to build a secondary unit in all primarily residential zones if they comply with a certain set of objective standards specified in the ordinance, including requirements related to the size of the unit, the size of the lot containing the unit, and the amount of space allowed on the side and rear of the unit. 

The current version of the draft ordinance states that the total floor area of the secondary unit not exceed 25 percent of the main dwelling unit and that the floor area of the secondary unit be no less than 300 square feet. At least two speakers at the hearing requested that the city revise these requirements to allow for the development of more accessory dwelling units. 

Jennifer Kaufer, a Berkeley resident and a member of Livable Berkeley, a nonprofit devoted to sustainable development, said the current size limitation would prevent the development of secondary units. 

“People with houses of 1,200 square feet wouldn’t be able to build under this requirement,” she said. “And given the number of traditional bungalows in Berkeley, the [size] requirement would significantly reduce the number of units being created.” 

At least one other resident didn’t agree with her. Tim Awry, who lives on Francisco Street near Franklin Elementary School, said he was concerned about the parking problems and congestion more accessory units would bring. 

“The parking problem is already bad and will get worse when the Adult School moves into my neighborhood,” he said. “Do we really want to look like San Francisco, like Japan, where there are wall-to-wall houses. Don’t we appreciate our gardens? Do we really want neighbors peering into your garden?” 

Other residents said they were worried that property owners would build secondary units that would tower over or encroach on existing residences, bringing shade to existing units and eliminating valued garden space. The current draft requires that detached secondary units have at least four feet of rear and side space. There is no current height restriction. 

The commission is also struggling with the question of owner occupancy. The current draft requires that the owner be a resident of the main dwelling unit. Commissioners discussed whether such a requirement is desirable or enforceable. Andy Katz, a member of the Zoning Adjustment Board, said the requirement would be “unduly restrictive on homeowners.” He also said it was hard to enforce. 

“If a grandmother moves into a unit, is that a tenant or a member of the [owner’s] family?” he asked. 

Senior planner Janet Homrighausen will complete another staff report examining the possibility of allowing for smaller secondary units, increasing the set back space and restricting the height limit. She will also look at policies in other cities regarding owner occupancy requirements for secondary units. The commission will consider the new information at the May 28 meeting, at which point it can wrap up its recommendations and send it to the full council for consideration. 


With a Waiting List of Suitors Author Searches for a Good Time

By SUSAN PARKER Special to the Planet
Tuesday May 13, 2003

Two weeks ago, when I called the New York publishing house Villard and asked to speak to Jane Juska’s publicist, a polite but curt voice demurred, “As you can imagine, she’s quite busy right now. Everyone’s talking about Ms. Juska and her book.” Eventually he put me through to the assistant to the publicist who sent me Jane’s new memoir, “A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance.”  

You betcha everyone’s talking about Jane Juska: Publisher’s Weekly, the Kirkus Review, The New York Times, The Times of London, the L.A. Times, television and radio talk shows across the country and the Atlantic. While I sat in Jane’s sunny garden for a little over an hour, the phone never stopped ringing. Jane Juska is in demand, and not just with the men she’s dating. 

About the only place that Jane hasn’t yet heard from is the New York Review of Books. And those are the very folks who should be knocking on her Berkeley cottage door. After all, it was in their pages that Jane placed the personal ad that prompted her tell-all memoir and thus the ensuing onslaught of media attention.  

It all started back in 1999, when Jane wrote the following ad after watching Eric Rohmer’s “Autumn Tale” at the Elmwood Theater in Berkeley: “Before I turn 67 — next March — I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.” She received 63 responses and, after putting them in piles of yes, no and maybe, she decided to explore her options. The result is a rollicking, well-told tale about a strong-willed, bold woman who goes in search of a good time.  

“A Round-Heeled Woman” is also a candid, sensitive look at what it’s like to be single, over 60 and desirous of physical and intellectual relationships. Jane taught English for more than 40 years in high schools, colleges and prisons in the Bay Area. For 20 of those years she was busy raising a son and juggling multiple teaching responsibilities. She writes bluntly that she was too tired, too fat and too depressed for sex. She hid her body in extra-large muumuus and numbed herself with scotch. But when she finally retired from teaching she knew she wanted more than reading, drinking and puttering alone in the garden. 

Jane’s honesty about her need for physical contact and meaningful dialogue is refreshing. She wants sex. She wants cuddling. She yearns to share intimate dinners and hold lively discussions about books, music and art. Through her personal ad she finds men who want to satisfy her physically and indulge in her passion for conversation and good literature. But it’s not perfect. As you might expect it’s sometimes messy, disappointing and scary. Messy because it’s not always easy to meet someone in person that you’ve communicated with only via snail and e-mail. Disappointing because, well let’s face it, sex can often be disappointing. And scary because Jane took some risks.  

“I knew when I went into this thing that I could get hurt. I knew I could get beaten up every which way, slapped around on both coasts, mugged, assaulted all across the country, suffer injuries from which I would never recover. I could even die. I knew when I decided to fill my life fully, I could not choose only the good parts.” 

Jane tells us about her suitors with humor and insight. She travels across the country several times for intimate rendezvous. Some of the men she meets are gentle, some are confused, others are mean, kind, funny, silly, handsome and both wonderful and lousy lovers. They range in age from 32 to 82. The personal detail of her prose is not scintillating. It’s honest, real, gutsy and genuine. Some readers may think that Jane should take a cold shower, get a dog or purchase a well-designed dildo down at Good Vibrations. But luckily, Jane opts instead to make some feisty choices and to share her journey with us. 

As I leave Jane’s garden, she walks me to the gate. I hear the phone ring. She smiles. “My publicist told me she’ll leave me alone on Sundays. And I told her ‘Don’t worry, I’m available 24/7.’”  

I think to myself “You go, girl. Someday, when I’m sixty-six, I’m going to run an ad like yours.”  

I watch Jane turn and head for her cottage. She has passed some of her joie de vivre on to me. I let my hips sway a little as I walk down the street. I smile. It’s good to be alive. It’s good to be in Berkeley. It’s good to know Jane Juska. 

 

Jane Juska will read from her memoir A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex & Romance on Thursday, May 15, 7 PM at Cody’s on Fourth Street.