In the latest departure of high-level administrators from Berkeley’s school system, Berkeley High School co-principals Mary Ann Valles and Laura Leventer announced Wednesday that they would resign at the end of the school year.  

Valles and Leventer, who were expected to serve as vice principals in the fall when Patricia Christa takes over as the new head of Berkeley High, said the loss of the top job played little role in their decisions to leave.  

Valles and Leventer join a growing list of key officials who are leaving Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) at the end of the school year. In the last four weeks, all three of the district’s associate superintendents have announced that they will be leaving, with two taking superintendent jobs elsewhere. The departures have raised questions about the stability of BUSD, which will face a budget deficit next year that could reach $8 million. 

Leventer has requested a one-year leave of absence to deal with a family medical crisis but, according to BUSD Superintendent Michele Lawrence, she is likely to return as a teacher rather than as an administrator. Valles has accepted a position as principal of Bancroft Middle School in San Leandro. 

The pair took over as co-principals in October 2001 after the sudden departure of former principal Frank Lynch. The arrangement was a temporary one and neither Valles nor Leventer applied for the full-time position Christa will take starting July 1.  

Christa said she was disappointed by the departures and the loss of the institutional memory that Valles and Leventer offer. 

“I don’t like to see history walk out the door,” Christa said. “But it’s something I’ll deal with.” 

Joan Edelstein, president of the Berkeley High School Parent Teacher Student Association, said the departures are likely to undermine the district. “I think it’s going to be a problem just in terms of the stability the school district needs,” Edelstein said. 

The administration is downplaying the impact of the departures. Superintendent Lawrence said their jobs will be more difficult in the short term, but added that she’s confident the district will pick up the slack. 

The biggest hole will be in the central office, where only a new business chief, Eric Smith, has been hired to replace the superintendent of business and operations, Jerry Kurr. Lawrence does not plan to fill the vacancies left by Associate Superintendent of Human Resources David Gomez or Associate Superintendent of Educational Services Christine Lim for at least a year. 

“I just can’t see filling them financially at this point,” said Lawrence. 

Berkeley High School has been on shaky ground since 1999, when the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) threatened to rescind accreditation if the school did not progress in 11 identified problem areas ranging from student safety to the “achievement gap” separating white and Asian students from blacks and Hispanics. 

Despite early warnings about inadequate progress, WASC determined in June 2002 that Berkeley High had improved significantly and extended the accreditation by three years. 

Parents and district officials credit Valles and Leventer for winning WASC’s seal of approval.  

“Getting us to WASC accreditation was a big accomplishment,” said Alan Miller, a Berkeley High English teacher. 

Miller said the school, which has had three administrations in the last four years, will miss Valles and Leventer. 

“They provided a lot of stability,” he said. “We need all the stability we can get.”

FRIDAY, MAY 23 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berke- 

ley, 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 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon Series 

“One Man’s Opinion,” with William K. (Sandy) Muir, Ph.D., Prof. of Political Science, emeritus, UC Ber- 

keley. Luncheon 11:45 a.m. $11.50 - $12.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For reservations 526-2925.  

Splitting the Sky, First Nations Freedom Fighter  

will speak on his experiences with the American Indian Movement at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5-$15 sliding scale. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Tibetan Aid Project Spring Benefit Dinner Enjoy a vegetarian meal and music from 6 to 9:30 p.m. at The Brazilian Room in Tilden Park. All the proceeds are dedicated to supporting Tibetan monasteries, nunneries and schools, and to supporting the distribution of sacred texts and art vital to Tibetan culture. For reservations call 848-4238. www.tibetanaidproject.org 

SATURDAY, MAY 24 

Chocolate and Chalk Art Festival along the sidewalks of Solano Ave., Saturday and Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Register to create your own chalk art at 1561 Solano Ave. Music, pet adoptions, food, chocolate and the unfurling of Spring Art Street banners. Sponsored by the Solano Avenue Associa- 

tion. 527-5358. www.solano- 

ave.org 

Strawberry Tastings at the Berkeley Farmers Market Free samples from all of the strawberry growers, from 2 - 7 p.m. Sponsored by the Ecology Center. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

Kiddies Carnival in Diamond Park, Oakland, from noon to 6 p.m. A traditional festival celebrated around the world. Music, costumes, face-painting, potluck. All performances are by children! Free event sponsored by Epic Arts in Berkeley. 644-2204. 

Winged Migration, a documentary by Jacques Perrin, on bird migration through forty countries, with presentations by Wildcare and The International Bird Rescue Research Center at 7 p.m. at the Albany Twin, 1115 Solano Ave. Tickets are $9. 843-3456. 

Outdoor Screening and Party for “Bum’s Paradise,” a  

documentary by Thomas McCabe about the Albany Bulb. Movie and bonfire at sundown at the Albany  

Landfill Amphitheater, at the end of Buchanan St. off of I-80. Rain date the following evening or evenings until it happens. www.nonchalance.org, 595-4626. 

Butterfly Blooms Tour  

Tour the Butterfly Garden, see what is in bloom and learn how you can help local butterflies, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. 525-2233. tnarea@ebparks.org. 

Making Room for Butterflies and Songbirds Come learn how the presence of butterflies and songbirds protects human health and enriches experience, and what is re- 

quired to re-establish and extend useful habitat for songbirds and butterflies. Led by Alan Hopkins, who has studied birds and their behavior and use of habitat and Barbara Deutsch, who studied birds and butterflies during the 15 years she spent making a refuge for them around a local pathway. From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $10 members, $15 others, no one turned away for lack of funds. For information call 548-2220 ext. 233. 

Fire Suppression Class  

offered by the City of Berkeley’s Emergency Operations Center, from 1 to 5 p.m. at 997 Cedar St. For more in- 

formation call 981-5605.  

SUNDAY, MAY 25 

Chocolate and Chalk Art Festival Solano Ave. See listing for Sat. May 24. 

Permaculture Principles 

The Berkeley Eco House, a permaculture demonstration house, hosts a series of workshops on permaculture, green building, and sustainable lifestyle every second and last Sunday of the month, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Berkeley EcoHouse, 1305 Hopkins, at Peralta (enter the garden gate on Peralta). Donations of $5-$20 requested and includes a vegetarian lunch. For information call 465-9439. 

Bike Fair with information on general bike maintenance, bike safety, and bike advocacy, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 549-7433.  

Meditation, a talk with representatives of Sant Thakar Singh at 1 p.m. at the Berke- 

ley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge. 845-9648. 

MONDAY, MAY 26 

Memorial Day - City Offices Are Closed 

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

unteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

TUESDAY, MAY 27 

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.berkeley 

cameraclub.org 

Lawyers in the Library, at the West Branch, 1125 University Ave. at 6 p.m. 981-6270.  

WEDNESDAY, MAY 28 

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. Meetings are held every Wednesday night at 7 p.m. at Epic Arts Studios at 1923 Ashby Ave. For further information on ways to get involved please call 644-2204. 

Berkeley Gray Panthers discuss Defending Our Civil Liberties, with Davis Riemer, former board chair of the ACLU, at 1:30 p.m. at North Berkeley Senior Center. 548-9696. graypanthersberk@aol.com 

Berkeley Poetry Slam Semi-Finals, 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. 

THURSDAY, MAY 29 

Dining Out For Life Have dinner at one of 39 participating East Bay restaurants and 25% of your bill will benefit programs and services for people living with AIDS in the East Bay. For a list of restaurants visit www. 

diningoutforlife.com or call 428-0442.  

Aid to Adopting Special Kids holds an informational meeting on becoming a foster parent to or adopting a child with special needs, at 7 p.m. in Conference Room 2, Alta Bates Campus, 2450 Ashby Ave. 869-6737. 

Hoods in the Night, a report back on Colombia by the National Radio Project, producers of Making Contact, with a slide presentation and excerpts from Hoods in the Night, a radio documentary featuring community leaders and displaced people of Medellin & Bogota. At 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. $5-$10 sliding scale. 849-2568. www.lapena.org  

Dennis Kucinich, “Repair the American Dream,” at 7:30 p.m. at the First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $12-$30. For reservations call 415-383-3982. 

Family Literacy Night for the whole family. Make Stone Soup, hop like Peter Rabbit and draw with a purple crayon with Harold. Book sale, book swap and information for parents on read-aloud choices and preparing your child for reading. From 5 to 7 p.m. at Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge St. 647-1111. www.habitot.org 

FRIDAY, MAY 30 

“So How Did You Become An Activist, and What Now?” featuring poets Wan- 

da Sabir, Frances Hillyard, and Adam David Miller from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar, at Bonita. Suggested donation $5, no one turned away for lack of funds. Wheelchair accessible. For more information call 526-4402.  

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berke- 

ley, 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 

ONGOING 

Technical Assistance for Non-Profits  

A free workshop series hosted by Alameda County Su- 

pervisor Keith Carson, to be held at the Alameda County Conference Center, at 125 12th St., Oakland. The first meeting will be May 29, on Public Relations and Media Training. For information or to register, please call Breonna Cole at 272-6060.  

CITY MEETINGS 

Community Meetings on the City Budget 

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

cit and how the city plans to address the issue on May 29 at the West Berkeley Senior Center. For information call 981-CITY.  

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board meets Thursday, May 22, at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers. Pam Wyche, 644-6128 ext. 113. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/rent 

Citizens Budget Review Commission meets Wednesday, May 28, at 7 p.m. in the  

North Berkeley Senior Center. Phil Kamlarz, 981-7006. 

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

Civic Arts Commission meets Wednesday, May 28, at 6:30 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center.  

Mary Ann Merker, 981-7533. 

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

Disaster Council meets Wed- 

nesday, May 28, at 7 p.m. in the Emergency Operations Center, 997 Cedar St. Carol Lopes, 981-5514. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/commissions/disaster 

Energy Commission meets Wednesday, May 28, at 6:30 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center. Neal De Snoo, 981-5434. www.ci.ber- 

keley.ca.us/commissions/energy 

Mental Health Commission 

meets Wednesday, May 28, at 6:30 p.m. at 2640 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. Harvey Turek, 981-5213. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/commissions/mentalhealth 

Planning Commission meets 

Wednesday, May 28, at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center. Ruth Grimes, 981-7481. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/planning 

The Berkeley Daily Planet accepts listings for both the Arts Calendar and the Berkeley This Week Calendar. Listings should be sent to calendar@berkeleydailyplanet.com, or by fax to 841-5695.

A MODEL PROPOSAL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

John Kenyon’s attack (May 16-19 edition) on Patrick Kennedy’s proposed project at University and Martin Luther King Jr., Way reflects the knee-jerk, anti-development attitude that Berkeley voters rejected last fall when they soundly defeated Measure P.  

Here we have a developer interested in transforming one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly locales in the city into a site with 190 apartments and ground-floor retail. Kenyon’s hostile attitude toward the developer answers his own question as to why Patrick Kennedy is increasingly the only individual willing to take on such projects — there are many other cities where one can build housing without facing the delays and demonization that has become part and parcel of the Berkeley public approval process. 

Kennedy’s proposed project is precisely the type Berkeley needs. It provides housing near transit, eliminates an unsightly corner parking lot, enhances neighborhood safety and creates desperately needed construction jobs. Kenyon’s claim that the proposed apartments “would drive any middle-class hill dweller into claustrophobic despair” is revealing. It has been years since the middle class could afford to buy or rent in the Berkeley hills, and the city’s lack of newly built apartments means even fewer housing opportunities for this income group. Mayor Bates should use Kennedy’s latest proposal as a model for how housing can move forward in Berkeley.  

Randy Shaw 

Berkeley 

• 

ANSWERS NEEDED 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I was drawn to the picture of Kevin Lee Freeman on last Friday’s cover. Could this have been the man I had been passing on my way to work each morning at 7 a.m.? Is this the man who was sleeping neatly in an alcove of a storefront on Northside, or gathering his almost nonexistent possessions, leaving no sign that he was ever there? Is this the slightly built man who didn’t ask for money, but smiled? 

I am looking at his face now on my kitchen table, his eyes full of human expression. His horrible death at Santa Rita is indefensible. He had an alcohol problem and was caged with a homicidal maniac.  

How did this happen? A full investigation is in order. I need an answer for Kevin and for myself. We all do, so that it never happens again. 

Merle Burnick 

• 

BY THE NUMBERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Subsidizing ferries, as envisioned by state bills SB 915 and SB 916, is a bad deal on both environmental and economic grounds. Since Paul Kamen writes that he’d agree “if [my] numbers were accurate” (Letters to the Editor, May 9-12 edition), let me demonstrate that they are: 

As for ferries being big polluters, my source is a July 2002 federally funded study of Bay Area transit options. Researchers at the CALSTART consortium found that a fleet of ferries meeting even the cleanest U.S. standards would generate more air pollution than trains or buses meeting the highest standards for their respective vehicles. And ferries would induce further pollution because passengers (most of whom don’t live near the water) would typically drive to ferry terminals. You can read or download the report at the following Web site: http://www.calstart.org/papers/Ferry%20Report.pdf. 

More revealing are ferry advocates’ own numbers about energy efficiency, a good indication of different transportation modes’ impacts on global warming. Ferries use an average 6,297 British thermal units (BTU) of fuel per passenger mile traveled, vastly more than buses (at 660), commuter rail (at 102), light rail (at 91) or BART (at 68). Ferries are even more fuelish than private cars, which average 5,321. That’s according to the April 2003 draft environmental report by the Water Transit Authority (WTA) — the regional agency established to advocate for expanded ferry operations.  

Finally, Mr. Kamen quotes WTA figures purporting to show that ferry costs per rider aren’t really higher than BART’s because of BART’s high capital costs. Unfortunately, these comparisons are misleading — and are concocted to justify the WTA’s preordained conclusion of “more ferries” — because BART’s main capital investments (tracks, tunnel and stations) have already been made. Incrementally expanding BART service (running more trains, adding back some of the cars BART has sidetracked to save money or even buying new cars) would cost relatively little per rider, compared with the capital cost of buying new ferry boats. 

And BART is relatively expensive transit. Incrementally expanding bus service (running more buses, adding new routes or just saving current AC Transit routes from looming major cutbacks) would cost still less. 

Tom Brown 

• 

ACT NOW FOR 2004 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The article on Howard Dean’s presidential candidacy is timely. All those who have been deeply dismayed by Bush administration policies that are damaging education, the economy, the environment, foreign relations and world security should inform themselves about Dean’s constructive platform and values. 

Given the amount of money likely to be spent toward electing Bush (not re-electing, as 3.4 million more of us voted for Gore and Nader than for Bush in 2000) and toward undermining the democratic process, as we saw in Florida in 2000, we need to begin now to organize for the 2004 election, register new voters and make sure qualified voters participate in the democratic process. 

Charlene M. Woodcock 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

First I want to thank David Scharfenberg for his thoughtful and well-written article on May 20 regarding the status of contract negotiations between Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) and the unions representing classified employees. This is not an easy subject to understand and we appreciate his efforts to be accurate and clear. 

On behalf of the Operations and Support Unit staff represented by Stationary Engineers, Local 39, AFL-CIO, I want to add some comments. The issue of capping what the district pays for health care is not fully understood by talking about co-pays and deductibles that people pay when they get medical or dental care. Everyone pays those who has health coverage and they’re going up for all of us all the time. This is especially true for prescription drug coverage, which has increased at nearly double the rate of all other health care expenditures. 

The critical issue is that the district is saying it will pay a specified number of dollars for a health care period. After that, all increases in the premium will come out of each employee’s pocket each month, whether they use their health coverage or not. That’s an absolute, permanent monthly cut in pay with no cap.  

If such a cap were in place, employees could start paying about $60-plus a month plus all deductibles and co-pays within the year. Even if an employee or his family members never went to the doctor or the dentist they could receive a $60-plus cut in pay, and every time health care costs were increased, that amount/cut in pay would increase without any limit. That is the issue that brought us to an impasse. 

In addition, the district proposed a number of reductions in long-standing conditions of employment that were simply unacceptable. Tina Brier, BUSD chief negotiator, reportedly says that the district would withdraw those if the unions would accept the cap. That is an accurate description of the type of bargaining the district engaged in. They put obnoxious, unacceptable takeaways on the table in an effort to blackmail the unions into accepting a permanent cut in pay while offering no salary increases for the second year in a row. 

That’s why we couldn’t get anywhere with BUSD. Hopefully a mediator will be able to explain to them what’s necessary to reach an agreement. We look forward to that process. 

Stephanie Allan 

Business Representative 

Stationary Engineers, Local 39 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

    The swallowtail butterfly caterpillars in fennel are not only black-green-and-yellow striped, beautiful and camouflaged, but also fun. 

If you tap their backs gently with your finger, two bright orange toy-like horns pop up on their heads. They then act like the dragon in a Chinese New Year’s parade. Even the newborns, cleverly disguised as black-and-white bird droppings, know this trick. 

    Warning: Don’t overdo it. They need to return to their true work, munching fennel so that they can become gorgeous butterflies. 

Ruth Bird 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

It is time to stop pretending.  

Let us stop pretending that our national government and our national economy are anything except crimes against humanity.  

Let us stop pretending that the Bush administration was surprised by the Sept. 11 attacks. People within our national government helped with the attacks. The evidence against the Bush administration is damning and available at hundreds of Web sites. A good place to start is www.911pi.com.  

The national security apparatus was given repeated and specific warnings of the coming attacks. Instead of protecting people in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration stepped directly into war mode. A pre-planned war on Afghanistan was seamlessly presented as the answer to those terrible attacks.  

Let us stop pretending that the Sept. 11 attacks justified a war on Iraq, or that the Bush administration was worried about weapons of mass destruction. The war on Iraq was criminal and should be treated as such in world court.  

Let us stop pretending that a globalized free trade economy is healthy. Such an economy concentrates power and wealth in the hands of the few. It strips from local communities the power to govern themselves. Indeed the free-trade economy functions to enslave workers in many countries.  

Let us stop pretending that our mainstream media sources, NPR included, are anything but corporate mouthpieces. All of this pretending would not be possible if our journalism outlets acted independently and with integrity.  

Most importantly, let us stop pretending that we can do nothing in the face of this great political and corporate power. For only when we pretend that we are powerless do we become powerless.  

To be certain there is much we can do.  

We can choose community markets over corporate markets. We can buy our food from local producers. The nature of our food economy alone has profound implications on global power structures.  

We can use less energy. We can act out of compassion instead of greed. We can pay attention only to honest media outlets.  

We can fight for democracy.  

Let us admit that government “by the people, for the people” has never truly occurred in this nation’s history. Yet let us also understand that the extent to which we actively reach for this ideal is the extent to which we realize another world that is possible.  

George Palen  

FRIDAY, MAY 23 

FILM 

Nicholas Ray: “Born to Be Bad” at 7:30 p.m. and “Flying Leathernecks” at 9:25 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 

The 10th Annual Poetry Reading, co-sponsored by Berkeley High School’s English Language Learners’ Department and Berkeley Public Library, will be held at 7 p.m. in the Central Library Reading Room, 2090 Kittredge St. Only program audience members will be permitted entrance to the building, which occurs outside the Library’s usual hours. 981-6139. 

Mat Johnson discusses gentrification and urban blight in “Hunting in Harlem,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Elaine Pagels reads from “Beyond Belief,” about the origins of Christianity, at 7:30 p.m. at the First Congrega- 

tional Church, 2345 Chan- 

ning Way. Tickets are $10 at the door, no one turned away for lack of funds. For information call 848-3696  

or Cody’s Books, 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Literary Friends discuss “Mothers in Nature,” at 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. For information call 232-1351. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Carnival, Carnival at Ashkenaz, featuring Singing Sandra, Pandeiros do Brasil, and steel pans from Trinidad and Tobago, at 9:30 p.m. at Ash- 

kenez. Cost is $15. 525-5054.  www.ashkenaz.com 

Latcho Drom, the story in music of the migration of the Roma people from Northern India to Europe at 8 p.m. at the Long Haul, a reading room, library and community center in South Berkeley, 3124 Shattuck Ave. Wheelchair accessible. All events are free. 540-0751. www.thelonghaul.org  

Live Oak Concert, with the Cypress String Quartet, at 7:30 p.m., at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Tickets are $10-$15 sliding scale. 644-6893. 

MLK Middle School Chamber Ensemble will perform  

at 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center,  

1901 Hearst St. 981-5190. 

Mystic Roots, Reorchestra, and Flowtilla perform Reggae Hip Hop, Funk and Jazz Funk at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Juanita Ulloa and Mariachi Picante, a concert of old and new Latin American huapangos, boleros and valses, at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $14 in ad- 

vance, $16 at the door. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Anthony Jeffries and his All Stars, blues band at 8:30 p.m. at Rountree’s, 2618 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $10, ladies free until 9 p.m. 663-0440. 

Alphabet Soup, with saxophonist Kenny Brooks, pianist Dred Scott, rapper Chris Burger and drummer Jay Lane, performs at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $10-$15 sliding scale. 649-8744. www.sfsound.org/acme 

Heavenly States, The Cables, Bill Holdens at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. 

Som’ma, Persian art music 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 

Thought Riot, Scissorhands, D.O.R.K., Beneath My Dreams 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. 

SATURDAY, MAY 24 

CHILDREN 

Dance Jammies, a multi-generational event presented by Orches, from 6 to 9:30 p.m. at 2525 8th St. Reservations advised. 832-3835. orches@ 

earthlink.net 

Eoin Colfer returns with the third adventure of Artemis Fowl in “The Eternity Code,” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

“One Dog Canoe,” a summer vacation story at 11 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

FILM 

Nicholas Ray: “In a Lonely Place” at 4:30 and 9 p.m. and “Knock on Any Door” at 7 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 

Turning Corners, a sign language-interpreted curator’s talk on a major exhibition of risk-taking art at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. Cost is $5-$8. 642-5249. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Rhythm and Muse features Asante and Chaos. Open mic 

sign-up at 6:30 p.m., reading at 7 p.m. Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St., between 

Eunice & Rose Sts. Admission free. Piano and 2 mics available. 527-9753 or 569-5364. 

Huston Smith discusses “Buddhism: A Concise Intro- 

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

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Benefit Concert Feel the Beat! Drumming up support for music in schools with a concert featuring O-Maya, Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir, the Big Belly Blues Band, the Berkeley High School Afro-Hai- 

tian Dance Troupe, members of the Jazz Ensemble, and more. At the Little Theater, BHS Campus, Allston Way, at 7 p.m. Join us for BBQ and pre-concert entertainment at 5 p.m. in the courtyard. Tickets are $25 in advance, $35 at the door, $10 for students. For tickets or donations call 644-8831. 

Trinity Chamber Concerts 

The Chamberlain String Quartet, with Michael Yokas and Sharon Hendee, violins, Darcy Rindt, viola, and Michael Graham, cello, perform the music of Beetho- 

ven, Shostakovich and Wolf at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Suggested donation of $12 general, $8 students, seniors or disabled. 549-3864. 

Michael Henderson with Norman Connors and the Starship Orchestra, perform at 8 and 10 p.m. at Rountree’s, 2618 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $25. 663-0440. 

Hyim and the Fat Foakland Orchestra urban sound combining Pop, Afro-Cuban, Folk, Hip-Hop, Reggae, Jazz, and World Beat, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $10-$25 sliding scale. 649-8744. sfsound.org/acme.html 

Steve Lucky and the Rhumba Bums with Ms. Carmen Getit, an evening of East Coast Swing and Lindy Hop at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054.  www.ashkenaz.com 

The Rich McCully Band and  

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

Sterling Dervish, Stranger Things, and Alexis Harte perform Rock at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $5. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

San Francisco Klezmer Experience 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 

Fito Reynoso’s Ritmo y Ar- 

monia, an evening of non-stop dancing at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $14 in advance, $16 at the door. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Planes Mistaken for Stars, Black Eyes, Love Me De- 

stroyer, Mach Tiver 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. 

Crystal Singing Bowls Concert, performed by Kathleen Farrell, Chuck Cunningham and Jack Maranian at 7 p.m. at the Art of Living Center, 2905 Shattuck Ave., near Ashby. Cost is $10. 848-3736.  

SUNDAY, MAY 25 

CHILDREN 

Sun and Moon Ensemble presents “Enchanted Forest,” with theater, dance, masked characters, giant puppets, and live music, at 2 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10 adults, $5 children, available from 925-798-1300.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash: Fresh Ink Poetry Group reading with poets Rita Bogaert, Madeline Lacques-Aranda, Barbara Minton, Charles Polly, Sue Prince, June Stoddart, and David White, at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. $2 donation. 845-7852. www.codys 

books.com, www.poetryflash.org 

FILM 

Nicholas Ray: “Johnny Guitar” at 5:30 p.m., “The Lusty Men” at 7:40 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 

Four Spices Cello Quartet performs Piazzola, Marais, Mozart, others at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center. Cost is $9-$10. 644-6893. 

Michel Taddei and Friends  

in a double bass recital at 4 p.m. at the Crowden Music Center, 1475 Rose St. Cost is $15 adults, $8 children. Proceeds to benefit Crowden School. 559-6910. www.thecrowdenschool.org 

Berkeley Youth Orchestra, conducted by Ann Krinitsky, performs Rossini, Mozart, Corelli, and Offenbach at 4 p.m. at the Laney College Theater. Tickets are $5 at the door. For more information call 525-8484. www.byoweb.org 

2 on 2: BBoy/GGirl Battle, a fast-paced contest with cash prizes, at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Templar performs punk rock at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $14. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

MONDAY, MAY 26 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash: Shirley Kaufman at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. $2 donation. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com, www. 

poetryflash.org 

MUSIC 

All Star Jam with the Steve Gannon Band at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $4. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

TUESDAY, MAY 27 

FILM 

The Inquiring Camera 

“From the Other Side” 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 

Le Thi Diem Thuy reads from “The Gangster We are All Looking For,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE  

Fling Ding: Earl White Band and Bluegrass Intentions, 

clogging with Evie Ladin at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $11. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Lennie Gallant, Canadian singer/songwriter 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 28 

FILM 

Video: I Found It at the Movies “Recon/Decon,” 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 

Mary Mackey reads from her novel, “The Stand In,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Lea Goldstein, Ph.D, discusses “Drugs and Your Kid,” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Tom Rigney and Flambeau, perform Cajun and zydeco with a dance lesson at 8 p.m. and show at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054.  www.ashkenaz.com 

Third World with MC UC BUU at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $5. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Ray Wylie Hubbard, new century Texas troubadour 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 

THURSDAY, MAY 29 

FILM 

Nicholas Ray: “I'm a Stranger Here Myself,” 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 

Chet Raymo on “The Path: a One-Mile Walk Through the Universe,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Laura Vestamen, will share ideas from her new book, “Travel Tips for the Sophisticated Woman,” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

John Renbourn with Jacqui McShee, folk baroque innovators 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 

Kirby Grips, Go National, Luster at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082.  

FRIDAY, MAY 30 

FILM 

Nicholas Ray: “On Dangerous Ground” at 7:30 p.m., “Run for Cover” at 9 :15 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 

In Your Face Youth Poets  

at 7 p.m. at PRO Arts Gallery, 461 9th St. Oakland. Cost is $3-$6. 525-3948. 

Calvin Trillin on “Feeding a Yen: Savoring Local Specialties, from Kansas City to Cuzco,” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Lavay Smith and her Red Hot Skillet Lickers, an evening jazz swing with a dance lesson at 8 p.m. and show at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054.  www.ashkenaz.com 

The Influents, Communique, Milwaukee at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082.  

Spin Cushion, The Cushion Theory, Tiuana Gasser at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Soul Frito The Caribbean Connection, Cuban hip hop at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

David Daniels, countertenor, Martin Katz, piano perform works by Handel and Ravel, plus a song cycle written for Daniels by composer Theo- 

dore Morrison, at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $28, $38, $48. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Slammin, an all-body band combining a cappella singing with beat boxing and body music, performs at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Tickets are $18. 845-5373. www.jazz- 

school.com 

White Oak Dance Project 

with Mikhail Baryshnikov, at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall. Tickets are $36, $48, $62. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Tin Hat Trio, chamber folk trio performs 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 

Monster Squad, Whiskey Sunday, La Plebé, The Saint Catherines, 30 Years of War 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. 

AT THE THEATER 

Living Arts Theater Ensemble presents an evening of playback theater. Bring a story to tell, or watch a story unfold. May 24 at 8 p.m. at the Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. Admission is $12-$18 sliding scale. 655-5186. 

Berkeley Repertory Theater 

“The Guys,” by Anne Nelson directed by Robert Egan. An exploration of loss and redemption in the aftermath of 9/11. May 21 – July 5, Tues. - Sun., call for starting times. Tickets are $10-$54. The Roda Theater, 2016 Addison St. 647-2918. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Berkeley Repertory Theater 

“Surface Transit” 

Written and performed by Sarah Jones, directed by Tony Taccone. African Am- 

erican poet and spoken word performer Jones weaves political humor into monologues detailing lives of eight New Yorkers. Extended until June 1. Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

California Shakespeare Festival runs May 28 to October 22. Opens with Julius Caesar. Please call for dates and times. Bruns Amphitheater, Orinda. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org  

Shotgun Players presents 

“under milk wood” a play for voices by Dylan Thomas, exploring the characters in a fishing town in Wales. At Eighth Street Studio, 2525 8th St., May 24 through June 22, Thurs. - Sat. 8 p.m., Sun 7 p.m. No performance May 25. Tickets are $18 adults, $12 children and seniors, $10 on Thursdays. 704-8210. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Transparent Theater 

Virginia Woolf's “Night and Day,” a stage adaptation by Tom Clyde, concerning the loves and careers of a group of young people in London in 1910. May 9 - June 8, Thurs. - Sat., 8 p.m. Tickets are $20. Sun., 7 p.m. pay what you can. 1901 Ashby Ave. 883-0305.

Marcia Donahue’s Our Own Stuff Gallery Garden exists on the line between passion and obsession. Even for Berkeley, land of the boldly and proudly iconoclastic, artists Donahue and her life-partner Mark Bulwinkle have created something rare, a garden and gallery that smashes all conceptions of what gardens or galleries should be.  

“Mark and I thought that it would be good to follow an example set by some of the artists in New York City who have salons in their studios,” Donahue said, recalling the beginning of the garden a decade ago. “Instead of having gallery shows we would show our work in a comfortable, non-formal, non-threatening, ‘sacrosanct’ environment at home and invite whoever was interested to come see what we’re doing.  

“It’s a pleasant thing to do on a Sunday afternoon and it’s sort of multifaceted. There’s the garden people who come and the art people and people with out-of-town guests, who want to see a little Berkeley lunacy.” 

Enormous and exotic vegetation surround Donahue’s South Berkeley home. From the shiny green and thorny tree in front of her house to the tall and sculpted cypress in her backyard; from the tombstone steps that define some of the backyard garden paths to the Skyy Vodka bottle tree; from the enormous white leaves of some exotic tropical plant buried in thick vegetation to the ochre-colored ceramic bamboo covered in Tibetan prayers, it’s clear you’re not in Kansas anymore and you’re not really in Berkeley, either. 

Sundays from 1 to 5 p.m. Donahue’s front door swings open. Entering her abode is like wandering into another, innocent and more colorful land. Chris Wakefield, his wife, Sherri, and sons Christopher and Dylan came from Rohnert Park to view and visit the gallery garden. 

“I’d like to live in a place like this because it’s really cool,” said 10-year-old Christopher. His favorites were the small pools stocked with fish and sculptures. 

“It’s got a very good feel to it,” agreed his father, Chris. “There’s a little of everything. There’s a little African art, a little psychedelic art, a little hippie, a little renaissance, a little everything.” 

Donahue’s walls and ceilings are painted in vibrant colors with either patterns or enormous portraits. Some of the chandeliers and light fixtures are hand-crafted from found and collected objects. Candles flicker, illuminating African masks and African textiles. Turn one way and you confront a shiny golden Buddha; rotate slightly and a statuesque ceramic nude created by Donahue’s adult daughter captures your attention. 

Twenty-five years ago Donahue purchased her Victorian-era duplex on quiet Wheeler Street and, like many new homeowners, she started a garden in her backyard. 

“This was my first chance to have a garden,” she said. “It took a little while to get going but once I got going, it got me. I got completely subsumed.” 

There’s an innocent, child-like quality to the garden world Donahue has created. 

“Part of it is how it’s all over your head,” she said. “You’re inside it and it makes you feel small.” 

Rosie Kaplan and her friend, Nancy Erb, came from Oakland to tour the garden and house. This was Kaplan’s second visit. Six years earlier her husband Harvey Goldenberg brought her here to select one of Donahue’s large, carved stone heads for a 50th birthday present. 

“It’s like a fantasy world that takes you away from everything that’s going on outside,” said Kaplan. “It’s wonderful.” 

Erb concurred: “Each path you wander has a focal point. She’s done it so it all looks very casual and happenstance but I think she’s very talented at putting it together. There are no accidents. It’s hard to capture. You see one part of it but then you keep discovering things.” 

More than just a garden, Donahue’s open house functions as a gallery for her and Bullwinkle’s art. 

“I make things for gardens and about gardens. Stone and ceramic last well outside and work well with organic stuff. That’s why I’m doing garden sculpture,” Donahue said. “The stones I make to drop a hint that it’s okay to relax in the garden.” She sighs to indicate release. 

“This is our version of self-promotion. The nice part about that is we don’t have to share it with the gallery. That’s a lot, especially when it can be up to 60 percent. The gallery scene is really hard and I’m not interested in it. I don’t like the openings. It doesn’t make people feel better. So I’m trying to do something else and this is better in so many ways. We both think it’s pretty great that we get to be on our own schedule and have that freedom.”  

Our Own Stuff Gallery Garden is located at 3017 Wheeler Street in South Berkeley. Hours are Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. only (510) 540-8544.

BART is raising its rates, again.  

In the first of five scheduled increases, the BART board of directors voted yesterday to increase all fares by 10 percent. The rate hike, which follows a 5 percent increase at the start of this year, will go into effect Jan. 1. The increase will raise the price of a trip from downtown Berkeley to downtown San Francisco from $2.75 to $3.05. 

BART directors approved the fare hike to help erase a projected $38.8 million deficit for next year. Starting in 2006 and running through 2012, fares are expected to jump every two years by roughly 5.5 percent, providing BART with about $183 million in new revenue. The system is projecting a $400 million shortfall over the next decade. 

“Today we made the tough decisions we had to make,” said Contra Costa board member Dan Richard. 

But the fare increases did face some opposition on the board. Board member Tom Radulovich of San Francisco said he could not approve the hikes for a system that, in his view, favors suburbanites over urban residents. 

“Before we pile on a new fare increase ... we need to fix what is broken,” he said. “BART’s fare structure is not a fair structure.” 

Radulovich, reviving a long-standing debate on the board, said suburban commuters do not pay enough for lengthy trips to urban areas. But Richard argued that the cost of operating a train does not increase significantly with distance. 

The fare increases are part of a larger budget-balancing plan that includes layoffs and shifting workers from BART’s core system. Some workers will be shifted to a new four-station extension, including a stop at San Francisco International Airport that is set to open June 22. A total of 28 workers face loss of their jobs, but management and union officials are working on a plan that may allow for early retirements rather than layoffs. 

Berkeley board member Ron Nakadegawa voiced opposition to the fare hikes for another reason, arguing that workers should take a pay cut rather than allow riders to foot the bill for the deficit. But, in the end, he voted for the hikes. 

“I knew I wasn’t going to get very far” with the call for pay cuts, he said. 

Some critics say BART, which began charging in December for some of the 40,000 parking spots outside its stations, should have tapped drivers for more cash, rather than leaning on all of its riders. Drivers, they argue, create more pollution and tend to be wealthier than those who walk or bicycle to BART. 

“Right now BART parking spots are highly subsidized,” said Cynthia Powell, volunteer coordinator for the Bicycle-Friendly Berkeley Coalition. “Rather than give riders a 10 percent hike, the parking should cost more.” 

Board member Thomas Blalock, who represents Fremont, Hayward, Newark and Union City, said raising fees would only scare commuters away from the nascent parking program. 

“It’s a new system and we have to give it time to settle in,” he said. 

Until last December, all drivers parked for free on a first-come, first-serve basis. Today, commuters pay up to $63 per month for a guaranteed spot in a BART parking lot. So far, the transit agency has attracted only 3,600 of the 9,700 subscribers it was hoping to get. 

The board delayed a vote on an additional 5-cent surcharge on every BART ticket to help pay for a series of seismic retrofitting projects. 

BART tried to win voter approval in November for a $1.05 billion bond to fund the projects, including a retrofit of the transbay tube that runs from Oakland to San Francisco, but fell just short of the two-thirds vote required.  

The measure would have raised property taxes by an average of $7.80 per $100,000 of assessed value to pay for the projects. Critics argued that BART riders, rather than property owners, should pay for the retrofits. 

The board, which will likely seek voter approval of a new bond in March 2004, decided to vote on the 5-cent increase closer to the election so it could send a signal to voters that BART and its riders are willing to foot some of the bill. 

“While this nickel doesn’t represent the entire amount we need, it is a good signal to the public that we are willing to do something for ourselves,” said board member James Fang of San Francisco. 

BART riders in downtown Berkeley had a mixed reaction to the fare hike news Thursday. 

“It sucks,” said Amber Gill, a Berkeley resident who plans to commute to the Lake Merritt BART station in the coming months to take classes at Laney College. 

Keyon Gray, an Oakland resident who uses BART to get to his job at Landmark Shattuck Cinemas in downtown Berkeley, said he understood the board’s vote given the $38.8 million deficit. 

“You have to do it,” he said. “It’s a business like any other.”  

The following letter was addressed to Mayor Tom Bates: 

I am very disappointed that although a majority of city councilmembers expressed an interest in calling for an emergency meeting to discuss saving the historic Doyle House, you did not arrange one. I urge you to make a public statement explaining your lack of action which paved the way for a Berkeley city founder’s house to be demolished. You owe the citizens that public statement, I believe. 

You regard increasing the civility of our City Council as the most important job of your first 100 days in office, yet you have just made hundreds of people leery of you. You had the opportunity to act as peacemaker, to lead this city and bring people together. In this important situation, you spoke one way but acted another, and left a severe rift in this city.  

We feel betrayed. The developer’s needs alone were met by the city. So many citizens were ignored on a matter that seemed simple: requiring a developer to grant a little time to move the Doyle House one block. The developer owed this city (from which he profits greatly) civility regarding a project funded through state money. Since BAHA’s lawsuit ended less than two weeks ago, how could the developer have been committed to act so suddenly with no regard for the house moving plans that were quickly forming through great efforts by so many? 

The Planet quoted you as saying that the developer and BAHA should not have chosen to fight it out in court. But BAHA tried to save the house by starting a public discussion provided for in California environmental law. This process was not chosen by the city. As mayor, you did nothing to resolve this conflict — at the final minute you said you wanted to save the Doyle House, yet you did not call the council together. Your actions differed from your assertions in a manner which seems ominous for Berkeley. 

In a debate during your election campaign, you said you were for preservation and claimed that if elected you would be a strong ecological mayor. But you did not stop the destruction of the 100-plus-year-old virgin timber of this house, which now has been turned to splinters and thrown away, not being recycled or reused. You said your most important focus is education. What, Mr. Mayor, does this teach school children? That in this town, fast money is more important than fair treatment of its citizens. We’ve learned that our mayor does not care about the history of our town fathers, or about the many people who cared deeply about this house, the last wooden structure from the 19th century in the heart of the city (one which was in the city’s own Downtown Plan). The landmarks of a town give it a sense of continuum, yet we hear talk of disbanding the Landmarks Commission. What are we to think now? 

I feel sad I cannot plead with you over the Doyle House because I know it’s now over. But as the hopes and history are hauled off for good, I want you to know that we will not forget and will be more vigilant in the future. This was my first interaction with the new administration, and I walk away sobered, saddened and wary.  

Mr. Mayor, you owed the people of Berkeley your skills to resolve this matter without leaving so many people angry and mistrustful. I believe it was well within your power. You could have considered all parties and proven yourself a true leader. 

Thank you for your attention. I am very sorry to have to express this, my honest opinion, to you, Mr. Mayor, but I can’t make this go away. 

Richard Schwartz

Emeryville’s 12-year economic expansion has exacerbated its housing problems and displaced many of its low-income residents, according to a new study by the East Bay Alliance for Sustainable Economy (EBASE).  

At a Wednesday press conference the authors of the 150-page report said the small city, as well as its neighbors, had paid a high price for its rapid-fire transformation from an industrial wasteland to a regional big-box retail magnet. The recent wave of development has displaced low-income residents, most of whom are African-American, and reduced the amount of affordable housing available in the area. The new high-tech jobs in the city have also increased the divide between its high-income residents and its low-wage service sector residents who are employed in the retail businesses. Traffic congestion has also increased significantly. 

Between 1990 and 2002, Emeryville created jobs at twice the rate of the East Bay regional average, added three million square feet of office space, and built vast amounts of retail space spread across three main shopping centers. During the same period, the city of 7,300 residents took in 70 percent of all net new retail sales among cities along the I80/880 corridor and received $760 million in private investments while its general fund ballooned by 63 percent.  

“Though Emeryville has created thousands of new jobs, the city has not mitigated and may have even exacerbated the regional trend toward an hour glass economy,” said Howard Greenwich, co-author of the study.  

The EBASE report examines five major Emeryville redevelopment projects and what the city did to ensure that they were built. It details how Emeryville frequently amended its general plan to allow for otherwise nonconforming developments, by using its redevelopment agency powers, which allowed the city to control more than 95 percent of the city’s land. The city also provided developers with an above-average amount of city staff assistance.  

Greg Harper, the former mayor of Emeryville and a director of the AC Transit Board, said the city has always been under the influence of very large organizations that have tended to control the development and planning process.  

“It’s always been a town which very large entities have been in and they have tended to effect the processes very early on. These large entities work through the staff. That’s why the public process is so important because if the public process is not opened up early on you end up with things being cast in concrete. One of the things the town needs to do is figure out a way to bring the public into decision-making early before these entities have a chance to wield too much influence.” 

Harper said it would be a mistake for the city to rest on its laurels because it has attracted so much development and revenues.  

“Why should we settle?” he asked. “Why not be a model. It’s really inconceivable that Emeryville doesn’t have a living wage yet.” 

The five projects studied were the East Bay Bridge Shopping Center, the Chiron Corporation laboratories and headquarters, the Pixar Animation Studios campus, the Bay Shellmound Project and the Bay Street shopping center and housing complex.  

“Regional considerations must be given a higher priority,” Greenwich said. “Redevelopment in general must be grounded in objective assessment of the most urgent needs of the community and redevelopment strategy must ensure that those needs are met.”  

According to the report, between 1991 and 2002 more than 5,500 jobs were created, with most of the new workers employed as cashiers, office managers, computer programmers, and office clerks. Of all new jobs created, most did not provide workers with adequate wages to support themselves and their families and about three-quarters of the new workers needed affordable housing. 

Among the specifics outlined in the report: 

*For a family of three with one earner, 72 percent of the new jobs do not pay enough to make ends meet. 

*For a family of four with two earners, 45 percent of the new jobs do not pay enough to make ends meet. 

*New development projects created 2,170 retail and hotel jobs, but the city built only 27 percent of the necessary affordable housing units necessitated by the increase in households. 

*Most hotel and retail employees live in Oakland. 

The report also details astonishing disparities in retail sales between Emeryville and its immediate neighbors. From 1990 to 2001, Emeryville gained $322 million in sales, contrasted with Berkeley’s $61 million gain and Oakland’s $80 million loss in sales. 

Oakland City Councilmember Jane Brunner said the report highlights the need for regional planning. “The big picture is that we don’t have regional planning. We have city competing against city for the developers and the only one who wins with this is the developer,” she said. “I absolutely support development, but the question is how do we get a commitment to the community?”  

The report recommends several tools for doing just that. One is the community impact report, which functions much like an environmental impact report but emphasizes other non-environmental issues like jobs and housing. Other suggestions include adopting living wage ordinances and requiring community benefits agreements to ensure local hiring, job training opportunities and affordable housing. 

EBASE also says state law should be changed to remove the incentive to build retail structures over other types of developments and is promoting an Assembly bill proposed by Assemblymember Darrell Steinberg (9th district) that would reduce local government’s reliance on sales tax revenue and increase their share of property tax revenue. 

Emeryville Mayor Ken Bukowski said much of the difficulty neighboring cities have in revitalizing their depressed areas may have to do less with competition from Emeryville and more to do with those cities’ own policies.  

“One of the reasons Oakland loses a lot of retail is that they don’t prosecute people who shoplift. We have the East Bay Bridge Shopping Center and there Emeryville provides hundreds of staff of police and fire services. Those businesses wouldn’t be there if Oakland had provided those services,” he said. “We did a joint housing project with Oakland and that housing project cost more than any other housing project we ever did because Oakland has all these requirements that have to be met before the project can go forward it kept dragging on dragging on and dragging on and it wasn’t getting anywhere. The cost of it went to the roof. I don’t understand, if a company wants to locate here and wants to develop why don’t you let them do what they want to do?”  

Bukowski said he thought the report would have been more “complete” and “balanced” if the authors interviewed some of Emeryville’s city officials. He also said that he is supportive of regional collaboration and thinks that if city officials were more educated about the issues it might equalize the benefits of development. “When you get elected to city government you don’t necessarily have an education about planning,” he said. “If you want to advocate for having better jobs, then someone needs to come explain to the council how that can happen.”

As an environmentalist and a neighborhood resident for over 20 years, I support the smart-growth project proposed to replace the strip mall at Martin Luther King, Jr. Way and University Ave.  

By now, most people understand the environmental benefits of this sort of infill development. It reduces urban sprawl, and it reduces traffic and auto-dependency by letting residents walk to jobs or school in central Berkeley rather than drive. This is the only way to produce needed housing without damaging the environment.  

Apart from environmental concerns, I feel particularly strongly about this development because I lived on Berkeley Way, just three houses down from this site, for several years after my son was born. I used to push the baby stroller up Berkeley Way every day, and I was cut off innumerable times by drivers speeding into the strip mall’s parking lot — and never thinking to stop for a pedestrian using the sidewalk.  

If you try to cross MLK Way, you will see that drivers become more aggressive here. It is a truism among city planners that strip-mall design encourages drivers to speed and ignore pedestrians, and that urban design, with housing and shops facing the sidewalk, encourages drivers to travel more slowly and to watch for pedestrians.  

When I lived there, I could hear the noise — and sometimes smell the fumes — of auto repairs from my backyard. I noticed that many people on the block never walked, even though they lived a block from downtown; one neighbor used to drive two blocks to buy the newspaper. Strip malls and parking lots facing the sidewalk obviously do not encourage walking.  

I now live two blocks from this site and pass it nearly every day. I look forward to the new development here because it will make my neighborhood more pleasant, more interesting and more livable.  

John Kenyon’s objections to this project (Daily Planet, May 16-18 edition) just reflect his own personal preference for suburban-style design — which he apparently wants to impose on everyone. He is obviously an Old Suburbanist (just the opposite of a New Urbanist). 

He objects to the project because it will “replace an innocuous one-story frontage with a five-floor cliff of stores and apartments sited right up against the ... sidewalk.” 

The one-story strip mall on this site is the ugliest and most pedestrian-hostile building in central Berkeley. If Kenyon considers this building innocuous, that alone should convince us not to take his ideas about urbanism seriously. It also convinces me that he has never walked around this neighborhood.  

By contrast, the building proposed for this site is the typical scale of European cities, where the most attractive and interesting streets are made up of four- to six-story buildings, with housing above and with shops facing right on sidewalk. This building will give real character and interest to the corner of MLK and University.  

Five stories is the right scale for the part of this development on University Avenue. It is the same height as some of the oldest buildings in downtown (such as the old Mason-McDuffy building on Addison and Shattuck). Four stories is an appropriate transition to the adjoining neighborhood.  

Kenyon gives himself away when he says this building “would drive any middle-class hill dweller into claustrophobic despair.” He is admitting that he thinks like a suburbanite.  

But suburbanites who understand how cities work should back smart growth. People will do much less damage to their suburban quality of life by living in denser neighborhoods where they walk rather than living in low-density sprawl where they drive everywhere.  

Many people like living in cities, and the boredom of living in middle-class suburbs would drive them to despair. Why does Kenyon want to force his suburban taste on these people? 

I am amused by Kenyon’s statement that this building should be designed “like the wood-shingled low-key building immediately north of Long’s Drug’s parking lot.”  

I was the activist who did the most to get the city to approve this building — there is a plaque with my name on the building — and I can testify that the local NIMBYs were furious at the hearing where the City Council approved it. They said, “It’s too big” so many times that, after the hearing, I told friends that my parrot could be a member of that neighborhood group, if I only trained it to say “It's too big.” 

But now that it is built, that building obviously fits right into the neighborhood and is a huge improvement over the gas station that used to be there — just as the proposed building at MLK and University will be a huge improvement over the strip mall that is now there.  

Whenever a new building is proposed, NIMBYs yell “It’s too big.” They claim to represent neighborhood residents, but nobody should believe them.  

Measure P lost, with 80 percent of the voters against it — the most decisive defeat of a ballot measure in memory. The “It’s too big” crowd is very noisy, but it obviously represents only a tiny minority of Berkeley residents.  

Charles Siegel is a Berkeley resident who has been active in many environmental groups.

Several nonprofits protested the city manager’s proposed budget cuts Tuesday night, citing crippling reductions in services and potential program cessation. Among them was the Family Violence Law Center, whose executive director forecast that the 10 percent cut could contribute to the loss of two vital positions. 

Tuesday’s public hearing was the first of two scheduled before City Council adopts the budget June 24. The budget looks to balance a projected $4.7 million deficit in part by the reducing grant and general fund allocations for many nonprofits and city agencies.  

The proposal also continues a selective hiring freeze, eliminates 23 city staff positions and increases parking meter fines. 

City Manager Weldon Rucker kicked off the hearing with some encouraging news on the state budget. He said that Governor Gray Davis has reinstated the full Vehicle License Fees in his most recent budget proposal. Rucker warned, however, that it is too soon to count on that funding because the state legislature is not likely to finalize their budget until sometime in the fall.  

Since 1998, the Vehicle License Fees have gradually been reduced by 68 percent. The average vehicle owner now saves about $124 annually. If the legislature reinstates the fees in the state budget, California cities will have access to an additional $3.8 billion. 

“If the fees are restored, we may be able to avoid further cost cutting,” he said. “But I have to warn you, that we have a long way to go before the state budget is adopted.”  

The executive director of the Family Violence Law Center, Julia Arno, asked the council to rethink the 10 percent cut proposed for her organization. The cut would amount to $7,500. The Family Violence Law Center helps battered women get the legal assistance they need to escape the cycle of violence. 

“I know it doesn’t sound like a lot, but because of the poor economy, we are being cut from a variety of funding sources,” she said. “The cuts could harm the family violence prevention program, which is key to what we do.” 

Arno said two positions would likely be threatened by the cuts. The first is a coordinator who works with the Berkeley Police Department to provide housing, legal and medical resources to women involved in domestic disturbance calls. 

The other is an attorney who works with battered women to remove the violent offender from the home, establish stay away orders and represent them in child custody hearings.  

“Studies show that 80 percent of battered women who get civil protection orders do not fall back into the cycle of violence,” Arno said. “If we loose these two positions, we will may not loose our ability to help these women.” 

A group of parents also protested the complete withdrawal of funds from Totland’s Young Artist program. Last year the city gave the program, which holds art classes for 150 kids a week, received $28,000 from the city’s general fund. This year the city manager recommended it receive none because it is a “low priority”, according to Totland Program Director Jennifer Burke  

Parent John King, whose daughter has been in the program for three years, said the cuts could mean the end of the program. “To cut this program back totally raises the risk of killing it, and once it’s dead, you can’t easily bring it back,” he said.  

Others who addressed the council were a group of swimming pool advocates who came to both thank the council and argue against proposed fee hikes at the James Kenny West Campus Pool.  

At one point during her testimony, swimming advocate Gail Alcott broke into song and was followed by a chorus. 

The council will hold another public hearing on June 17th after making adjustments during a council meeting on June 10th. The budget is required by law to be adopted at the council’s June 24 meeting.  

In addition to the council meetings, the city manager is holding a series of community meetings on the budget. One is being held at the West Berkeley Senior Center on May 29th and another at St. John’s Church on College Avenue on June 5th.  

We were walking in opposite directions on University Avenue in mid-April, and we started grinning as soon as we saw each other, part of Berkeley’s family of mutual notoriety. 

“Spare change for old times’ sake,” he said, and I gave him the five in my pocket. “How come they haven’t killed you yet?” he joked, and I told him I should ask him the same thing. “Oh, we got it lined up now,” he said, “we’re all set now.” He went on that way for a bit, and whatever he meant, it seemed positive, and it seemed to include me. I told him to take care, and we parted. 

Kevin Freeman wasn’t crazy, and he wasn’t drunk. Whatever may or may not have happened on April 22, the police and the courts had already decided that he shouldn’t be allowed in the area south of campus, the one place he could count on finding friends, inexpensive or free food, and access to services.  

It’s a common routine, making part of the town off-limits to people the police and the courts have decided are “problematic.” With a few repeated arrests, any prosecutor can point to a “record,” argue for a stay-away order and usually get one. 

Massive amounts of these stay-away orders were issued against protesters in 1991 in an effort to reduce attendance at demonstrations. I was the only SLAPP-suit defendant found in violation of an injunction the courts issued against four alleged “key leaders” of those demonstrations, and, although I was a civil prisoner, I was put into the general population in Santa Rita in violation of the law. 

The Berkeley Police have their own public relations department, unlike the rest of us. Because of its affinity for eccentricity and love of the nut-brown bowl, most of Berkeley’s population teeters on the edge of sanity and sobriety from time to time. If one has a home to hide in, one doesn’t risk getting the treatment Kevin Freeman got; typed, ticketed and tossed into a cell with someone violent enough to kill him. 

Kevin Freeman was your brother; not the one that went to Harvard, the other one, maybe without the loving wife and happy family and good job. We now have no chance to know what he had all lined up, whatever it was he was so cheerful about the day we passed each other. But his story should at least illuminate the danger of the seemingly benign stay-away order, which criminalizes simply being in a part of town where others are free to congregate. 

The University of California, the police and the courts constantly conspire to relocate the “problematic” people who frequent the area south of campus, the people with the wrong clothes, the wrong demeanor and the wrong politics. It’s not happening in some dark room off the record, it’s happening in broad daylight with almost all of our permission. It’s business as usual, and for once, for a brief moment, Kevin Lee Freeman has shown us how much it costs. 

Carol Denney is a Berkeley resident.

The body that was discovered between two houses in South Berkeley has been identified by police as that of 20-year-old Mario Deshawn Mills.  

Mills, who died of gun shot wounds, was a resident of central Berkeley. The investigation into his death is ongoing, and police have not released any information about the type of gun used in the shooting or how many times Mills was shot.  

Residents of the 1400 block of Derby Street, where Mills’ body was found, called police around 11:30 p.m. to report hearing as many as five gunshots. Police canvassed the area but did not discover anything unusual.  

However, at 6:30 a.m. the following morning, a resident leaving for work spotted what he thought was someone’s feet sticking out from between two houses. He called police, who found Mills’ body.  

Mills was pronounced dead at the scene and police scoured the area for evidence.  

Mills is the third murder victim in Berkeley this year. On January 14, Ronald Easily, 19, was shot to death in the 1600 block of Harmon Street; on March 17, Andre Byes, 37, was shot to death in his home in the 1300 block of Glendale Avenue.  

A previously scheduled community meeting at the Francis Albrier Community Center, which is near where Mills’ body was discovered, was expanded Thursday night so community members could discuss the status of the case with police.  

—John Geluardi

Along with his label of being the Teflon Don (that is, a politician who manages to get out of public view on an issue just before things fall apart and folks start looking around for a politician to blame), California state Sen. Don Perata also has a reputation for eating his young (that is, gathering an impressive group of young and loyal up-and-coming politicians around him, getting their hopes up about his support for their political futures, and then turning and rolling over them like a tank if their political futures happen to get in the way of his).  

Too complicated a sentence to start off a column? I'll wait while you read it again ... 

Anyhow, if all of the above is true, then it might be that the senator has suddenly run into a child who does not intend to be digested so easily.  

Back in 1998, word on the street and unsubstantiated rumor has it that Perata (then the District 16 state assemblymember) promised his support for Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson if Carson ran to fill out the remaining term of Barbara Lee’s District 9 state Senate seat. That was the year Barbara Lee left the Senate to fill Ron Dellums’ unexpired term in the U.S. Congress. Carson entered the District 9 race along with Berkeley state Assemblymember Dion Aroner, at which point Perata announced that the state Senate seat was looking sort of good to him, and he was going to run for Lee’s old seat as well.  

One analysis of that race is that Carson (who is African-American) pulled just enough African-American votes away from Aroner to allow Perata to win the Senate race in the fall of 1998. Any speculation that Perata lured Carson into the race with promises of support while Perata was really intending to run for the seat all along is, well, only speculation. 

Green Party member Audie Bock beat out Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris for Perata’s District 16 state Assembly unexpired seat in 1999 and then, a year later, then-Alameda County Supervisor Wilma Chan beat Bock for the full term for that same seat.  

I know that’s a lot of political history to take in at one gulp, but take a breath, and we’ll muddle on.  

Now Perata would probably be happy to stay in the California state Senate for as long as the voters would keep on re-electing him. I haven’t asked him about this, but that’s my guess. Perata can’t stay in the Senate indefinitely, though, because of California’s term limit law, which says a state Senator can only stay in a seat for two terms. So Perata starts shopping around for something else to do when his two terms are up. He moved from Alameda to Oakland, and everybody (or most everybody, anyhow) thought this was because Perata was interested in running for the mayor of Oakland after Jerry Brown’s tenure was over.  

Meanwhile, Perata and Assemblymember Wilma Chan are giving the appearance of working as a team up in Sacramento, co-sponsoring such legislation as the Oakland school bailout bill and the Oakland sideshow bill. And word on the street has it that Perata promises to give his support to Chan if she runs for Perata’s District 9 state Senate seat in the fall of 2004, when Perata is forced by term limits to vacate it. So Chan makes plans to run for the District 9 seat, along with former Assemblymember Dion Aroner.  

But then Perata crosses everybody (Wilma Chan especially). He goes to California Attorney General Bill Lockyer and asks if there is any chance that he (Perata) can squeeze out another term in the state Senate. And last month, Lockyer issues an opinion that oh, yes, Perata can indeed serve another term because the term limit law reads that term limit limitations “shall not apply to any unexpired term to which a person is elected or appointed if the remainder of the term is less than half of the full term,” and in Lockyer's opinion, Perata took over Lee’s seat with less than half of her full term remaining. Lockyer conceded that “there are those who will disagree with my interpretation of the law, and it is safe to assume that a court ultimately will decide the issue.”  

Not waiting for the court, Perata was off and running for the Senate again in 2004, and if this sounds like a reprise of his alleged strategy in the 1998 race (with Chan and Aroner knocking each other off while Perata slips in), let’s just say — to paraphrase Gore Vidal — this isn’t so much conspiracy as it is coincidence.  

But Chan and Aroner — both students of history — apparently don’t want to repeat it, either as a tragedy or a farce (that’s from Marx, I think, though we’re not supposed to quote him).  

Deciding that she can only win the District 9 Senate seat if she runs a negative campaign against Chan and Perata, Aroner dropped out of the race. At which point a lot of people assumed that Chan would also drop out of the District 9 race because they don’t think she wants to run against the powerful Perata.  

But this is where we come to the good part, children, where Gretel refuses to climb into the witch’s oven.  

Chan has now gotten a legal opinion from the state Assembly’s legislative counsel which says that Perata can't run for the state Senate again because his first term was a full term. And so Chan is still running for what her staff says is the “open” Senate seat in 2004. So this may be a campaign where both the courts and the voters have to decide.  

More on this one later.

Catholic priest William O’Donnell recently returned to Berkeley after six months in federal prison. 

O’Donnell, 73, was arrested at a mass demonstration for stepping onto the property of the School of the Americas, the U.S. Army’s alleged training school for Latin American death squads at Fort Benning, Ga. 

It was his fourth arrest at Fort Benning, his 227th arrest overall — a total of a full year in one jail or another as a follower of the teaching of Jesus. 

O’Donnell returned unruffled. 

“I’ve never seen him get angry or irritable,” said Rev. George Crespin, who has been a priest with O’Donnell at St. Joseph the Worker Church in Berkeley for 22 years. “He’s just a very peaceful man.” 

Sixty years ago, O’Donnell wandered into the priesthood. He was brought up with three brothers and two sisters in a poor Irish Catholic sharecropper family in Altamont. It was the Depression. 

“My mother used to drive us to a small Catholic school in Livermore,” O’Donnell said. “I remember the nuns always saying the best thing you could do with your life was to be a priest. The seminary looked very good to me. Farming was hard work. It was healthy, but there was no payoff, no money.” 

One of O’Donnell’s sisters became a nun. A brother became a real estate agent. Another brother and sister became alcohol and drug abuse counselors. 

As was done then, O’Donnell began studying for the priesthood at age 13 and finished 12 years later. He was ordained and sent to his first parish, Corpus Christi in Piedmont. 

O’Donnell had been a priest for five years when, in 1961, he became aware of the civil rights movement. 

“I was only reading about it in the newspapers,” he said. “I was reading that people were being denied their rights, their right to vote, their right to housing, to jobs, to health care, just because of their color. I didn’t understand it.” 

Then came Vatican II, the Church reform which, among other things, allowed Mass to be held in languages other than Latin. 

“If the Church was the expression of Christ in the world, it had to be in the street to be relevant,” he said. “That’s when my real education began and I left the sacristy and went into the street.” 

O’Donnell’s constant civil rights activities troubled his superiors, who removed him from Corpus Christi in 1965 and sent him to St. Joseph’s in Alameda, where his activism persisted. 

The Church sent him to St. Joaquim in Hayward in 1967, where he became involved in the farmworkers’ attempt to start a union. 

“I didn’t think it could happen because of the violence delivered on anyone who attempted to organize,” O’Donnell said. “But there was this little Mexican guy, Chavez, who had learned about the power of nonviolence from Martin Luther King, who had learned it from Ghandi, who had learned it from the Sermon on the Mount, and who knows where Jesus stole it from.” 

On May 15, 1969, O’Donnell was arrested for the first time. He went with a delegation of farmworkers to discuss the grape boycott with the Board of Directors of Safeway. The delegation refused to leave after the meeting and was arrested for trespassing. 

“I got up on Sunday [after the arrest] and said it was a mortal sin to shop at Safeway,” he said. 

St. Joaquim shipped him off to Sacred Heart in Oakland, where O’Donnell said he was “held under a sort of ecclesiastical house arrest.” 

“The bishop said if I left the boundaries, I would be suspended.” he said. “But it was just a threat. I talked him out of it.” 

In 1973, O’Donnell, was sent to St. Joseph the Worker in Berkeley, where he has worked as a priest ever since. 

Neither parishioners nor the community has complained very often, not  

even in the 1980s, when St. Joseph became a sanctuary for refugees from El Salvador. O’Donnell said he hasn’t gotten a complaint from the diocese in 29 years. 

“What to say about him?” said Rev. Paul Vassar, vicar general of O’Donnell’s archdiocese. “We’ve been in the same [priest] support group for 22 years and I can only speak for myself. 

“He’s a godly anomaly. I admire him tremendously because of his dedication and his intelligence. He takes the gospel seriously and isn’t afraid to wrestle with reality. In our group he will push us to wrestle with things we don’t really want to wrestle with.” 

Vassar indicated he doesn’t completely follow O’Donnell’s politics but that “it appears he underwent a transformation during that time with Cesar Chavez.” 

O’Donnell currently is on the board of directors of the Middle East Children’s  

Alliance and went with director Barbara Lubin on her first trip to occupied Palestine in 1988. 

“I’ve know Bill O’Donnell for 25 years. He’s one of the smartest and to me, most importantly, most funny people in my life and I love him dearly. He gives the Church a good name. 

“It’s hard to find people who don't love Bill," Lubin said.  

Last Sunday, there were 1,000 people at the Spanish-language mass at the church, a usual occurrence. 

Taped at the entrance was a large poster saying “Hungry for Justice,” urging support for the Claremont and Holiday Inn hotel workers. 

After 23 years, the Center For the Education of the Infant Deaf (CEID) will finally have a space of its own.  

In a ceremony Wednesday afternoon, CEID Executive Director Jill Ellis and Board of Directors President Eric Horodas unveiled plans for the 6,000-square-foot building, which is scheduled to be completed by January 2004. Ellis said the new space, located on Grayson Street at San Pablo Avenue, will allow CEID to double the number of infants it can work with to about 60.  

At the groundbreaking, CEID students and their parents gathered with Mayor Tom Bates, Ellis and area residents to celebrate the center’s work. While parents chatted in a mixture of English and American Sign Language, children dug the first shovelfuls of dirt to signify the beginning of construction, a product, Horodas said, of 23 years of work. 

The new building was designed by local architect Susi Marsuola, whose haring-impaired son went to school at CEID. The plan calls for three classrooms, several offices and an audiology suite, which Ellis said will allow the center to assist local hospitals in testing infants for hearing loss. 

The center has been operating out of the Hopkins Early Childhood School in Berkeley since 1983, but staff members were forced to look for a new location when their lease with the Berkeley Unified School District ran out and district officials increased the price to extend the lease, according to Ellis. 

Ellis and Horoda now will turn their attention to securing funding and the proper permits for the project. The city has yet to grant a building permit, but CEID board member Donna Dahrouge said approval is in the final stages. 

The CEID board of directors is putting its efforts into a fund-raising campaign to pay for the construction of the new building. Ellis said they have raised about one-third of the $3 million dollar goal.

Some people are just easy to talk to.  

Joe Spano is one of them. He’s easy to listen to, too. Spano is the Emmy-winning actor who gave the commencement speech in UC’s Zellerbach Playhouse Wednesday afternoon at the graduation ceremony for the department of theater, dance and performance studies. When he was graduated from UC in 1967 it was known as the department of dramatic art, and, he said in a comforting tone to the barely hatched graduates, “I didn’t know what I was going to do.” 

What he did was help found Berkeley Repertory Theater and eventually go on to Hollywood where he established a significant career in television. Many will remember this slight, balding man with the easy grin from his seven-year role as Lt. Henry Goldblume in “Hill Street Blues.”  

More recently, he has played a recurring character on “NYPD Blue.” He has starred in 20 films made for television and guest-starred on 29 television programs. He won an Emmy in 1989 for his performance in “Midnight Caller.” His Broadway debut was with Eli Wallach in Arthur Miller’s “The Price,” nominated for a Tony Award for Best Revival. And he received an L.A. Drama Critics Circle Award for his performance in David Mamet’s “American Buffalo.” 

Spano said to the graduates, “Don’t worry about not having a great dream. I didn’t have plans when I got out.” Even more surprisingly, he said of himself: “I am insecure.” It isn’t the kind of comment one usually gets from a well-known actor, but somehow it wasn’t surprising coming from Spano.  

Draped in his academic gown, Spano sat on stage with faculty members and watched as students marched to the traditional grandeur of “Pomp and Circumstance.” He immediately won his audience with the unexpected comment, “I’m pretty terrified. ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ had me tearing up, a little bit intimidated. I felt like I was 18 again. You know, that recurring dream where you’re facing a final exam and have forgotten to go to any classes all semester long.”  

Spano reflected on his experiences: “ ‘Why in the world did you choose this major?’ I’ve asked myself. An education has to be about something other than itself. I needed validation.” It’s a question that must have roiled his family: Spano, who entered UC as a pre-med major, was the son of a doctor who got his own education on the G.I. Bill at Berkeley. Spano didn’t act much in high school, but in his first year at Berkeley he took one acting course and immediately changed his major.  

Speculating after the ceremony about the role of acting in his life, Spano said, “Acting is the only art I have. It can lead you to be totally present. When I’m acting, I’m totally there. I hear what I’m saying, who I’m saying it to. I’m present. It’s very painful to not be present. I hope acting will continue to make me aware when I’m not present.  

“You have to start where you are. Acting can also be a source of external approbation. A lot of actors become slightly insane. Where I learned about it was in university. I realized that ego gratification, or ego validation, was a limited view of what this art form could accomplish. I got the idea that acting could open worlds to other people. I realized that it was much bigger than ego gratification. Yes, ‘ego gratification’ is a necessary part of what an actor does. It’s a challenge that we have to live with.” 

He continued: “We all got into theater and we got an education — like it or not. The result is that our work has to be about something other than ourselves. I think it’s because we went to school; it’s a result of living in a community that places value on learning about the world.” 

To the graduates, Spano quoted T.S. Eliot: “What you do not know is the only thing you know.”  

And, finally, he closed with Robert Frost: “Every poem begins with an ache in my heart.”

Log federal forests in order to save them? That’s what the House voted to do Tuesday. Invoking the ghost of George Orwell, the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 encourages federal land managers to “conduct hazardous fuel reduction projects.” In a 256 to 170 tally, the House would allow what environmentalists say will lead to logging 190 million acres the Bush administration claims are “at risk” of forest fire. It also limits citizen participation and authorizes another $125 million in industry subsidies. The Senate plans to take it up in summer. 

“We call it the ‘Healthy-Stealthy’ Act,” explained Andrew George, National Forest Protection Alliance campaign coordinator. “It allows logging in the forest when logging is one of the single greatest causes of fires.” Environmentalists allege it hands prime forests, including ancient trees, to the timber industry and will lead to decimating precious public lands.  

Rep. Scott McInnis’ (R-CO) HR 1904 uses community protection as the act’s raison d’être — stopping fires from burning down homes and structures at the fringes of the forest. Instead of addressing the development/forest interface, the bill “does nothing” to protect communities, according to George. 

Pro-logging forces, like the American Land Rights Association, admit the bill will also allow the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management “discretionary authority to limit [environmental] analysis. . . meaning the agencies would not be required to analyze and describe a number of different alternatives to the preferred course.” The association adds in a letter, “This legislation is crucial for protecting our air, water and wildlife from insect infestations and catastrophic wildfires.” 

The Society of American Foresters, agrees, pointing to “80 years of the accumulation of fuels-dead vegetation and overly dense stands of trees” leading to an “all-time high” potential for fires. 

The “stealthy” part of the act comes from supporters like these who greenwash their intent, say environmentalists. “The greenwashing starts in the bill’s title,” said Matthew Koehler, Native Forest Network campaign coordinator. He said the proposed legislation would implement the Bush administration’s “Healthy Forest Initiative” launched last summer — following the 2000 wildland fire season — using the “guise of protecting communities while severely curtailing citizen participation.” 

Behind the administration’s urgency is its public complaint that environmentalists delay logging plans.  

In a federal report out May 14, environmentalists were apprised that if delaying logging is their strategy, they are lousy at it. Of the “fuel reduction” plans that environmentalists appealed in the last two years, two-thirds were approved as planned and only 10 percent were reversed. But in so reporting, the investigative arm of Congress, the General Accounting Office (GAO), also noted that if environmentalists’ delay tactics are the reason for stripping out public input in the Healthy Forests Act, then that too is a canard. 

Koehler said the GAO report put the lie to the Bush administration’s claim of “analysis paralysis” in invoking the necessity of the Healthy Forests Act. 

“If the act passes, it would be considered implementation of the administration’s plan,” said Koehler, who characterized the bill as one of several that are “payback” to campaign contributors. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the timber industry contributed $4.6 million to politicians last year — a vast majority of which went to Republicans. 

“The Bush administration has been good at greenwashing — good at using people’s fear of fire to limit opposition,” said Koehler. “It has also sold the American public a false bill of ‘analysis paralysis.’ That’s the level they’ll go to to ensure we will see more logging on public forests.” 

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 wwwdowntownberkeley.org 

Don’t be surprised if Berkeley High School’s newly appointed principal, Patricia Christa, shows up at work next fall in a helicopter. 

Christa, who served as an assistant principal and principal at Newark Memorial High School for 12 years, has a reputation for making a splash on the first day of school. 

“When I started [at Newark Memorial], everybody was down and I thought, I’ve got to be a little goofy,” she said. 

So the principal, a petite woman, arrived at her first all-school assembly on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, engines roaring. Not content with one jaw-dropping stunt, she turned up in a race car and a helicopter in subsequent years. 

Unexpected entrances became a tradition, one Christa promises to continue at Berkeley High. “But I won’t tell you what I’m going to do,” she said. 

Berkeley parents and school officials, who are just getting to know Christa, say they are impressed with her spunk and hope she will succeed in a post with notoriously high turnover. 

“It’s a very tough job,” said Marisita Jarvis, who served on the parent committee that screened the final nine candidates. “But she has a little touch of craziness, which is good ... She would be willing to do something a little off to get the attention of the students.” 

Christa, who grew up in Sacramento and San Jose, will be the fourth Berkeley High principal in six years. She said she plans to stick around, brushing aside concerns about a sprawling school that some consider unmanageable. 

“To me, it’s a travesty that principals have left,” Christa said. “That’s absurd. I had a hard time leaving my school after 12 years.” 

When Christa left Newark Memorial at the end of the 2001-2002 school year, she took a job as director of educational services for the Newark Unified School District. But she said the central office job was not as rewarding as her work as principal. 

“It was fine,” she said. “But I missed the kids.” 

Last week Christa began splitting her time between Berkeley High and Newark Unified. She plans to spend two days a week at the high school until July 1, when her responsibilities as full-time principal begin. Christa said she wants to familiarize herself with staff, parents and students, and learn about what issues the high school faces, before taking the helm.  

Christa will fill a post that has been vacant for two years. Co-principals, Mary Ann Valles and Laura Leventer, have been running the show in the interim. 

“The two co-principals have been doing a wonderful job at the school,” said Joan Edelstein, president of the Berkeley High School Parent Teacher Student Association. “Nonetheless, parents felt there needed to be an identified person in charge who had authority and could bring a vision to this school.” 

Christa sums up her vision neatly: “Every school needs to have five things: leadership, culture, infrastructure, educational program, and professional development.” 

Newark Memorial is in some ways quite different from Berkeley High. Newark Memorial has 2,100 students this year, compared to 3,200 at Berkeley High, according to data from the California Department of Education.  

The school also has a much smaller black population — 6 percent of students versus 32 percent at Berkeley High. But Newark Memorial’s Hispanic population is significantly larger, 34 percent versus 12 percent. 

Christa isn’t overly concerned about the differences between the two. “Kids are kids,” she said. “High schools are very similar.” 

Newark Superintendent Ken Sherer, who served as Berkeley High principal in the late 1980s, said what really separates the Berkeley campus from Newark Memorial is the deep gap between its high-achieving and low-achieving students. 

Sherer said Christa understands the challenge and is ready to face it. 

“We talked long and hard, before she went down there, about what she can expect,” said Sherer. “She’s tenacious.” 

The long-standing “achievement gap” at Berkeley High breaks down along racial lines. Last year, white students at Berkeley High averaged 882 on the state Academic Performance Index, far exceeding a state target of 800. Asian students averaged 759, while Hispanics scored 550 and blacks averaged 512. 

“You’ve got a community that is reaping the benefits of the high school and a community that is just struggling to be there,” said Michael Miller, a member of Parents of Children of African Descent. 

Newark Memorial’s scores, by contrast, clustered in the middle last year. Asian students scored highest, at 724, followed by whites at 718, Filipinos at 668 and Hispanics at 590. The number of black students was too small to generate a score. 

Christa said she needs to take a close look at the Berkeley gap before charting a course of action. 

“I don’t know a lot about how big the gap is, who the gap is. I cannot proceed until I know that,” she said. “That’s why I’m getting into the school a little bit earlier than most people would, so I can do a lot of analysis and then, with the staff, make a plan.”  

Berkeley administrators want to close the gap by placing 50 percent of Berkeley High students in small, themed learning communities by 2005. The proposal, not yet approved, is a modification of a more ambitious plan, approved by the Board of Education last year, to move entirely to “small schools.” 

Negotiating the transition to small schools, each with relatively autonomous administrative structures, will be one of Christa’s chief challenges, school officials said. 

English teacher Rick Ayers said it’s important that the leadership transition doesn’t delay the reform effort. “We’re hoping there will be continuity with this process and it won’t be held up,” he said. 

Christa, who created small learning “clusters” at Newark Memorial, said she likes the concept and looks forward to getting small schools in place at Berkeley High. 

She added that communication and cooperation will be hallmarks of her administration. 

“We’re going to do everything as a team,” she said. 

Look out — there may be a fleet of Harleys in the parking lot next year.

TUESDAY, MAY 20 

Strawberry Tastings at the Berkeley Farmers Market Free strawberry samples from all of the strawberry  

growers, from 2 - 7 p.m. Sponsored by the Ecology Center. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org/farmers_mrkts/ 

Berkeley Garden Club pre- 

sents 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. Potluck 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, 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, at Bowditch. 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. 

THURSDAY, MAY 22 

Best Bike Rides in Northern California, a slide presentation with outdoor writer Ann Marie Brown, at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Bay Area Racial Justice Coalition meets at 3 p.m in the main lounge of the YWCA, 2600 Bancroft Way, at Bowditch. For more information call Ana Traylor Jefferson at 848-6370. 

FRIDAY, MAY 23 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berke- 

ley, 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 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon Series 

“One Man’s Opinion,” with William K. (Sandy) Muir, Ph.D., Prof. of Political Science, emeritus, UC Ber- 

keley. Luncheon 11:45 a.m. $11.50 - $12.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For reservations 526-2925.  

Splitting the Sky, First Nations Freedom Fighter  

will speak on his experiences with the American Indian Movement at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5-$15 sliding scale. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Tibetan Aid Project Spring Benefit Dinner Enjoy a vegetarian meal and music from 6 to 9:30 p.m. at The Brazilian Room in Tilden Park. All the proceeds are dedicated to supporting Tibetan monasteries, nunneries and schools, and to supporting the distribution of sacred texts and art vital to Tibetan culture. For reservations call 848-4238. www.tibetanaidproject.org 

SATURDAY, MAY 24 

Chocolate and Chalk Art Festival along the sidewalks of Solano Ave., Saturday and Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Register to create your own chalk art at 1561 Solano Ave. Music, pet adoptions, food, chocolate and the unfurling of Spring Art Street banners. Sponsored by the Solano Avenue Associa- 

tion. 527-5358. www.solano- 

ave.org 

Strawberry Tastings at the Berkeley Farmers Market Free samples from all of the strawberry growers, from 2 - 7 p.m. Sponsored by the Ecology Center. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

Kiddies Carnival in Diamond Park, Oakland, from noon to 6 p.m. A traditional festival celebrated around the world. Music, costumes, face-painting, potluck. All performances are by children! Free event sponsored by Epic Arts in Berkeley. 644-2204. 

Winged Migration, a documentary by Jacques Perrin, on bird migration through forty countries, with presentations by Wildcare and The International Bird Rescue Research Center at 7 p.m. at the Albany Twin, 1115 Solano Ave. Tickets are $9. 843-3456. 

Outdoor Screening and Party for “Bum’s Paradise,” a  

documentary by Thomas McCabe about the Albany Bulb. Movie, djs, and bonfire at sundown at the Albany Landfill Amphitheater, out in the SF Bay at the end of Buchanan St. off of I-80. Rain date the following evening or evenings until it happens. www.nonchalance. 

org, 595-4626. 

Butterfly Blooms Tour  

Tour the Butterfly Garden, see what is in bloom and learn how you can help local butterflies, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. 525-2233. tnarea@ebparks.org. 

Making Room for Butterflies and Songbirds Come learn how the presence of butterflies and songbirds protects human health and enriches experience, and what is re- 

quired to re-establish and extend useful habitat for songbirds and butterflies. Led by Alan Hopkins, who has studied birds and their behavior and use of habitat and Barbara Deutsch, who studied birds and butterflies during the 15 years she spent making a refuge for them around a local pathway. From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $10 members, $15 others, no one turned away for lack of funds. For information call 548-2220 ext. 233. 

Fire Suppression Class offered by the City of Berkeley’s Emergency Operations Center, from 1 to 5 p.m. at 997 Cedar St. For more information call 981-5605. TDD: 981-5799. 

SUNDAY, MAY 25 

Chocolate and Chalk Art Festival along the sidewalks of Solano Ave. See listing for Sat. May 24. 

Bike Fair and Demonstration from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Permaculture Principles 

The Berkeley Eco House, a permaculture demonstration house, garden, and resource center, hosts a series of  

workshops on permaculture, green building, and sustainable lifestyle every second and last Sunday of the month, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Berkeley Eco- 

House, 1305 Hopkins, at Peralta (enter the garden gate on Peralta). Donations of $5-$20 requested and includes a vegetarian lunch. For information call 465-9439. 

Meditation, a talk with representatives of Sant Thakar Singh at 1 p.m. at the Berke- 

ley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge. 845-9648. 

MONDAY, MAY 26 

Memorial Day - City Offices Are Closed 

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

unteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

ONGOING 

Technical Assistance for Non-Profits  

A free workshop series hosted by Alameda County Su- 

pervisor Keith Carson, to be held at the Alameda County Conference Center, at 125 12th St., Oakland. The first meeting will be May 29, on Public Relations and Media Training. For information or to register, please call Breonna Cole at 272-6060.  

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. 

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. in the West berkeley Senior Center. 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.

The death of Berkeley resident Kevin Freeman in Santa Rita Jail raises a number of questions which public agencies who had him in custody before his death must answer. 

The first questions are for Alameda County, which runs Santa Rita. The most obvious one, of course, is why Freeman, charged only with public drunkenness, was assigned to the same cell as a man who was alleged to have attacked a stranger with a knife. Is it the jail’s policy to house people charged with violent crimes with non-violent offenders, or was a mistake made? If it was a mistake, how did it happen? Was one or the other of the cell mates mischaracterized, and if so, by whom? What are the qualifications of those who evaluate the psychological state of inmates before placing them in cells? 

Then there are the questions for City of Berkeley authorities. Berkeley Police officers expressed shock at Freeman’s apparent murder, but how did he end up in jail in the first place? Alcoholism, after all, is addiction, though to a legal drug. Most experts call it a disease. So why is the City of Berkeley still locking people up in the county jail for being alcoholics? 

Do we jail middle-class alcoholics with a support network of friends and family, or is jail reserved for the poor? There was a drunken brawl in front of a fraternity house a week or so ago. Any U.C. students locked up in Santa Rita for being drunk in public in that situation? 

And how much does it cost to jail an alcoholic for 30 days anyway? When you consider the salaries of prison guards, police officers and judges, not to mention the cost of building jails, it’s bound to add up to a pretty penny. Could the judge who sentenced Kevin Freeman to 30 days in Santa Rita have required the city to spend the same amount of money on medical detoxification for him instead? 

In the wake of Freeman’s death, social service agencies have once again called for the establishment of a local detox center. State Proposition 36 mandated a treatment option for people addicted to illegal drugs, but it doesn’t cover victims of alcohol, the heavily advertised legal drug. 

There is a widespread public perception that it’s a good idea to get people like Kevin off the street and out of sight by any means necessary. Gavin Newsom, a rich kid who has probably seen friends drunk in public, is making a run for mayor in San Francisco on the backs of unfortunates who can’t lick their alcoholism and other problems. His allies in the San Francisco hotel industry have even floated a billboard campaign against giving money to panhandlers. Their Care not Cash proposal, passed by San Francisco voters but recently overturned by a judge, would substitute shelter vouchers for food and rent money, with the excuse that sometimes checks are spent on alcohol. It takes more than a bed for the night to beat alcohol addiction, unfortunately. 

We tried a voucher program here in Berkeley a few years ago, probably after Kevin Freeman was already addicted, already on the street. It didn’t work, for him or for anyone else in his condition, and it won’t work in San Francisco either. 

Sick people like Kevin need treatment, not punishment. And even if punishment is all we offer them in Berkeley, it’s particularly outrageous that the criminal negligence of the management of Santa Rita has turned Kevin Freeman’s misdemeanor drunkenness into a death penalty crime. 

— Becky O’Malley, executive editor 

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 

Youth Poetry Slam and Jazz with students from Berkeley Alternative High School and the Ben Saxe Quintet from Berkeley High, at 7 p.m. at The Jazz House. Students free, adults $3. 649-8744. www.sfsound.org/acme.html 

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 

Live Oak Concert, with Marvin Sanders, flute, David Cheng, violin, Marta Tobey, viola, Paul Rhodes, cello, perform Quartets for Flute and Strings by Mozart and Haydn, at 7:30 p.m., at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Tickets are $10-$15 sliding scale. 644-6893. 

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 per- 

formed by students age nine to 14, at 7 p.m. at the 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 

Fred Wilson: “Aftermath,” guided tour of the installation at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way, at 12:15 p.m. Free for members, UC students, faculty and staff, $5 seniors and disabled, $8 adults. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

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 

Live Oak Concert, with Matthew Owens, cello, performing original compositions, at 7:30 p.m., at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Tickets are $10-$15 sliding scale. 644-6893. 

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 

FRIDAY, MAY 23 

FILM 

Nicholas Ray: “Born to Be Bad” at 7:30 p.m. and “Flying Leathernecks” at 9:25 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 

The 10th Annual Poetry Reading, co-sponsored by Berkeley High School’s English Language Learners’ Department and Berkeley Public Library, will be held at 7 p.m. in the Central Library Reading Room, 2090 Kittredge St. Only program audience members will be permitted entrance to the building, which occurs outside the Library’s usual hours. For information call 981-6139. 

Mat Johnson discusses gentrification and urban blight in “Hunting in Harlem,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Elaine Pagels reads from “Beyond Belief,” about the origins of Christianity, at 7:30 p.m. at the First Congrega- 

tional Church, 2345 Chan- 

ning Way. Tickets are $10 at the door, no one turned away for lack of funds. For information 848-3696 or Cody’s Books, 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Literary Friends discusses “Mothers in Nature,” at 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. For information call 232-1351. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Carnival, Carnival at Ashkenaz, featuring Singing Sandra, Pandeiros do Brasil, and steel pans from Trinidad and Tobago, at 9:30 p.m. at Ash- 

kenez. Cost is $15. 525-5054.  www.ashkenaz.com 

Latcho Drom, the story in music of the migration of the Roma people from Northern India to Europe at 8 p.m. at the Long Haul, a reading room, library and community center in South Berkeley, 3124 Shattuck Ave. Wheelchair accessible. All events are free. 540-0751. www.thelonghaul.org  

Live Oak Concert, with the Cypress String Quartet, at 7:30 p.m., at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Tickets are $10-$15 sliding scale. 644-6893. 

MLK Middle School Chamber Ensemble will perform at 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst St. 981-5190. 

Mystic Roots, Reorchestra, and Flowtilla perform Reggae Hip Hop, Funk and Jazz Funk at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Juanita Ulloa and Mariachi Picante, a concert of old and new Latin American huapangos, boleros and valses, at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $14 in advan- 

ce, $16 at the door. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Anthony Jeffries and his All Stars, blues band at 8:30 p.m. at Rountree’s, 2618 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $10, ladies free until 9 p.m. 663-0440. 

Alphabet Soup, with saxophonist Kenny Brooks, pianist Dred Scott, rapper Chris Burger and drummer Jay Lane, performs at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $10-$15 sliding scale. 649-8744. sfsound.org/acme.html 

Heavenly States, The Cables, Bill Holdens at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. 

Som’ma, Persian art music 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 

Thought Riot, Scissorhands, D.O.R.K., Beneath My Dreams 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. 

SATURDAY, MAY 24 

CHILDREN 

Dance Jammies, a multi-generational event presented by Orches, a non-profit dance/ 

art organization, from 6 to 9:30 p.m. at 2525 8th St. Reservations advised. 832-3835. orches@earthlink.net 

Eoin Colfer returns to delight readers young and old with the third adventure of Artemis Fowl in “The Eternity Code,” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

“One Dog Canoe,” a summer vacation story at 11 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

FILM 

Nicholas Ray: “In a Lonely Place” at 4:30 and 9 p.m. and “Knock on Any Door” at 7 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 

Turning Corners, a sign language-interpreted curator’s talk on a major exhibition of risk-taking art at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. Cost is $5-$8. 642-5249. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Rhythm and Muse features Asante and Chaos. Open mic 

sign-up at 6:30 p.m., reading at 7 p.m. Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St., between 

Eunice & Rose Sts. Admission free. Piano and 2 mics available. 527-9753 or 569-5364. 

Huston Smith discusses “Buddhism: A Concise In- 

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

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Benefit Concert Feel the Beat! Drumming up support for music in schools with a concert featuring O-Maya, Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir, the Big Belly Blues Band, the Berkeley High School Afro-Hai- 

tian Dance Troupe, members of the Jazz Ensemble, and more. At the Berkeley Community Theater, Allston Way, at 7 p.m. Join us for BBQ and pre-concert entertainment at 5 p.m. in the courtyard. For tickets or donations call 644-8831. 

Trinity Chamber Concerts 

The Chamberlain String Quartet, with Michael Yokas and Sharon Hendee, violins; Darcy Rindt, viola and Michael Graham ‘cello perform the music of Beetho- 

van, Shostakovich and Wolf’s Italian Seranade at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Suggested donation of $12 general, $8 students, seniors or disabled. 549-3864. 

Michael Henderson with Norman Connors and the Starship Orchestra, perform at 8 and 10 p.m. at Rountree’s, 2618 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $25. 663-0440. 

Hyim and the Fat Foakland Orchestra urban sound combining Pop, Afro-Cuban, Folk, Hip-Hop, Reggae, Jazz, and World Beat, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $10-$25 sliding scale. 649-8744. sfsound.org/acme.html 

Steve Lucky and the Rhumba Bums with Ms. Carmen Getit, an evening of East Coast Swing and Lindy Hop at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054.  www.ashkenaz.com 

The Rich McCully Band and  

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

Sterling Dervish, Stranger Things, and Alexis Harte perform Rock at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $5. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

San Francisco Klezmer Experience, Jewish music ensemble 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 

Fito Reynoso’s Ritmo y Armonia, an evening of non-stop dancing at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $14 in advance, $16 at the door. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Planes Mistaken for Stars, Black Eyes, Love Me De- 

stroyer, Mach Tiver 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. 

Crystal Singing Bowls Concert, performed by Kathleen Farrell, Chuck Cunningham and Jack Maranian at 7 p.m. at the Art of Living Center, 2905 Shattuck Ave., near Ashby. Cost is $10. 848-3736.  

SUNDAY, MAY 25 

CHILDREN 

Sun and Moon Ensemble presents “Enchanted Forest,” with theatre, dance, masked characters, giant puppets, and live music, at 2 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10 adults, $5 children, available from 925-798-1300.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Fresh Ink Poetry Group reading with poets Rita Bogaert, Madeline Lacques-Aranda, Barbara Minton, Charles Polly, Sue Prince, June Stoddart, and David White, at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. $2 donation. 845-7852. www.codys 

books.com, www.poetryflash.org 

FILM 

Nicholas Ray: “Johnny Guitar” at 5:30 p.m., “The Lusty Men” at 7:40 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 

Michel Taddei and Friends in a double bass recital at 4 p.m. at the Crowden Music Center, 1475 Rose St. Cost is $15 adults, $8 children. Proceeds to benefit Crowden School. 559-6910. www.thecrowdenschool.org 

2 on 2: BBoy/GGirl Battle, a fast-paced contest with cash prizes, at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Berkeley Youth Orchestra, conducted by Ann Krinitsky, performs Rossini, Mozart, Corelli, Offenbach and more at 4 p.m. at the Laney Col- 

lege Theater in Oakland. Tickets are $5 at the door. For more information call 525-8484. www.byoweb.org 

MONDAY, MAY 26 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Shirley Kaufman at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. $2 donation. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com, www.poetryflash.org 

AT THE THEATER 

Berkeley Repertory Theater 

“The Guys,” by Anne Nelson directed by Robert Egan. An exploration of loss and redemption in the of 9/11. May 21 – July 5, Tues. - Sun., call for starting times. Tickets are $10-$54. The Roda Theater, 2016 Addison St. 647-2918. 647-2949. 888-4BRTTIX. www.berkeley 

rep.org 

Berkeley Repertory Theater 

“Surface Transit” 

Written and performed by Sarah Jones, directed by Tony Taccone. African American poet and spoken word performer, Jones weaves political humor into a collection of monologues detailing lives of eight New Yorkers. Extended until June 1. Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. 647-2949, (888) 4BRTTIX. www.berkeley- 

rep.org 

Transparent Theater 

Virginia Woolf's “Night and Day,” a world premiere stage adaptation by Tom Clyde, concerning the loves and careers of a group of young people in London in 1910. Directed by Tom Clyde. May 9 - June 8, Thurs. - Sat., 8 p.m. Tickets are $20. Sun., 7 p.m. pay what you can. 1901 Ashby Ave. 883-0305. www.transparenttheater.org 

Shotgun Players presents 

“under milk wood” a play for voices by Dylan Thomas, exploring the characters in a fishing town in Wales. At Eighth Street Studio, 2525 8th St., May 24 through June 22, Thurs. - Sat. 8 p.m., Sun 7 p.m. No performance May 25. Tickets are $18 adults, $12 children and seniors, $10 on Thursdays. 704-8210. www.shotgunplayers.org 

The Berkeley Daily Planet accepts listings for both the Arts Calendar and the Berkeley This Week Calendar. Listings should be sent to calendar@berkeleydailyplanet.com, or by fax to 841-5695. Events are printed on a space available basis. For information call 841-5600, ext. 102.

The accused murderer of a jailed Berkeley man had attacked two of his previous cellmates in recent weeks, according to a newly released Alameda County Sheriff’s report. 

Ryan Lee Raper, 20, was arraigned last Friday on charges of murdering Kevin Lee Freeman, a longtime Berkeley transient, in Santa Rita jail. The murder has raised questions about Santa Rita Jail’s inmate classification and housing policy. Freeman, who at the time of his death was serving a 30-day sentence for public drunkenness, was a homeless alcoholic who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. According to court records he had no history of violent behavior. 

At the arraignment, Pleasanton Superior Court Judge Hugh Walker ordered the release of the report. Raper, who is being held without bail, is expected to enter a plea on Wednesday. 

According to the sheriff’s report, Raper, who was jailed on March 2, had attacked two previous cellmates before the fatal attack on Freeman, who was 55. In one of those attacks, he is suspected of pulling his cellmate out of his bunk in the middle of the night and threatening to break his leg. Neither of the victims pressed charges. Raper, who was arrested on charges of assault with a deadly weapon, was also caught stockpiling his medication.  

Raper is accused of killing Freeman in their two-man jail cell early on Friday May 9, a day after the two were assigned to the same cell. According to the report, Raper called sheriff’s deputies on the cell’s intercom system around 3 a.m. and said, “It’s done.” The guard asked if there was an emergency in the cell and Raper repeated, “It’s done.”  

When deputies arrived at the cell they found Freeman wrapped in bedding and face down on the cell floor. Raper lay in the cell’s upper bunk with a blood-soaked bed sheet wrapped around his waist. His face, hands and legs were also covered with blood, according to the report.  

Freeman was pronounced dead in the cell after paramedics tried to revive him. The Alameda County Coroner later determined that Freeman died of a skull fracture and severe trauma to his upper torso.  

As Raper was being taken to an isolation holding area, he said, “Man, the dude jumped off the top bunk at me and we got into it,” according to the report.  

Freeman’s friends and homeless advocates said they remain baffled as to how Raper, who had a series of recent violent offenses, was assigned to the same cell as a man who was not known to be violent. 

Alameda County Sheriff’s Spokesman Lt. Jim Knudsen did not return calls from the Daily Planet on Monday regarding Santa Rita’s cell assignment policies.  

Contacted in Pennsylvania by telephone, Freeman’s brother, Terry Freeman, said he is following the case closely.  

“I’ve been in contact with the district attorney’s office and I’m planning a trip out there,” he said. “I’m going to make sure this case will not go away.” 

Terry Freeman said his brother moved to California around 1971. He was born in Indiana and the family later moved to Pennsylvania where Kevin Freeman attended Trinity High School and later LaSalle and Temple universities.  

“He was an extremely smart person. He was a championship swimmer, boy scout and an all-American kid,” Freeman said. He added that his brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia in his early 20s. 

Deborah Tatto, who works for UC Berkeley at an office at 2481 Hearst St., said she started a street memorial on Friday in honor of Freeman. The memorial is located in front of a vacant store on Euclid Street near Hearst where Freeman would often hang out. She said Freeman has slept in the doorway of the building she works in for years.  

“He was very nice, never mean spirited or belligerent,” she said. “He never said anything to anybody, no asking anyone for anything, he’d put a cup out and that’s it.” 

Freeman is survived by two daughters, his mother and two brothers.  

URBAN INTRUDER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thank you for John Kenyon’s thoughtful ruminations (May 16-18 edition) on the project proposed for University Avenue at Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. It is worth reflecting on some of the reasons why this project is, to use Mr. Kenyon’s phrase, an “urban intruder.” Developers like Patrick Kennedy know what so many Berkeley residents either have not noticed or have tacitly given in to: city officials’ profound and enduring failure to establish and follow public policy, evolving it accountably, through due process, as needed. 

City officials, elected and appointed, routinely ignore the General Plan. Neither state law nor Berkeley’s citizens require this charter city to follow any public policy for land use. The General Plan population density guidelines for this project’s location is 40 units per acre; Kennedy proposes nearly 200 — five times the foreseen density!  

Whose vision is the city realizing? If it’s to be the public’s, Berkeley needs to make its zoning ordinance and General Plan consistent. 

City officials utterly disregard the University Avenue Strategic Plan, officially adopted in 1996. The city has yet to implement it, conveniently missing the obvious opportunity in 1999 when the zoning ordinance was overhauled. That area land-use plan called for a three-story maximum along University Avenue, with a four-story maximum at commercial “nodes” (with room for greater height stories downtown). This project, as with the Kennedy project down the avenue at Acton Street, is an inappropriate five stories. 

We can count our blessings that the project might offer visual architectural merits, for the city’s own zoning ordinance requiring guidelines, against which its Design Review Committee must judge projects, also lies forgotten. Only the downtown area has such guidelines, leaving the public with no informed basis on which to interact with the DRC’s process for most projects in Berkeley. 

And while residents’ local officials are assisting such developers with stepping over or around municipal land-use plans and ordinances, as well as rolling over state environmental protection laws, readers can rest assured that developers’ bottom lines are being helped by millions in generous public tax and bond dollars, without adequate citizen input. 

Howie Muir 

• 

KEEP NEWS OBJECTIVE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Why bother having an Opinion and Letters section of your paper when the articles themselves are loaded with opinion? Maybe I missed a headline in the on-line version of the May 16 edition, but John Kenyon’s “article” about the proposed development on Martin Luther King, Jr. Way and University was not a news article, but clearly an opinion piece. 

Maybe I’m too idealistic, but I believe news reporting should present an objective recounting of basic facts — who, what, where, why and when. If Mr. Kenyon wants to be an architecture-planning-sociological critic, then please present his work as such. Frankly, after reading his article, I have no idea what is truly being proposed for the site other than the fact that Mr. Kenyon doesn’t like it. 

Gregory S. Murphy 

Editors’ Note: John Kenyon is a well-known Bay Area urban design critic who has written for the East Bay Express and other publications. The Planet assumed his byline would be familiar to readers. 

• 

WASTEFUL BUREAUCRACY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It is ironic that rent board commissioner Chris Kavanagh argues to increase landlord fees based on inflation rates in the Bay Area. He and his fellow commissioners of excessive regulation and economic waste have, for years, opposed rent increases based on similar indexes. 

The facts regarding the rent board are simple. This group of self-aggrandizing bureaucrats has reduced and damaged the rental housing stock, inspired and supported a system of legalized extortion, usurped the rights of individuals to negotiate agreements and wasted 20-plus million dollars of citizens’ money on a counter-productive and profoundly unjust system. 

Most profoundly, the abuse of common sense and basic fairness perpetrated by this self-righteous and self-deluded group has polarized our community and undermines a basic trust in the legitimacy of local government.  

Reason and wisdom would abolish this wasteful bureaucracy and use collected landlord fees for a general housing fund to build housing and provide subsidies for those who truly need it. Such a common sense approach would compel Kavanagh and his kind to actually be creative and inventive rather than engage in their usual ritual of whining and wasting public money.  

John Koenigshofer 

• 

REASSESS BANNERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Why is it that when budget-cutting time rolls around and services for the poor are getting the ax, one can still see silly banners flying from light poles all over town? How can someone make a serious argument that banners are more important than the Jobs Consortium, or the other groups which are in danger of losing funding? 

Considering the costs of making and maintaining banners, and the costs of putting them up, taking them down and changing them seasonally, the obvious message they send is that when it comes to superficial business boosting, Berkeley has money to burn. 

Carol Denney 

• 

FINANCIAL FIASCO 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

When are Berkeley Unified School District’s excuses for poor fiscal management going to end? For example, the food service director, making a whopping $95,000, lost $800,000 during 2001-2002 and $650,000 this year, 2002-2003. The food service director and this director’s administrative bodyguard superintendent blamed the previous food service manager for the loss last year. (When, in fact, the previous manager left the district with an $800,000 surplus.) Now that the current director has been in place for nearly two years — what’s the excuse this year? 

When is the BUSD community going to wake up and realize that: 

1 — BUSD has made poor hiring recommendations, and 

2 — The current food service financial fiasco supports this idea. 

What is the Berkeley community getting for their hard-earned property taxes? Nothing but excuses, excuses and more excuses, which are boring and not very creative anymore. 

Rick Fuller 

Antioch 

• 

GRIEVOUS HARM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have been following the story on the Doyle House with more than passing interest. 

A college education called me to Berkeley from a small town in Idaho in 1942. In those days, Berkeley was a tranquil place, graced with lovely old homes and gardens. 

The following year I was called to serve in the European Theater of Operations during World War II. 

When I returned to Berkeley to complete my studies in 1946, I was struck by the presence of so-called wartime housing ... multiple units of simple design, displayed cracker-box style, while displacing elderly, dignified single-family homes. 

With college completed, I returned to France to wed my wife. Following a period of employment in Paris, I brought her and our little son to Berkeley and found work in San Francisco. 

Shortly after our arrival in 1951, I leased the second floor of the Doyle House from a friend, Frances Doyle Murphy, the Doyle family daughter, for a term of three years. 

Mrs. Murphy’s niece and her family occupied the first floor, except for the Darling Flower Shop and its kindly owner, Ray Touriel, with space facing University Avenue. 

Our second child was born in the house. 

By 1969, beset by the congestion caused by multiple-unit housing around us, we left our home on Benvenue in Berkeley for the more pleasant neighborhood of another city. 

I recently learned of the peril confronting the Doyle House and note from your latest article that its demolition is imminent. 

Aside from my personal attachment to the house and its architectural features, many others have felt strongly that it should be preserved. 

There is a potential owner for this historic home with a site to which it can be removed. While the formalities of such a move have apparently all been completed, it is now discovered that a 20-day notice of removal must be published to accomplish its salvation, but there is not sufficient time to do so before demolition is scheduled to begin. 

Given the amount of time the possibility of a move has been under consideration, how could this requirement have been overlooked? 

Must the continued existence of such a noble old house be condemned for what seems to be a flimsy technicality at best? Your newspaper has certainly provided sufficient notice of such a possibility. 

How sad, that in the space of a half-century or so, we have lost our concern for these magnificent dwellings of the past, as well as our respect for those who created the very environment which Berkeley enjoys. 

Our desire to intensify land usage and increase return on investment has grievously harmed the Berkeley of old. 

This has neither served the betterment of the community nor its needs. Rather, it has served the interests, public and private, of those intent upon the pursuit of the almighty dollar to the detriment of the character and soul of the city. 

Berkeley was a delightful place in 1942. Where has that Berkeley gone? Where is the present Berkeley going? Is it progressing? I think not. 

Allen F. McDonald 

Oakland 

Negotiations between a second school union and the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) collapsed Thursday in a dispute over health care coverage. Talks with another union had stalled the week before. 

The two unions, representing about 500 school district employees, from secretaries to bus drivers, have both declared a formal impasse in negotiations. If the state’s Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) rules that contract talks have indeed reached a standstill, it will assign state mediators to intervene. A PERB decision on one of the two impasse declarations is expected by the end of the week. 

Union officials said the chief sticking point in negotiations is the district’s attempt to place a cap on health care costs, freezing its annual expenditure for each employee at $9,200, and passing the cost of rising premiums to workers. 

District officials say the move is necessary given that the schools face a $4 million to $8 million budget shortfall and health care costs are projected to rise 20 percent next year.  

“We’re trying to contain costs — not just in health and welfare, but across the board,” said Eric Smith, district associate superintendent for business and operations. District officials said they were disappointed by the unions’ decisions to declare an impasse, but union officials said they had no choice. 

“We had a situation where we kept getting back the same proposals, which were unacceptable,” said Ann Graybeal, president of the Berkeley Council of Classified Employees (BCCE), American Federation of Teachers, Local 6192, which represents about 330 teachers’ aides, library technicians, secretaries and accountants, among others. 

Graybeal said her union, which declared an impasse May 8, is not yet ready for a strike. 

“I don’t think any of us would use that word at this point,” she said. “There’s still a lot of work to be done.” 

Stationary Engineers, Local 39, which represents 160 bus drivers, custodians, food service workers, maintenance workers and safety officers, declared an impasse Thursday. Both Local 39 and BCCE have been operating without a contract since July 2002. 

Local 39 and BCCE members currently get full dental and health care plans, paying nothing for visits to the doctor and $1 for prescriptions. If the district has its way, employees would face co-payments of $10 to $20 for doctors’ visits or prescriptions next year, according to officials. 

“It’s a huge takeaway,” said Stephanie Allan, business representative for Local 39. 

Samuel Scott, Jr., a general maintenance worker who serves on the Local 39 bargaining team, said his health care plan currently covers two children and a fiancee with chronic back problems who goes to therapy three times a week. If co-payments jumped to $10 per visit, he said, he would spend at least $120 per month on health care costs. 

“I have three people to provide for and $120 per month would hurt,” he said. 

Union officials say they are also concerned about proposals to cut back on some employees’ hours and eliminate an incentive clause in the last contract which provides four days’ pay to any employee who doesn’t take a sick day during the year. 

“They proposed all kinds of takebacks which were effectively cuts in income,” said Graybeal. 

But Tina Brier, the district’s director of classified personnel, said management offered to withdraw many of the “takebacks” for Local 39 in exchange for agreement on the health care cap, and was about to make the same offer to BCCE when that union declared an impasse. 

“They didn’t get to see all our cards because they didn’t give us the opportunity,” Brier said. 

The district is set to meet with BCCE Wednesday. The union’s chief negotiator, Richard Hemann, said he does not expect significant progress on the major stumbling blocks. 

“I doubt very much that the impasse will be resolved,” he said. 

Local 39 and BCCE have represented the district’s “classified employees” — most of its non-teaching staff — since last May, when they wrested control from another union, Local 1, through a workers’ vote. 

You don’t hear much about Howard Dean’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in the newspapers or on television, which is not surprising given the way the corporate media has been towing the government’s pro-war line. However, the Dean campaign is definitely picking up support in the East Bay and particularly in Berkeley. At a “meet-up” of 85 Dean supporters at an Oakland rally in early April, over one-third of the participants were from Berkeley. 

A physician by profession, Howard Dean is the former governor of Vermont. He came out early and vociferously against Bush’s unilateral invasion of Iraq. His speeches question why so many Democrats in Congress are going along with the administration’s policies not only on Iraq but also on tax cuts, health cuts, civil liberties, the environment and education. Dean has also been a consistent supporter of women’s reproductive rights, unlike the only other anti-war candidate, Dennis Kucinich, who has a miserable voting record with regard to a woman’s right to choose. 

As governor of Vermont, Dean acquired a reputation for courage and integrity by supporting civil unions for homosexual couples when the polls showed only 35 percent support for the bill. This stand could have cost him re-election, but it didn’t. 

Many people at the April meet-up who had heard Dean speak previously in Sacramento said they were impressed with his forceful delivery, personal presence and sincerity. They seemed convinced he could actually win the presidential election, and this conviction got them involved in the campaign. 

The Dean campaign is highly organized, totally grassroots and on-line. Almost all of the organizing is taking place on the Internet. Dean’s positions on the issues are posted on his Web site, http://www.deanforamerica.com, as are his speeches, including an abridged version of the address to the California State Democratic Convention that got so many Bay Area supporters excited about his candidacy. The Web site also enables contributions and sign-ups for local meet-ups, where people can schmooze with other Dean supporters and get involved in the campaign. 

For UC students, there is a Berkeley Students for Howard Dean organization on campus. The student contact is Adam Borelli (aborelli@uclink.berkeley.edu). People with Internet access who want to be informed about Dean organizing in the Berkeley/Albany area can subscribe to an e-mail list at http://lists.solanoave.net/listinfo.cgi/dean-bay-area-solanoave.net, which was born as a list of Berkeley and Albany residents who attended the last Dean meet-up in Oakland. 

Four liberal members of Congress have already endorsed him: Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) and Sen. Jim Jeffords (I-Vt.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). A Franklin Pierce poll published in early April showed Dean tied with John Kerry at 21 percent of likely New Hampshire voters, with the Democratic hopefuls (Lieberman, Gephardt, Hart, Edwards, Clark and Graham) all below 10 percent. 

In the coming months, you can expect more noise about Howard Dean’s platform on and off the Internet as a meaningful alternative to the policies of the Bush administration and the platforms of the Democratic Bush-wanna-bes. 

Lynn Davidson is a Berkeley resident.

Developer Patrick Kennedy demolished the Doyle House on University Avenue Monday, bringing an end to a 17-month fight over the 19th-century home of Berkeley pioneer John M. Doyle.  

Kennedy plans to build a $7 million building at the downtown site, including 35 residential units and a flower shop. 

Preservationists with the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA), who argued that the house was an important historical resource, sought to block the project but lost a court battle last month. 

In recent weeks, Mayor Tom Bates tried to broker a deal that would have moved the house a block away and saved it from the wrecking ball. Berkeley resident Ian Faircloth, who was set to take the house on his Berkeley Way property, put up $25,000 for moving costs, BAHA pledged $15,000 and Kennedy offered $10,000. But the city requires a 20-day waiting period for the permit to move a structure, and Kennedy said he couldn’t wait. 

“We want to build during the summer when the weather’s good,” said Kennedy, who aims to complete the project by August 2004. 

BAHA board member Austene Hall criticized Kennedy for the decision. 

“For want of a couple of weeks, [he will] tear down 113 years of important Berkeley history,” she said. 

The developer said he twice offered the house to BAHA — once in December 2001, when BAHA moved to sue, and again in April. Kennedy said the group should have acted when the move was still a realistic possibility. 

“Moving a house is a very complex deal that cannot be thrown together in two weeks,” he said. 

Hall said Kennedy should have conducted an environmental impact report on the project months ago, which would have thrown it into the public arena. The publicity, she said, would have generated early public interest in moving the building.

One week ago The New York Times published an astonishing article. It was the story of Jayson Blair, a rogue reporter who repeatedly lied, plagiarized and conned his way onto the front page of the country’s leading newspaper. The paper claimed that a breakdown in communication among its top editors caused them to miss a hailstorm of signals that Blair, a troubled young black reporter with a long trail of bad work, was not the right person to cover some of the year’s most important stories. The Times placed the story of Blair’s “Long Trail of Deception” on the front page above the fold and continued it inside for four full pages. That kind of space is usually reserved for superpower summits or tectonic shifts in national policies. 

The journalism community is buzzing over the bizarre Blair scandal. And race and diversity are at the center of the fingerpointing. As a black journalist who spent several years as a Times reporter, I’ve watched with disbelief as this scandal has unfolded and been used by racist commentators as a broad indictment of blacks in journalism. Supposedly, black journalists are pulling down the high standards white journalists have built up. I don’t know which is more absurd: The idea that America’s newsrooms are under siege from unqualified minority journalists because the media company executives — bamboozled by affirmative action — are determined to elevate black employees; or, the top editors of the Times claiming their management blunder was really just a failure to communicate with each other.  

I spoke with several people at the Times this week to get a sense of the mood and the thinking in their newsroom. It isn’t pretty. The mood was described as “nasty,” “angry,” “vindictive” and so forth. One reporter said, “This is not over. It’s just beginning. Someone’s going to pay for this.”  

The same reporter said many of his colleagues are betting that Gerald Boyd, the second in charge at the Times and the paper’s first black managing editor, would pay the heaviest price. Apparently Boyd is seen as Blair’s sponsor although Howell Raines, the executive editor, admitted giving his stamp of approval. Now that Raines has stumbled, Times reporters have been more open in their criticism of his autocratic management style, but Boyd is seen as the real heavy. 

Who is really responsible for the Times’ mess and how could it have happened? Few readers would have missed the flat-footed way the Times’ editors used the blowout coverage to run from their own disastrous mistakes. It’s clear that Raines, Boyd, and national desk editor Jim Roberts share the responsibility for what Times’ publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., called “a huge black eye.” But you would hardly have known it from reading the Times’ account.  

The top guys at the Times still don’t seem to understand that they have failed on two different fronts: first, by not attracting more qualified non-white journalists to diversify the Times’ newsroom and, second, by giving a young reporter with a dreadful track record bigger and bigger stories supposedly as a way of helping black journalists.  

The Times article had the top editors dodging behind talk of not being fully briefed on Blair’s track record or thinking that he had suddenly reformed enough to be put on the Washington sniper case. Sulzberger, whose family has controlled the paper for more than a century, summed up the editorial posture by warning against placing blame on Raines and his deputies. “The person who did this is Jayson Blair,” Sulzberger said in the Times’ own account. “Let’s not begin to demonize our executives…” 

That must have been the mantra when the editors brought the full weight of the most powerful paper in the country down on this 27-year-old cub reporter who, they imply, has a drinking problem. The Times went to great lengths to crush Blair by describing him as a “study in carelessness” whose sloppiness was on display in many aspects of his life, including his clothing and his diet — Scotch and Cheez Doodles accompanied by cigarettes. 

A few days after the article, Raines held an unusual meeting of hundreds of the Times’ editorial staff where he offered a mea culpa for the Blair episode. He said that as a white man from Alabama who believes in diversity in the newsroom, he must admit that when he looks into his heart for the truth he realizes that he gave Blair one chance too many because he was black.  

What does this mean? Well, for starters, it means that Raines still does not get it. He and Boyd seem not to understand that diversity in the workplace does not mean showing black people who are bad at their jobs greater leniency than whites would get. Diversity programs at their best provide greater access to institutions and workplaces that have a history of excluding qualified minorities. And by that measure, the New York Times newsroom definitely needs to be diversified. 

Did Raines have to look into his heart to pull out another chance for this underperforming journalist because there aren’t any high-performing minority reporters out there? Some people would love to believe that that’s true. But it isn’t. Many talented minority journalists have left the Times in frustration over the years and they have gone on to success elsewhere. I met many great journalists (black and white) when I worked for the Times. And I know there are few minority journalists there who think the paper’s management gives them the same high regard or opportunities that it more commonly offers white journalists. 

The simple truth is that The New York Times has never been seriously committed to diversity in its newsroom. The Blair disaster shows that the top people don’t even understand what diversity would look like. 

Richard Hylton, a former New York Times reporter, lives in San Francisco.

The nonprofit Ecology Center doled out $2,500 to three unsuspecting Berkeley residents Friday for their recycling prowess. 

Administrators of the Cash for Trash contest rifled through the trash of 20 randomly selected Berkeleyans early Friday morning, awarding $2,000 to a West Berkeley couple and $500 to a North Berkeley senior citizen when they found no recyclable materials in their waste cans. 

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Anne Edwardson, who won the $500 prize. “I thought it was a joke.” 

Edwardson said the check will be “very welcome,” adding that she’ll spend the money on plumbing and other household needs. 

“I do recycle and I do believe in it,” she said. 

Stephanie Turner and Robert Ping, who have a new baby, according to the Ecology Center, won the $2,000 prize. 

“We want to generate excitement about recycling and kind of remind people,” said Matthew Carlstoem, contest manager for the Ecology Center. “We want to have a little fun.” 

The Alameda County Source Reduction and Recycling Board provided a total of $7,500 in prize money, which the Ecology Center hopes to award by the contest’s conclusion June 13. 

The center puts up $250 in prize money every day. If no one wins, the money rolls over to the next day. Friday was day 10 of the contest, and with no previous winners the pool had reached $2,500. 

—David Scharfenberg

Not thinking highly of the Berkeley Repertory’s new production “The Guys” is rather like not being impressed with your best friend’s new baby. It’s a touch hard to figure out exactly what you should say.  

The play came directly out of the horror of Sept. 11. In more than one way it is a direct and honest response to the chaos and agony that permeated New York in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Author Anne Nelson is a longtime reporter who teaches at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. The play is a first draft, written in nine days and never revised.  

It could almost be a transcript of her experience with a firefighter whom she helped to write eulogies for the men in his unit who died at the towers. 

The situation is heartbreaking, and still so close to our personal experience that it seemed embarrassing to feel relief that the “The Guys” is limited to four of the eight eulogies. Considering the play’s source, it’s hard to admit to a tinge of boredom. 

The substance of the play is the dialogue between the writer (Sharon Lawrence) and the fireman (Keith David) as he provides touching reminiscences of the dead men and she, in turn, writes eulogies and reads them back to him. It is far from an easy format for the actors. Each has lengthy speeches at times, and the other character little opportunity to respond. Other difficulties are inherent in the text, but both actors come through quite well. 

There is a little variation in the format when the writer comments directly to the audience about her own feelings or personal experiences. And there is a rather jarring attempt at relief from the play’s substance by some references to Argentina and the introduction of a tango between the two characters. (The rationale seems to be the fact that Nelson had to go to that country to give a lecture immediately after finishing the play). Nelson apparently expected to subject her first draft to the usual process of revision but was short-circuited by the speed with which the “The Guys” was staged.  

The play’s history would rouse envy in most fledgling playwrights. Shortly after Sept. 11, Nelson, who has no previous experience with playwriting and no particular ambition in that field, accidentally met Jim Simpson, the founder of New York’s Flea Theater. Located just seven blocks from the World Trade Center, the theater flourished before the attacks but audiences vanished in the subsequent chaos. 

Simpson, who is married to Sigourney Weaver, was vigorously looking for a play based on the tragedy. When Nelson casually told him about her work with the firefighter, he jumped at the idea. Simpson asked Nelson to turn her experience into a play, which then opened 12 weeks after the bombings. 

Aside from public interest in the material, the play’s success may have been boosted by the fact that Weaver and her friend, Bill Murray, played the writer and the firefighter. They established a pattern in which pairs of actors of similar renown rotated through the roles for short periods. Berkeley Repertory is following that same practice. The actors will include Dan Lauria, Lorraine Toussaint, Joe Spano, Linda Purls, Jimmy Smits and Wanda de Jesus.  

Another tradition which Berkeley Repertory maintains is that the actors work from open scripts. There are various explanations for that staging, but none mention that it might have something to do with the fact that the actors may not have time to completely learn their roles. 

The house manager made an announcement before the play started that the use of the scripts was to create a greater sense of reality. 

No comment.

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 

In a bid to expand Berkeley’s rental housing inspection program, the City Council on Tuesday narrowly approved a controversial new fee for rental property owners. The council vote came after a heated public hearing during which property owners said they are already overburdened with taxes and fees. They called the program flawed and the new fee unfair. 

The new $18 per unit annual fee is expected to generate almost $280,000 annually.  

By approving the new fee the council has also made available $205,000 in funds from the Community Development Block Grants that would have been used to fund housing inspections. Those Block Grant funds will instead be distributed to several nonprofits and one city agency.  

After some discussion and alterations, the council narrowly approved the new fees by a 5-4 vote. Councilmembers Margaret Breland, Betty Olds, Kriss Worthington and Gordon Wozniack voted against the fees.  

Before approving the new fees, the council expanded the plan to include single and double-unit properties. Initially the program applied to three or more units.  

According to Deputy City Manager Phil Kamlarz, expanding the program to include one and two-unit buildings will likely decrease the per-unit annual $18 fee, which comes out to $1.50 a month, although he wasn’t yet certain by how much. 

The $205,000 in grant money that is freed up by the new fee will be divided among the Housing Trust Fund, Alzheimer’s Service of the East Bay, the Center for Education of the Infant Deaf, the James Kenney Recreation Center and the West Campus Pool. 

Michael Wilson, the president of the Berkeley Property Owners Association, said the council was more interested in giving more grant money away then approving a sensible program.  

“It sounded to me like certain council member were adamant about making sure they had their (grant money) regardless of whether this program made any sense whatsoever,” he said.  

Councilmember Dona Spring, who supported the new fee, said she would rather see additional funding go to the nonprofits. “It feels like an more appropriate use of the money if it goes to the low-income community,” she said.  

But most property owners complained that the City was funding nonprofits by punishing property owners. 

“I’m tired of Berkeley landlords being sitting ducks for new and unnecessary bureaucracy,” one property owner said.  

Councilmember Gordon Wozniack, who voted against the fee, challenged the report’s conclusion that more fines will be generated by hiring a new inspector.  

Councilmember Kriss Worthington said the fee was unfair to landlords who maintain safe rental property. “I suggested we triple the penalties to landlords who violate building safety codes,” he said on Thursday. “The way it is now, more than half of the $18 fee will go to administrative paper work.” 

Property owner Susan Lucas, who owns seven rental units, said Berkeley landlords are already overburdened. She said she pays 18 percent more in property taxes than she did in 1999 and 17 percent more for refuse removal.  

Lucas demanded that the council not approve the fee. “Do not prey ceaselessly on my income. Do not presume upon my means and do not approve this cock-a-mamie fee,” she said.  

Also, after holding a brief public hearing during which there were no speakers, the council raised fees for 13 city services including ambulance users, recreation programs, permits, sewer service, refuse collection, and the Animal Care Shelter. 

It’s public hearing night and the City Council will be hearing testimony on a number of different issues including the proposed budget and city fees. 

The proposed budget  

The public will have its first opportunity to address the council on the city manager’s proposed budget, which balances a projected $4.7 million deficit by continuing a selective hiring freeze, eliminating 23 city staff positions and raising parking meter fines from $23 to $30. 

The budget also has a built-in alternate plan in case the state budget, when it’s adopted in the fall, calls for local program cuts that are deeper than expected. The alternate plan is designed to balance a budget deficit of $6.8 million, in which case the city will eliminate 29 jobs. 

In addition to the selective hiring freeze, the city manager has already restricted travel and pager and cell phone use.  

Another public hearing on the budget will be held June 17, and City Council is required by the city charter to adopt the budget on June 24. 

City fees 

The council will also hear public testimony about a proposal to increase city fees for a variety of services including recreation programs, the animal shelter and fire permit inspections.  

Perhaps the most controversial fee hike proposal is the per-unit fee for the Rental Housing Safety Program. The Housing Advisory Commission (HAC) and the city manager are recommending that landlords be charged $18 per unit to fund the program, which is designed to catch building code violations. It is estimated to cost about $330,000 a year with three full-time employees and at least five part-time employees.  

Currently the program is funded in part by the Community Development Block Grant funds and the General Fund. Both the HAC and city manager support the fee to free additional grant funding for nonprofits. 

Landlords have complained they are already overburdened by excessive Rent Board fees and higher license fees than other types of business.  

The council will also hear comment about raising recreation fees. The city manager is proposing an overall 24 percent hike in fees for programs including athletics, swimming pools and youth and family camps. Recreation fees had a cost of living increase of 4 percent in 2002.  

The city is also planning to raise its refuse rate. Currently residents pay $17.22 for the once-a-week pick-up of a 32-gallon container of refuse. The city manager is proposing a $1.22 hike to cover union labor agreements and a 1 percent increase to fund the city’s green building program.  

Even with the hike, city residents will pay less than Oakland, Richmond and El Cerrito residents who pay between $20 and $21.46 for the same services. 

Higher sewer fees are also proposed. The new rates would include a 6 percent raise for 2004, which will net approximately $13 million in new revenue, followed by a second 6 percent raise in 2005 for another $13.7 million.  

What that means for the average homeowner is an increase from $36 per month to $40.50 per month by 2005. Duplex owners will pay $65 a month in 2005 and triplex owners will pay $96 a month. 

Sewer charges pay for city sewer system maintenance, construction and administration.  

Without the increase, sewer funding would face a shortfall of $800,000 by next year. If that occurred, the city would have to reduce repairs, which could affect the city’s 30-year plan to eliminate San Francisco Bay pollution.  

There is also a proposal to increase fire safety fees from $41.50 to $53. Animal shelter boarding fees are also slated to go up. The per-day cost to board a dog, for example, will go from $10 to $15. 

School Protest Planned 

Teachers, librarians, clerks and other professionals will demonstrate in front of Berkeley Unified School District’s Administration Building Tuesday, May 20, from 3:45 to 4:15 p.m. Protesters are concerned that cuts recommended by Superintendent Michele Lawrence go beyond what is necessary to solve the budget crisis. 

More than 100 teachers received final layoff notices last week, forcing increases in class size and cuts in other programs.