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Letters to the Editor

Tuesday May 27, 2003

EMERYVILLE BOOM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I enjoyed your piece, Friday, about Emeryville and how its booming economy contrasts to stagnant Berkeley’s and declining Oakland’s. Emeryville is our local Hong Kong: an entrepreneurial enclave next to a vast Socialist dystopia, or (like North and South Korea and East and West Germany) the closest thing in economics to a controlled experiment pitting Capitalism against Socialism. 

While Emeryville sees to the goose, Berkeley and Oakland think mostly of collecting the golden eggs. And at the end of the day, look who really gets to collect more eggs. 

Ted Sternberg 

Fremont 

 

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ASTRONOMICAL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I found Randy Shaw’s letter about Patrick Kennedy’s project at University and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way (Planet, May 23-26 edition) very amusing. He refers to the question of “why Mr. Kennedy is increasingly the only individual willing to take on such projects.” I’ll bet the fact that Mr. Kennedy has figured out how to get “nonprofit” money (while profiting egregiously) might factor into Mr. Kennedy’s enthusiasm for transforming Berkeley. 

He received $15.3 million in state money for the Gaia building, which has been covered in plastic and scaffolding for five months now, and is nonetheless advertising minute apartments for $2,175 to $3,075 per month. In addition he got $18 million for the Fine Arts Building, $6.2 million to turn the Doyle House into splinters, $9.8 million for the Bachenheimer Building, $10.4 million for Acton Courtyard and a mere $4 million for the ARTech (I believe that’s about $1 million per “low-income” unit). These astronomical figures are available for all to confirm at the following Web site: http://www.abag.ca.gov/services/finance/fan/fanlist.htm. 

C. Osborn 

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RENT BOARD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

To briefly respond to John Koenigshofer’s May 20 letter (“Wasteful Bureaucracy”) assailing the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board and its policies: it is worth reiterating that all nine Rent Board commissioners were democratically elected by Berkeley’s voters. 

Rather than launching ad hominin attacks against commissioners (“self-aggrandizing,” “self-righteous,” etc.), if Mr. Koenigshofer is genuinely displeased with current policies, I would suggest instead that he invest his energy in actively campaigning to elect commissioners who reflect his political views. 

With respect to Mr. Koenigshofer’s claim that the Rent Board has “for years, opposed rent increases,” if one looks at the years 1990 to 1994 — when a real estate industry-backed majority controlled the Rent Board — Berkeley rent levels increased by 45 percent across the board citywide during that four-year period. 

After 1994, when an affordable housing majority slate was elected, the Rent Board has maintained reasonable, moderate rent increases through the required Annual General Adjustment (AGA) process. 

The AGA process allows Berkeley’s annual citywide rent increase (each January) to reflect more than a dozen separate owner operating expenses, including rental property-related costs that decrease or remain flat. 

Chris Kavanagh 

 

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TOPPLE BUSH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Building on the recent letter from George Palen, let me suggest that big things come from small starts. Folks everywhere are searching for little ways to make a difference. Here’s a simple tip for spreading awareness that the phony Bush stature (or is it statue?) can be brought down to its rightful size. 

On every letter, especially when paying bills by post, write “Topple Bush” large and in color across the front of the letter. Since the farcical “fall of Baghdad,” it’s a metaphor that quickly resonates. With every letter, you immediately reach at least three readers: the letter sorter, the letter carrier and the one who opens the envelope. Think of the possibilities if 10,000, 100,000 or a million people or more join the effort. Pass it on. 

Jerry Holl 

 

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EXORBITANT SALARIES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

What should we pay school administrators? The Planet (May 6-8 edition) reports that teachers are questioning administrative salaries that are three or more times those of the teachers, while Dennis Myers of the Association of California School Administrators defends the salaries as being low in comparison to that of corporate CEOs. 

From Myers’ comment one might think that salaries are related to the responsibility and value of the employee, but anyone who has ever looked at a proxy can see that executive salaries are not set in this manner. The critical assumption in the determination of relative compensations is that there are a very limited number of people who can successfully run a company, but there are lots of people who have the skills for the other jobs. Company “A” states that to attract/retain its valued executive it is setting CEO salary above the median paid to CEOs of “comparable” companies. This raises the median, and sparks comparable raises in company A’s competitors. The result is that CEO salaries have risen far faster than the salaries of other employees. 

Is this a successful strategy? It didn’t stop Enron’s stock from dropping from $80 a share to 8 cents a share. Do we really need high-paid administrators? Superintendent Lawrence evidently feels we can forgo $300,000 worth of associate superintendents (two are departing). Non-essential, but worth three teachers apiece. 

The truly pernicious effect of this strategy is that it devalues any other kind of work. If you are a teacher, Kenneth Lay is worth 1,000 of you, so why are you even alive? Why be a school administrator if you can earn 10 times more in business? Why be a teacher, if you can make three times more as an administrator? When I was a high school student I had a truly wonderful teacher one year. The next year he got a higher paying office job in the school, where as best I could tell, he was fairly mediocre. 

When all is said and done, it is the teachers who teach our children. Having great administrators is not going to help us if we can’t pay our teachers. Berkeley cannot isolate itself from the rest of the country, but we can try to moderate some of its worst excesses. If you own stock, vote against excessive CEO salaries. If you have kids, let the school board know that, given the fixed or shrinking budget, you want more money for teachers, and less for administration. 

Robert Clear  

Barbara Judd 

 

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KEEP LIBRARIES OPEN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The following letter was addressed to Mayor Tom Bates and City Councilmember Dona Spring: 

Your decisions can keep Berkeley’s public libraries serving hundreds of people in our town and from surrounding communities. You have a vital role keeping our city’s public libraries open. You have the power to continue employing library workers. 

It is a known fact that public school libraries do not provide adequate reference materials for their student population. Yet students must excel in order to enter college. College is a daily image in every high school student’s mind because of the presence and reputation of the University of California in our town. 

The majority of our public citizens do not have access to the book stacks at the university libraries.  Paid membership is required to enter the book stacks, to use non-circulating materials and to check out books. 

Our public city libraries serve as the equalizer of access to education. City libraries house mainly books. And books house the whole wide world for every child, teenager and adult who decides to open a book. 

  Keep Berkeley’s public libraries open. Let us all have equal access to the world through books. 

Norine Shima 

 

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CATERPILLARS 

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 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 they can become gorgeous butterflies. 

Ruth Bird 

 

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SEARCH FOR TRUTH 

Editors, Daily Planet; 

One of the big myseries of the war in Iraq is why did Saddam Hussein disappear without using any of his vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction? 

One possible explanation is that the stockpile never did exist — except in the fertile imagination of President Bush. 

But anyone who believes that would also believe that our political leaders would lie just to be able to steal a few million barrels of oil. 

Marion Syrek 

Oakland 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In all of the gallons of crocodile tears and printer’s ink expended over the “historic” Doyle House, you forgot to tell your readers that three reputable architectural historians testified that the building did not 

possess outstanding architectural or historical merit. I and every other architectural historian that I know would concur. In a word, my reaction to the house and its alleged history was “Huh?” 

Despite that professional testimony, the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association’s board of directors chose to sue the city. I’d like to know on what basis the directors make such decisions other than sentimentality masking a desire to checkmate developer Patrick Kennedy. How much did litigation cost BAHA and the taxpayers of Berkeley at a time of extreme fiscal crisis, and were the members of BAHA ever polled on this use of their dues and staff resources? Not surprisingly, BAHA’s directors quickly dropped the suit when they discovered that it might entail financial consequences for themselves and the organization. 

BAHA has done a great deal of good by researching the history of Berkeley and educating the people of the Bay Area about the town’s outstanding architectural heritage. But through such nuisance suits and a specious egalitarianism about what merits city landmark status whenever a developer seeks to build, it has also damaged its own credibility and that of the Landmarks Commission. If virtually everything is a landmark, then nothing is. 

Gray Brechin