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The City Council meetings of June 17 were a nightmare. 

Despite the generally outstanding budget work of the city manager and his staff and despite earlier mayoral and council declarations of budget rectitude, fairness and council team spirit, and despite the as-yet-undetermined recommendations of the Citizens Revenue Task Force, the city’s budget discussions have now regressed into chaos and bad old ways. And, I am very sorry to say, that despite an impressive growth in leadership qualities and commitment to democratic process that emerged from the poor start of Papergate, Mayor Bates now appears to have relapsed into his bad old ways. He is behaving in an alarming, inappropriate and arrogant manner, and engaging in Sacramento-style strong-arming and ramrodding with respect to his favored agendas. 

The immediate precipitating substantive cause of the June 17 council disaster was the Berkeley library’s unprecedented request that council approve a 36 percent library assessment increase on Berkeley property owners. More about this shortly. 

With respect to democratic process, there was little in evidence at the June 17 meetings. Despite the fact that the city now has a Rules/Agenda Committee which is supposed to advance preview council items for completeness, despite the existence of a Revenue Task Force which has yet to make recommendations, and despite the city clerk’s honorable commitment to letting the sun shine on public decision making, critical budget materials were delivered at the last minute and they were not posted on the city’s Web site, even by the next morning at 11 a.m. Not only was the interested public and the press shortchanged, so were our councilmembers. How could council possibly review these complex materials in the scant hour or even minutes prior to the meeting? 

Furthermore, certain vital materials relating to the library, to which only the library director, Mayor Bates and Councilmember Linda Maio were apparently privy, were literally waved in the air during the meeting. No copies of this new document were initially available for other councilmembers, the public or the press.  

The process also broke down when the chair, that is the mayor, let his advocacy for certain ideas overwhelm his chairmanship obligations. Councilmembers were speaking out of turn, certain councilmembers were favored and others ignored, Councilmember Maio acted as unauthorized and unelected co-mayor, premature motions were made, assertions were put forth as facts and non-existent “compromises” were stated as fact by Mayor Bates. These “compromises” were simply wishful thinking. 

As a person who has attended or viewed almost every council meeting in the last four-and-a-half years, I can honestly state that this was among the most disgraceful. 

As for the Berkeley library issue, this is a complex issue that deserves a separate discussion. For now, here is my summarized version.  

The library has asked the council to approve a huge property assessment increase of marginal or no legality that would mostly fund substantial “cost-of-living” increases for library staff and substantial library services for non-Berkeley residents. There has been an unseemly and out-of-character haste by the library, as a cherished Berkeley institution, to grab all that it can even before it needs it and to stonewall council requests for information that could negatively impact its grandiose budget plans. And there has been an unseemly effort by Mayor Bates and Councilmember Maio, who support the library on this matter, to force a premature and unnecessary council vote for the whole enchilada. The city attorney and city manager have advised that the maximum legal assessment increase would be about 13 percent, and they actually recommend a much smaller amount. So we are not only dealing with unwarranted library budget increases, we are also dealing with potential taxpayer rebellion and lawsuits. 

The library budget and assessment needs to be a part of the full budget process. That is, it needs to be looked at in the context of all new tax assessments and all program needs. What I saw on the part of the library director, the mayor and Councilmember Maio was an alarming disrespect for the budget process, the city manager and his staff, other councilmembers, the press and the interested public. 

I certainly hope that this meeting was an aberration and that the mayor, council, library and other stakeholders in our city will return to the sane and thoughtful approach to our budget crisis on which I once thought they had embarked. 

Barbara Gilbert is a Berkeley resident and a frequent contributor to the Planet’s editorial pages.