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So, now begins the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, as the English poet John Keats described it. Labor Day is over. Squirrels are having noisy battles in oak trees over this year’s acorn crop. The swallows are packing up to leave Capistrano. And here in Berkeley, citizens can celebrate the seasonal return of the City Council to take up their civic responsibilities—for a couple of weeks at least. Since we’re in California instead of England, we can expect the mists of August to lift somewhat in September and October. But the miasma that lately seems to hang over decision-making in Berkeley shows no signs of abating.  

This year, the Berkeley City Council has certainly been into “mellow.” They’ve been praised in suburban papers for agreeing most of the time on just about everything, and for ending meetings at the pleasant hour of 9:30, thus permitting suburban reporters to go home early. With very little fanfare, Berkeley has shifted over to “government lite.” The formerly contentious electeds are leaving much more of the business of government to the lifers, the people who stay on at City Hall year round and who know what the real city agenda is most of the time.  

What was once a four week summer recess has now almost stretched into October. This fall one of only three September meeting was cancelled so as not to interfere with a trip the mayor is planning. City staffers, not surprisingly, don’t complain. In fact, the office of the city clerk was lavishly decorated with “aloha” trappings to celebrate the Council’s July departure. 

In the six months between July and December of 2003, the City Council will have held only 11 regularly scheduled meetings, an average of fewer than two a month. One of the two meetings is devoted to public hearings and other non-action duties, so the Council typically considers “action items” only once a month these days. Even the “action items” tend to be lite: “nasty fences,” traffic circles on bicycle boulevards, etc. Major policy making takes place elsewhere, presumably, but you don’t see it much any more on cable TV at 7 on Tuesdays. Some special work sessions start at 5 p.m. on regular meeting days, where topics like “the budget” are discussed out of the glare of the public eye. Votes on such topics, by agreement, don’t usually happen at these sessions, though the published agenda carefully reserves the right for the Council to take action on any item if they choose. 

And setting the agenda in the first place is where the real decisions often take place. When Mayor Tom Bates took office, he brought a Sacramento-style decision-making process to Berkeley, featuring backstage deals instead of noisy public debates where possible. His first effort was to create an all-powerful “Rules Committee” like the one in the State Legislature (where he spent at least 25 years) which exerts tight control over what reaches the floor. Vocal objections from Councilmembers Spring on the left and Olds on the right eventually resulted in a shift to an “Agenda Committee” with less draconian powers. The Agenda Committee, nevertheless, is still a forum for off-camera wheeling and dealing. And it can be used to prevent controversial items from being discussed in public. It now might take a month or more for an item to reach the Council’s action agenda. 

Even worse, it can make it impossible to deal with urgent though non-controversial topics in a timely way. The current foolish and embarrassing dispute over hanging banners downtown to celebrate Berkeley Symphony Conductor Kent Nagano’s 25th anniversary in Berkeley is a case in point.  

There is absolutely no reason to believe that any elected policy maker in Berkeley, present or past, has ever intended to prohibit the publicly funded signposts in the downtown area from being used to pat a local non-profit arts organization on the back. And yet some constellation of ill-informed city employees has ruled that the symphony banners are verboten in Berkeley. The Planet’s story quoted Cisco DeVries, Mayor Bates’ Flack-in-Residence, repeating a bunch of faux-constitutional analysis which someone in the city attorney’s office dreamed up to support the ban. Never mind the fact that other cities like San Francisco hang signs for non-profits all the time. The University of California displays banners on city poles picturing Nobel Prize winners. The Downtown Berkeley Association, with many commercial members, hung banners advertising their Front Row Festival. And why shouldn’t they? 

This discussion has been going on since July, and it gets goofier and goofier. The Berkeley City Council is not perfect, by any means, and they do have their disagreements, but collectively they have more common sense than whatever non-elected city employees created this mess. The bottom line is that the Symphony celebration will take place on Sept. 29, regardless, but the Council will not be able to vote to approve the banners until Sept. 16, because they haven’t been around much lately. When they finally get a chance to vote on it, they’ll straighten it out, but by that time it will probably be too late to hang the banners.  

And that’s bad news for the concept of democratically elected government. These particular banners are no big deal in isolation, but the real strength of having elected citizens making timely public decisions in open meetings is that it keeps silly outcomes like this one to a minimum. 

Becky O’Malley is executive editor of the Daily Planet. She confesses to also being a non-voting member of the Berkeley Symphony’s board of advisors, and to being an inactive member of the State Bar of California. She doesn’t particularly like mass-produced banners of any kind.