Editorials

Editorial: Poll Skewers Task Force

Becky O'Malley
Friday October 03, 2003

Sorry. It will certainly look like bad taste to some if the Daily Planet allows itself a bit of a gloat over the results of the city’s likely voter survey. But we can’t resist saying, humbly but loudly if that’s possible, We Told You So. What was the first task force appointed by Mayor Bates? The one on the permitting process. And what comes in dead last on the list of voter concerns? The permitting process. And second to last: new housing, also a part of the task force’s charge. So why have almost eight months, uncounted hours of paid city staff time (and unpaid but still valuable volunteer time) been spent on (and we really hate to sound like a broken record) fixing what’s not broke? 

One problem is the constitution of the task force. The mayor, or whoever picked the list of participants on his behalf, was not bound by Berkeley’s fair representation ordinance, which requires more permanent bodies such as commissions to have members chosen by all of the city’s elected officials on a pro rata basis. If the members were answerable to City Council, who in turn are accountable to the voters, they might have a better idea of what Berkeleyans think. Instead, the majority of the members seem to have been chosen because of their connection with development interests, and two of them don’t even live in Berkeley. Anyone who knows anything about campaign finance shouldn’t be surprised by this, since it’s a cliché among those who study such things that the building industry and its allies are always big time political contributors. This is one of the perennial arguments for public financing of elections. Let’s hope Arianna’s Huffington’s Clean Money initiative has a remedy for this problem. 

Another problem with the task force is that even the best intentioned participants started out with very little knowledge of how things actually work in Berkeley. An unconscionable amount of time was spent on explaining things like the difference between a building permit and a use permit. Maybe the remedy would have been to start out with a crash course on how the permitting process actually works, with a pre-test and a post-test to make sure everyone got it. The discussion of the Landmark Preservation Ordinance was a particularly embarrassing display of pooled ignorance coupled with special interest lobbying. It might have been nice if the task forcers had at least read the ordinance before they started critiquing what they thought was in it, or if any member of the Landmarks Commission had been invited to the meeting to answer questions.  

On the other hand, even though Berkeley voters are not particularly interested in new housing per se, they placed homeless services high on their list of concerns, not far behind services for the elderly and disabled. It’s not too much of a jump to suggest that most of us would like to see people who are now homeless decently housed if possible. It’s just that we don’t think that it’s necessary to expedite the production of another thousand units of luxury student housing under the pretext of providing a very few low-income units in each big building. 

There’s one question which wasn’t asked by this survey. Would citizens support the city’s building a reasonable number of carefully targeted units directed specifically at the neediest part of the population? If it were asked, the answer would undoubtedly be yes, based on the strong affirmation by survey participants of their willingness to support services for Berkeley residents who need them. Maybe it’s time for the mayor to convene a task force on housing the homeless. 

 

Becky O’Malley is executive editor of the Daily Planet.