Editorials

The latest act in the seemingly ceaseless saga which is Mayor Bates’ Task Force on Permitting and Development is now underway. A “Discussion Draft” of a final report has been posted on the web, and the first of two discussions of it took place last Friday, with a second scheduled for next Friday. Participants included original task force members, selected by the mayor with heavy weighting toward developers, and self-selected residents who regularly attend the group’s meetings.  

These residents are not shy. They comment vocally whenever they’re allowed to by the chair, realtor Laurie Capitelli. Some of them—unsolicited—have contributed long, densely reasoned position papers to the task force’s web site. The most tenacious of the resident commentators, Sharon Hudson, whose rented apartment is very close to the American Baptist Seminary mega-expansion site on the Southside, spoke up last Friday about the elephant in the middle of the living room. 

Many residents (particularly Flatlands residents, who feel that their neighborhoods have big bulls-eyes painted on them in planning maps) think that the city’s Department of Planning and Development is entirely too chummy with developers. This perception has been raised frequently in the task force meetings, both by the peanut gallery of residents and occasionally by task force members. For example, Jean Safir, a veteran professional planner in other cities, said she thought that Berkeley’s practice of having a staff planner present a developer’s proposal before City Council was unusual and inappropriate.  

Nonetheless, the draft final report’s introductory chapters, which were prepared by the mayor’s staff, did not even mention this very widespread perception, let alone speculate about whether it could possibly be true. It is fashionable in professional planning circles to dismiss resident concerns as NIMBYism or paranoia. But there’s ample justification for citizens to worry about whether Berkeley’s paid planners think of themselves as regulators of development or advocates for developers. 

This problem was emphasized for me recently when I heard from a friend who has been active in promoting affordable housing in Santa Barbara, where she lives. She attended some sessions at the American Planning Association meeting which took place there in late September, among them a panel discussion about development in Berkeley. 

The presenters included City of Berkeley staff members Wendy Cosin, Mark Rhoades, and Tim Stroshane, joined by two developers, Kevin Zwick from Affordable Housing Associates and Patrick Kennedy from Panoramic Interests. What she heard shocked her and some of the other audience members, she told me. She was particularly surprised by Kennedy’s role in the presentation because, she said, “he had nasty things to say about Berkeley at every opportunity.” She commented that “I found him appalling in his expression of hatred for the city and the people who live there.”  

Since she’d taped the discussion, she sent me a copy. A rough transcription of some of the main topics has been placed on the Daily Planet’s web site, in case anyone’s interested. It’s at HTTP://www.berkeleydaily.org/transcript.html 

Nothing said will shock veterans of the Berkeley planning process. The Planet and its owners, of course, were prime targets. That’s no surprise to us, and we can take it.  

What should give task force members pause, though, is that such a discussion took place in a venue where City of Berkeley sponsorship was implied, and that citizens were attacked without being given equal time to defend their point of view. Some people might think that putting together a panel consisting only of city staff and developers was inappropriate in the first place.  

The characterization of the role of public input in the planning process at the Santa Barbara session clearly revealed the Berkeley Planning and Development Department staff’s attitudes and prejudices. Land Use Planning Manager Mark Rhoades said it most clearly: “This has been tremendously difficult in Berkeley, to try to start to change the culture about what infill development can actually do.”  

His casual remark highlights a key question for the task force: is “changing the culture” the role of city staff, or is it their job to reflect the culture and decisions of the citizenry as expressed in the general plan and elsewhere? In other words, should staff be spinning citizens? Could this be the source of the perception of bias? 

These are important questions, and the task force’s final report should not be issued until they have been fully examined. 

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