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On the eve of the first (and only) scheduled City Council hearing on the proposed March parcel tax increase, a loose federation of Berkeley neighborhood associations declared their opposition to the tax. 

It is the third Berkeley community organization to do so in recent weeks. 

Meanwhile, hoping to forestall a renegotiation of the city’s labor contracts, representatives of three of the city’s major city employee unions—Local One of the Public Employees Union, Local 535 of the Service Employees International Union, and Local 1245 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers—held a Monday noontime press conference on the steps of City Hall to reveal proposed cost-cutting strategies. 

A union spokesperson says the strategies were distilled from a comprehensive budget reduction package which the three unions presented to the City Manager at the beginning of the summer, and which have been the subject of continuous negotiations with the city manager’s office since that time. 

Without corrective action, Berkeley faces an estimated $9.5 million city budget deficit in fiscal year 2005, which could rise to $19.5 million in five years. Council has structured its proposed March, 2004, parcel tax increase ballot measure to wipe out half of the projected deficit, and intends to use budget cuts to take care of the rest. 

Organized opposition from significant numbers of the city’s neighborhood groups could make passage of the parcel tax measure difficult. A city-sponsored survey of Berkeley voters taken last summer showed that support for a parcel tax increase hovered between 65 percent and 69 percent, depending on how the measure was presented to voters. A 67 percent approval vote is needed to pass the measure. 

In a Nov. 15 memo addressed to Mayor Bates, City Council, and the city manager, the Berkeley Alliance of Neighborhood Associations (BANA) wrote that it is “opposed to the proposed property tax increase ballot measure and urge you not to place this measure on the ballot at this time. We believe that a full and fair discussion of the causes and cures for the City’s financial problems has not yet been undertaken.” 

The organization added that “having just one public hearing on the tax measure and one discussion of the city labor contracts, both on very short notice, is completely unacceptable.” 

BANA urged its affiliated organizations to take similar positions on the proposed parcel tax, and the LeConte and Claremont Elmwood Neighborhood Associations previously announced opposition to the tax hike. 

In its memo, BANA cited its concern about what it called “excessive cost of the city’s labor contracts.” The alliance also suggested other “belt-tightening measures that the city can and should undertake” in lieu of a parcel tax increase, such as requiring “educational and wealthy nonprofit organizations, including UC” to “pay for the negative impacts they create and for all of the city services they use” and imposing “development impact fees” on both profit-making and nonprofit organizations. 

Council is scheduled to hold a public hearing on the parcel tax at today’s regular 8 p.m. meeting (Nov. 18th). Council has also scheduled a public report on the content of its city labor contracts at a special 5 p.m. meeting today, and then will break into private session to discuss negotiation strategies in asking city labor unions for budget cuts. 

Council must finalize language for the proposed parcel tax measure by its Nov. 25 meeting if the tax measure is to appear on the March, 2004 ballot. 

Mindful of a growing willingness of Council, the mayor’s and city manager’s offices, and citizen representatives to look at layoffs and cutting employee salaries as one way of attacking Berkeley’s budget deficit, city workers tied up city Landscape Equipment Operator James Wallace in red tape at their Monday press conference, and then descended the steps to cut him free with scissors. A handout said that the unions were symbolically cutting “needless red tape and bureaucratic inefficiencies, offering more citizen-friendly, streamlined and cost-effective services.” 

Called the “Three R’s” Initiative (representing “RightSize, Reduce, and Restructure), the union cost-cutting proposal committed its members to “working with management together on behalf of the Berkeley community to improve service delivery, restructure the organization and to reduce operating costs” and using “attrition and accelerating retirements...[to] reach sustainable, target personnel levels without requiring layoffs or wage and benefit cutbacks.” 

The unions presented a number of specific proposed cost-cutting measures, including a Safe Workplace Action Plan that they say will save the city $1 million annually in Workers Compensation costs. 

Eric Landes-Brenman, president of Public Employees Union Local One and a Senior Management Analyst with the Mental Health Division of Berkeley’s Department of Health and Human Services, said that the press conference and demonstration were also timed to coincide with the Sacramento inauguration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger “who is going to have a profound effect on city of Berkeley finances.” 

Landes-Breneman said that representatives of the three unions originally presented seven pages of budget-cutting proposals to then-City Manager Weldon Rucker last January, and have been holding periodic meetings on the proposal with representatives of the city manager’s office since that time. 

The three unions present at the City Hall demonstration represent most of the city’s civilian, non-sworn employees. Members of the SEIU Local 790, which represents the city’s clerical workers, were not present at the press conference and have not taken a position on the proposals. 

Councilmember Kriss Worthington has maintained during City Council meetings that a review of the city’s labor contracts would show that city unions have already assisted in cutting Berkeley’s labor costs during the past several years. 

In response to citizen complaints that city workers had been recently granted higher-than-sustainable wage and benefit increases, City Manager Phil Kamlarz included a “Public Presentation and Council Questions Regarding Wages and Benefits in Existing Labor Agreements” with Council’s Nov. 18 agenda packet. 

The memo outlined the city’s recent negotiations with its safety and non-safety employee unions, and compared Berkeley’s recent labor contract salary increases with similar increases in several Bay Area cities. 

However, the Kamlarz memo failed to state the actual salaries of city employees in any of the listed cities, including Berkeley, making it difficult to determine how Berkeley city salaries compare to those of its neighbors.