On a night when Berkeley City Councilmembers deliberated a host of potential November ballot measures to shore up a $10 million budget deficit, council action made it likely that two other electoral choices will come before city voters this November. -more-

The loss of 11 students is just a drop in the bucket to most college student organizations. But for the Native American Recruitment and Retention Center (NARC) at the University of California, it is enormous. -more-

In a 7-0 vote, a state voting panel decided Wednesday to allow 10 counties, including Alameda, to continue using their touchscreen voting machines provided those counties also supply all their polling places with paper ballots for any voters who choose to use them. -more-

The Berkeley Planning Commission’s UC Hotel Task Force wrapped up their last official business Tuesday, adopting the last of their recommendations on the biggest project to ever hit downtown Berkeley. -more-

One of Berkeley’s largest and most fiscally troubled nonprofits is back in hot water with its labor union. -more-

Recent discussions before the Civic Arts Commission and in these pages remind me of what I learned in my stint in the 1970s as an intern at the California Arts Council, when Jerry Brown was still playing his Governor Moonbeam role and I was a law student. The council’s executive director was the redoubtable Eloise Pickard Smith, a painter and political activist. Among the illustrious commissioners were actor Peter Coyote, poet Gary Snyder and Luis Valdez, founder of El Teatro Campesino. Watching from the sidelines as these politically savvy artists allocated public funding for the arts taught me many lessons. The most surprising thing I learned was how much many members of the public hate public art. Or rather, how much they hate certain kinds of public art. Or most specifically, how they actively dislike large non-representational sculptures plopped into public spaces. We got letters, we got lots and lots of letters, almost all complaining about such installations. -more-