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Jakob Schiller: 
          Latice Barns waits for a San Francisco-bound train at the Coliseum BART station with Daniel  and Jimmy Rodgers, ages 7 and 8. Voters in November will elect a new member for BART’s District 3 seat and decide the fate of a $980 million seismic upgrade bond issue for the system. See Story, Page Five.t
Jakob Schiller: Latice Barns waits for a San Francisco-bound train at the Coliseum BART station with Daniel and Jimmy Rodgers, ages 7 and 8. Voters in November will elect a new member for BART’s District 3 seat and decide the fate of a $980 million seismic upgrade bond issue for the system. See Story, Page Five.t
 

News

Judge Orders Halt To Pt. Molate Pact: By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Tuesday August 31, 2004

A Contra Costa County Superior Court judge dealt a setback to the Richmond City Council’s plans to sign a lucrative deal for a casino resort at Point Molate, handing ChevronTexaco a temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking the sale prior to another hearing on Sept. 20. 

Judge David Flinn issued the 20-day TRO in his Martinez courtroom on Monday. While it is in force, the city may not sell the site to Berkeley developer James Levine’s Upstream Point Molate LLC. 

Levine’s plans call for development of the site, which would become a reservation of the Guidiville Rancheria band of Pomo tribespeople managed by Harrah’s Operating Company, an arm of the six-decade-old Nevada casino giant. 

The Richmond City Council was scheduled to vote this evening (Tuesday) on its proposed contract with Upstream to sell the property for a waterfront Las-Vegas style casino resort with four hotels and a major shopping center. The hearing will go forward, but no action will be taken, said a city spokesperson. 

Earlier in the day, councilmembers are scheduled for a 9 a.m. executive session to discuss the status of the suit, originally filed by ChevronTexaco and the Ione Band of Miwok tribespeople who are seeking to block the casino. 

The Native Americans backed out of the suit after their status was challenged by other Miwoks, leaving ChevronTexaco and the city as the sole contenders. 

The legal grounds for the challenge rest on the oil firm’s contention that the sale should be precluded by the California Surplus Property Act, which calls for other public agencies to get the first crack at lands sold by public agencies. 

Gabrielle Whelan, a lawyer from the Oakland law firm of McDonnough Holland & Allen retained by the city for the lawsuit, said that statue does not apply, and that the California Military Base Reuse Act applies instead. 

The legal argument could revolve on the Navy’s earlier sale of the site to the city, raising the issue of whether the military reuse statute would apply since the title is no longer held by the military. 

The oil firm argued that the land should remain undeveloped to serve as a security buffer for their massive refinery just across the ridge from the casino site. The company has offered $34 million for the site, which would be used as park land and wildlife habitat. 

The most controversial of the casino projects, one that has the potential for sinking all the others, fell into legislative limbo last week when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declined to introduce his plans for a San Pablo casino that would have bestowed a Bay Area monopoly on a tribe without historic roots in the region. 

One of five major compacts proposed by the governor, the Casino San Pablo proposals would have granted the Lytton Band of the Pomos an exclusive monopoly on slot machines within a 35-mile radius of San Pablo. 

Originally floated as a 5,500-slot monster that would have been larger than anything in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, the San Pablo sank into legislative quicksand when Democrats in both houses of the state legislature made in very clear they’d sink the deal—even after the governor and the Lyttons cut the number of slots in half. 

“When the governor’s administrative staff came to brief the Legislature, both houses had serious concerns, so they decided not to introduce the proposal and settled for the four other compacts,” said Hans Hemann, chief of staff for Assemblymember Loni Hancock. 

The proposal is on hold until January, “unless the tribe does something else, perhaps through the courts,” Hemann said. 

When the Legislature returns to Sacramento in January, Hancock will present a proposed amendment to the state Constitution that would mandate a 60-day legislative review period for any future casino deals. Schwarzenegger’s proposal hit legislators with only a week to go before the session closed. 

Schwarzenegger’s deals called for the five casinos to pay the state a quarter of their net earnings, revenues his staff had estimated at combined total of $1 billion a year. 

The other four pacts—for casinos in Humboldt, Amador, San Diego and San Bernardino counties—sailed through both houses of the legislature and now await approval by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. 

The Point Molate casino proposals call for a site purchase price paid to the City of Richmond of $50 million, plus an ongoing cash flow to compensate the city for lost sales and property taxes and for needed city services. 

Details are sparser for the second Richmond casino, which would be built in the economically distressed and unincorporated North Richmond on a site purchased by a Florida casino developer for the Scotts Valley Band of Pomos.?


Day-Long Walkout Strikes Med Center: By J.DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR

Tuesday August 31, 2004

Workers staged a spirited one-day walkout from the four facilities of the troubled Alameda County Medical Center (ACMC) on Monday, in protest against recently-proposed staff cutbacks. 

Representatives of three locals of the Service Employees International Union—250, 535, and 616—picketed in front of the Highland Hospital Emergency Room and the Alameda County Administration Building in downtown Oakland. While in-patient and emergency room care remained in operation in Highland Hospital in Oakland and in-patient care continued at Fairmont Hospital in San Leandro, county-run clinics were closed in order to shift staff to the two hospital facilities. 

In addition to Highland and Fairmont, the facilities affected were the Juvenile Hall’s medical unit and the John George Psychiatric Pavilion in San Leandro. 

The job action was targeted toward a Monday evening meeting of the ACMC board of trustees, where a vote was scheduled to confirm a new ACMC budget that proposed a 10 percent reduction in the medical center’s work force. Last Friday, California Superior Court Judge James Richman denied—without comment—an ACMC request for an injunction to halt the one-day walkout. 

SEIU representatives issued a formal statement on the walkout, quoting one local hospital worker that “if the proposed ACMC budget is adopted, patient care will be at risk. To lay off staff means that we would not be able to provide quality care that we pride ourselves on at ACMC. We would be short-staffed, and the community would suffer.” 

Michael Brown, ACMC Public Affairs Officer, said there was “no excuse for a work stoppage. This is unfortunate from the standpoint of patient care.” 

Watched by Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies and private security guards as well as patients in hospital gowns taking outside smoking breaks, more than a hundred workers in purple and gold SEIU t-shirts marched in a circular picket line for much of the day in front of Highland shouting “no health care, no peace” and “health care cuts have got to go” and carrying signs that read “Measure A Was Not About Health Cuts In Alameda County,” and “Cut Cambio Not Public Health Care.” 

The “Cambio” referred to Cambio Health Solutions, the Tennessee-based company hired by the Medical Center’s board of trustees last February to analyze ACMC’s finances. Measure A referred to the medical sales tax overwhelmingly approved by Alameda County voters two years ago specifically to shore up publicly-funded hospital care in the county. 

Several cars passing by on East 31st and 14th streets honked horns in solidarity, but one middle-aged man leaning on a crutch at the bus stop across the street from the Emergency Room shouted, “Go take care of your patients!” and spoke against the work stoppage to anyone who came within hearing range. 

Picketers held an early morning rally in front of the Highland Hospital Emergency Room which union representatives estimated at around 400 persons. 

While it was clear from the size of the demonstrations that large numbers of hospital workers were not on the job, no official numbers of walkout participants were immediately available. In addition, union representatives appeared unclear as to the exact effect of the walkout. 

A union media advisory announcement said that workers had “shut down Oakland’s Highland Hospital” but at least some portion of the hospital was clearly in operation during the walkout, with the emergency waiting room appearing to be about a quarter full. A union media spokesperson also said that union workers had assisted the hospital last week in finding replacement workers to keep the Highland facility open. 

ACMC, which is charged with providing both emergency, in-patient, and clinic health care for the county’s uninsured citizens, has been in serious financial trouble for several years. Last July, the Alameda County Civil Grand Jury formally blasted both the County Board of Supervisors and ACMC board of trustees for an administration of the medical center the grand jury said was “in shambles.” 

Last year, ACMC’s budget deficit rose to between $60 and $70 million and in April of this year, the Center laid off 340 workers. 

The new round of worker layoffs was estimated between 200 and 300 workers. The 300 figure was listed in a preliminary budget passed last month by the ACMC board of trustees, but Brown called that figure a “moveable target” based upon the actual number of patients to be served by the center’s various facilities. 

“The staff/patient ratio has been getting out of whack for the last couple of years,” Brown said. “Our goal is to get to a staff to patient ratio of 5.79 to 1,” down from what he identified as the present staff to patient ratio of 6.16 to 1. 

In recent weeks, union and ACMC representatives have been holding formal “meet and confer” talks to discuss the proposed layoffs. Brown said he did not expect those sessions to be interrupted by the one-day action,  

A picketer identifying herself only as a specialist in clinic scheduling at ACMC said that management on Sunday evening may have inadvertently contributed to the success of the walkout. 

“They wouldn’t let you park in the lot after six,” she said. “You had to go all the way down to 20th and Broadway, and then catch a shuttle back to the hospital. Management made it so difficult to get to work that some workers who actually wanted to work said they might as well join us.” 

The picketer also took issue with management’s reasoning on the staff/patient ratio and quality care. “I don’t find any logic in laying off people if you’re saying you’re going to be increasing patient care,” she said. “Do you?” 

Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson (D-Berkeley) said that while the workers have the right to strike (“I support that”), he pointed out that the one-day work stoppage would cost the medical center $1.5 million, “which they can’t afford, considering the present $60-plus million deficit.” 

Carson said that the medical center’s budget is solely within the discretion of the board of trustees, and that by law, the Board of Supervisors could only intervene in the labor dispute if either the state or federal health and human services agencies made a formal finding that patient care was being compromised in Alameda County because of the budget problems. 


ZAB Reviews Controversial Plans In Late-Night Marathon Session: By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Tuesday August 31, 2004

Berkeley’s Zoning Adjustments board took its first look at three controversial projects Thursday night, and gave tentative blessings to one in a grueling seven-hour marathon session. 

Despite pleas from neighbors and a member of the city Landmarks Preservation Commission, board members voted to approve a mitigated negative declaration on plans for a pair of duplexes in a recently landmarked West Berkeley historic district. 

The board also held the first of two public hearings on a planned nine-story Center Street housing, retail and theatrical building and took a first peek at plans for the Ed Roberts Campus (ERC), a center for training and assisting the disabled that would rise at the site of the Ashby BART Station. 

The ERC presentation wasn’t made as part of an action item, the pitch being given by campus staff to brief the board on a project that will appear before them when plans are finalized sometime in the near future. 

The skillfully staged presentation featured a delicate balsa building model, a Power Point presentation and a sizable audience contingent—many in wheelchairs—sporting “I Support ERC” badges. 

ZAB members may have wished they’d skipped the pitch altogether, as the meeting dragged into the wee hours, with Chair Andy Katz running a very loose ship—leaving it to member David Blake to interject with periodic motions to extend the various hearings as each invariably waxed on longer than the minutes allotted. 

 

Marin Avenue Views 

Members devoted considerable time to playing Solomon, though this time it wasn’t a baby to be divvied up but neighbors’ vistas of the Bay and beyond in the face of a new three-story house planned for 2615 Marin Ave. 

Project neighbors on Keeler Avenue were unhappy that the new home would cut into their views, none more so than Daphne Kalmar, who complained at length that David Richmond’s new home would destroy most of her vista from her own home on Marin. 

The city staff sided with her in their report, but Rena Rickles, attorney for the homebuilder, called “enough” earlier in the hearing, saying her client had participated in arbitration hearings and changed his design three times in the course of the dispute. 

Neighbors had been asked which sight they’d settle on losing: the Golden Gate, San Francisco, or Alcatraz. 

Richmond’s architect had thrice revised the plans, reducing the third story by a fourth to 750 square feet, which Kalmar said had done nothing to save her view. 

With member Blake and Carrie Sprague dissenting, the board voted to overrule the staff recommendations and approve the project, though moving the house back 12 feet on the lot—which Kalmar said wouldn’t help her at all. 

 

Jeremy’s Expansion in Elmwood 

Attorney Rickles was back up before the board for the next item, a request by clothier Jeremy Kidson to expand his business into a third storefront on College Avenue over the objections of other members of the thoroughfare’s voter-created Commercial District. 

Realtor George Oram Jr., the current occupant without a lease of Kidson’s storefront at 2963 College, wanted the board to give Kidson a use permit conditional on Oram’s being able to find new quarters on the street, a requirement which city staff said the board is explicitly barred from making. 

The board did authorize Oram to relocate to 2931 College, a site he said won’t be vacant until February. 

Kidson wanted Oram’s old space for an additional 700 square feet of retail sales floor and another 500 square feet of break room and office space, a move which would normally be precluded under district rules. 

“I am very much against the quota system,” Kidson said, describing it as a “government-sponsored cartel to use the quota system to control the expansion of businesses. 

“We do a very good business, and I think we bring a lot of business to the neighborhood,” Kidson said. 

Rickles then called a series of neighborhood women customers to testify to the wonderfulness of shopping at Jeremy’s and to attest to the crowded shopping conditions, which they were assured would ease once Kidson won permission to expand. 

Expansion opponent and Elmwood Business Improvement District member Connie Imodrie, owner of Your Basic Bird, pointed out that it was only because of an error by city staff that Kidson was allowed to violate the quota system and expand his store into the old bank building at the southeast corner of College and Ashby—a fact confirmed by City Planner Mark Rhoades. 

A city staff member erroneously issued a counter permit authorizing the expansion, Rhoades said, and he only caught the error when Kidson was about to hold his grand opening. Under the terms of the commercial district ordinance, an expansion into a space previously occupied by another business requires a hearing before ZAB. 

The board received protests of the newest expansion signed by 21 area merchants asking ZAB to delay acting until more members of the business community could voice their objections. 

Gregory Harper, attorney for George Oram, contended that the city staff issued a recommendation favoring Kidson’s move based on his client’s ability to move into new quarters. 

Rickles pointed out that Oram’s lease had expired on July 31. “He came to us and said he wouldn’t object (to the expansion) if we paid him $50,000 and let him stay another six months. 

Dean Metzger, the newest ZAB member, objected to the move, saying “I was involved in writing the quota system for the Elmwood and it is very dear to me. . .If we let Jeremy’s do this, we will wind up having a super store in our neighborhood.” 

Blake also objected, but to no avail. When the votes were tallied, they were the only dissenters. 

 

Sisterna Tract district 

The greatest organized opposition came to protest the proposed adoption of a mitigated negative declaration giving a preliminary go-ahead to the two duplex conversion at 2104 and 2108 Sixth St. in the Sisterna Tract historic district. 

But by the time ZAB members got around to the public hearing, the witching hour had come and most of the opponents had headed home. 

One of those who stayed was Lesley Emmington Jones, a member of the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) who appeared on behalf of that panel. 

“We are unanimously concerned and forwarded our recommendations to you, but I don’t see them shared in the staff report,” she said. “We were unanimous in reporting that in the Environmental Impact Statement under esthetics impacts. . .it should state that there will be substantial damage to the historical buildings within the context of the district” if plans are adopted as submitted. 

While Emmington Jones praised developer Mark Feiner for his efforts to adapt his plans to LPC recommendations, she also faulted city staff for failing to produce the statement in a timely manner, a fault planner Rhoades acknowledged, blaming the timing difficulties on the lack of sufficient staff. 

Rhoades said the LPC would have the final say on designs. 

The board finally adopted the plan, with only Dean Metzger and Carrie Sprague voting no. 

“See you in court!” declared several disappointed neighbors as they filed out of the meeting.  


Seagate Project Changes Lead to Sparks at ZAB: By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Tuesday August 31, 2004

The clock had ticked into the early morning minutes Friday when what may become one of the most controversial buildings in downtown Berkeley made it into the limelight at the Zoning Adjustments Board. 

Darrell de Tienne, project manager for the Seagate Building—the largest structure planned for downtown in recent years—had already received a warm welcome from one ZAB member earlier in the evening Thursday. 

In the break following City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque’s briefing on the city’s new and complex ex parte communications rule, it was time to ex parte down when ZAB member Deborah Matthews spotted de Tienne in the hallway outside the hearing room. 

Matthews rushed over and graced the developer with a warm hug and a peck on the cheek. 

When the hearing began the developer hadn’t even unpacked his elaborate scale model, which remained carefully nestled in boxes piled adjacent to where Berkeley City Planner Mark Rhoades sat with Greg Powell, the senior planning staff member assigned to the project. 

“The logic of the project is very simple,” said de Tienne. “It’s a residential building in downtown Berkeley with a quality above the student level”—a remark clearly intended to differentiate his edifice from those of controversial developer Patrick Kennedy, who targets the UC student market. 

Looking at the drawings de Tienne submitted, ZAB member Dean Metzger mused that “with 70 percent of the apartments under 700 square feet, are we just building another dorm here? Who’s going to live in 500 square feet if not a student?” 

De Tienne said that while the project was entitled to 149 units based on the housing set aside for lower- and lower-income residents, “there may be much less as building goes forward.” 

Because of the dramatic view he said the units would include, the San Rafael-based Seagate Properties, Inc., is looking both at building larger units and converting the project to condominiums, with the likelihood that contractor insurance issues will govern the final decision. 

“We can’t tell you right now what it will be,” he said. 

The builder is allowed four stories above the general downtown height limit, two of them for providing “inclusionary” housing for those earning lower-than-average incomes and two more for providing cultural arts space for non-profit groups—in this case, the Berkeley Repertory Theater. 

The cultural bonus was awarded on the basis of the 6-3 vote by the Civic Arts Commission on Feb. 25, based in part on the theatrical space and in part on Seagate’s agreement to pay a city-hired curator to present the works of local artists in 800 square feet of corridor display space. 

Arts Commission chair David Snippen, who voted for the project, and Jos Sances, an opponent who chairs the commission’s Public Art Committee, submitted a joint letter to ZAB protesting Seagate’s about-face on the exhibit space. 

Sances weathered that long meeting to testify at Friday’s early morning hearing, where he reported that Seagate now insists on hiring their own curator, a move opposed by the commissioners, who want stipulations inserted in any final use permit requiring that the curator be a Seagate-paid city employee and calling for the use of two streetfront windows for public viewing in addition to the corridor. 

“This is not acceptable to us,” Sances said of Seagate’s revised proposal. “This is not a great deal for the arts community. This change has made it very unacceptable to us.” 

While City Planner Mark Rhoades said the city didn’t want to be in the position of hiring a curator, Sances proposed using the same curator the city already employees for the Windows gallery. 

Planner Greg Powell said that a condition of city approval would require the curator to select works from a list selected by the arts commission, though he acknowledged the Seagate employee could chose other works from artists not on the list. 

ZAB member Metzger worried that unless ZAB “put some teeth” into the agreement governing the theatrical space, “it probably won’t happen.” 

Rhoades said that if the space remains unused for a specified period, it would be offered to the next candidate on the arts commission list at half the cost. 

The final controversy centered on the placement of the low-income units in the building. 

When ZAB member Laurie Capitelli questioned why none of the units were located on the top two floors of the building, Rhoades said that the city zoning ordinance precluded placing them in the extra floors which were granted as a result of including the units. 

“The inclusionary ordinance does not apply to the density bonus floors, and those are the top two floors of this project.” 

“That’s an absolute disgrace,” declared member David Blake. 

“This is consistent with all of the infill projects that we have approved in the last five years. None of them have inclusionary units in the top floor,” Rhoades said. 

Matthews said she had spoken to the city housing department, “and they still felt this was a very good situation.” 

Landmarks Preservation Commissioner Lesley Emmington Jones questioned the wisdom of building more infill development projects in the city at a time when apartments are going vacant, but Rhoades said the reason rents were dropping was because of the addition of new housing, which he called a blessing for the city. 

And so, just after the clock ticked off 1:20 a.m., ZAB Chair Andy Katz declared the meeting at an end. 

But it wasn’t the end of the Seagate proposal, which comes back to the board for a second hearing and final action on the 9th.w


New Student Rep Aims to Make Her Presence Felt: By MATTHEW ARTZ

Tuesday August 31, 2004

Anyone who has seen Berkeley’s Board of Education in action has to feel a little bit sorry for this year’s student representative Lily Dorman-Colby. 

In return for access to power and a guaranteed head-turner on her college applications, the 17-year-old senior will be asked to sacrifice alternate Wednesday nights to a school board known for shutting down after most local pubs. 

But those late hours might be a thing of the past, said Dorman-Colby, who has plenty of incentive to keep the board on schedule.  

Her wrestling tournaments are Thursdays. After years of passing through foster homes and vanquishing boys in her 120-pound weight class, the ninth-ranked female wrestler in the country last year isn’t afraid to twist the arm of any school board director that stands between her and a full night’s rest. 

“These meetings are ending at 10 p.m.,” she said, tongue partially in cheek. “If they have questions I’ll tell them, ‘Talk to me before the meeting, I’ve got a tournament tomorrow.’” 

The role of student director, although lacking a formal vote, is still vital to the board, said Director Shirley Issel. “It keeps us in touch with the kids,” she said. 

When the gavel falls, the school board can expect a different brand of student representation from Dorman-Colby, who hails from a more progressive student slate than Bradley Johnson, last year’s representative.  

Though Johnson has given Dorman-Colby some insight into board politics, the two disagree on the most divisive academic issues facing the school. 

For one, Dorman-Colby is a critic of Academic Choice—the high school’s semi-autonomous program that picks its own teachers, promises more rigorous coursework and traditionally attracts mainly white students. The problem with it, Dorman-Colby said, is that the program sucks up the best teachers and widens the achievement gap. 

“Students who can’t do the advanced stuff end up with a poorer teacher when they need a better one,” she said. 

Dorman-Colby also supports Identity and Ethnic Studies (IES), a mandatory class for freshmen, that critics, including Johnson, have labeled a dispensary of political correctness and academic fluff. Last year, the board, against Johnson’s urging to scrap the whole program, voted to rename the class and beef up the curriculum. 

When the subject moves outside the classroom, Dorman-Colby promised to unify students against unpopular board actions like last year’s decision to implement a new get-tough attendance policy. 

Nearly universally condemned by student leaders, the policy calls for truants to lose a letter grade for every five unexcused absences they record in a semester. Three tardies count for one absence.  

“Wealthy parents won’t let their kids lose a letter grade. It will only make the achievement gap worse,” said Dorman-Colby, who has lobbied the administration to broadcast the new policy during daily announcements so students have fair warning.  

Although Dorman-Colby’s vote on the board is only advisory, she plans to use the bully pulpit of her position to pressure directors to heed student concerns. 

“I embody student morale,” she said. “If I say a lot of good things parents will think the high school is doing well. If I say bad things they’ll say the high school has problems.” 

To ensure that she isn’t a voice in the wilderness—a place Johnson found himself last year debating the attendance policy—Dorman-Colby is organizing student council elections early this year and formulating a student e-tree so students can be mobilized to defend their interests before the board. 

Dorman-Colby got her start in student politics in seventh grade by protesting, of all things, pepperoni. As a vegetarian who qualified for free lunch, she started a petition drive to force the Longfellow Middle School to offer a pizza without the meat-based topping.  

At the same time she began to grasp her natural strength.  

She joined Longfellow’s football team, but excelled most in mercy, the schoolyard tradition of locking hands to see who can bend their opponents’ wrist backwards. 

“I beat everybody, the whole boys’ basketball team had to challenge me,” Dorman-Colby said. 

After taking a pounding against boys twice her size her freshman season on Berkeley High’s junior varsity football squad, she took her love of tackling to the wrestling mat. 

Dorman-Colby won just three matches her freshman year, but skyrocketed to sixth in the country among girls as a sophomore. Last year she placed ninth in nationals and first in North California and Oregon in her weight class. Against boys, the 5-foot, 2-inch Dorman-Colby finished second in her league, but wasn’t allowed to advance to a regional tournament which didn’t allow inter-gender matches. 

While Dorman-Colby shot up the wrestling ranks, her homelife took a tumble. When she was 12, the county removed her and her three brothers from their parents’ house and split them into different foster homes. 

“I moved five times in two years,” said Dorman-Colby, who now lives at a friend’s house and visits her parents periodically.  

Having never had parental discipline, Dorman-Colby adopted her own strict code of conduct, based on personal responsibility and healthy living. “I’ve never had anyone to rebel against, so I never had a reason to drink or smoke pot,” she said. 

Dorman-Colby said her experience both as one of the few white kids in her South Berkeley neighborhood and then as a foster child at the home of an African American family in East Oakland has shaped the beliefs she will take to the school board. 

“When you grow up poor you see how African Americans are treated and how no one stands up for their rights,” she said. “I live in a lot of different worlds; worlds that aren’t represented at the school board.” 

Dorman-Colby thinks her wrestling career will probably end after this year, but insists her public life is just getting underway. 

“I want to be a politician,” she said. “I want to change the world.”


Well Qualified Trio Vies For BART Seat: By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR

Tuesday August 31, 2004

Three veterans of widely-different areas of public life are competing in the Nov. 2 election to represent a BART district that stretches from Kensington in the north to San Lorenzo in the south and encompasses the eastern portions of both Berkeley and Oakland. 

Seeking re-election to a fourth four-year District 3 term is retired City Traffic Engineer Roy Nakadegawa. He is being challenged by seven-year BART administrative employee Bob Franklin and management consultant Kathy Neal, who has served on several state and local boards and was recently considering a run for Peralta Community College District Board of Trustees. 

On the same ballot, under Measure AA, Alameda County voters will be asked to approve authority for BART to issue up to $980 million in earthquake safety improvement bonds. 

BART—which employs 3,500 workers under a $460 million annual budget in a rapid transit district running through Alameda, Contra Costa, and San Francisco counties—was recently named the top transit system in the country by the American Public Transportation Association. 

Nakadegawa, who says that this will be his last term on the BART board if he wins, lists seismic retrofit and emphasizing system efficiency over continued expansion as two of his key goals. 

“I brought up earthquake safety five years ago as the most important project we need to be undertaking,” he said. “We’ve now got new studies that say that the tube under the bay is the most vulnerable; we now believe that its foundation could liquefy in a major earthquake.” He credited his leadership with influencing the BART board to put Measure AA on this year’s ballot. 

Nakadegawa also said that he was “the only BART board member raising the issue of social equality,” insisting that BART is “spending megabucks for expansion to the more affluent suburban areas” while neglecting the needs of existing riders. 

Franklin agrees with Nakadegawa on the need for seismic retrofit, but disagrees in the area of expansion. His extensive campaign website lists extension to San Jose, Livermore, and Antioch as two of his goals. While he says a BART extension to San Jose “is a very expensive option,” he called a “better connection” between BART and San Jose “essential and inevitable.” 

He says that while BART is one of the “main [transportation] backbones for the Bay Area,” it needs to incorporate a more efficient system of “finishing shuttles” in order to correct a problem where “BART gets you near where you want to go, but far enough away from your final destination that most people opt to drive rather than to wait to transfer to a bus.” 

Franklin’s website lists several specific policy proposals for the system, including extending service past midnight, lowering pricing for all riders during non-commute hours and for “economically disadvantaged” riders during all hours, and making better labor relations a priority. 

He is currently on leave from his position as the Executive Staff Assistant to BART’s Controller-Treasurer. 

The politically-connected Neal, who operates her own Oakland-based consultant firm with several public agencies as her clients, says that BART needs to establish a better balance between quality service and expansion, adding that one problem with the system is that it “has historically thought of itself as a transportation agency only.”  

She said that BART could do a better job of managing its extensive land holdings, developing capital improvement projects as an alternative source of revenue. 

Neal’s name was publicly floated this spring and summer for the Peralta Community College District 6 board seat being vacated by trustee Susan Duncan. But Neal, who once served on the State Community College Board of Governors, said that she turned down requests from friends and associates to run for the board because of the “distraction” of sitting on a board that oversaw the activities of Peralta Chancellor Elihu Harris, who is Neal’s estranged husband. 

“Nobody wanted to talk about anything else but that,” Neal said. “Nobody wanted to know my issues or concerns about the district.” 

She said she decided to run for the BART board because she is interested in public service, and because Nakadegawa is “a nice gentleman who suffers from a lack of leadership. We’re woefully underrepresented. I have not talked with anyone who has a good working relationship with the incumbent.” 

Neal has also served on the California Integrated Waste Management Board and the Oakland Port Commission. She once worked on the staff of Oakland City Councilmember Desley Brooks.ô


Fund-Starved BUSD Urges Students to Start on Day 1: By MATTHEW ARTZ

Tuesday August 31, 2004

After racking up nearly $30,000 in lost attendance revenue the first week of school last year, Berkeley Unified is hoping students will be in class when school starts on Wednesday and not hiking in the Sierra, visiting family back east or touring Europe. 

Attendance is a high stakes game in California, which uses it to divvy up education dollars. And last year, at least, the district, which for several years has started school the week before Labor Day, was slow out of the gate. 

In 2003 when school started Aug. 27, just 8,013 of the district’s roughly 8,900 students showed up for class. With the state penalizing school districts $27.84 per child absence, the dismal first day showing cost the district in the neighborhood of $23,000. District attendance didn’t surpass 8,600 students until Tuesday, Sept. 2—the day after Labor Day—and didn’t reach 8,800 until Sept. 6. 

While Berkeley is in a crowded field of districts that start classes before Labor Day—Oakland is the only neighboring district that will open its doors after the holiday—it faces a unique struggle to get its students to the first few days of classes. 

Berkeley Unified spokesperson Mark Coplan chalked up the phenomenon to the Berkeley’s transient population. “So many people choose to summer elsewhere it’s a matter of when they decide to come back,” he said. 

In addition to mailing out the standard beginning of school packets which include a school calendar, the district has taken the extra step this year of posting messages on each school’s e-tree reminding families that students need to be back by Sept. 1, the first day of school.  

Coplan said the district, with the required consent of its unions, moved up the start of school several years ago when Labor Day arrived late and hasn’t reverted to its past tradition.  

Berkeley Federation of Teachers President Barry Fike said a recent survey of teachers showed they were split down the middle about whether or not to start classes before Labor Day. 

“We haven’t pushed strongly one way or the other,” he said. “If the district wanted to start after Labor Day we would have agreed.” 

Superintendent Michele Lawrence said the district had to factor numerous variables into formulating the calendar. In the future, she said, she would like to see the district adopt a year-round schedule. 

 

School Day Set To Change 

Berkeley Unified and its teachers’ union have agreed on a new school schedule that will reduce the school day by forty minutes on Wednesdays in return for adding 10 minutes to the other four days of the week 

The change is scheduled to begin at elementary and middle schools the week of Monday Oct. 4 and does not affect Berkeley High. 

Under the terms of the agreement, teachers will now get four hours a month, all on Wednesdays, to collaborate on lesson plans. 

“Teachers want more opportunities to work closely with our colleagues and learn from each other in order to improve our craft,” Fike said in a prepared statement. 

As an example of how the new policy will work, if a student was previously dismissed each day at 2:10, the student would now be dismissed at 2:20 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday and at 1:30 on Wednesday. 

Schools will start at the same time as they had previously. 

The district has closed schools early on some Wednesdays in previous years, said Coplan, who added that school officials were still adjusting child care provisions for the new schedule. 

“We’ve got a month to gear it up and get arrangements made,” he said. 

 

ô


Court Ruling Hamstrings Police Review Commission: By MATTHEW ARTZ

Tuesday August 31, 2004

Everett Bobbitt says his San Diego law office is adorned with 11 medals, 10 he won in Vietnam and the eleventh—the one he cherishes the most—bestowed upon him by the Berkeley Police Association (BPA). 

“In Vietnam I was just a marine doing my job, here I believe in the issues and I’m proud of creating a precedent that will last a long time,” said Bobbitt, a former police officer. 

Bobbitt has never defended a Berkeley cop, but thanks to a landmark decision he won in San Diego nearly every sustained allegation of police misconduct against Berkeley officers since 2002 has been overturned. 

In the 30-year war between the police union and Berkeley’s Police Review Commission (PRC) Bobbitt has handed officers a powerful weapon both to weaken the commission’s clout further and to tie it up in a procedural morass. 

Bobbitt’s legal triumph in 1999 granted California police officers the right to an administrative appeal of any allegation against them sustained by the state’s 15 civilian oversight boards. A second ruling in 2002 laid out the appeals process and placed the burden on the review boards to prove their case.  

Civilian commissions, like Berkeley’s PRC and San Diego’s San Diego County's Citizens Law Enforcement Review Board (CLERB), are independent of a police department’s internal affairs office—the police department’s internal investigation and disciplinary unit—and their decisions never see their way into an officer’s personnel file.  

Their primary role is to give the public a vehicle to air concerns about the department and express their point of view directly to the officers in question. Police departments nearly universally ignore their rulings, Bobbitt said. Nevertheless, the Fourth District Court of Appeals found that since a sustained allegation could conceivably cost an officer a shot at a promotion or a job opportunity in a different force, the California Police Officer’s Bill of Rights required an appeal. 

The ruling, which the state supreme court declined to review, has had little impact throughout most of the state. Police in Oakland and Riverside haven’t initiated a single appeal. In San Diego County, where the lawsuit was initiated, sheriff deputies have only challenged five sustained allegations. 

In Berkeley, however, the police have appealed nearly every finding, from serious charges of improper procedure to simple discourtesy. And their appeals are nearly always successful. The most recent data collected by the Police Review Commission shows that out of 32 appeals to sustained allegations, 28 have been overturned. 

“Clearly they’re trying to bury the review process there,” said John Parker, executive director San Diego’s CLERB.  

Since the PRC’s rulings carry little weight, he and several PRC commissioners insist the motivation behind the police union’s “challenge everything” tactic is not to clear officer’s names, but to paralyze the PRC. 

With just four staff members, one investigator and a budget of $424,000 several Berkeley PRC commissioners said the commission must divert precious resources from investigating complaints to handling the appeals.  

“It hurts our budget, it hurts the whole process,” said former PRC Chairperson Bill White. 

Each appeal requires a written and an oral argument presented before a three-person appeals panel, handpicked by the city manager, which hears the case in private and doesn’t publicize its decisions.  

Currently, the panel is comprised of Office of Economic Development Director Tom Myers, Senior Human Resources Analyst Margarita Zamora and Hearing Officer Ann Miley. The composition of the review panel has raised concerns among PRC commissioners that the final arbiters might have a bias towards their fellow city employees. 

“They’re supposed to be objective, but they’re judging their own,” said PRC Commissioner Lucienne Sanchez-Resnik, who also argued that the panel’s reliance on the written transcript favored officers. 

“They’re missing a lot of the body language,” she said. “Reading the transcript and being there are two different things.” 

In contrast to the Berkeley system, designed by former City Manager Weldon Rucker, San Diego sends appeals to a civil service commission, where the panel members are selected by elected supervisors and can hear live testimony. 

Carol Denney, the publisher of Berkeley’s satirical newspaper, the Pepper Spray Times, wasn’t present when the Berkeley appeals panel overturned rulings that had been in her favor. She had filed a complaint against an officer who she claimed refused to arrest a man she said assaulted her. She charged that the officer inserted into the police record what she said were false mental health records. 

Denney said she received a cash settlement from the city for the incident, but the review board overturned the PRC’s findings anyway. 

“It’s disturbing that a panel can meet in secret and have the last word,” Denney said. 

Former Berkeley Police Associaton President Randolph Files, however, said there’s a simple explanation for the multitude of overturned rulings: “The PRC has a systemic bias against the police.” Files said he experienced the bias when he was brought before a PRC hearing panel. “There was nothing I could say that the PRC wanted to hear. I was wrong because of who I was.”  

The PRC sustains about one-third of the allegations brought before them—a higher percentage than most other civilian boards. In 2002, The PRC sustained 52 allegations out of 154. Comparatively, in 2003, the Riverside review board sustained 22 out of 107 complaints and San Diego sustained nine out of 99 complaints. 

Administrative review is just the latest in a series of legal battles in which the police have pared down the power of the PRC. 

Created by ballot initiative in 1973, the commission was originally designed to replace Internal Affairs, but a judge ruled that only a charter amendment, not a ballot initiative, could give the commission authority to discipline officers. 

Reduced to a role of advisor to the city manager—who reviews the commission’s findings and controls its funds—the commission wields little institutional power.  

Now, again thanks to Bobbit, the PRC risks losing even more relevance 

Last year, Bobbit won a case, again in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, that closed civilian board hearings in San Diego. Other jurisdictions have quickly fallen into line. Riverside and Richmond have placed hearings behind closed doors, and last month the Oakland Police Officers Association (OPOA) filed suit against the city both to close public hearings and to keep review board findings confidential. PRC commissioners fear that if the OPOA suit is successful, Berkeley Police will also seek legal recourse.  

In 2002 Berkeley police filed a suit to keep PRC findings under lock and key, but not to close hearings to the public. However, after settling other bones of contention with the city, they never pressed the issue. 

“If someone in Berkeley filed a writ in superior court, they could close the hearings,” Bobbitt said. “I’m guessing they’re mostly happy with the way it’s going and don’t want to deal with a public outcry.” 

Asked if the BPA planned to follow through on closing hearings, Files replied, “No comment.”


Iranians Face Increased Harassment in U.S. : By DONAL BROWN

Pacific News Service
Tuesday August 31, 2004

WASHINGTON D.C.—Iranians in the U.S. are seeing a surge in firings and FBI interrogations and security clearance denials as anti-terrorist efforts mount and Washington’s criticism of the Iranian government sharpens.  

Dokhi Fassihian, executive director of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), says she is getting up to five reports a day of Iranians complaining of harassment.  

Fassihian says Iranians have been singled out since 9/11 but that the current crackdown comes from tightening U.S. security measures as well as increased tension between Washington and Tehran over Iran’s nuclear program and alleged ties with terrorist groups. “It appears that, after Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran is a likely target of the next U.S. invasion,” says Ali Golchin, an immigration lawyer in San Diego.  

Amrit Singh, a lawyer with the Immigrant Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York City, says the government is definitely keeping an eye on immigrants from all over the world. But, he adds, there is added bias against Middle Easterners and Muslims, or those mistaken for them, based on fears that they are all agents of terrorism. Golchin says Iranians in the U.S. defy stereotypes, being “Muslims, Christians, Jews, Bahaiis and Zoroastrians."  

Government and private employers are not applying rules fairly but are profiling by race, charges Fassihian. Iranians complain they are getting harsh treatment even though there are no specific intelligence findings marking them as security threats.  

Neil Gordon, a director with the AIDS Research Alliance in Los Angeles, reported that a key researcher, an Iranian citizen with an H-1 visa, who returned this year to Iran for her father's funeral, was stranded in Switzerland for four and a half months. The State Department required her to get her visa stamped as a condition for returning, but the U.S. consulate denied her reentry pending review of her records.  

Gordon is upset that a person who has been doing valuable work in the U.S. for seven years would be so severely. “The frustration is that it is not that she is researching anthrax or in nuclear research, it’s that she is Iranian and has a biochemistry PhD,” he says.  

Fassihian says many Iranians have been denied security clearances for federal jobs or contracts. In West Virginia, Aliakbar Afshari and Shahla Azadi, an Iranian couple, were recently fired without explanation from their jobs at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). They were told there was no appeal.  

Afshari and Azadi have been permanent residents for 17 years and NIOSH employees in Morgantown for seven. In May they were told, to their surprise, that they failed a background check and were escorted from the premises. Each had passed a previous check. They were told documentation of the recent check was classified.  

Their attorney, Allan Karlin, resorted to the Freedom of Information Act, but the FBI said it had no related documents in Washington and are looking in other places. He says the government made no attempt to interview the couple’s co-employees and superiors. He learned that the Department of Homeland Security ordered the background check on individuals from “threat countries to the United States,” which includes Iran.  

Karlin obtained 20 letters from diverse sources testifying to the couple’s upstanding characters. “These are two of the finest people I have ever had the privilege of knowing and representing,” Karlin says.  

Fassihian also cites the case of an Iranian who has been in the United States since 1973, with a green card since 1983, and applied for citizenship in 1998. His application has been stalled without explanation for six years.  

After Sept. 11, the government required all males, 18-65 years old, from 25 Middle East countries, to report to INS offices. The process was called the National Security Entry Exit Registration System (NSEERS).  

In Southern California the INS handcuffed and detained some 1,000 Iranians for days without access to lawyers, family members or doctors when they voluntarily reported. Critics accused authorities of not recognizing that the detainees did not commit any crimes and, by reporting, were actually trying to comply with the law. Many were waiting for their permanent residency application to be approved, but by responding to NSEERS became subject to deportation proceedings.  

Fassihian says there is a new round of FBI interrogations, but people are too scared to step forward to tell their stories. Morad Ghorban, political director for the Iranian American Political Action Committee, thinks it is a continuation of NSEERS, during which the government made lists of Iranian nationals.  

Ghorban and Fassihian want balanced anti-terrorist measures that promote homeland security while respecting the rights of industrious and law-abiding persons. Golchin says most Iranians are successful in education, science, business and the professions and deserve the Temporary Protected Status accorded to nationals of many other nations.  

They say the treatment of Iranians is out of proportion. “Never, never has there been an instance of terrorism by someone from the Iranian community in America,” Fassihian says.  




Claremont Hotel Picketed Through the Night: By JAKOB SCHILLER

Tuesday August 31, 2004

Marcos Escobar, an organizer with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) local 2850 marches outside the Claremont late Friday night as part of a 27-hour picket to celebrate the three-year anniversary of the union and worker’s boycott of the hotel. According to Claire Darby, another HERE organizer, around 150 workers participated in the picket and over 300 people marched in total. At the end of the picket, Oakland mayor Jerry Brown showed up to speak at a pro-union rally, which was the first time Brown had come out to publicly support the workers at the picket..


Making a Big Impression At a Catskills Resort: From SUSAN PARKER

Tuesday August 31, 2004

My friend Taffy was getting married for the third time and planning a three-day wedding extravaganza. It was taking place in a tiny village located in the middle of New York state’s Catskills Mountains. Besides being near a popular ski resort, Fleischmanns is the summer destination of choice for many of New York City’s Hassidic Jews. Walking around Fleischmanns is a lot like walking around Jerusalem, only it’s greener and safer. Bearded, black-shrouded, forelocked Hassidics share the narrow country roads with skinny lycra-clad outdoor enthusiasts.  

I made plane reservations for New York and looked into accommodations. After noodling around on the Internet, I found a motel for less than $100 per night. The proprietor told me that I couldn’t make an August reservation until June 1, so I waited. On June 1 I called the motel. “We’re booked,” said the proprietor. “How can you be booked?” I asked. “You wouldn’t let me make a reservation earlier.” “Sorry,” said the woman, and she hung up. “Thanks,” I said, but she didn’t hear me. 

I found a more expensive, but available B&B close to Taffy’s summer cabin. My friends Mac and Susie were also going to the wedding. We decided to share the room in order to save money.  

At the Highlands Inn, the owner handed us one key. “Can we have two?” I asked. “We might not be together the entire time.” “Don’t worry,” answered the proprietor. “I never lock the doors. Really, you don’t even need a key.” I put the key in my pocket and we drove off to the rehearsal dinner.  

The following day there was a group run and yoga, and then a hike up the mountain to the site of the wedding. Taffy stuffed her wedding dress in a backpack just as it started to rain. But the sky cleared at the top of the peak and a ceremony was performed by the groom’s best friend. Then we took the ski lift down to the lodge for a party. At 11 p.m. I was sitting in a hot tub in back of Taffy’s cabin, and by midnight I was walking to the B&B with the bride and her daughter. Taffy had on a bathrobe and slippers. Amelia had Taffy’s large green parrot, “Bird,” on her shoulder. The Hassidics were all in bed for the night. 

At the B&B we found the front door locked and all the lights out. We went to the back door. It was locked. We checked the ground floor windows and finally found one that was open. I stood on the bride’s shoulders. Bird squawked encouragement. I kicked with my legs to try to squirm in the window but I was cautious. I didn’t want to somersault into the darkened room. Taffy started to giggle. Bird parroted her laughter. I laughed too, and then a voice from inside said, “What the hell do you think your doing?” It was the proprietor. 

“I’m the bride,” said Taffy, as way of explanation. 

“I’m the bride,” mimicked Bird. 

“I’m the bride’s daughter,” said Amelia. 

“I’m the bride’s friend,” I said. “And I don’t have a key to my room.” 

“I gave you a key,” said the proprietor. 

“I know,” I said, “but my friends have it because they came in earlier than me. You said you never lock the front door.” 

“That’s why I gave you a key,” said the proprietor. 

“But you only gave us one key and they have it.” 

“That’s why I gave the key to you,” said the proprietor. 

“KEY!” shouted Bird. 

“Shut up,” said Amelia. The proprietor looked at her in alarm. “Bird,” she said. “I’m talking to Bird.” 

“It’s okay,” said the bride quickly, wanting to avoid a fight between the parrot, the proprietor, Amelia, and me. “Now you’re here and Suzy can get in, and I can go home and prepare for the next party.” 

I got down off the bride’s shoulders and went around to the front door where the grumpy innkeeper let me in. 

“Kiss the bride,” said Bird. 

I did.?


Police Blotter: By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Tuesday August 31, 2004

Gunman Opens Fire on Car 

A shooter unleashed a volley of shots at a car filled with four or five occupants near the corner of Russell and Sacramento streets about 9:20 p.m. Sunday, said Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies. 

No one was injured in the attack, and police have identified several suspects in the attack. 

 

Case Closed, Years Later 

A student shopping in a local used book store last week spotted several volumes bearing the stamp of the Pacific School of Religion. 

A check with the school determined that the volumes in question had been boosted several years before and later sold to the unwitting merchant, who volunteered to return the books without cost if a police report was filed. 

The necessary document was filed Sunday morning, and the books were on their way back to their old domain. 

 

Finger Bite Ends in Arrest 

Berkeley officers arrested two men at Civic Center Park Saturday night on charges of battery with serious bodily injury after a woman reported that they’d bitten her finger. Charges of interfering with a police officer were added after they took physical issue with the arresting officers. 

 

Golden Bear Inn Robbed 

A young man with a handgun walked into the Golden Bear Inn at 1620 San Pablo Ave. at 9:41 Friday evening and demanded cash. He fled moments later with the contents of the till. 

 

Knife-Armed Robber Gets Wallet 

A man with a knife approached a pedestrian at Ashby and San Pablo avenues at about 3 a.m. Saturday. The victim escaped without injury after he handed over his wallet, but it took him eight more hours before he was able to call police. 

 

Alleged Car Thief Faces More Charges 

Berkeley officers stopped a car near San Pablo Avenue and Haskell Street shortly after 9:30 Saturday night after the plates turned up on their hot sheet. 

They arrested the 41-year-old driver, and added public intoxication, parole violation and drug paraphernalia charges after they got a closer look at him and his hot wheels. 

 

Week’s Most Peculiar Heist  

Three young men in their late teens, one claiming to have a gun, approached a pedestrian at Tenth Street and Hearst Avenue about 9:15 p.m. Saturday and executed a strong-arm robbery. . .of his cigarette lighter. 

 

Rat Pack Juvenile Bandits 

A group of a dozen or more teenagers robbed three youngsters near the corner of Monterey and Posen Avenues at 9:30 Saturday evening, making off with their money. 

 

Gunman Takes Wallet 

A gunman, back up by two other young felons, confronted a pedestrian near Milvia and Blake street at 11:46 p.m. Sunday and took his wallet. 

 

Teens Snatch Purse 

A band of four teens snatched a woman’s purse near the corner of Fulton Street and Durant Avenue just after 12:30 a.m. Sunday. 

 

Trio Gets Cash 

Three young men relieved a pedestrian of his cash in a strongarm heist near the corner of San Pablo Avenue and Delaware Street at 2:39 a.m. Sunday.ô


Fire Department Log: By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Tuesday August 31, 2004

The Federal Emergency Management Agency gave Berkeley a $413,000 grant last week—to be supplemented by $177,000 in matching city funds—for a four-pronged program to reduce fire danger in the hills. 

Deputy Fire Chief David Orth said a fourth of the combined city and FEMA Fire Prevention and Public Safety Grant funds will go toward creating and launching a fire hazard education curriculum. 

Another 35 percent will go for an updated fire hazard evaluation program to assess fire dangers in the hills, prioritize areas of concern and collect data for academic studies of the hills. 

The grant earmarks another 30 percent for designing and implementing an effective program for reducing natural fuels along pathways in the hills so they can serve as effective evacuation routes in the event of major fires. 

The final 10 percent will be used for evaluating the programs in cooperation with UC Berkeley. 

 


Letters to the Editor

Tuesday August 31, 2004

WILLARD GARDEN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I want to thank you so much for the wonderful, illustrated opinion page feature you did last issue on what can only be described as the BUSD assault on the Willard garden and Willard Greening Project. (Wendy Schlesinger’s letter was sheer poetry.) 

The Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle had a major feature on the fine and closely related work Alice Waters is doing at King Middle School and now elsewhere in the District. We are so lucky to have her.  

Yolanda Huang too is a treasure—albeit one without a foundation she can tap to carry out her ideas (though she has written successful if smaller grants.) I hope people who have seen the Willard grounds and/or last week’s Daily Planet letters and photo will be outraged enough by the contrast in how Yolanda Huang, the Willard Greening Project, and the Willard PTA have been treated to call Superintendent Michelle Lawrence (644-6206) demanding a public apology and—even more important—that Yolanda and someone from the Willard PTA be immediately brought onto the Willard Site Committee and have major voices in what steps are taken there from now on. 

Donna Mickleson 

 

• 

SIXTIESLAND 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Regarding Albert Sukoff’s proposal (Daily Planet, Aug. 20-26) to transform the area from UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza down Telegraph Avenue into a “Sixtiesland” following the model of Williamsburg: I think it is a great idea for the sake of this unique community, better than transforming the same area into a deserted AC Transit bus terminal (which seems to be in the works). 

Berkeley councilmembers and local communities should act positively on community preservation along the lines of Mr. Sukoff’s proposal before the pending destruction of that same area becomes a reality. 

Takeshi Akiba 

 

• 

SHERRY KELLY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Oh, No ! 

It may be “common knowledge around city hall” (“Sherry Kelly to Retire as City Clerk,” Daily Planet, Aug. 27-30) but news of Kelly’s impending retirement comes as a great shock and disappointment to me, a mere voting citizen. Eh gad. 

The emphasis on the long hard-worked hours she obviously puts in is appropriate, but I’m here to underscore not only the quantity of her work, but the quality of her skills and standards! 

Helen Rippier Wheeler 

 

• 

IRRADIATED FOODS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

On Aug. 25, the California Legislature served up a big win to parents and students by passing a bill requiring school board approval, public disclosure and parental notification before irradiated foods can be purchased for school lunch programs. This bill provides a democratic decision-making process for a highly controversial issue that has concerned parents across the state.  

Irradiation is a technology used to kill the bacteria that causes food poisoning, but that’s not all it does. In the process, nutrients are destroyed and new toxic chemicals are formed, some of which may promote cancer development and cause genetic damage to human cells. No long-term studies have been conducted on how children’s health is affected by eating irradiated food. 

Given the scientific uncertainty over the safety of irradiated foods, it is important to involve parents in decisions regarding food their children will be served. In California, three million children participate in the National School Lunch Program, most of whom are from low-income families and may be undernourished at home.  

By passing this bill, lawmakers have ensured that California remains accountable to both parents and disadvantaged schoolchildren, who are among the most vulnerable of our state’s residents. 

Assemblymember Loni Hancock is largely to thank for authoring this legislation. Now we urge the governor to sign AB 1988 to preserve parents’ and students’ right to know what is served in school meals. 

Anna Blackshaw 

Director, Public Citizen’s  

California Office, 

Oakland 

 

• 

RIGHT OF WAY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Bravo Berkeley Police for recent stings enforcing pedestrian right of way (Police Blotter. Daily Planet, Aug. 20-26). It is all too accurate to call the ticketed drivers “hapless,” given how rarely this and other traffic laws are enforced, but a harsher word is deserved. Aggressive drivers make crossing many of our streets an ordeal calling for cold nerve and flawless timing. I’d like to learn which merchants were trying to save them from getting nailed, and why. Surely it’s better for business when pedestrians can get safely to your door. 

But will the stings continue until word gets around that shaving five minutes off a crosstown drive is a high stakes gamble, or are ticket recipients indeed victims, along with those three dead pedestrians last year, of erratic policing tactics that change nothing? I have to report that it was still business as usual on Aug. 23. Eight or 10 cars passed at 40 mph as I waited in the crosswalk at San Pablo Avenue and Parker Street. Two violations for the price of one; the second unavoidable since at that speed stopping for a pedestrian is unsafe.  

Would this change with consistent, continuing enforcement of speed limits and pedestrian right of way? Yes! Even drivers who didn’t read about the stings in the Planet or get cited themselves would often have to reduce speed behind more savvy motorists. It would prevent accidents and help reduce traffic and parking congestion by making walking and biking safer. 

Unrestrained traffic on our main streets takes the pleasure out of running errands and makes parents fearful of letting kids walk to the park or school. Keeping up the stings until drivers get the message, and following up with occasional—monthly?—reminders thereafter is probably the single easiest and least controversial (I hope) thing that could be done to improve the quality of life in our town. Let’s do it! 

Ann Sieck 

 

• 

STRAWBERRY CREEK LODGE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

At its monthly meeting the Strawberry Creek Lodge Tenants Association unanimously approved the following letter. 

The constant court actions by Housing Commissioner Marie Bowman opposing the building of a senior residence at 2517 Sacramento Ave. concerns us. Even though the courts have decided that the building should start, the end is not in sight. The court actions have already siphoned off over $750,000 from efforts to provide needy seniors safe, affordable housing in Berkeley. The wasted sum of money can mount to over a million dollars if these court cases continue. 

Strawberry Creek Lodge is a senior residence with over 150 separate apartments. We are privileged to live in a pleasant home, where help, concern and new ideas are available from staff and residents. It’s a beautiful feeling to know that interesting and interested persons are close at hand. 

In close vicinity are homes filled with families. We have no problem with our neighbors and they have no problem with us. Our community is an asset to our neighborhood and we believe that the proposed new 40 apartment senior residence will be an asset to that neighborhood.  

The courts have decided in favor of building the 40 unit building. Neighborhood persons have asserted their objections, but have been overruled. Clearly the new building would be an improvement over the existing unsightly and unsafe building. Other persons in the neighborhood, at a rally have urged that the housing should be built as proposed. 

Ms. Bowman has said over and over that she cares for seniors. She agrees that they are deserving of an affordable and caring place to live. She could affirm this care by not pursuing future court cases. 

We trust that Ms. Bowman will sincerely address the thoughts we expressed. Already too much of the funds needed for housing seniors has gone into a fruitless battle. Common sense must prevail. 

Sid Efross, 

President, Strawberry Creek Lodge Tenants Association 

 

• 

BUSH’S RECORD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

While the Republican National Convention hails President Bush as a strong leader, let’s remember that the country has lost about seven million jobs on his watch and that the average American family’s income has decreased on his watch. The clincher is that President Bush has turned record surpluses into record deficits, threatening the Social Security system that working people rely on, so that the wealthiest one percent of Americans can enjoy huge tax cuts—all this while cutting combat pay to soldiers. If strong at all, Bush’s leadership is head-strong, and it’s leading us down the drain. 

Claudia Morrow 

 

• 

GET OUT THE VOTE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Bush lies continue. First he lied about his Vietnam military service, or lack of it. Then he lied about his drinking and drug problems. He lied to support his illegal invasion of Iraq. He lied about clean air and clean water. Now he lies about John Kerry’s honorable service in Vietnam. I know. I spent 19 months in Vietnam. 

By now, we all know what Kerry knew in 1970. That Vietnam was an illegal war. Just like Iraq is. A war contrived by the neo-fascist business-government partnership that President Eisenhower warned about. 

If one is to do anything meaningful this year, it is to vote. With less than 50 percent voting, the neo-conservatives will continue to pillage America’s wealth and international goodwill, unless everyone votes. 

Please register and vote. America’s future is on the line. 

William Dodge 

 

• 

INTERNATIONAL GOOD WILL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Fantastic Olympics. I am sending money for my couch potato seat here in the Bay Area to help defray the high cost Greece took on to build such fine facilities and provide such flawless security. 

Greece revealed the beauty of the whole world acting in concert. The country that invented democracy and the Olympics renewed its heritage by hosting the best Olympics ever. The world was treated to incredible performances in every sport. All nations competed under commonly accepted rules. New peaks of human performance were achieved. 

At a time when our president has divided nations into “good” and “evil,” into a “coalition of the willing” and turncoats like France and Germany, we needed the Olympics to highlight international cooperation. Anger only flared in Athens when a representative of the Bush administration was to show up. Despite our fine athletes, the administration’s foreign policy has obviously gained the disrespect of the world. 

We Americans have qualms about starting a war unilaterally because of weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there. We were led into thinking that Saddam Hussein was somehow connected to 9/11, overlooking Saudis who actually were. We were reminded that Saddam was brutal to the Iraqis. Only reservists, troops and their families registered the loss of life and limb. The investment of our tax money was too huge to be understood. But as atrocities surfaced showing Americans sent to Iraq also brutal to caged Iraqis, we sensed shades of Vietnam. We still did not know the depth of international disrespect. 

In much of America the sources of news are limited; most of us know more about a murder trial in California than about world opinion. Yet we need the cooperation of the rest of the world more than ever to restore peace and save our environment. The torch of international cooperation was lit again in Greece. Let’s carry it further. 

Eva Bansner 

 

• 

EMBRACE THE FLAG 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

We went to see Uncovered: The Truth About the Iraq War at the California Theater on Kittridge Street Sunday and my daughter asked afterwards why all the “bad guys” (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld) wore U.S.A. flag pins on their lapels and the “good guys” didn’t. Why have we let the current administration and their followers assume our flag for their own? Patriotic dissidents can wear the flag, also. Let’s do it. I’m sure we can find the pins for sale somewhere in Berkeley. 

George Paxton›


Campaign 2004: The Battle Over Character: By BOB BURNETT

Commentary
Tuesday August 31, 2004

The month of August has seen an escalation in the battle over the character of the presidential nominees. First, Bush and Kerry sparred over the October 2002 vote giving the president power to go to war in Iraq, each questioning the other’s judgment. Next, Republicans unleashed the scurrilous Swift Boat ads that questioned Kerry’s integrity. While these two skirmishes will soon be forgotten, the issue of character will remain paramount until Nov. 2. 

To put this in perspective it’s useful to recall the two faces of the 2000 Bush campaign. The positive side featured four policies designed to appeal to the Republican base: cutting taxes to help the economy, bolstering defense, making education accountable, and reducing Federal entitlements—the “faith-based” initiative. The negative face consisted of a relentless attack on the character of Al Gore, where a series of alleged Gore improprieties—for example, that he claimed to have invented the Internet—were contrasted with the Bush promise that he would restore dignity and responsibility to the White House.  

In 2004, Bush is running a similar two-faced campaign. Only this time his policy options are restricted, as he can’t emphasize tax cuts, education, or the faith-based initiative because these programs aren’t working. All that Bush has left to work with is the issue of defense, where he is making the dubious claim that Americans are safer because he is president. And once again the dark side of the Bush campaign features an assault on his opponent, a no-holds-barred attack on the character of John Kerry, an effort to sell voters on this simplistic theme: Bush is resolute, while Kerry waffles.  

Most Democrats scoff at the assertions that the Bush administration has strengthened America and that he is a strong leader. There seems to be abundant evidence that America has grown weaker under Bush: everyone in the world now seems to hate us, terrorists multiply like bunnies, North Korea continues to threaten nuclear war, etc. Moreover, political insiders characterize Bush as a figurehead president, a weak leader who is easily manipulated by Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and a small group of neo-conservatives. And, over the past three and a half years, Bush has had his own share of flip-flops: opposing nation-building and then embracing it, opposing the 9/11 commission and then reluctantly endorsing it, to mention just two. 

But a slight majority of Americans continue to regard Bush as a strong leader because in managing the president’s image, Rove and the Republican spin masters have added a healthy dose of the political version of magical realism. In addition to their claims that the president is resolute and has strengthened America, they emphasize that he is a Christian and imply that he gets his instructions directly from God. In the minds of many this has created a vivid characterization of Bush as a devout warrior who is leading the nation on a crusade against evil. Undoubtedly this will be the primary theme of the Republican convention—“onward Christian soldier.” 

It is against this backdrop of a carefully manipulated Bush image that we should consider the recent skirmishes, which were responses to successful Kerry assaults on Bush’s character. Kerry left the Democratic convention having planted a seed of doubt in the mind of many voters about Bush’s leadership. Polls showed Kerry and Bush in a virtual tie on the issue of “strong leader” and “who is best able to lead the war on terrorism.”  

The Bush campaign saw this as a major setback for their candidate and responded with two thrusts. On Friday, Aug. 6, Bush challenged Kerry to say whether he would have supported going to war with Iraq if he had known “what we know now.” Bush then misquoted Kerry’s response and used it an example of Kerry’s alleged flip-flopping. 

But Kerry actually used Bush’s taunt as an occasion to attack the character of the president, albeit not effectively. Kerry began by correctly characterizing the resolution that he voted on in the fall of 2002; it wasn’t a vote on whether to invade Iraq but rather whether the president should be given the authority to invade if all other measures failed. Kerry explained that he voted to give Bush war power believing that the office of the president needed this in order to protect the nation. Kerry emphasized that the mistake was not that Congress granted Bush war power, but what Bush did with this power. Kerry asserted that the president made three critical errors of judgment: he failed to scrutinize the pre-war intelligence and invaded based upon wildly inaccurate information; he failed to build a real coalition and therefore the United States was left with the burden of the war and occupation; and he failed to provide an exit plan, a strategy to insure that the war in Iraq reached a quick and satisfactory conclusion. 

A few days later the Bush campaign counterattacked by launching the Swift Boat ad campaign, where Vietnam vets accused Kerry of lying about the incidents that led to his medals and demeaning veterans by his famous 1971 Senate testimony. The Kerry campaign responded that Bush was resorting to the same smear tactics he had used against first, John McCain, and then, Al Gore, four years ago; this time, they were able to link the ad campaign to Bush campaign insiders. Kerry, in effect, accused Bush of cowardice, of hiding behind his campaign staff while supporting the ads. 

Polls indicate that Kerry has been damaged by these two assaults, but the election remains very close. The big problem that the Bush campaign faces, over the next two months, is that it has only this one issue, and there are inherent problems running solely on character. Unlike 2000, when Al Gore was unable to defend himself from personal attacks, John Kerry appears to be able to do this. Four years ago, the press gave Bush a free ride; reporters accepted his claims that he was a person of strong moral character. Now the press is willing to question his character by, for example, examining Bush’s questionable military service and investigating his links to smear campaigns. 

And, of course, most voters want an exchange of ideas, not insults; they want to hear what each candidate proposes as a strategy for America’s future. Kerry has expressed such a plan but Bush has not. The Kerry campaign is beginning to make a damming comparison: Bush went into Iraq without a plan, and now he is campaigning for reelection without a plan. To exploit this weakness and win the battle over character, Kerry needs to make clear that he has a plan for America, and the strength of character to execute it. He must demonstrate that he provides Americans with a clear exit strategy from the Bush administration. 

 

Berkeley resident Bob Burnett is working on a book about the Christian Right.›


Republicans Need A Clear, Simple Message To Appeal to Undecided Voters: By MICHAEL LARRICK

Commentary
Tuesday August 31, 2004

The presidential election is to be decided by those voters who have yet to make up their minds. Who are they, and how do you get them to vote for George Bush? 

I believe these voters are largely honest and practical citizens. They are concerned about our involvement in Iraq and national security. They care about the environment and jobs. They expect that their children will receive a decent education and have a chance to compete and succeed. 

The Republican National Convention needs to speak to these good folk by keeping it simple, direct, and by making sense. Give them a choice of black or white, not Kerry’s 40 shades of gray. 

They have already heard that Germany, France, Russia, England and even John Kerry thought there were weapons of mass destructions in Iraq. Yes, repeat it one more time and tell them about the flaunting of U.N. sanctions, etc. Make the war more personal. Congratulate the Iraqi soccer team and all the Iraqi athletes who no longer have to compete with the fear of being locked up, beaten and even killed for a poor performance, as were the conditions when Saddam’s son Uday Hussein was the “athletic director.” Welcome these athletes and all Iraqi citizens to the free world. 

Speak to the good women of America about the horrific conditions under which most of their sisters in the Islamic world exist. Ask them to look at their daughters and imagine them covered in cloth from head to toe, denied an education and living their lives as little more than slaves in service to the men. Explain to them that raising the status of women brings benefit to all of society. Women’s education is key because as the literacy rates rise, the birth rates fall and the first steps out of ignorance and poverty are taken. Gender equality initiates change economically, politically, and finally culturally.  

Showcase the most progressive achievement of Iraq’s new constitution, a mandate that 25 percent of the legislature be women. This ascent of the status of women in an Islamic nation and the planting of the seed of democracy in Iraq is the beginning of the end for the tyrannical regimes of the Middle East. Make no mistake; we are in a culture war. George Bush and our brave men and women have taken the fight to the enemy and the fighting is fierce because the Muslim extremists know that if they lose the battle of Iraq, they lose the culture war and their dream of an Islamic world. 

Address their concerns about the environment and job creation. Explain how, if we signed on to the Kyoto Treaty, U.S. manufacturing would be greatly restricted while large green house gas producing countries like China, India, and Brazil would be completely exempt. This would do great damage to our economy without doing much good for the environment. There is great debate over the cause of, or the legitimacy of “climate change.” Over the past 3,000 years the Earth’s temperature has fluctuated, due to natural causes, over ranges much larger than that predicted to cause global warming. As has been the case in recent years, technologies will continue to develop which will clean up our environment without us having to go back to the horse and buggy. 

Please, allow protesters to be seen and heard. Interview the rank and file. They typically come across as very angry and in nearly every case are unable to coherently articulate their position. This does not play well in Peoria. 

Kerry must be exposed for what he is, a man who thinks of himself first and foremost, a man who during 20 years in Congress has not exhibited the leadership quality needed to guide even one piece of legislation with his name on it past the president’s desk. The public already sees him as a flip-flopper and this image should be reinforced. He is not talking about his voting record because he has the most liberal voting record in Congress. Kerry has chosen to run as a war hero and that choice may be his undoing. There is no need to mention the Purple Heart and medal mess, that has a life of its own, but if John McCain attempts to discredit the brave war heroes who oppose Kerry, it should become an issue at the convention. It will not hurt, when talking about health care, to link John Edwards and his band of brothers, personal injury lawyers, to the obscene rise in medical cost due to malpractice lawsuits which the Democrats refuse to place a cap on and is a major stumbling block on the road to affordable health care. These issues will play in Peoria. 

 

Michael Larrick is a Berkeley resident and a registered Republican.h


Najaf Needs Gatekeeper for Keys to the Holy City: By MU’AN FAYYAD

Commentary, Pacific News Service
Tuesday August 31, 2004

(Translator’s comment: Grand Ayatollah Sistani has brokered a peace in the embattled Iraqi city of Najaf where the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr have been fighting American and Iraqi forces. This column written by a close advisor to the Ayatollah appeared in the influential London-based Arab daily Asharq-al-Awsat and was probably approved by Ayatollah Sistani himself to go out no later than August 22. The reason was that in Iraq the main contending parties had already reached the accord that was announced after August 22.  

At the end of this abridged translation the author Mu'an Fayyad says, “After all the Companions [of Muqtada as-Sadr] belong to the same culture as ours.” That is the key to what the rest of the world knows now—the old Ayatollah and the young firebrand have come to terms.  

But the real heroes are the many thousands of Najafis and their supporters. They forced both Muqtada as-Sadr and the Americans to realize that the power of people can move mountains. Or as Mu’an Fayyad writes: “The people took over responsibility. They and others learned how to cooperate with each other.” What Najaf is looking for now is a kalidar, or a gatekeeper, who will take custody of the keys to the city.)  

 

LONDON - The citizens of Najaf have long been preoccupied with keys that can open up the locked places in the Shrine of Imam Ali. Some still think the keys can lead to palaces or reveal treasures. Some talk about the “seven rooms” that will turn into one room. They call it the “difficult way.” According to popular belief, if a key opens up these doors, they will get blessings from God and good luck. Others who open a door will fulfill their dreams, mostly “meaning their troubles will go away.” All Najafis know their city has great heritage value for Arabs and Muslims.  

Even if the keys bestowed were only symbolic, like giving “keys to the city” to some honored person from afar, they have value. A look at the houses, markets, motels, schools and tombs show Najafi citizens have both material values and concern for their city. Before the recent fighting, Najafis kept their city very clean. They believed they were given keys that allowed them entry into the urban culture. And the Ayatollah appointed a gatekeeper whose religious responsibility was to preserve the keys to the culture.  

But Najafis now do not have a gatekeeper because, as a religious figure, they were subject to assassination. Last year pro-Western Iraqi Shi’ite leader Sayyed Abdul Majid al-Khoei was assassinated. He lost his life trying to defend the Kalidar, Persian for gatekeeper. Since then the Najafis have had no gatekeeper.  

But the people took over the responsibility. They and others learned how to cooperate with each other in handing out keys.  

Some of the new interim gatekeepers were Persian. In fact the Persian word for gatekeeper, kalidar is widely used in Najaf. In Iraqi Arabic the word is “keeper of the couches.” So Najafis cooperate with each other in handing out keys and couches. The Shrine has not only a religious function but also a social, economic and, especially, a political function. The keeper of the keys has to be honest, otherwise, the Shrine cannot function.  

The temporary gatekeepers are deeply concerned about the future of the Shrine and the Imam Ali culture. From London come voices of worry from exiles. Ordinary families demand that the tombs be protected. “We need a Kalidar to assume religious responsibility to protect our heritage,” they say,  

What we see in the media is appalling when it comes to preserving the keys of the culture. The Companions of Muqtada al-Sadr keep saying, “We don't know of any keys handed over to some else.” But they also say, “Most, but not all, of the keys are accounted for.”  

Nevertheless, some aide to the temporary kalidars could have given away keys to some Persians. We ordinary folk want nothing more than that all the keys are accounted by a real authority. We are worried about the treasures in the Shrine.  

We don’t understand why our keys should be turned over to outsiders. After all the Companions of Muqtada al-Sadr belong to the same culture as ours. Anyway, they have not yet renounced us. We and they are the same Najafis and we both adore going on a visit to the Imam Ali Shrine and sitting on the sacred couches.  

 

This commentary originally appeared in Asharq al-Awsat and has been translated by Franz Schurmann.ô


A Half-Million Protesters Cry Out ‘Bush Must Go!’: By CHRISTOPHER KROHN

Special to the Planet
Tuesday August 31, 2004

NEW YORK—They came from across New York and across the country with a protest focus and ferocity that left little to the political imagination. “Bush must go!” was the chant of choice, and water the beverage of all on this hot August day.  

On Sunday, in what some are calling the largest convention protest ever held, almost a half-million protesters snaked through the canyons of Manhattan protesting the war in Iraq and Republican attempts to politicize New York’s 9/11 tragedy. The march ended peacefully with few arrests, considering the enormous crowd. 

While protest organizers, led by the group United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) had predicted only days earlier reaching the lofty goal of 250,000 demonstrators, no one imagined that the final number would be twice that. Their estimate was that more than 500,000 people braved near 90-degree heat and humidity to let the world know that the Republican Party is unwelcome in New York, and that it cannot continue to use the 9/11 theme—a past campaign success for President George W. Bush—to pump up his present campaign.  

Despite repeated police warnings, threats according to some protesters, large numbers of demonstrators still came to New York City. Warnings of impending disaster were also heard from Democratic insiders, offering credence to some Republican hopes that a violence-marred event would be laid at the feet of nominee John Kerry. But protesters heeded little of this advice.  

Ray Seidel, a politics professor at Sarah Lawrence College, was there because he thought that “it’s important that there are public protests, that people protest the Bush economic and civil rights record,” he said. “Our children will be paying off his $220 billion deficit.” 

Leslie Woo, a New York City educator, said, “It’s important to be out here in terms of the public coming together and choosing the next president, but I do see how an event like this can be spun to middle America.” 

Jessie Molina, a registered Democrat and fourth grade teacher from Northampton, Mass., said she had been quite moved the previous night when she attended an event with parents who had lost children in Iraq. She said simply, “I am shocked and appalled that he chose New York City.” 

Environmental organizer Ilyse Hogue from San Francisco had another reason why so many had taken to the streets: “This is democracy in action. There was no way for the broad spectrum of humanity to buy themselves seats in the convention,” she said. 

Bob McLane, from Tyler, Texas, a Vietnam marine veteran now selling bumperstickers, said he was worried, but he played down the potential of a conflagration between protesters and police. “If there’s any violence today it’s going to play right into the hands of Bush. No,” he said, “there is not going to be any violence today.” 

And he was right. 

They came from Orlando, Houston, Tallahassee, Madison, and yes, even Brooklyn. They came in wheelchairs, in strollers, and on bicycles. And it was not only the 20-somethings and 30-somethings, but sweat-suited 40-somethings, graying 50-somethings, and some cane-supported 70- and 80-somethings marched too. 

And of course, one of Berkeley’s favorites, was there too, the Raging Grannies. In the end, with fewer arrests and even fewer incidents of unruly behavior, the NYC police chief was complimenting the marchers’ comportment and the marchers were complimenting the restraint of the police. Don’t forget, this march uncorked nearly four years of pent-up frustration, anger and enmity toward an administration which those interviewed characterized, again and again, as warmongers and hypocrites who cared little for the poor and the elderly. 

Perhaps graphic artist Nicole Schulman said it best. “I’m here because I am a fourth-generation New Yorker who believes we have to get rid of George Bush who is trying to turn a left-wing Democratic city into a police state!” 

Bands of protester were organized by region and by issue, from 14th to 23rd streets between Fifth and Ninth avenues, in the Chelsea and Flatiron districts. They stepped off from 23rd Street, led by Jesse Jackson, Danny Glover and Michael Moore. The march moved down Seventh Avenue towards Madison Square Garden, the convention site, and returned to Union Square via Fifth Avenue. At one point during this intensely hot day some marchers were reaching the end point before others had even started. At 1:30, according to the New York Times, marchers spanned the entire route.  

Although the war was seen by most as the issue to protest, there were clearly other issues on the minds of the demonstrators as well: rescinding the Patriot Act, abortion rights, same-sex marriage, the huge national deficit being rung up by the Bush administration, and the loss of respect for America in the world community. 

A few blocks into the march the protesters ran into a counter-demonstration by an ad hoc group calling itself “protestwarrior.com.” About a hundred counter-demonstrators held large manufactured (not hand-made) signs aloft and chanted vociferously at the passing anti-Bush marchers. Slogans included “Take a shower, take a shower; we’re the real progressives; fry Mumia; and John eff-ing Kerry, no eff-ing way.”  

The counter-protesters were kept away from the marchers by a huge wall of barricades and police. Simon Teitelbaum, an engineer from Chicago now living in Boston, said he had heard about this counter-protest on the Internet, though he hadn’t previously met any of them. “The object is to mingle in with the crowd,” said Teitelbaum of the tactics of the counter-demonstrators. “They say they’re for peace, but it is guaranteed they’re going to try and silence us. Unfortunately, we have a police escort now!”  

And mingle in several eventually did. They were met with the animosity Teitelbaum predicted too. This reporter witnessed several incidents, as the day unfolded, of marchers grabbing signs from counter-marchers, ripping them apart and hurling them over the barricades to the sidewalk. Each time the police refused to get involved. 

In general, police in New York City were very different from their counterparts in Boston. In Beantown, questions to police were usually met with indifference or contempt, and often went unanswered. In New York, although no officers would be quoted on record about what they thought of the protest, they were uniformly friendly, well-mannered, and at times helpful to both demonstrators and the press. Of course the presence of so many demonstrators demanded that the police restrain themselves, while in Boston the police and the military most often outnumbered demonstrators.  

One footnote: at a Critical Mass rally on Friday night, police unleashed a torrent of force against unruly bicyclists, and arrested more than 250 of them. One, Edward Potter, told the Daily Planet that he went to seven different jail cells that night, one a pen in an old warehouse where they shone spotlights on the prisoners all night. He said he was held for 27 hours before he saw a lawyer. One cop, he said, told him, in a friendly way, “you guys were like guinea pigs” for all the new equipment and training the police force had received for the convention.  

Did the demonstrators succeed in upstaging the Republicans on the eve of their convention which was one of the organizers’ hoped for goals? It would seem so. The resultant large and relatively peaceful demonstration of almost a half million competed in the media with Republican pre-convention messages of how former New York Mayor Rudy Guilliani would exhort the Republican faithful on Monday evening and where George Bush would be campaigning leading up to his Thursday acceptance speech. There was no comparative Republican salvo during the Democratic convention in July. Clearly yesterday’s New York reception was not the one Republican strategists were looking forward to when they made New York their first choice for this year’s convention.


Ten Thousand Words for ‘No’: By OSHA NEUMANN

Special to the Planet
Tuesday August 31, 2004

NEW YORK—We couldn’t have a rally in the Great Meadow of Central Park because 250,000 people would ruin the grass, and because we didn’t come to court early enough to say “pretty please can we have our rights”—that’s what the judge ruled when United for Peace and Justice, the organizer of today’s mammoth demonstration, asked him to rule that the city must give us a permit. 

So that’s why thousands of us, though dead on our feet from a day of marching on New York’s unforgiving cement, were determined that the Great Meadow is where we would be, permit or not. The Great Meadow became our great green mother, beckoning us into her arms. And we came, and by late afternoon she was filled with our tired, sweaty bodies. We sprawled on her grass, our picket signs and banners laid down beside us, as the cooling shadows spread, and practiced a peaceful, pleasant politics, a politics without speeches, which is not really such a bad thing. Perhaps the judge did us a favor after all. 

It was one of those days where everything worked out. United for Peace and Justice did exactly what it intended to do—turned out the numbers to protest the Republican National Convention. All the trash talk about how tough the cops would be, all the scary stories of their fancy high-tech weapons, the sonic blaster that could break eardrums, all the on-again off-again uncertainty about a permit did not deter us. 

By 10:30 a.m., the designated feeder streets for the march in lower Manhattan are clogged with people and more are coming every minute. On 15th St., both sides of the entire block between Sixth and Seventh avenues are lined with cardboard coffins under construction, each draped with its own American flag. A few blocks further on, a Korean dance group, with drums and clashing cymbals, dances through the crowd. Metal police barricades lined both sides of Seventh Avenue, the designated march route, and the crowd fills every inch between them, and stretches in both directions as far as the eye could see. 

At noon the great mass of people begins to move up the avenue towards Madison Square Garden. As we get closer, the lines of police behind the barricades thicken. Every intersection is blocked by a sanitation truck, behind which is a street full of police vehicles of every sort and description. 

The closer we get to the Garden the more police line the barricades. By the time we reach the Garden itself, the cordon of cops is three or four rows deep, supplemented by clots of Secret Service, looking like refugees from a Men in Black sequel, except their sunglasses are a different brand, and their suits are charcoal gray, not black. They all sport that little cork screw wire dangling from their ear, a sure sign that they’re not quite human. 

Hanging from the Garden Arena is a many stories high banner of the Statue of Liberty with a background of stars and stripes. Just up the street, the equally huge billboard proclaimed Fox News the place where America goes to get its information. 

The block of Seventh Avenue directly in front of the Garden is as close as we will get to what more than one sign calls the “asses of evil.” The crowd roars, and yells epithets, and chants “RNC Go Home” more loudly and breaks out the sidewalk chalk to write greetings to the delegates. 

Just before we pass the Garden and make the turn towards Fifth Avenue, we catch a whiff of tear gas, and a woman on rollerblades says there’ve been arrests, but for the hundreds of thousands of us who are not watching it on the news, this march may be the largest and perhaps the least violent we’ll ever experience in our lifetime. 

If the Eskimos have 100 words for snow, this crowd has 10,000 ways of saying no to this administration, its wars, its dreams of four more years of power. They range from the obscene, “My Bush would make a better president,” and “My Dick would make a better vice president,” to the plain: “Moderate against Bush,” carried by the nice librarian from Boston, who sits down next to me, taking a breather on 21st Street and Fifth Avenue. Perhaps the least well represented way of saying “No to Bush,” is “Yes to Kerry/Edwards.” If most of the protesters are planning to vote for the two Johns, and I suspect they are, almost no one is advertising the fact. The real alternative is here in the street. 

No doubt the character of the protest will change over the next few days, and perhaps also, the response of the police. In the corner of the Great Meadow, behind the backstop of a clay baseball diamond, I come across a small group of people training for a day of civil disobedience scheduled for Tuesday. They are sitting in a circle, practicing how to go limp if arrested, and what to do if you’ve locked arms, and the police pull one of you away. Before I left Berkeley, the East Bay Express carried a Chris Thompson diatribe warning of the menace of black block anarchists, and other self-indulgent disturbers of the peace, sewing chaos, alienating middle America, and giving a big boost to Bush’s chance of reelection. Todd Gitlin, writing in the Nation made much the same point, though with a more fatherly tone. His message: If New York, 2004 = Chicago 1968, we risk getting Bush for our efforts, just like we got Nixon back then. 

Today all that grumpy worrying seems a little silly. Today was just what the doctor ordered, mass mobilization, a message written in large numbers, and if tomorrow or the next day a few or many brave souls lock arms to sit down in some intersection, it is, as they say, all good. If today we walked inside the barricades, and tomorrow some of us push them over, nothing will be lost and much will be gained. Let the spinmeisters spin as they will. 

At the end of the day, exhausted, I take a taxi to meet some friends in a restaurant. Hassan, the driver, a man in his 40s, says business is bad. Republicans are staying hunkered down, and not venturing out much into town. When I ask him what he thinks about the protests, he tells me how important it is that many of us are in the streets so that the world knows the people of the United States are not the government, and how we must care about the future, about the trees and the rivers, and our children who will depend on them, and how money and power corrupt, and about working 70 hours a week and not being able to pay the bills, but he says he’s lucky for there are many people without any work at all, unable to put food on the table. 

When he pulls to a stop at my corner, he refuses the large tip I offer him, pushes it back at me twice, and says what is important is that today he made a friend. And so, with these demonstrations, we make friends, and how that friendship will blossom is more important than all spinning of the spinmeisters. It’s been a good day, and it’s only the beginning.›


Thousands Won’t Keep Off the Grass: By CHRISTOPHER KROHN

Special to the Planet
Tuesday August 31, 2004

NEW YORK—Two self-described Republican women “from the South” had wandered over to Central Park’s Great Lawn on Sunday. On the lawn already were several thousand people sharing stories from an exuberant day after a huge sweat-soaked march. Refusing to offer their names to a reporter, the two southerners pronounced the Great Lawn event “another Woodstock.” 

As they looked out over the numerous groups of mostly young people scattered about the park, many having just come from the march, one of the women called the gathering “misguided youth” and said they were “the reason John Kerry will lose.” The two 60-something cultural voyeurs then ventured into several political conversations with some of those present only to come away disappointed that they could not convert anyone into a Bush supporter. 

Those who came to the Great Lawn on Sunday night saw it as a political act in the free speech vs. pristine grass debate. They came to defy Mayor Bloomberg’s no-rally-in-Central Park edict. Bloomberg’s views were backed by two court decisions coming in last week. The mayor had earlier said there would be no large gatherings on the Great Lawn a traditional political rallying point. Most present scoffed at the Mayor’s final reasoning, coming through the city’s Parks and Recreation Department, that a large group of 250,000 would ruin the recently re-seeded Great Lawn. Even the New York Times, in an editorial, declared that this was a bit much and came out in support of a Great Lawn rally as did 70 percent of New Yorkers when polled. 

In an interview with New York City Police Deputy Commissioner for Training James Fyfe, it seemed a fait accompli to him that marchers would in fact show up on Central Park’s Great Lawn. “I’m sure they will be in the Park, and it’s okay as long as they don’t bust up property.” 

Fyfe was cornered by this reporter as he scurried down west 31st Street, body guard in tow, after reviewing the police lines and barricades which separated marchers from the Hotel Pennsylvania. The hotel is directly across from Madison Square Garden and had become a de facto holding tank for many Republicans who could not brave Sunday’s five and a half hour march. 

“Things are good, the protest is going well,” Fyfe replied when asked about the march. When he realized the reporter worked for a Berkeley newspaper he responded further. “Berkeley,” a bemused look fell over his face as he recalled a long-ago time in his life. “How’s Berkeley these days? I used to have a girlfriend from Berkeley. What a place!” 

And go the protesters did to Central Park’s Great Lawn. It was part teach-in, part be-in, and part soap box. There were Berkeley-style drumming circles, yoga, and at one point a conga line snaked across the field. Woodstock? No, the Mayor would not allow amplified music, and there wasn’t. Bloomberg also said there were to be no gatherings of 20 or more without a permit and there were. The police chose not to enforce this law. 

The thousands occupying the Great Lawn were basking not only in the late-day warm sunshine but also in the glow of a rare protest victory. They collectively sensed that the day’s large protest was something historic, but most weren’t yet sure what it meant. The numbers had far exceeded anyone’s wildest expectations especially after a spate of negative headlines appearing in the Times and the tabloid, New York Daily News, in the days leading up to the event. Everywhere people asked, “How many? How many were we? 200,000? 400,000? 700,000?” 

Several estimates came in Monday: “More than 100,000 (amNew York newspaper, published by Russell Pergament), 120,000 (New York Daily News), over 400,000 (United for Peace and Justice, march organizer), and 500,000 (New York Times, “rivaling a 1982 anti-nuclear rally in Central Park”). Several local veteran marchers said it was the biggest march they had seen since the 1982 Central Park no-nukes rally. 

Graphic Designer Bruce Krueger from the Bronx said simply, “It was big.” He wasn’t as much a Kerry supporter, as many who gathered in the park that day were not, as he was an inspired and focused George W. Bush detractor. “Let’s have Kerry win and make him regret every day,” he said. Then, curiously, Krueger stated rather matter of factly, “You know, Bush is smashing imperialism all by himself.” 

Paula Ryan, a commercial litigation lawyer from Larchmont, New York, was also present along with her lawyer-husband who had performed legal work for Vietnam protesters. Both are enthusiastic Kerry supporters. She said, “Today went well. Peaceful. The sentiment was against Bush and the only time people seemed to become really angry was when they marched past Madison Square Garden (site of RNC 2004). Bill Anderson, a Green and a student from Delafield, Wisconsin is studying at UW Madison. “Today’s march sends a message…there were so many people.” He added, “I think it shows the power we have to affect change.” 

New York City artist Stefan Calabrese, a member of the Abbie Hoffman Brigade, “a group of Abbie’s friends and Abbie’s wife” that meet frequently for dinners and political discussions, was not so sure how many came out. “I’m not sure what it meant. I need a few days to process it and process the numbers,” he said. Travis Morales from Houston, Texas is in Advertising. He said the march ”was a massive repudiation of Bush and everything he stands for.” 

Tim Goodrich from San Diego came outfitted in his U.S. Air Force uniform. He is a veteran of the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan “Enduring Freedom.” Goodrich is also founder of the group, Iraq Veterans Against the War. He said he was not only surprised by how many people rallied earlier in the day, “but how many people there are in Central Park right now.” 

Scanning the Great Lawn crowd as dusk fell on the weary protest lot, Goodrich spoke in his lilting native Oaklahoman accent. “I am voting for Kerry ‘cause he’s the lesser of two evils, but when he gets elected we’re going to call on him to withdraw all troops from Iraq and remind him that he was the founder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.” 

No one seemed eager to be back on the Great Lawn protesting during a Kerry presidency. 


Sunday’s Marchers Deserve Olympic Gold in Niceness, Freedom of Speech: By JANE STILLWATER

Special to the Planet
Tuesday August 31, 2004

The Internet cafe on 96th and Broadway—around the corner from our flea-bag hotel in New York—closes in just six minutes so here is my very-improvised report on the Republican National Convention:. 

If the U.S.A. were competing in the Olympics in an event called the Protest March, we woulda won a Gold Metal today! One-fourth million people crossed the finish line! Even me. We marched from 14th Street to Madison Square Garden with only a few moments out to window shop and chit-chat with cops. Streams of people just kept pouring past these poor dazed Republicans as they sat in the windows of their high class restaurants. 

“Where did all these people come from?” they must have asked themselves. 

We were created by George Bush! 

Today was a very special day for American patriots. The U.S.A. took the gold. A gold metal in free speech. A gold metal in niceness too. And an all around good time was had. 

Ooops. They are closing the internet cafe on me. Do I have time for spll check? How could they deny a few extra minuts to a Gold Metal Winner!!!!


Arts Calendar

Tuesday August 31, 2004

TUESDAY, AUGUST 31 

THEATER 

Shotgun Theatre Lab “The Faith Project” runs Tues. and Wed. at 8 p.m. to Sept. 15 at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby at MLK. Free with suggested donation. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

FILM 

Cajun Film Night at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. A benefit for Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Time’s Shadow: “Decasia” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“The Gastronomical Tourist” with author Arthur Bloomfield at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Travel Shop & Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave. 843-3533. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Dick Conte Duo at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Jazz House Jam, hosted by Darrell Green and Geechy Taylor at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donation $5.  

www.thejazz- house.com 

Concert for Amaly featuring John Santos and the Machete Ensemble at 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Wed. Cost is $10-$15. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 1 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Community” works by Sonya Derian, John Kenyon, Ira Lapidus, Biliana Stremska and Vee Tuteur opens at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

“Construction/Paintings and Mixed Media Collages” by Gerald Huth opens at the Berkeley YWCA, 2600 Bancroft Way. 848-6370. 

“Metal Art 2004” an exhibition of wearable, ornamental and artistic metal art opens at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St. 834-2296. 

FILM 

Performance Anxiety: “Vito Accondi” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with Nazelah Jamison and Karen Ladson at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Gerald Landry and the Lariats at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun/zydeco dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Improvised Composition Experiment open jam session at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $5. www.thejazzhouse.org 

Soroa, salsa music, at 8 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Brenden Millstein Quartet at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Whiskey Brothers at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Jules Broussard, Ned Boynton and Bing Nathan at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. www.downtownrestaurant.com 

Wes “Warmdaddy” Anderson at 8 and 10 p.m., Wed. and Thurs. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$18. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, SEPT. 2 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Time and Place” Kala Fellowship Exhibition, Part II, featuring Paul Cantase, Elizabeth D’Agostino, Eunjung Hwang, and Joan Truckenbrod. Reception for the artists from 6 to 8 p.m., at Kala Art Institute, 1060 Heinz Ave. Runs to Oct. 2. 549-2977. www.kala.org 

“Construction/Paintings and Mixed Media Collages” by Gerald Huth. Reception for the artist from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Berkeley YWCA, 2600 Bancroft Way. 848-6370. 

FILM 

Performance Anxiety: “Heidi” at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Free screening. Chaplin: “Modern Times” at 7:30 p.m. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Lunch Poems Fall Kickoff at 12:10 p.m. in the Morrison Library in Doe Library, UC Campus, with campus luminaries reading and discussing their favorite poems. Admission is free. 642-0137.  

http://lunchpoems.berkeley.edu 

Janell Moon will read her poems at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, Edith Stone Room, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

Word Beat Reading Series at 7 p.m. with featured readers Molotov Mouths followed by an open mic, at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave., near Dwight Way. For information call 526-5985.  

Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Matirx 212  

A dialogue with Kaja Silverman and Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson at 5:45 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE  

George Pederson and The ReincarNatives at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

Connie and Friends at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Gini Wilson, solo piano, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Jazz Mine, string swing jazz quartet, at 6:30 p.m. at King Tsin Chinese Restaurant, 1699 Solano Ave. www.jazzmine.net 

FRIDAY, SEPT. 3 

THEATER 

Alameda Civic Light Opera. “Pippin,” Sept. 3, 4, 10, 11, 17, 18 at 8 p.m. Sept. 12 and 19 at 2 p.m. Kofman Auditorium, 2220 Central Ave. in Alameda. Tickets are $23 in advance, $25 at the door. Child and senior discounts. 864-2256. www.aclo.com 

Aurora Theatre Company, “The Persians” opens at the Aurora Theatre and runs through Oct. 10. Tickets are $28-$45. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

California Shakespeare Theater, “The Importance of Being Ernest” Tues.-Fri. at 7:30 p.m., Sat at 8 p.m., Sun. at 4 p.m. at the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, through Sept. 3. Tickets are $13-$32. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Impact Theatre, “Fluffy Bunnies in a Field of Daisies” a sexually-honest comedy, at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean Theater, 1834 Euclid, and runs Thurs. - Sat. through Oct. 2. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. www.impacttheatre.com 

Woodminster Summer Musicals “Flower Drum Song,” David Henry Hwang adaptation of Rodgers & Hammerstein classic at 8 p.m. at Woodminster Amphitheater in Joaquin Miller Park, 3300 Joaquin Miller Rd. Fri.- Sun. to Sept. 12. Tickets are $19-$31. 531-9597. www.woodminster.com 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Community” works by Sonya Derian, John Kenyon, Ira Lapidus, Biliana Stremska and Vee Tuteur. Reception for the artists at 6 p.m. at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

7th International Juried Enamel Exhibition opens at the ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. Gallery hours are Mon.-Fri. 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sat. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. 843-2527.  

www.accigallery.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Artist’s Talk with “Time & Place” artists Elizabeth D'Agostino and Joan Truckenbrod. Elizabeth and Joan will be screening slides and videos of recent work plus discussing their Fellowship projects currently on view at 7 p.m. at Kala Art Institute, 1060 Heinz Ave. 549-2977. www.kala.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Kathleen Grace Trio at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $10-$15 sliding scale.  

www.thejazzhouse.org 

Pharma, 77 El Dora at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

Tropical Vibrations play Calypso, Reggae and Soca at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054.  

www.ashkenaz.com 

The Ravines, folkadelic torch blues at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Brian Melvin Trio at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Dave Ellis at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Jose Rizo’s Jazz on the Latin Side at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $12-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Naked Aggression, Toxic Narcotic, Midnight Creeps, New Earth Creeps at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

Kathleen Grace Trio at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $8. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Barbary Coast by Night Join maestro Omar for an evening of authentic music and food from Algeria, at 7 p.m. at Cafe Raphael’s, 10064 San Pablo Ave. El Cerrito. 525-4227. 

Beckett’s Battle of the Bands with The Fated, The Skindivers, Thriving Ivory and Walty at 6 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

SATURDAY, SEPT. 4 

CHILDREN  

“Wild About Books” Labor Day concert with folksinger Adam Miller at 10:30 a.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223. 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“The Voices of Civil Rights Bus Tour” will be on display at Art & Soul in downtown Oakland in the plaza of the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building, Clay St. between 12th and 14th Sts., though Sept. 6. Admission to Art & Soul is $5 per day, children under 12 free. 444-CITY. www.artandsouloakland.com 

“Eyes Opened Wider” Recent panoramic landscapes by photographer Robert Reiter opens at the Photolab Gallery, 2235 Fifth St. Exhibition runs to Oct. 16. 644-1400. 

THEATER 

“Surviving Cain” by the youth group of Chinese for Christ Church, at 8 p.m. at 2715 Prince St. Also Sun. at 2 p.m. www.cfcberkeley.org/english 

FILM 

Maurice Pialat “Turkish Chronicles” at 9:10 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Bay Area Poets Coalition holds an open reading, 3 to 5 p.m., on the front lawn at 1527 Virginia St., cross street is Sacramento. 527-9905. poetalk@aol.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Native Elements, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054.  

www.ashkenaz.com 

Paul Cebar and the Milwaukeeans at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com  

Kugelplex performs Klezmer at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Marca Cassity and Emma Luna, singer songwriters, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Sylvia and the Silvertones at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Monkey Knife Fight at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

T.S.O.L, D.I., Wormwood, Blooddy Phoenix, Nightmare at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, SEPT. 5 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Times of India: The Woman and the Goddess” a collection of paintings by women artists from the Madhubani District, in rural India, at the Addison Street Windows Gallery, 2018 Addison St. Exhibition runs to Oct. 12. 981-7546. 

FILM 

Labor Day with Chaplin: “Modern Times” at 4 and 6 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Linda Elkin, Larry Felson and Bill Mayer at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Wawa Sylvestre and the Oneness Kingdom, Haitian, Latin and Caribbean, at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Skit System, Desolation, Blown to Bits at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

Americana Unplugged with Redwing Bluegrass Band at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

MONDAY, SEPT. 6 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Last Word Poetry Series with Jessica Loos and Neeli Cherkovski at 7 p.m. at Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

MUSIC 

Larry Vuckovich & The Blue Balkan Ensemble at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

TUESDAY, SEPT. 7 

THEATER 

Shotgun Theatre Lab “The Faith Project” runs Tues. and Wed. at 8 p.m. to Sept. 15 at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby at MLK. Free with suggested donation. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Mark P. Fisher “Love for Sale” paintings, opens at Turn of the Century Fine Arts, 2510 San Pablo Ave. and runs to Oct. 20. 849-0950. www.turnofthecenturyfinearts.com 

FILM 

Alternative Visions: “The Films of Morgan Fisher” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Richard Clark discusses “Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terrorism” at 6 p.m. at Zellerbach Auditorium, UC Campus. Sponsored by Cody’s Books. Tickets are $10 available at Codys. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

Mandy Aftel descrbes “Aroma: Recipes for Scented Food and Fragrance” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Edessa & Smyrna Time Machine at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Greek dance lesson with Lise Liepman at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Peter Barshy Duo at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Jazz House Jam hosted by Darrell Green and Geechy Taylor at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donation $5.  

www.thejazzhouse.com 

Ernestine Anderson at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Also on Wed. Cost is $10-$18. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Jazz School Tuesday with Misturada at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 8 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Ninth Annual Yozo Hamaguchi Printmaking Scholarship Awards Exhibition Reception from 6 tp 8 p.m. at the Isabelle Percy West Gallery, California College of the Arts, 5212 Broadway, Oakland. Exhibit runs to Sept. 19. www.cca.edu  

THEATER 

Berkeley Rep, “The Secret in the Wings” opens at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. until Oct. 17. Tickets are $10-$55. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

FILM 

Performance Anxiety: Linda Montano” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Café Poetry hosted by Kira Allen at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña. Donation $2. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik, featuring Three Blind Mice, at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082. 

www.starryplough.com 

Roya Hakakian describes “Journey From the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

www.codysbooks.com  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Wednesday Noon Concert, Jessie Lee, piano, Garrett McLean, violin, Inning Chen, piano, at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

Baguette Quartette at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Parisian musette dance lesson with Karen Tierney at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Kurt Ribak Trio at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Jules Broussard, Ned Boynton and Bing Nathan at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Pat MacDonald, Liam Carey and Paul Panamerenko at 9 p.m. at the Ivy Room, 858 San Pablo Ave. at Solano. 524-9220. www.ivyroom.com 

Larry Ochs of Rova, with Fred Firth, Miya Masaoka and Chris Brown at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donations of $8-$15 suggested.  

www.thejazzhouse.org


Zealous Chainsaw Use Proves Lethal to Trees: By RON SULLIVAN

Special to the Planet
Tuesday August 31, 2004

It’s an unfortunate fact of life in 21st century America: Anyone can buy a chainsaw over the counter, without a prescription, without a license, without a background check or a waiting period or any input at all from the Department of Homeland Security. Most unfortunately, also without any proof of competence. Apparently, fools are buying and using them. 

I’m interrupting the series of portraits of Berkeley’s street tree species because I have had the consequences of uncontrolled chainsaw ownership by incompetent blunderers thrust in my face. Stupid tree pruning is epidemic, unnecessary, and hanging over my back fence right now. I suspect the landlady next door actually paid for the hideous piece of vandalism that was inflicted on a formerly healthy purple-leaf plum that stands on our fenceline.  

The basics of decent pruning are not esoteric, and not hard to find out. Anyone who commits the sort of blunders that this poor tree displays—and, to add to the crime, charges for it—is a fraud and a bungler. You can do better yourself, starting now. 

Trees are not scaffolds, and they’re not animals either. They’re alive and growing; they have hormones and circulation; they wear their vital organs just under the skin.  

When you cut a branch, cut it at its base where it connects with a larger branch or the trunk, not at some arbitrary point in its middle. Do leave the branch collar. Under the slight swelling, like a turtleneck at the base of the branch, is specialized tissue that the tree can grow to compartmentalize the wound you make. Trees don’t heal like animals; they build internal cellular walls that resist infection. Don’t use tree paint or sealer; it just keeps moisture in and fosters rot.  

Learn to make a “jump cut.” First slice into the bottom of the branch collar, two or three inches deep. This prevents bark tearing. Then cut the branch at any convenient point; finally, slice down to the first incision to leave a clean wound—a lump, not a flush cut. If you can hang your hat on it, it’s a stub. Stubs look ugly and they act uglier. They rot back to the trunk faster than the tree can compartmentalize, and eventually can kill it.  

Those branches cut halfway through, looking amputated and unnatural? They look bad because they are bad. They make lots of sprouts, as the tree attempts to recover its food-making ability. You know how you pinch back the tips of a houseplant to make it bushier? That’s just the effect these cuts have on a tree. (It’s all done with hormones. Look up “auxins.”) 

The new sprouts will turn into branches that are weakly attached—they grow from the cut edges of the limb below them, not the heartwood center. Eventually they will get too heavy to support themselves on that weak attachment. They become a lawsuit waiting to happen. 

Too many branches were cut off this tree at once; next spring it will put out a flush of sprouts and twigs, draining its reserves and undoing whatever reduction was done last week. This makes all the other problems worse, and adds more weakness to the burden the tree has in recovering from the assault.  

The tree was pruned completely out of balance. The bunglers cut away most of one side, leaving most of the other side intact. The tree will weigh much more on “our” side of the fence, toward which the prevailing wind pushes it anyway—speaking of lawsuits waiting to happen. 

And the tree was topped. The central leaders were cut off, throwing the tree’s hormonal systems and its recuperating ability off balance. This is murder. Topping a tree kills it; it dies slowly, so the criminals can make a fast getaway and maybe not even manage to see what harm they’ve done.  

The wretches who vandalized this tree possibly charged less than a competent arborist would have—but they cost a lot more. What they did was criminal, and anyone who hires such goons is subsidizing crime. Hire an ISA certified arborist, OR call Merritt College, which has a great arborists’ club, or at the very least, never hire anyone who advertises that he tops trees. 

 

 

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Berkeley This Week

Tuesday August 31, 2004

TUESDAY, AUGUST 31 

“Climbing Yosemite’s Big Walls: Fast & Light” a slide show with Speed Climbing World Champion Hans Florine, at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

“Inner and Outer Peace Through Meditation” with Marshall Zaslove at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble, 2352 Shattuck Ave. 644-0861. 

Creating Economic Opportunites for Women Free orientation meetings for training programs for immigrant and refugee women in English, finance and computer skills. Also on Sept. 2, 7 and 9. 655 International Blvd., at 7th Ave., 2nd floor. To register call 879-2949. 

Kurukula Self Defense Class for Girls at 6:15 p.m. in Albany. Drop in for $15. 847-2400. www.albanykarateforkids.com  

Argosy University Open House for those interested in learning about degree programs in the fields of psychology, education or business, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at 999-A Canal Blvd. in Point Richmond. Event is free. 215-0277. www.argosyu.edu 

Cantabile Chorale Auditions from 7 to 10 p.m. at All Souls Episcopal Church, 2220 Cedar St. To schedule at time call 650-424-1410. 

Organic Produce at low prices sold at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon Streets every Tuesday from 3 to 7 p.m. This is a project of Spiral Gardens. 843-1307. 

Phone Banking to ReDefeat Bush on Tuesdays from 6 to 9 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. Bring your cell phones. Please RSVP if you can join us. 233-2144. dan@redefeatbush.com 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers We are a few slowpoke seniors who walk between a mile or two each Tuesday, meeting at 9:30 a.m. in the Little Farm parking lot. To join us, call 215-7672 for information or check our web page, http://home.comcast.net/~teachme99/tildenwalkers.html or email teachme99@comcast.net 

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 1 

WriterCoach Connection (formerly Writers’ Room) seeks volunteers for this coming academic year for Berkeley schools For information on training sessions please contact Lynn Mueller at 524-2319 or writercoachconnect@yahoo.com www.writercoachconnection.org 

Tilden Tots A nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds each accompanied by an adult. We’ll look for fall spiders. From 10 to 11:30 a.m. in Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

“The Future of Food” a film at 7 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Admission is free. Part of the GMOs and Food series sponsored by GMO Free Alameda County. 527-9898. www.gmofreeac.org 

Auditions for the new Arlington Children’s Choir will be held between 4 and 6 p.m. at 52 Arlington Ave. in Kensington. Also on Sept. 8. Children, between the ages 8 and 14, who enjoy singing and performing, are invited to participate. For information and audition time call Shanti at 843-7745. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday, rain or shine, at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes, sunscreen and a hat. 548-9840. 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

Workin’ It Awards Ceremony for the Bay Area’s working women at 6 p.m. at YWCA, 1515 Webster St., at 15th, Oakland. Tickets are $15 in advance, $20 at the door. www.workinit.org 

Berkeley Communicators Toastmasters meets the first and third Wednesdays of the month at 7:15 a.m. at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. For information call Robert Flammia 524-3765. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6:30 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. www.ecologycenter.org 

Fun with Acting Class every Wednesday at 11 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Free, all are welcome, no experience necessary.  

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Vigil at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, SEPT. 2 

Tilden Tots A nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds each accompanied by an adult. We’ll look for fall spiders. From 10 to 11:30 a.m. in Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Tilden Explorers A nature adventure program for 5-7 year olds who may be accompanied by an adult, no younger siblings, please. We’ll learn about spiders and their biology. From 3:15 to 4:45 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Environmental Restoration Program Community Update at 5:30 p.m. at the City of Berkeley Planning Dept., 2118 Milvia St., 1st flr. conference room. www.lbl.gov/community/ 

East Bay Mobile Blood Drive from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Alta Bates Herrick Campus, 2001 Dwight Way. 1-800-GIVE-LIFE.  

Berkeley Farmer’s Market Shattuck at Rose, from 3 to 7 p.m. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

Kairos Youth Choir Auditions for boys and girls age 7-15. For information call 414-1991, info@kairoschoir.org www.kairoschoir.org 

FRIDAY, SEPT. 3 

Radio Summer Camp Learn how to build and operate a community radio station. A four-day camp from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sponsored by Radio Free Berkeley. 625-0314. www.freeradio.org 

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 7:15 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Players at all levels are welcome. 652-5324. 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. wibberkeley@yahoo.com 548-6310, 845-1143. 

Meditation, Peace Vigil and Dialogue, gather at noon on the grass close to the West Entrance to UC Berkeley, on Oxford St. near University Ave. Sponsored by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. 655-6169. www.bpf.org 

Overeaters Anonymous meets every Friday at 1:30 p.m. at the Northbrae Church at Solano and The Alameda. Parking is free and is handicapped accessible. For information call Katherine, 525-5231. 

Peace Ceremonies with Andree Morgana and the Hayehwatha Institute at 7 p.m. at Belladonna, 2436 Sacramento St. Cost is $10. 883-0600. www.belladonna.ws 

SATURDAY, SEPT. 4 

Basket Bonanza Learn about the weaving techniques of native people and the many uses of baskets. We will weave baskets of our own. For ages 8 and up. From 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Cost is $3-$5, registration required. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Kids Garden Club on the science of cooking. Investigate kitchen science by making soup and baking bread, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. For ages 7-12. Cost is $3-$5, registration required. 525-2233. 

Berkeley Fire Station Open House from 1 to 4 p.m. at Station 4, 1900 Marin Ave. Tour the station, see a safety presentation, and historical display and enjoy hot dogs and cake. Families and children especially welcome. 981-5506. 

World Food Festival Asian Cuisine from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Farmers’ Market, Center St. at MLK Jr Way. Cooking demonstration of Thai-California cuisine at 11 a.m. with Vanni Patchara. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland “New Era/New Politics” highlights African-American leaders who have made their mark on Oakland. Meet at 10 a.m. at the African American Museum and Library at 659 14th St. 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

Art and Soul Festival from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. through Mon. at Frank Ogawa Plaza, City Center, Oakland. Over 40 bands on four stages, food, artisan marketplace, and Fun Zone for children. Cost is $5. www.artandsouloakland.com 

Sick Plant Clinic The first Sat. of every month, UC plant apthologist, Dr. Robert Raabe, UC entomologist Dr. Nick Mills, and their team of experts will diagnose what ails your plants. From 9 a.m. to noon at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. Free. 643-2755. 

Yoga for Seniors at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St., on Saturdays from 10 to 11 a.m. Open to non-members of the club for $8 per class. For further information and to register, call Karen Ray at 848-7800. 

SUNDAY, SEPT. 5 

“Propagating Natives with Cuttings” with Martin Grantham, Greenhouse Manager for San Francisco State University. From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Visitors Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $40 members, $45 nonmembers. Attendance is limited, advanced registration strongly advised. All class fees benefit The Friends of the Regional Parks Botanic Garden. 845-4116. www.nativeplants.org 

Reptile Roundup Come meet Tilden’s reptiles and learn how the world was formed on the shells of turtles and why snakes have natural spectacles. From 2 to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Domingo de Rumba a family participatory event with Afro-Cuban folkloric drums and dances, at 3:30 p.m. at La Peña, 3105 Shattuck Ave. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Les Contes pour Enfants An hour of nature stories in French for children at 10 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

“Growing Up and Growing Old: Life Stages of Enlightenment” with Walter Tuett Anderson, at 9:30 a.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302.  

MONDAY, SEPT. 6 

Tilden Environmental Education Center Open House with a variety of drop-in programs from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group for people 60 years and over meets Mondays at 10:15 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Join at any time. 524-9122. 

Central Labor Council of Alameda County celebrates Labor Day at the Oakland A’s game at 4 p.m. at the East Side Club. Tickets are $12.50. For reservations call 632-4242. 

Color of Woman Story Writing Workshop with Shiloh McCloud at 6 p.m. at Belladonna, 2436 Sacramento St. Cost is $40, materials $20. 883-0600. www.belladonna.ws 

Fitness for 55+ A total body workout including aerobics, stretching and strengthening at 1:15 p.m. every Monday at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5170. 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

TUESDAY, SEPT. 7 

An Evening with Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism czar and author of “Against All Enemies” at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Auditorium, UC Campus. Sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy. Tickets are $5-$10 available from 642-9998.  

“OUTFOXED” a documentary on media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News at 9:15 p.m., 1834 Park Blvd. near Lake Merritt in Oakland. This free event is sponsored by Not in Our Name. 601-8006.  

National Organization for Women Oakland/East Bay Chapter meets at 6 p.m. in the Boardroom of the Oakland YWCA, 1515 Webster St. The speaker will be Jean Damu who will discuss reparations for damages caused by slavery. 287-8948. 

WriterCoach Connection (formerly Writers’ Room) seeks volunteers for this coming academic year for Berkeley schools. From 6:30 to 9:30 p.m., and on Sept. 14. Other training times available. For information please contact Lynn Mueller at 524-2319 or writercoachconnect@yahoo.com www.writercoachconnection.org 

Family Story Time at the Kensington Branch Library, Tues. evenings at 7 p.m. 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

“Trekking the Himalaya and Beyond” Practical tips for exploring the world on foot with Arlene Blum at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Docent Training at the Regional Parks Botanic Garden every Tues. through Feb. 8 at the Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Cost is $125. To register please send a check to Dr. Glenn Keator, 1455 Catherine Drive, Berkeley, 94702. For more information call 527-9802. www.nativeplants.org 

Kairos Youth Choir Auditions for boys and girls age 7-15. For information call 414-1991, info@kairoschoir.org www.kairoschoir.org 

Acting and Storytelling Classes for Seniors offered by Stagebridge, at Arts First Oakland, 2501 Harrison St. Classes are held at 10 a.m. Tues.-Fri. For more information call 444-4755. www.stagebridge.org 

American Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation from 9:30 to 11 a.m. at 6230 Claremont Ave., Oakland. Volunteers needed for Berkeley blood drives and/or Oakland Blood Center. Advance sign-up needed 594-5165.  

Creating Economic Opportunites for Women Free orientation meetings for training programs for immigrant and refugee women in English, finance and computer skills. Also on Sept. 9. 655 International Blvd., at 7th Ave., 2nd floor. To register call 879-2949. 

Organic Produce at low prices sold at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon Streets every Tuesday from 3 to 7 p.m. This is a project of Spiral Gardens. 843-1307. 

Phone Banking to ReDefeat Bush on Tuesdays from 6 to 9 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. Bring your cell phones. Please RSVP if you can join us. 415-336 8736. dan@redefeatbush.com 

“Heal Your Back, Straighten Your Spine” at 1 p.m. at Pharmaca, 1744 Solano Ave.  

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Scuba diver Carl Arnoult will show underwater slides of coral reefs around the world at 11 a.m. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers We are a few slowpoke seniors who walk between a mile or two each Tuesday, meeting at 9:30 a.m. in the Little Farm parking lot. To join us, call 215-7672.  

CITY MEETINGS 

Commission on the Status of Women meets Wed., Sept. 1, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Ruby Primus, 981-5106. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/women 

Fire Safety Commission meets Wed., Sept. 1, at 7:30 p.m. at the Public Safety Building, 2100 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, 2nd floor. David Orth, 981-5502. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/firesafety 

Community Environmental Advisory Commission meets Thurs., Sept. 2, at 7 p.m., at 2118 Milvia St. Nabil Al-Hadithy, 981-7461. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/environmentaladvisory 

Housing Advisory Commission meets Thurs., Sept. 2, at 7:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Oscar Sung, 981-5400. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/housing 

Public Works Commission meets Thurs., Sept. 2, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jeff Egeberg, 981-6406. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/publicworks 

Commission on Disability meets Wed., Sept. 8, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Paul Church, 981-6342. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/disability 

Homeless Commission meets Wed., Sept. 8, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jane Micallef, 981-5426. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/homeless 

Planning Commission meets Wed., Sept. 8, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Ruth Grimes, 981-7481. www.ci.berkeley. ca.us/commissions/planning 

Police Review Commission meets Wed. Sept. 8, at 7:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, Barbara Attard, 981-4950. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/policereview 

Waterfront Commission meets Wed., Sept. 8, at 7 p.m., at 201 University Ave. Cliff Marchetti. 644-6376 ext. 224. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/waterfront 

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board meets Thurs. Sept. 9, at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers, Pam Wyche 644-6128 ext. 113. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/rent 

Commission on Early Childhood Education meets Thurs., Sept. 9, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Marianne Graham, 981-5416. www.ci.berkeley. ca.us/commissions/earlychildhoodeducation 

Community Health Commission meets Thurs, Sept. 9, at 6:45 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. William Rogers, 981-5344. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/health 

Transportation Commission meets Thurs., Sept. 9, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Peter Hillier, 981-7000. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/transportation 

West Berkeley Project Area Commission meets Thurs., Sept. 9, at 7 p.m., at the West Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7520. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/westberkeley  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., Sept. 9, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/zoning  ª


New Hurdles Ahead For East Bay Casino Deals: By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Friday August 27, 2004

Two major stumbling blocks landed in the paths of would-be East Bay casino developers this week, the first in the form of legislative resistance to an exclusive Bay Area franchise the governor wants to award a San Pablo casino and the second in the form of a legal motion to block a major casino at Point Molate.  

Defeat of the San Pablo pact, signed Monday by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and representatives of the Lytton Band of the Pomo Tribe, would seem to be good news for would-be developers of gambling palaces at Point Molate and North Richmond. 

The governor’s deal, a political hot potato handed to lawmakers at the last minute, has generated strong opposition from Democrats and some Republicans in the state Assembly and Senate and its fate remains uncertain as the Legislature’s session nears its end today. 

Berkeley Assemblymember Loni Hancock has emerged as an outspoken foe of the San Pablo plan, and intends to submit a state constitutional amendment that would end such last-minute casino bombshells by requiring that lawmakers be given at least 60 days to study casino agreements before voting on them. 

Reached on the Assembly floor Thursday, Hancock said “So far, no news is good news. It looks like they haven’t got the support for it, so during the b reak we’ll be able to consider all of these contracts and the direction they would take the state.”  

ChevronTexaco, owner of the Bay Area’s largest refinery, located at Point Richmond, recently presented Richmond City Councilmembers a counter offer to th e casino proposal offered by Berkeley developer James D. Levine. 

The oil company and the Ione Band of Miwoks—a tribe, unlike the Lyttons, with historic roots in the East Bay—followed up Tuesday by filing a motion in Contra Costa County Superior Court see king a temporary restraining order that would block next week’s planned Richmond City Council vote on the Levine accord. 

A special hearing on the motion is scheduled for 11 a.m. Monday in Department 22 of the Contra Costa County court. 

Both Levine and C hevronTexaco would guarantee access for the Bay Trail through the site and preserve open space as park land, but Levine’s offer could fatten the city’s coffers far more than the petro-giant’s pitch. 

Key documents detailing plans for the San Pablo and Poi nt Molate casinos entered the public record over the last week, one the compact signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the other a detailed contract with the City of Richmond offered by a would-be Berkeley casino developer. 

Though reduced from a bigger-than-Vegas 5,000-slot-machine monster to a more Sin City-sized 2,500-slot gambling palace, Schwarzenegger’s plans for Casino San Pablo still face a rocky road before state legislators. 

The other agreement, presented by James D. Levine and his Upstream P oint Molate L.L.C., outlines the proposed conditions the Richmond Council will consider if and when they vote on plans for a major gambling waterfront resort on a former Navy fuel depot. 

But Levine’s proposal, as well as plans for another casino in North Richmond, could be torpedoed in the increasingly unlikely event legislators did approve Schwarzenegger’s pact with the Lytton Band of Pomo tribespeople for the 2,500-slot machine casino in San Pablo. It guarantees a ban on other casinos within a 35-mile radius—effectively handing the Lyttons a Bay Area casino monopoly. 

While typical legislation is subjected to committee and fiscal reviews in both the Assembly and Senate, lawmakers were told they would have their first and only say on the governor’s Lytt on accord and four other casino pacts when they come up for a floor vote. 

But the real question in the East Bay is what will happen to two other casino proposals currently under consideration in Richmond and North Richmond. 

Berkeley developer Levine and partner John Salmon are forging ahead with their plans for a Point Molate casino, and the Scotts Valley Pomo Band are continuing to push their Sugar Bowl Casino in North Richmond. 

Levine’s proposal includes an operating contract with Harrah’s Operating Company, a subsidiary of Harrah’s Entertainment—a firm with 67 years’ experience in the gambling business. 

Starting from a single bingo parlor in Reno, Harrah’s has branched out both nationally and internationally, becoming the first New York Stock Excha nge issue devoted entirely to gambling. The company maintains a strong position in tribal gambling operations. 

The Lyttons’ San Pablo casino would be jointly operated by the Maloof family—a clan that owns a casino in Las Vegas and the Sacramento Kings of the NBA and gives generously to the GOP—and the Wintun Band of the Rumsey Tribe, operators of the Cache Creek Casino in western Yolo County. 

The Scotts Valley Band has reached an agreement with Florida investor Alan Ginsburg’s North American Sports Mana gement to run their proposed casino in North Richmond. 

On another casino front this week, foes of a tribal casino in Rohnert Park lost their bid to oust two City Councilmembers who voted for a tribal casino that promised the city $200 million paid out ov er 20 years. The duo successfully prevailed in a recall election Tuesday by 55-to-45 and 56-to-44 percent margins. 

Two other councilmembers who voted for the casino face anti-gambling challengers in November. 

In other Northern California casino news, th e Santa Rosa Press Democrat reported Tuesday that two tribal groups have signed an agreement with a prominent Sonoma County Native American family to building a $70 million, 1500-slot casino in Cloverdale on land already held in trust by the Bureau of Ind ian affairs.›i


Albany Chamber Fears Impact of Mall At Golden Gate Fields: By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Friday August 27, 2004

Though only a handful of Richmond Chamber of Commerce members turned out for a meeting last week on a Canadian developer’s plans for a massive shopping mall at Golden Gate Fields, those who spoke were decidedly cool on the plan. 

Magna’s maxi-mall, plann ed for a little used 45-acre parking lot, would provide 600,000 to 800,000 square feet of retail space in a scenic location—which area merchants fear will kill businesses already reeling from a troubled economy. 

While Magna had held a series of community meetings seeking input on a then ill-defined mall proposal, Albany Chamber President Sherman Linn said that nothing as large as the scale now being floated by the project’s developer—which amounts to a six-to-eight-Costco-sized project—had surfaced durin g those sessions. 

Despite repeated approaches by James Carter, the chamber’s executive director, “there’s been no indication they’re willing to divulge anything about their plans,” Carter said. 

Carter said he feared that another mall in the area would d eepen the adverse impacts on local businesses that followed the opening of the El Cerrito Plaza, when “we were hard hit. 

“It’s not very likely it’s going to have a positive impact on our community. . .it’s something we perceive as a potential threat to o ur existing business district.” 

Caruso didn’t return a call from the Daily Planet, nor did the Canadian offices of Magna. 

A Los Angeles Police Commissioner as well as a developer, Caruso is also a major political contributor, heavily favoring Republican s. His biggest donation, $100,000 on June 21, was made to the Progress for America Voter Fund, a conservative “527 group” which is running spots supporting the re-election of President George W. Bush. 

Magna Entertainment Corp., the Canadian racing firm t hat owns the track and is North America’s largest operators of race tracks, has selected Caruso Affiliated Holdings, a controversial Los Angeles developer, to build the complex. 

Firm president Rick J. Caruso generated considerable heat in Los Angeles for building The Grove, a mega-mall adjacent to Los Angeles’s venerable Farmers Market, which draws more annual visitors than Disneyland. 

Jorge Sandoval, who’s owned Walker’s Pie Shop on Solano Avenue for the last 19 years, said “I don’t think Albany needs one of those,” especially with parking already difficult on a street noted for its eateries and shops. 

The longest-term business owner on Solano, Sandoval said that after the El Cerrito Plaza opening, “some of our businesses on Solano really got hurt, including ourselves. We can’t compete with mall restaurants with big parking” and linked to chains that buy supplies in vast quantities at deep discounts. 

Paul Revenaugh, owner of the Sunny Side Cafe on Solano, said he would not have opened his business a year ago had he known of plans for the Magna mall. “If it opens, we’ll see ‘For Lease’ signs up and down Solano,” he said. “It’s really a question of survival for small businesses.” 

Chamber Executive Director Carter, who’s leaving his post in October aft er three years on the job, said he’d been required “to keep my tongue kind of stapled for the last few years.” He unstapled it at the close of the discussion. 

“I think this is a very bad idea. It could be the death knell for a lot of our businesses, espe cially on Solano. 

“People seem to want to turn the East Bay into another L.A., where every five minutes along the freeway there’s another mall, and small businesses in the surrounding area have gone belly-up. 

“How are we going to compete marketing our b usiness district against a giant mall? And the whole political shape of our community is going to change.” 

Two City Council candidates also appeared at the forum, Richard Cross, a mall opponent and Alan Riffer, who said he remains open to considering dev elopment at Golden Gate Fields. Riffer also said he’d heard “a lot of good things about Caruso.” 

Incumbent Councilmember Jewel Okawachi, who spoke to a reporter after the meeting, said she was also keeping an open mind about the proposal. 

Okawachi had b een at a niece’s wedding in San Diego during an Aug. 21 press conference where a rival said she supported the project. 

“I still don’t know enough the project to make up my mind,” she said. 

Even Chamber President Linn acknowledged that the city needs mor e sales and property taxes, both of which would flow from a new multi-million-dollar regional shopping center. 

“There are some big box stores that wouldn’t be compatible, but we have to be open,” Linn said, citing the chamber’s recent support for the new Target store along the eastern side of the Eastshore Freeway at Buchanan Street. 

“Target will be a good neighbor,” he said, citing the projected $400,000 annual sales tax revenues and the store’s recent job fair at a local school. 

“They don’t devastate a community the way a Wal-Mart does,” Linn said. 

Carter cited another threat on the horizon—Proposition 68, which if approved by voters in November would authorize slot machines at race tracks and strip local communities of control over development at t rack sites, even if the racing is shut down. 

Magna’s Northern California expansion plans also include a major new racing facility in Dixon in Yolo County on 260 acres adjacent to Interstate 80.  

After the business session ended, seats in the Albany Comm unity Center filled as the crowd arrived for the second half of the meeting—presentation of two Citizen of the Year Awards. 

Linn and Assemblymember Loni Hancock presented the adult award to Joan Larson, reeling off a long list of organizations she’s devo ted her energies to—from Friends of the Library and Meals on Wheels to the Albany Historical Society and the Albany Education Fund. 

Councilmember Akkan Maris presented the Young Person of the Year to Briana K’Burg, a graduate of Albany High School and pr esident of the school’s Leos Club. Her causes include the Berkeley Food Pantry, leadership of the Relay for Life Team, Friday Night Live, working to improve landscaping on the Albany Blub and numerous others. The award came just before she leaves for Gonz aga University, where she’ll attend on a Dean’s Scholarship and one from the Albany Lions.›


Sherry Kelly to Retire as City Clerk: By MATHEW ARTZ

Friday August 27, 2004

Berkeley’s top dispenser of public information released some news this week that seemingly no one wanted to hear: She’s calling it a career. 

Sherry Kelly, 57, Berkeley’s city clerk since 1993, will retire effective Dec. 3, after she sees the city throug h one last election. 

Kelly, who has garnered great praise from both residents and city officials for her devotion to transparent government and willingness to burn the midnight oil, said she needed to spend more time with her husband, who retired three y ears ago. 

City Manager Phil Kamlarz said a search for her replacement will begin soon and that Kelly’s top deputy Sara Cox will be a candidate for a promotion. 

Weldon Rucker, Kamlarz’ predecessor, called Kelly, “One of the hardest working people I’ve ev er met. It’s going to be a huge loss for the city,” he said. 

“Sherry’s done a terrific job,” said City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque. “On the tech front to have all the public documentation on the web, it’s a quantum leap from where we were before.” 

T hou gh Kelly’s pending retirement was common knowledge around city hall, neighborhood leaders were surprised and saddened. 

“I have so much respect for her,” said Marie Bowman, president of Berkeley Alliance of Neighborhood Associations. “She instilled so muc h trust in that office.”  

As city clerk, Kelly has been responsible for managing city documents, researching inquiries, recording City Council and commission happenings and managing elections—a particularly time consuming chore in a city with numero us el ected offices and a penchant for citizen-intiated ballot measures. 

Her work to get city government information online, including council agenda packets and live streaming video of City Council meetings, was recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists, which last year named Kelly a recipient of the James Madison Freedom of Information Award. 

In October the city is scheduled to release an online City Council archive chronicling every council action since the start of the 20th century. A si milar interactive database for other city departments is due out within a year. 

“I think people can’t make good decisions without being well informed and they can’t be well informed unless they have the facts,” Kelly said. 

Getting information to the pub lic, h owever, has never been a nine-to-five job for Kelly, who is known to arrive at city offices by 7 a.m. and stay past 9 p.m. 

“She’s always the first car in the lot, I’m probably the second,” Kamlarz said. 

It’s been that way since Kelly, a San Diego-native, arrived from Martinez where she served as deputy city clerk and assistant to the city manager. Before that she had stints as a sales analyst for a pharmaceutical company and a load administrator for a bank. 

“I liked Martinez,” Kelly said. “But I though t Berkeley might have more resources to get information to the public”. 

She was in for a rude awakening. Much like the present, 1993 was an era of tight city budgets and Kelly was hard pressed to maintain services with a skeletal staff and outdat ed compu ters. 

Compounding her early challenges, within a few months after she took office, the mayor resigned and she had to handle a public hearing on panhandling that drew national attention. Her first election included 68 candidates and a city-wide run-off for mayor. 

“If I had known it was going to be that bad, I probably wouldn’t have taken the job,” she said. 

Kelly tackled those challenges the same way she handles her current workload: She worked a prodigious amount of overtime. 

“There’s always more you can do,” she said. “It just depends on how you define yourself.” 

Kelly’s penchant for late nights and some automatic-locking doors have left her trapped in City Hall more than once, and nearly stranded her one Christmas Eve. 

While preparing to bring a b ox full of work home with her on the night before Christmas, Kelly tried to exit City Hall via the stairwell only to find that the doors had locked from the inside. 

“For the next two hours I was screaming and pounding on doors hoping somebody w ould let me in,” she said. “I knew my husband wouldn’t even look for me until Christmas morning.” 

Finally convinced there was no security guard to heed her call, Kelly escaped through an unlocked door in the basement where earlier that day construction c rews were removing asbestos. “At that point I figured asbestos or not, I’m taking my chances,” she said.  

Kelly will not be a stranger in city hall after her retirement. She plans to work as a consultant and has already discussed possible projects with K amlarz. 

“I need to keep active and busy,” she said. “This has been my life for so many years.”àv


School District’s New Teachers Learn the Ropes: By MATTHEW ARTZ

Friday August 27, 2004

Sharon Zinke has spent her last 38 years teaching kids, but on Tuesday she looked like a cat just delivered from the shelter as she tiptoed through empty hallways searching for her first new classroom in over a decade. 

“I’m so lost here,” said Zinke, a recently hired sixth grade special education teacher at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School and the self-proclaimed “most experienced new teacher in the Bay Area.” 

Even though Zinke was grading homework before most of her fellow Berkeley Unified rookies saw the light of day, she is part of a wave of fresh blood at the district—the largest class of new teachers to hit Berkeley Unified in several years. 

When all of the paperwork is completed, Berkeley expects to hire 60 new teachers this year—about 10 pe rcent of the entire staff, said Pat Calvert, the district’s human resources director for teachers. 

The hiring frenzy comes mainly from improving district finances. Unlike in recent years when budget deficits forced the district to increase class size and shed teacher positions, Berkeley Unified goes into 2004 with its books balanced and its coffers full enough to replace departing teachers. 

Adding to the increase in job openings were a spike in teacher-requested leaves of absence and about a dozen new positions created by higher-than-anticipated enrollment, a new algebra program and an additional social science requirement in the high school. 

This year’s class, which assembled at an orientation session Tuesday at King Middle School, could be the first wave of new hires if voters pass an $8 million tax measure on the November ballot. The initiative would reduce class sizes to 2001 levels and add 59 teacher positions, according to district estimates. 

Calvert, who has two file drawers full of applicatio n s, is confident that the district won’t soon suffer from a lack of qualified candidates. “Berkeley is still a draw,” she said. “People want to come here to work.” 

Perhaps no new teacher has traveled as far to join the district as Joseph Omwamba. Last y ea r the veteran instructor was teaching English in his native Kenya to students who sat with their hands folded on their desks. This year he will teach Swahili and English to Berkeley High students who have garnered a less obedient reputation. 

“I think it’s more fun when students talk back, because then you know when they understand and when they don’t,” said Omwamba, who got a taste of the American education system several years ago in Hayward. 

Another new teacher making an unusual transition is Mikk o J okela. His desire to teach in his adopted hometown led him to resign from the prestigious Piedmont Unified School District to take a job at King Middle School teaching humanities. 

Although they come from different backgrounds, Omwamba and Jokela shar e on e common bond that make them more attractive to the district: neither is white. 

While not fully reflecting Berkeley Unified’s student diversity, among the roughly 40 teachers at Tuesday’s orientation were five African Americans, several Asians and a woma n wearing a Muslim headdress. 

To bolster their ranks, Calvert said the district planned to develop a minority recruitment program this year. 

Demographic and statistical information on the new hires hasn’t been compiled yet. Calvert estimated that the average new teacher has between zero and five years experience and all are credentialed, although she guessed about six would be working on an emergency credential. 

If past trends hold, the new teachers will remain in the district for between 15-20 y ears, she said, although it’s unclear if average tenure for new teachers has dropped since the local real estate market started surging over the past decade. 

While several young teachers feared home prices could one day force them from the district, most said they flocked to Berkeley for the same reasons the city attracts so many outsiders 

“Here it seems like I’ll have a lot of opportunity to give a progressive education that asks critical questions and is critical of our history,” said Chris Young, a w orld history teacher at Berkeley High. 

Zeike, who’s taking a pay cut to join the district, decided to leave her job in a Hayward elementary school when budget cuts would have doubled her workload and forced her into two district schools. 

“There wouldn’t have been enough time to work with the kids,” she said. Zinke is close to King Principal Kit Pappenheimer and said she was happy to be closing her career out in a district that wasn’t rolling over to education bureaucrats. 

“I feel at home in Berkeley,” she sa id. “In Hayward they’re doing what they’re afraid they’re supposed to be doing, Berkeley still respects personal judgment.”›


Protesters Stream into Manhattan for GOP Convention: By CHRISTOPHER KROHN

Special to the Planet
Friday August 27, 2004

They keep coming, but will they have a place to protest? 

According to organizers in New York City for the Republican National Convention, thousands of activists from all over the country have been working for months to bring hundreds of thousands of pro testers to the Big Apple for anti-Bush marches, rallies, music, teach-ins and parties.  

More than a thousand Bay Area protesters are expected to be in New York, according to one prominent Berkeley organizer. But a major snafu seems to be occurring. The largest planned and permitted march was rebuffed in two New York City courtrooms this past week.  

As the Daily Planet went to press the protest situation was fast coming to a head. It is yet unclear if a large sanctioned rally will take place anywhere in Manhattan during the four-day convention—the main protest group is still rejecting the official protest site along the city’s Westside Highway—or whether an unsanctioned, illegal gathering will take place on Sunday in Central Park after the march. 

As usu al, Bay Area organizers are figuring prominently in the logistical operations of these planned large-scale protests, but so far things are not going so smoothly. 

First, on Tuesday the group International A.N.S.W.E.R.—Act Now to Stop War and End Racism—was denied a permit to use the park for a rally of up to 75,000 people. Then on Wednesday the week-long demonstration umbrella organization, United For Peace and Justice (UFPJ), was denied use of Central Park for an even larger planned anti-Bush protest. 

“Essentially the judge said we were too late,” said Oakland resident and UNFPJ steering committee member Andrea Buffa. Speaking from the group’s New York office Buffa said, “We’re disappointed, the First Amendment applies to the entire U.S., but we need to move ahead. We will work with the police and we will have a legal march to Madison Square Garden beginning on Sunday morning at 10 a.m., assembling at the corner of 14th Street and 7th Avenue (in Manhattan).” 

And where will the rally be after the march? “That’s what we are in negotiations with the police about right now,” Buffa said. 

Not In Our Name, another prominent Bay Area organization with a national following, may be taking a different tack. Media coordinator for the group and Berkeley resident A iMara Lin, speaking outside the courthouse just after the judge handed down the second decision not allowing protesters to use Central Park, was less conciliatory. 

“Not In Our Name says we have a legitimate right to be in Central Park on Aug. 29. The per mit battle is not over,” she said. “It is a personal choice for folks whether to participate in an act of Civil Disobedience.” 

UFPJ’s Buffa said, “Many of our constituent groups cannot risk arrest, many immigration groups who plan to participate, for exa mple…going to Central Park will not be part of our march.” 

The collective agendas of all groups seem to be pro-peace, pro-immigrant, anti-racist, and pro-labor. Their main goal, stated over and over in interviews, is to protest the policies of the past f our years of an unpopular president. But because of the restrictions being placed on protesters by the police, there may be fissures developing within the various groups represented. 

“New York City officials are sowing tremendous fear and confusion about protesting in this city,” said Berkeley resident Bob Wing, who is editor of the monthly anti-war newspaper War Times. Wing is also the co-chair of United for Peace and Justice. Speaking from New York, Wing said NYC’s police force seems to be mirroring th e Bush administration’s “politics of fear,” and they are doing it with the help of the local media. 

“The parallel here is Arabs as terrorists and dissenters as anarchists,” Wing said. “The (New York) Post even ran a story about how the Weather Undergroun d has reemerged for these protests…even the (New York) Times has run two front page stories about how anarchists are coming to destroy the city.” 

Wing, clearly frustrated with New York City officials said, “Sunday is the day everybody has agreed they wil l work with and mobilize for…this is scheduled to be the largest (protest) event and it doesn’t even have a site.” 

Medea Benjamin of Code Pink and San Francisco’s Global Exchange (which operates a fund-raising retail outlet in Elmwood), is already on the ground in New York. Reached by cell phone Thursday in New York’s Union Square she says she hasn’t seen heavy police presence (like that in Boston) yet. 

“At our rally this morning we had about 15 Code Pink women, and at first there were no police, but later ten motorcycle cops showed up, but they were light and relaxed,” she said. 

On Wednesday a group of four Code Pink women were arrested when police “stormed into the (Sheraton) hotel room we were renting, when they unfurled a banner [out the window] across the street from Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s press conference.” 

According to Benjamin the banner read, ‘Welcome Protesters. Where? Central Park.” 

Benjamin herself was not arrested in this incident. The four women arrested have been released. A Bay Area woman was kept overnight, according to another Code Pink spokesperson, Danielle Ferris of New York City.  

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Voter Packet Goes to Press After Judge Rejects Challenge: By MATTHEW ARTZ

Staff
Friday August 27, 2004

Berkeley’s voter information packet is ready for printing after Superior Court Judge James Richman dismissed complaints Thursday challenging the wording of two controversial ballot initiatives. 

Authors of a ballot measure to liberalize the city’s marijuana laws and a measure to create a Tree Board to protect public trees both protested that the City Council had approved ballot titles designed to undermine support for their initiatives. 

Tree Board author Elliot Cohen further charged that the city attorney’s analysis, included in the voter packet, offered misinformation. 

Among his litany of complaints, Cohen argued that the city had overstated the measure’s cost, refused to consider potential savings and used “alarmist language” to frighten voters that the initiative would increase the risk of fires. 

However, state election law required Cohen to provide “clear and convincing” evidence that the ballot measure language was false or misleading, a standard Judge Richman ruled Cohen failed to meet. 

The ballot titles, which voters will see on their touchscreen machines, became embroiled in controversy this summer when the City Council spontaneously decided to review the language for three measures they opposed. 

Judge Richman denied the request of marijuana advocates to revert to the original draft. That version placed the measure’s most controversial provision—a by-right use permit to cannabis clubs—at the bottom of the ballot statement rather than the top. 

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LeConte Neighbors Fume Over Stolen Endorsements: By MATTHEW ARTZ

Friday August 27, 2004

Several officers of the LeConte Neighborhood Association have accused one of their own members of misrepresenting the group’s positions on ballot arguments set to be delivered to Berkeley voters. 

They say Jim Hultman exploited lax state election laws and, without their permission, signed the group up to ballot arguments opposing five controversial initiatives.  

Most egregious, said LeConte President Karl Reeh, is that the group is listed as opposing a proposal to publicly finance city elections and a library tax. Reeh said board members never voted on campaign finance and, although they oppose the library tax, some members objected to harsh language in the ballot argument. 

The rebuttal Hultman signed on behalf of LeConte against the library tax charges that the venerable institution is mismanaged. 

“He had no authority to say that on our behalf,” said LeConte Secretary Patti Dacey. “I read the library argument and I was appalled. I like the way the library is managed.” 

Hultman, however, insists he did nothing wrong and contends the neighborhood backlash is being orchestrated from City Hall where politicians are especially protective of the initiative to publicly finance elections. 

“The mayor is putting pressure on them to get our name off the ballot argument,” he said. “Public campaign financing is his baby and he can’t stand that his own neighborhood group opposes it.” 

Reeh said that the mayor’s office has not contacted the group since it appeared as an opponent to campaign finance reform. 

Much to the displeasure of neighborhood groups, the city is seeking four tax measures that would raise an estimated $8 million to help plug projected budget deficits in its general fund and special funds including those for libraries and emergency medical services. Publicly financing city elections would pluck an estimated $500,000 a year from the city’s general fund, but isn’t officially a tax. 

Hultman, who sits on the LeConte board but isn’t an elected officer, was one of several members of neighborhood groups to sign ballot arguments both as individuals and on behalf of their organizations.  

As part of its fight against new city taxes and spending programs, the Berkeley Alliance of Neighborhood Associations (BANA) has urged neighborhood groups to depart from past tradition in which neighborhood leaders signed ballot arguments as individuals and instead take a united stand. 

Not only does it send a stronger message of neighborhood opposition to city tax hikes, but procedurally it’s very easy. 

To assign himself as LeConte’s official spokesperson, all Hultman had to do was check a box that he was signing on behalf of a group, and then sign a separate consent form that he was a “principal” of the group. No proof of his standing with the group or outside verification was required. 

“It seems anybody can sign something on behalf of anybody. That’s pretty outrageous,” said Dacey, who along with Reeh and LeConte board member Rob Wrenn requested that City Clerk Sherry Kelly remove LeConte from the contested ballot arguments.  

Wrenn sent an e-mail to Kelly’s office with copies sent to Cisco DeVries, Mayor Bates’ chief of staff, and councilmembers Linda Maio and Dona Spring, sparking claims from Hultman and others that politicians were pressuring LeConte leaders to backtrack from their opposition to public campaign financing, a charge rejected by the mayor’s office. 

“We were not involved in this discussion with LeConte,” said DeVries, who was out of the country on vacation when the e-mails were sent. 

Councilmember Dona Spring challenged all of the ballot arguments with neighborhood or block group endorsements. 

“I don't believe that very many of these block groups or neighborhoods actually took positions on the ballot measures,” she wrote in an e-mail to Kelly. 

But City Clerk Kelly, in consultation with the city attorney’s office, determined state law gave her no power to review the matter. The election code, she said, only requires that someone signing a ballot argument on behalf of a group be “a principal” but doesn’t define the term. 

“I have to take their word for it,” Kelly said. “Someone else has to challenge them.” 

State election law allows a 10-day window for legal challenges to ballot arguments, but Reeh said by the time LeConte learned of its right to sue, it didn’t have enough time or will to mount a challenge. 

Hultman, however, insisted he would have prevailed in court. Given just two days to conduct a vote in time to be included on ballot arguments, he forwarded an e-mail from BANA asking for a vote on the tax measures, in which the measure to publicly finance campaigns was also included. 

“Everyone came back opposed to everything,” he said. “Public financing was included. It’s a tax, it’s coming out of the general fund.”  

Although it’s shrouded in controversy, the rushed Internet vote taken by the LeConte board—their standard practice when time restraints prevent a face-to-face meeting—appears to have been among the most democratic among neighborhood groups that went on record opposing some of the tax hikes. 

Greg Harper, head of the Southwest Berkeley’s Stanton Street Neighborhood Association, which is listed on the ballot argument opposing the library tax, said he never officially polled his members. “My neighbors trust me to act for them. We don’t get together,” he said. 

Claremont-Elmwood Neighborhood Association (CENA) board member Mort McDonald, said his group didn’t take a formal vote either, though he added CENA president Dean Metzger had asked members if anyone was opposed to joining BANA against the tax hikes.


Shirek Seeks Union Support For Possible Write-In Bid: By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR

Friday August 27, 2004

Veteran Berkeley District 3 City Councilmember Maudelle Shirek is keeping her options open for a possible re-election campaign, despite the fact that she was disqualified earlier this month from the November ballot for failure to provide the proper number of qualified nomination signatures. 

Shirek reportedly won a dual endorsement recommendation from the Alameda County Service Employees International Union when she showed up last weekend at a candidates’ meeting of the labor group to seek their support. The SEIU dual endorsement also went to Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board Chair Max Anderson, who will appear on the November ballot as a District 3 City Council candidate. 

Neighborhood organizer Laura Menard and political newcomer Jeffrey Benefiel are also running for the District 3 seat. 

The recommendation now goes to the Alameda County Central Labor Council, which will conduct candidate interviews for all Alameda County political races in mid-September. A source at the Central Labor Council said that while the council tends to follow the recommendations of local unions in candidate endorsements, those endorsements are not automatic. 

The SEIU recommendation was first reported earlier this week in other area newspapers and was confirmed by Anderson. 

Neither Shirek, members of her staff, nor representatives of SEIU Local 790 returned several calls concerning the story and rumors that Shirek has been considering conducting a write-in campaign for her seat. However, candidate Max Anderson confirmed that Shirek attended the SEIU meeting and asked for the union support. He said she did not mention a possible write-in campaign.  

By law, candidates cannot officially begin running a write-in campaign until at least 57 days before the election. For the Nov. 2 election, that would not occur until the second week in September. 

“We’ll have to just wait and see,” Anderson said, concerning a possibly Shirek re-entry into the race. “I’m going to run the same type of race as I’d always planned.” He expressed concern that “with Laura Menard in the race,” Shirek’s re-entry might “split the progressive vote,” possibly allowing the more moderate Menard to win. 

Anderson had announced his intention to run for the District 3 seat before Shirek was disqualified. In an earlier interview, he had told the Daily Planet that he was running for the seat, and not specifically against Shirek.


Bay Area Coalition Finds Hope, Fear in Haiti: By JUDITH SCHERR

Special to the Planet
Friday August 27, 2004

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Courage, integrity, rage; hunger, disillusionment, fear—a group of mostly Bay Area human rights workers and journalists found it all, here on this embattled island, where once-enslaved people rose up 200 years ago to found the pro ud independent black nation of Haiti. 

Among the dozens of people interviewed on the streets, in jail, in union halls, in homes, at demonstrations and at spiritual events, we found unbridled hope and deep discouragement, bravery and dread; we witnessed dr ums and dance that filled people with the spirit of life and we heard testimony after testimony of family members charred or riddled with bullets in sordid death.  

Courage incarnate. That’s Annette Auguste, sitting in the crowded visitors’ cell at the pr ison in Petionville, on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. Her brown eyes gleaming, the prisoner lent her strength to the group that squeezed into the space around her. “I am not afraid,” the folksinger and Lavalas activist said. “I have too much support. T hey won’t do anything to me.” 

Lavalas is the political party of deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former priest whose theology and political goals have been directed at empowering the poor and voiceless. On Feb. 29, according to accounts writ ten by the exiled leader, Aristide was forced out of the country by U.S. officials. The State Department version says that, in response to his call for help, the U.S. facilitated Aristide’s escape from a country in turmoil.  

Port-au-Prince resident Wilfred Lavaud talked about the arrest of his wife Sò Anne, a folk singer and Lavalas supporter. “On May 10, the American military came into the house at one in the morning and said they had information that Sò Anne attacked their forces and had large guns in the house,” said Lavaud. Weapons were not found and a judge declined to prosecute the activist on the original charges. Yet Sò Anne, like still uncounted numbers of Lavalas supporters, remains in custody without precise charges and without a trial date.  

This, of course is in stark contrast to last week’s trial of Louis Jodel Chamblain. Chamblain is a leader of “rebel” forces that brutally took over portions of Northern Haiti at the beginning of the year. This group continues to control parts of Haiti ne ar the Dominican Republic border, according to UN officials. Chamblain had been found guilty in absentia for the murder of an Aristide ally in 1993. Under Haitian law, the “rebel” leader had the right to a retrial on his return to Haiti. Chamblain was acquitted in a retrial that lasted one day only. (He remains “jailed”—he has a single cell at the woman’s prison—on other charges.)  

Haiti’s U.S.-backed interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue has called the rebels “freedom fighters;” on Aug. 15, a group of 150-200 “rebels” was permitted to march through the streets of Port-au-Prince carrying their weapons. (A United Nations spokesperson said the peacekeeping organization didn’t stop them because their job is to support the Haitian police, not intervene on t heir own.)  

 

A People’s Politician 

Integrity. Our politicians throw the word about until it pops like a plastic bubble.  

Meet Jean Charles Moïse, mayor—I should say former mayor—of Milot, a northern rural district of some 50,000 inhabitants. The area a bounds in coconut palms, avocados and passion fruit; groves of banana trees line its narrow roadways. The 30-something father of four is among the more than 400 mayors and countless other local elected officials across the country booted out of office alo ng with Aristide, creating chaos throughout the tiny nation.  

Of peasant stock, Moïse grew up in Milot, where, at great financial sacrifice, his parents sent him and his three sisters to school. As a young man, Moïse began to organize fellow peasants int o the Peasant Organization of Milot to help them get title to the land that they share-cropped. He ran for mayor in 1995 promising to enforce Article 74 of the Haitian Constitution, which says that local government has the right to redistribute local gove rnment-owned land. (Most of the so-called landowners didn’t have legal title to the land they claimed—it actually belonged to the government; they held it as a result of favors from the Duvalier governments.) Moïse was elected mayor in 1995 with 85 percent of the vote and again in 2000 with 70 percent.  

The popularity of the mayor of Milot was evident on Aug. 14, when he appeared in public for the first time in months at a pro-Lavalas protest march that drew more than 2,500 participants. Cheered loudly by supporters, the mayor stayed at the march only briefly, surrounded by the group of human rights workers in bright orange shirts, who believed their presence would help Moïse stay safe. As popular as the Lavalas partisan is with his community, he has an gered Haiti’s elite over the years by his tireless work for land reform and his penchant for calling for locals to plant crops for their consumption rather than devoting the soil to export products such as tobacco. He is the subject of frequent threats against his life and property.  

While the Aug. 14 march was a time for many to put their fears aside, don their Aristide t-shirts and protest publicly against the government they say is unconstitutional, many stayed away, some in hiding, others too afraid to demonstrate their Lavalas loyalty in public. In Port-au-Prince, I spoke to one radio journalist who had worked in the north, but now hides in the densely populated capital. There it’s easier to be anonymous, he said, noting that he never sleeps in one home for long.  

Many people have been traumatized by the violence that characterized—and continues to characterize—the Aristide opposition. Lavalas supporters in Cap Haitian, a northern city near Milot that ranks second in population after Port-au-Princ e, put together a “Caravan for Justice,” to memorialize the places where people were killed and homes and institutions burned by rampaging “rebel” forces Feb. 22.  

 

A Traumatized and Angry Witness 

The airport, courts, a radio and TV station, police stat ions, a prison and a number of homes were among the charred and bullet-ridden sites where people had died. While viewing the burned-out remains of a small fleet of school buses, Lavalas supporters leading the caravan found one reluctant witness who, after some persuasion, agreed to speak on condition of anonymity.  

His job was in the school bus yard. When rebels came and destroyed the nearby courthouse and prison, they also incinerated at least six school buses, used to pick children up in the countryside. The program instituted by local Lavalas officials had cost parents only 250 gourdes (about $7) a year.  

“Now we can’t do anything,” said the man, a Lavalas supporter who went into hiding for several months after Feb. 22. “The new government doesn’t give us anything.”  

This now unemployed father was at the site that day with others who were trying to see if any of the badly charred buses could be restored. “The children need to go to school,” he said, as tears began to run down his cheeks. He steppe d away from the reporters and human rights workers to recover his composure, then continued speaking, taking aim at the U.N. “They are not there for protection. Maybe they are there to protect the government.”  

The day preceding the caravan, the Bay Area group met with a number of mothers and fathers whose children had been killed or who were in hiding and women whose husbands were dead or in jail. I asked many of them if they were going to seek justice from the police or the courts and without exception, people seemed to find the question bizarre. “There’s no justice, no one to go to,” said the mother of Jean Pierre Elipha, an 18-year-old killed by the rebels.  

While the stories of violence, death and destruction were tragic, the group found comic relief in one Frederick B. Cook. The balding white man, always accompanied by a quiet Haitian, was first spotted taking pictures of the Bay Area group as we observed a demonstration in support of Sò Anne. That was in Port-au-Prince. Several days later at the demonstration in Cap Haitien, Cook came up to former Oakland-now-Port-au-Prince resident, filmmaker Kevin Pina and engaged him in conversation. The man, whose card indicated that he was with the State Department, was happy to talk to journalists present, but refused to talk on the record. He said his purpose in being at the demonstration was to protect our group; if anything happened to one of us, it would create a lot of paper work for him.  

The last morning of our stay, the journalists and rights workers decided to do some tourism and ride horses up the mountain to the almost 200-year old Citadel, built to keep the region safe from Napoleon’s army. At the top of the steep climb, we weren’t alone with our horses and guides: there was Frederick B. Cook, his quiet companion and about two dozen Chilean U.N. forces.  

And later in the day, when we took the 18-passenger plane back to Port-au-Prince, Mr. Cook and friend were in the front seats. While his omnipresence became a joke among the rights workers and journalists, it underscores the arrogant attitude our nation projects, which is in stark contrast to the Haitian warrior-heroes we met: people like Sò Anne, Jean-Charles Moise and the man at the bus yard.  

 

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City Staff Urges Approval Of 9-Floor Seagate Project: By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Friday August 27, 2004

Plans for the 115-foot tall, 186,151-square-foot nine-story Seagate Building will go to the Zoning Adjustments Board for a second public hearing on Sept. 9, following an earlier session held Thursday night. 

City staff has urged adoption of the controversial project, which includes 149 residential units, 12,067 square feet of ground floor space for the Berkeley Repertory Theater, 5769 square feet of ground floor retail and three floors of underground parking. 

One major question remains to be decided, said city Senior Planner Greg Powell.  

“The application was presented as a rental contract,” he said, “but the applicant has said they are considering doing it as condos.” 

The project entails demolition of four buildings from 2041 to 2067 Center St., between the City Center Garage and the Wells Fargo Annex, including two structures currently used by the Berkeley Rep, one building used by Vista Community College and a Ritz Camera store. 

The new structure’s address would be 2065 Center St.  

While the city’s General Plan limits downtown buildings to five stories, the building gained two more floors under the cultural facility density bonus by providing space for Berkeley Rep. 

The other two floors were awarded because Seagate guaranteed it would offer 23 units at rates affordable by low- and lower-income tenants (respectively those earning 81 percent and 50 percent or less of the Oakland metropolitan area median income). 

The development by Seagate Properties, Inc., of San Rafael would rival the Gaia Building as the tallest structure built in the city in recent decades. 

City Manager Phil Kamlarz and staff had been working with the developer Darrell de Tienne for more than two-and-a-half years before the project was first unveiled publicly at a meeting of the Civic Arts Commission Feb. 25. 

Though the commission voted to endorse the project, members voiced frustration at receiving the plans only two days before their scheduled vote. The proposal went before the commission to receive their blessing on the cultural density bonus. 

Two commissioners, Bonnie Hughes and Jos Sances, dissented, saying they were reluctant to hand control over one of the largest performance spaces in the city to a well-funded group at a time when other organizations are struggling to find performance venues.  

Under their lease with Seagate, Berkeley Rep is obligated to hold its own public performances in the building 48 days a year and to make the space available to other non-profit arts groups for another 52 days a year and submit annual documentation that they are fulfilling their obligation. 

Berkeley Rep will bill the nonprofits according to a fixed schedule, 26 days billed at actual operating costs excluding rent, one fourth at half actual costs excluding rent and the remainder at a quarter of costs excluding rental.  

Project developer Seagate is a privately held five-member partnership with extensive real estate holdings in the Bay Area and apartments in Colorado. Berkeley holdings listed on their website include the 12-story Wells Fargo Building at 2149 Shattuck Ave. (site of their local office), and structures at 1950 and 2039-2040 Addison St., 2055 Center St. (slated for demolition to build the 9-story building) and 1918 and 1936 University Ave. 

The proposed Mitigated Negative Declaration calls for approval if the developer fulfills a list of requirements, including providing housing and space required for the cultural and low-income housing bonuses, minimizing noise, dust and other impacts during construction, and installing 74 bicycle stalls for residents and another eight for shoppers and users of the Berkeley Rep space. 

The city’s proposal also requires the developer to pay $15,000 toward construction of a downtown Berkeley BART bike facility and another $15,000 to upgrade traffic signals at both ends of the block. 

A similar traffic signal fee is being imposed on the new Vista College Building rising just across Center Street from the Seagate site.


Police Blotter: By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Friday August 27, 2004

Carjack Victim Sodomized 

Berkeley Police are seeking two men who sodomized a motorist they carjacked late Tuesday evening near the corner of Fourth Street and Channing Way, said BPD spokesperson Officer Joe Okies. 

After forcing the victim to drive out of the area, “basically they forced him into the back seat and forced him to orally copulate them as they sodomized him,” Okies said. 

The suspects are two white males between the ages of 25 and 35, one described as stocky and the other as slim. 

Okies declined to give further information about the case, which is still under investigation. 

 

Police Find Shooting Victim 

Officers responding to reports of shots fired near the intersection of Sixth and Page streets discovered a bleeding man on a porch at 900 Bataan Ave., a block and a half from the reported location of the shots. 

The 43-year-old victim, bleeding from several gunshot wounds in his neck and torso, was rushed to Highland Hospital and taken into surgery for treatment of wounds that are reportedly non-life-threatening. 

Officer Okies said investigators have found no evident connect between the shooting and an earlier incident that evening in which a man reported being beaten by a racially mixed group. 

 

Forgot Zip Code? 

Fellow pedestrians noted something odd about one of their number as they strolled along 10th Street near Gilman Street last Thursday afternoon. Inadvertently or otherwise, the 40-something gentleman clad in khaki and a tan-brimmed hat was exposing part of his anatomy normally unseen on Berkeley Streets save when the Xplicit Players are abroad in their full, fleshy splendor. 

He had vanished by the time Berkeley’s Finest arrived. 

 

 

Two Gunmen Get Cash 

Two men, each armed with a handgun, approached a pedestrian near the corner of Parker and Fulton streets shortly before 1 a.m. last Thursday and demanded his wallet. The victim wisely consented. 

 

Rat Pack Slash Attack  

A group of five or six young men approached another man near Willard Middle School shortly after 1 a.m. last Friday, one of them carrying a knife. The victim was beaten and sustained a non-life-threatening wound, for which he was treated at a local hospital. 

 

Young Robbers Arrested  

Berkeley Police arrested two juveniles after an aborted strong arm robbery at Hearst and McGee avenues early Tuesday evening. 

 

Masked Gunman Gets Cash 

A masked gunman confronted a pedestrian near the corner of Howe and Ellsworth streets about 7:30 Sunday evening and demanded cash. The victim opened his wallet and the bandit fled in a car. 

 

Ash Tray Equals Deadly Weapon 

Police are seeking a 28-year-old Berkeley woman on assault with a deadly weapon charge after she bashed a gentleman with a heavy glass ashtray Monday night. Police declined to give out further details of the incident. 

 

Shoplifter’s Dumb Move 

A man confronted by a security guard at the Shattuck Avenue Long’s Drugs on suspicion of shoplifting turned a boost into something more serious when he brandished a knife. 

The 36-year-old knife-flashing booster was provided with new accommodations at the city pokey. 

It was the second knife incident at a Shattuck Avenue drugstore in less than a week. On the 19th, another man brandished a knife at a security guard at the 1451 Shattuck Ave. Walgreens. The 38-year-old suspect was still in jail when his fellow knife-wielder arrived.e


New Home for North Berkeley Farmers Market: By LIZ FOX

Friday August 27, 2004

Shoppers gather around Chris Boswell, a chef at Chez Panisse Cafe, to sample fresh bruschetta at the grand opening of the North Berkeley Farmers Market at Shattuck Avenue and Rose Street. The Thursday afternoon market is a program managed by the Berkeley Ecology Center.


Sunday Memorial Honors Reginald Zelnik,UC Historian and Key FSM Supporter: By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Friday August 27, 2004

a Friends and family of renowned UC Berkeley historian and Free Speech Movement supporter Reginald Zelnik will gather for a memorial service Sunday at 11 a.m. in the Faculty Glade outside the Men’s Faculty Club. 

Zelnik, internationally famous for his studie s of Russian and Soviet history, died in a May 17 accident when a delivery truck backed over him as he strolled across the campus. 

The memorial, sponsored by UC’s Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies and the Department of History, will be opened by Martin Jay, Chair of Berkeley Department of History, followed by recollections from leading current and retired faculty from Cal, Stanford, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania and New York University and Lynne Hollander Savio, Free Speech Movement activist and spouse of the late Mario Savio. 

Following their talks, there will be an open mic for 15 minutes, followed by closing remarks from Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.  

 

—›


Deep Budget Cuts Scar New UC Academic Year: By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR

Friday August 27, 2004

A spokesperson for the University of California at Berkeley said that the university has “hit bottom” with this year’s budget and will begin to turn itself around with the aid of the Higher Education Compact signed earlier this year by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the heads of the UC and California State University systems. 

But the compact is not legally binding, and its terms could be changed in future state budgets either by the Legislature or by the governor. 

Student fees across the entire UC system have been rising dramatically in the past two years, according to UC Berkeley Director of Media Relations Marie Felde. The fees have jumped 60 percent from $2,100 a semester to $3,365 a semester for California residents in the past three years. In roughly the same period, state general fund monies to UC Berkeley plummeted, dropping from $514 million in 2003-03 to $437 million in 2004-05. 

As one result, Felde said, “non-faculty employees have not had any raises for three years. In this region, with the current economy, that’s hard. People have felt that.” 

The largest decline in UC Berkeley’s budget this year was in the area of research, which was dropped from the 2004-05 budget altogether, but was later restored, 10 percent lower last year. Nonacademic programs suffered a six percent cut, while academic programs lost 2.25 percent in funds. 

General fund support to the statewide UC system dropped from $3.1 billion in 2002-03 to $2.7 billion in 2004-05. 

Last May, UC President Robert Dynes and California State University Chancellor Charles Reed agreed not to oppose proposed severe cuts in the universities’ budgets in exchange for Gov. Schwarzenegger’s agreement to a Higher Education Compact to stabilize future state funding. 

In exchange, Schwarzenegger agreed to support a 3 percent state general fund increase to both UC and CSU in 2005-06 through 2006-07, jumping to a four percent general fund increase from 2007-08 through 2010-11. 

Under the compact, undergraduate student tuition at both university systems would be capped at raises of an average of 10 percent for the next three years. 

The agreement was called “inexcusable,” “despicable,” and “embarrassing” by John Vasconcellos, the outgoing chair of the Senate Education Committee. Vasconcellos was particularly concerned that the compact did not address the problem of thousands of UC-eligible California students who were scheduled to be turned away from the university system this year because of budget cuts. 

One portion of the university’s budget agreement has already hit a stumbling block: Earlier this month, a California Superior Court judge in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction against the raising of UC fees this fall for 3,000 professional school students who enrolled prior to 2003. Those fee increases would have averaged a 30 percent jump from last year. Judge James L. Warren said that student plaintiffs attempting to halt the fee hikes had “demonstrated a substantial likelihood of success on the merits” in a case which is scheduled to go to trial this fall. UC is appealing the judge’s ruling. 

The Higher Education Compact has been compared to a similar agreement between the governor and California city and county leaders, but it differs in one significant way: Enforcement. Earlier this year, California city and county leaders agreed to proposed cuts in state funding in return for Schwarzenegger’s support for a constitutional amendment to protect them from funding cuts in later years. That constitutional amendment is scheduled to go before California voters in November as Proposition 1A. The Higher Education Compact has no such funding protection mechanism for the state’s university system, relying instead, on both the governor’s word and his ability to get his budge through the Legislature in future years.


A Citizen’s Guide to Absentee Ballots: By JUDY BERTELSEN

Special to the Planet
Friday August 27, 2004

The Nov. 2 presidential election is about two months away. What can we do to make sure our votes are counted?  

We hear news every day about the well-documented flaws and weaknesses of paperless touch-screen voting technology. Many people are aware that if they cast their votes on a paperless voting machine there will be no physical paper record to be used in a recount. And how will registrars of voters hand count a sample of the votes to check against the electronic totals, as required by law?  

Althoug h our California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley has taken courageous steps to improve security for the November election, the paperless machines will be in many voters’ polling places, including Alameda County.  

And then there is all the speculation ab out possible catastrophic events on election day: snafus at the polls that might make it impossible for many to vote, terrorist attacks on election day, etc., etc.  

What’s a voter to do?  

Here are some specific steps one you can take both to maximize th e likelihood that your vote will be counted for the candidates and issues you support, and to strengthen election day procedures for everyone:  

 

To Protect Your Vote 

Cast a recountable paper ballot. Either vote absentee, or request a paper ballot in your polling place on election day. 

In California, you cannot be required to vote on a paperless electronic machine. You must be provided a paper ballot if that is your preference. If you vote absentee, you will avoid possible long lines and will take pressu re off of the polling places on election day. 

 

Absentee Voting  

An absentee ballot is a “voter-verified” paper ballot: it is a paper document that you fill out (and sign the envelope). After being counted, your absentee ballot will be retained by the Reg istrar of Voters in the pool of paper ballots to be randomly sampled as a check against the machine totals. And it will be available for hand count, should the machine totals be questioned. If you vote on the paperless electronic machine, there will be no thing to hand count, should the electronic totals be questioned. Urge everyone you know to request an absentee ballot.  

 

How to Cast an Absentee Ballot 

Your absentee ballot will be mailed to you in the month before the election. Your completed absentee b allot must be received by the Registrar of Voter by the close of voting: 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 2 (not just postmarked) or it will not be counted. You may mail your ballot to the Registrar of Voters, hand deliver it to the office, or turn it in to any po lling place in your county on election day before the polls close. 

Be sure to sign your absentee ballot envelope. Registrar of Voters staff check for signatures and will throw out any ballots that do not include the signature. This step assures that each voter casts only one ballot. Once your envelope is received and checked off, it is opened and your ballot (which of course does not have your name) is retained for counting. 

Be sure your signature matches the one the Registrar of Voters has on file for you. If you can’t remember how you signed your registration card, you can do one of two things: Either re-register and keep a copy of your registration so you’ll remember how you signed, or go to the office and ask a staff member to show you the signature they have on file. You can do this when you turn in your ballot—just be sure not to sign the ballot envelope until you see the signature they have on file. Do this well in advance of election day to avoid long lines or delays. 

If you are registered in a nother city or state, either re-register here or apply for an absentee ballot now. If you are a resident of a swing state, you may wish to consider registering and voting absentee from that state. You’ll need to contact your home county Registrar of Voter s indicating your wish to vote absentee.  

What are the swing states? The polling data keep changing. Here is a list of 22 possible swing states: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hamp shire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin. 

 

If for any reason it is not possible for you to register and vote absentee in your home state, you can register here if you claim California as you r domicile. At the time you register, you can request to be made a permanent absentee voter.  

 

What More Can I Do? 

• Plan to take election day off from work or school and volunteer your time to help the election go smoothly. Election day poll watching/mo nitoring activities are currently being planned throughout the country. Visit the websites www.votewatch.us and www.votersunite.org for information about how to take action. You can volunteer to serve as a poll worker for the Registrar of Voters office (272-6971). If you are a techie, consider joining VerifiedVoting.org’s Tech Watch project: http://vevo.verifiedvoting.org/techwatch. 

• Locally, encourage voters to vote absentee. Distribute a simple and clear brochure about absentee voting (why, how, when, etc.). In Alameda County a copy of such a brochure is available from East Bay Votes; telephone them at 834-4180, or look for their website which will be up soon. 

• Urge everyone you know who has not voted absentee to request a paper ballot at the polls on election day. In California, this is permitted by the Secretary of State. You cannot be required to vote on a paperless electronic machine in California. You must be provided a paper ballot at the polling place, if that is your preference.  

 

 

›o


Getting Involved Before November 2: By BOB BURNETT

Special to the Planet
Friday August 27, 2004

In 2000, in the critical 10 weeks before the presidential election, there was nothing like the surge of political energy that has rippled through Berkeley in recent days. 

Of course, four years ago we didn’t understand how awful George W. Bush really is; most of us dismissed him as a travesty, rather than a menace. And, most voters were not enthused about the robotic Al Gore; we were prepared to vote for him, and perhaps donate money to the Democratic Party, but not to work for him. Four years of the Bus h administration has changed all this. 

Recently, everyone I’ve talked to has been eager to defeat Bush. (Not all are enthusiastic about Kerry, but they are united in their anti-George passion.) 

The question is, what can people do between now and Tuesday, Nov. 2? How can we best expend our money, time, and energy? Here are a few ideas, with emphasis on time and energy. 

First of all, we have to be sure that we vote and that everyone in our extended family also votes. Online voter registration is available at www.ss.ca.gov/elections/votereg1.html. For those who don’t have Internet access, voter registration forms can be found at the county Registrar of Voters Office (Alameda County Courthouse, 1225 Fallon St. Room G-1, Oakland), offices of the Department of Motor Vehicles, Berkeley city clerk’s office, public libraries and post offices.  

For those who expect to be out of town on Nov. 2 or who don’t trust the new touch-screen voting machines, you can vote by absentee ballot by going to www.acgov.org/rov/absentee.htm, sending in the request form on the back of your sample ballot, mailing a letter to Registrar of Voters at P.O. Box 24424, Oakland, 94623, or calling 663-8683. 

Most of the Berkeley activists I’ve talked to are focused on getting out the vote (GOTV); some on maximizing the vote in the Bay Area, which will ensure that the Democrats carry California, and others on tipping the balance in swing states. 2004 GOTV campaigns seem to have four phases: registering voters, convincing them to vote against Bush, getting them to the polls, and then ensuring that their votes count.  

Locally a number of organizations are committed to all these activities. Among these are the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club found at www.democraticrenewal.us/index.htm, the East Bay Democrats at www.ebaydemo.org, and the United Democratic Campaign of Alameda County, 791-2179. If you are a student, or member of the UC community, you might contact Campus Democrats at http://campusdemocrats.org, Cal Berkeley Democrats, www.caldems.com, or California Young Democrats, www.YoungDems.org. 

Among the Democratic Party faithful there is a debate about whether the best way to coordinate swing state GOTV is with the Democratic National Committee (DNC), www.democrats.org/index2.html, or America Coming Together (ACT), http://actforvictory.org. The buzz at the Democratic Convention was that ACT is the best place to go for coordination of GOTV in swing states, while the DNC will primarily fund national media buys. 

ACT is the get-out-the-vo te wing of America Votes, www.americavotes.org, a coalition of activist organizations dedicated to moving forward a progressive agenda, in general, and defeating George Bush, in particular. (For example, the MoveOn.org Voter Fund and the Sierra Club are m embers of the America Votes coalition.) ACT is a 527 organization that relies upon so-called soft money and, therefore, legally must operate independently from the DNC and the Kerry campaign; however, the current campaign-finance rules permit ACT to focus on turning out pro-Democratic voters. 

Many Berkeley activists plan to make the relatively brief trip to Reno, Nevada, or Medford, Oregon to work on GOTV. The ACT contact person in Reno is James Katz, jkatz@act4victory.org. The Wellstone website lists Jack Kurzweil as their voter registration contact, jkurz@igc.org. You can also sign up on the ACT website http://actforvictory.org/act.php/home/static/volunteer_form, and they will provide you with a contact person.  

Of course, you don’t have to travel to a swing state to contact potential voters there. Various Berkeley groups have launched phone or Internet-based GOTV efforts. MoveOn has started, www.moveonpac.org/donate/leavenovoterbehind.html, which coordinates with ACT. Re Defeat Bush, www.redefeatbush.com, has launched a national phone campaign aimed at unregistered women; the local contact is dan@redefeatbush.com, (415) 336-8736. Another national organization focused on unregistered women is 1000 flowers, www.1000flowers.org. A comparable group is th e Mainstreet Moms Oppose Bush, www.themmob.com, which has lots of programs (and also sells nifty political jewelry). 

Besides the campaign to corral unregistered women, there are national efforts underway to coordinate GOTV programs targeted for racial/et hnic groups. One interesting example is National Voice, www.nationalvoice.org, which works with African-American, Hispanic, Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and Native American constituencies. If you want to get involved with this effort, check out www.electionmatch.org.  

Many voters are very concerned about a recurrence of voter fraud on Nov. 2. The best website I’ve found on this topic is www.blackboxvoting.org, which is run by investigative reporter, Bev Harris. (Another good reference is “How They Could Steal the Election This Time,” at www.thenation.com.) If you are an attorney and can take time to work on the protection of voting rights, contact www.johnkerry.com/communities/lawyers, Lawyers for Kerry-Edwards. 

Of course, I haven’t the space to list all the local parties planned as benefits for these or comparable groups. My point is that we are surrounded by opportunities for political action in the next 70+ days, action that we must get involved in if we are to take back our country. ›


Touchscreen Voting Allowed by Shelley

Friday August 27, 2004

Most California counties that use touchscreen voting will be able to use the electronic voting machines in the November elections, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley announced Tuesday. 

In April, Shelley had banned use of the Diebold TSx system in the four counties which used them—Solano, San Joaquin, San Diego and Kern—and decertified touchscreen voting systems in eleven other counties, including Alameda, Napa, and Santa Clara. He said that security measures were insufficient to allow the machines in the election.  

Shelly announced this week that safeguards have now been put in place for the 11 counties to allow the touchscreen voting. The counties and vendors were required to install a voter-verified paper trail or implement other security measures, such as giving voters the option of a paper ballot, have the computer source code available for independent analysis, prohibit any wireless, Internet or phone connections on the machines, and run a poll worker-training program.  

The four counties that purchased the Diebold machines are still prohibited from using them. 


Berkeleyan Moves to New Mexico to Work for Kerry: By ZELDA BRONSTEIN

Special to the Planet
Friday August 27, 2004

From now until Election Day, Berkeley resident Lynn Davidson will be going door to door in New Mexico with the League of Conservation Voters’ Environmental Victory Project in an effort to win that state for John Kerry’s presidential bid.  

The 55-year-old Davidson is an unemployed technical writer and a self-described “shy person” who has a “No Soliciting” sign on the front door of her North Berkeley home. Her only previous electioneering, she says, was a week of campaigning for Eugene McCarthy in 1968. The intensity of her newfound political activism reflects her deep apprehension about the current administration.  

“I can’t see another four years of Bush. I just think it will be the end of this country and democracy. You can do a lot more in a swing state. California is going to go for Kerry, so there’s no point in staying here, as far as I can see, working on the campaign. I’ve been involved with some organizations that are trying to work swing states from here—but there’s nothing like working face-to-face with people. You want feedback, you want to know if you’re really having an effect. You can really see it happening when you’re there.”  

Davidson starting looking for an organization to hook up with in May. In early June she went to the Take Back America in Washington, D.C. 

“All the groups were there, and they were all saying, go work in a swing state,” she says. “I was looking for groups either in Oregon or New Mexico, because those are swing states that I was interested in spending time in. I had contacts for America Votes, which is an umbrella organization that does coordination for all these groups, and the guy from America Votes referred me to these people.”  

Oregon and New Mexico are two of the five states in which the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) is running its Environmental Victory Project; the others are Florida, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Davidson chose to go to New Mexico because “they were ready for me” there, she says. The LCV is providing her and other volunteers free housing in “a block of cheap apartments” in Albuquerque, where their New Mexico operation is based. Plus, she says, the environment is “not like Iraq. It’s easier to talk to people about the environment because there are huge differences between the candidates.”  

The League of Conservation Voters is a national, non-partisan organization that works full-time to strengthen a pro-environmental Congress and White House. Its environmental scorecards grade elected officials. Bush is the first president who’s ever gotten an F.  

The LCV’s Environmental Victory Project is one of the so-called 527s, groups that can run partisan campaigns as long as they are not coordinated with the official presidential or party efforts.  

“We cannot coordinate in any way with Kerry or the Democratic National Committee,” says Davidson,” but we can coordinate with groups like MoveOn and America Coming Together [ACT]. In fact, we share a data base with ACT.”  

Davidson initially went to New Mexico at the end of July. She stayed for two weeks, knowing that she would return to Berkeley in mid-August when her daughter would be visiting from New York. Her idea was to test the waters. If she liked it, she would go back in late August and stay until Nov. 2—and that’s what’s she’s done.  

The Environmental Victory Project’s New Mexico office has a staff of five and, during Davidson’s first stint, about 20 volunteer canvassers. “The office is really run by a bunch of 25-year-olds,” Davidson says, “and most of the volunteers over the summer have been college interns” who are going back to college in the fall.  

If you’re thinking that this sounds like a lark, think again. Davidson and her compatriots typically work Monday through Thursday, from 1 to 10 p.m.  

“The vans pick us up, we go into the office, we’ve got paperwork from the night before.” she says. “We’re writing postcards to follow up on the undecideds we talked to the night before. There’s data entry: every time you talk to somebody, you fill out a form. So that stuff has to be entered in the computer. We have a meeting every day. Usually someone’s done research on an issue, so they make a presentation—like Kerry health care.”  

At about 4 p.m., a van takes canvassers to targeted precincts, where they work for four hours. “We’re canvassing registered voters—going door-to-door. We’re in the first stage, which has basically been I.D.ing voters—asking them who they’re going to vote for, so that later, when we’re getting out the vote, we’re not bothering Bush people. The precincts we’re going into are very mixed”—not solid working class or minority. “I go home and tally up every day, and I’ve got half Republicans and half Democrats. We carry registration forms in case somebody wants them, but we’re working from voter registration rolls. We’re asking two questions: who are they going to vote for, and which two political issues are most important?”  

What’s she’s hearing is “a lot of national security. Also Iraq, the economy, the environment, health care,” Davidson says. 

“Maybe, on a good night, I’ll get half a dozen undecided voters. I’ll knock on maybe 75 doors, maybe I’ll talk to 35 people, and maybe get five or six who aren’t totally committed.” That may sound like peanuts, but Davidson emphasizes that in 2000, Gore won New Mexico by only 366 votes.  

Friday is the day off, unless it rained on one of the regular work days. Which, says, Davidson, it did in early August (this is Albuquerque’s rainy season).  

“Saturday’s you normally do what’s called community canvass. There’s going to be more of this in the next stage, where we bring on local volunteers to canvass with us.” And Sunday’s a half day.  

“Sometimes we don’t canvass on Sundays,” says Davidson. Instead the LCVers will go out to an event. During her first stint, Vice President Dick Cheney visited New Mexico on a Sunday, and Davidson and her colleagues went out to picket him—an experience she describes as “something else.”  

“First of all, he was outside of Albuquerque in one of these exurbs called Rio Rancho—way, way out on the edge of nowhere. We were not allowed within a couple miles of the place, and you had to sign a loyalty oath to go hear him speak. He was talking at a middle school, but in order to go in there you had to endorse them.”  

Davidson says she hasn’t seen much Bush activity in Albuquerque.  

“I don’t think they’re going door to door,” she says. “We in the office are convinced that if Kerry carries New Mexico, it’s going to be because of us. I believe that—and I’m not an optimistic person….The polls are showing Kerry ahead in New Mexico.” 

But that’s no reason to relax, Davidson says, since “it’s neck and neck when I total the people I’m talking to in suburban Albuquerque.”  

 

For information about volunteering for the Environmental Victory Project in New Mexico, contact Olivia Stockman at (505) 244-1077 or via e-mail at olivia_stockman@lcv.org. For information about the project in other swing states, call 1-866- 528-2284 or log on to www.envirovictory.org.  

 

 

 

 


Documents Spell Out Plans |For Two East Bay Casinos: By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Friday August 27, 2004

With the release of two key casino proposals over the past week, East Bay residents can form a clearer picture of the scope, costs and potential impacts of the major Native American gambling resorts that tribes and well-connected developers want to bring to the area. 

What follows is an overview of a developer’s proposal for a major resort/casino/shopping complex at Point Molate in Richmond and the agreement Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed with the Lytton Band of the Pomo Tribe to expand their operations at their card club in San Pablo.  

 

Point Molate Contract 

Berkeley developer James D. Levine’s Point Molate proposal calls for a $1 million payment to the city for rights to purchase and lease the land until Jan. 15, 2006, and the same amount for every year the city extends the agreement until a final sale is approved. 

When the sale goes through, Upstream, Levine’s company, would provide an initial payment of $20 million—minus amounts paid out previously to hold the land—and submit a $30 million promissory note payable at $2 million a year. 

Once the deal closes, Upstream would transfer its rights to the Guidiville Band of the Pomo Tribe, and the property would become a federal reservation if approved by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. 

While the tribe is not bound by city codes and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), before transfer to the Guidivilles Upstream would submit plans to the city for building, planning and environmental review. 

The accord calls for preserving “a reasonable amount of the natural and scenic qualities”—at least 100 acres, most set aside for wildlife protection—and preserving the landmarked 220,000-square-foot Winehaven building, which would become the casino. 

The project would include 150,000 square feet of showroom and conference space, 1,100 hotel rooms and 300,000 square feet of retail space 

Should legal or economic realities bar tribal gambling on the site, Levine would have the right to consider other uses for the site and submit an amended agreement. 

While law enforcement would fall primarily under the jurisdiction of tribal police and ambulance service would be provided by the tribe through a private firm, fire services would be provided by the city, with the tribe building a fire station on site and providing all necessary equipment. The agreement calls for one city fire captain and three firefighters per shift to be paid for by the city. 

The tribe would cover the costs of city emergency service staff required for special events staged at the site. 

As compensation for city services the tribe has agreed to pay the city an additional $8 million a year for the first eight years after gambling operations commence and $10 million annually thereafter. 

On areas controlled by the tribe or casino manager, the tribe would pay the city $10 per day per hotel room in lieu of occupancy tax, up to $5.25 per square foot of retail sales space per year to cover lost sales tax revenues and an additional annual fee based on construction costs. 

For areas not under direct tribal or casino control, the hotel fees would be $7 a day and the retail space surcharge would be up to $7.50 per square foot to cover lost sales tax revenue. 

 

Lytton Agreement  

Schwarzenegger’s pact with the Lytton Band of the Pomos, along with four similar agreements he signed with other tribes Monday, is posted on the chief executive’s website. 

Casino San Pablo has already received federal recognition as a Lytton reservation, but needs state approval to expand the operation to a full scale casino. 

The compact, which runs through Dec. 31, 2025, allows the tribe to install the card and machine games normally found in Nevada casinos while barring roulette and dice games, a statewide rule. The agreement also allows the tribe to negotiate a separate compact allowing off-track betting on horse races—which would put the San Pablo casino into direct conflict with Golden Gate Fields. 

The 2,500-machine limit applies only until Jan. 1, 2008, when the tribe would be allowed to renegotiate the number “based on market conditions and the off-reservation effects” of the casino on the surrounding community. 

The quid pro quo is a guaranteed quarterly payment to the state of one in every four dollars the operators win, with the numbers verified by an independent auditor. 

The key selling point for the tribe—a ban on all other casino-style gambling, tribal or non-tribal, within 35 miles of the San Pablo casino—remains intact, and the accord gives the tribe the right to enjoin any casinos a governor might authorize. 

If another governor-approved casino opens nonetheless, the tribe can stop all payments until the other operation ceases or agrees to share its revenues with the Lyttons. 

The agreement also allows the tribe to cancel the pact if Proposition 68 passes in November, and full-scale non-Indian casinos are allowed. The tribe could also continue the agreement, but stop paying its 25 percent win share to the state.  

The Lyttons also agreed to pay $3 million into a fund to be shared out among non-gambling tribes. 

Schwarzenegger’s pact requires the Lyttons to prepare a tribal environmental impact report detailing the casino’s impacts. The tribe would then negotiate mitigations of off-reservation impacts with the city and county, agreeing to reimburse local agencies for police, fire and other public services. 

The tribe also agreed to waive sovereign immunity and accept binding arbitration to insure that mitigations are fulfilled and to comply with San Pablo municipal building codes. 


Cell Phone Police Column Gets ‘Interesting’ Reactions: J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR

UnderCurrents
Friday August 27, 2004

A recent column on cell phone policing in an Oakland neighborhood got some interesting reactions. Let us sort through them, in the hopes of finding some clarity on the subject. 

The police cell phone column triggered a Jim Herron Zamora article in the San Francisco Chronicle, in which Mr. Zamora wrote that “a community anti-crime group has come to the aid of the cash-strapped Oakland Police Department and made it easier to contact officers by buying a special cell phone for a police team in North Oakland.” I thought it was a bad idea, because it appeared to favor members of the donating group over others. 

In response, someone forwarded me two e-mails circulated to the OPD@yahoogroups.com newsgroup, one written by Shattuck Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council Chair Don Link, another by Mr. John Cascio, who was mentioned in the Zamora article as the initiator of the cell phone purchase. 

“I suspect [Mr. Allen-Taylor] wrote [the column] without doing his homework,” Mr. Link writes. “At least one other reporter for a major newspaper in our area wrote in to suggest that this was probably the problem with his article’s intent and mistaken conclusions. Those who rise to the top ranks of journalism get their facts right, do all of the background homework needed, and then get it right in their stories. We can hope that he will learn from this experience and do more preparation.” 

“It is interesting how facts change and stories twist as tales get re-told,” Mr. Cascio writes in his e-mail posting. “Particularly when it is reporters, responding to and spinning something that another reporter published. To set the record straight… The expected use of the phone is for internal [police] communications. ... No one in the [Beat 8 Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council] expects to get the cell phone number.” 

But the question is not what the NCPC expects will happen, but what the police expect will happen. To that, we return to Mr. Zamora’s article: 

“The cell phone…will make it easier for residents to update officers about crime problems…,” the article reads. “The phone number will not be released to the general public but will be shared with community groups or crime victims who are on the lookout for specific suspects or activities, said Lt. Lawrence Green, who oversees patrols and crime reduction teams in North Oakland.” 

After I received Mr. Cascio’s e-mail, I passed it on to Mr. Zamora, who interviewed both Mr. Cascio and Lt. Green for the Chronicle article. “I’m not sure exactly what Mr. Cascio means by the term ‘internal,’” Mr. Zamora writes me back. “My impression from police is that the phone would not be used exclusively for officer-to-officer conversations.” But perhaps this will turn out to be one of those he-said-she-said kind of mysteries that never get solved. 

Not so are some of the assertions of Sam Herbert, a South Berkeley resident whose letter appeared in the Aug. Daily Planet. 

In the original column, I wrote that my vision of “community policing” was of police officers getting out of their cars, walking a beat on foot, and getting to know the neighborhood and the neighbors. “It is understandable that Mr. Allen-Taylor longs for a simpler time, when individual officers had the luxury of time and limited responsibilities, and could reasonably expect to be able to meet and greet each resident in their district by name,” Ms. Herbert writes, adding that “[b]y contrast, current beat assignments involve responsibility for densely-populated urban communities, and cover geographical areas too extensive to cover on foot.” 

Poor, naive, unhomeworking Mr. Allen-Taylor. Except that the Oakland Police Department actually does manage to get out of its police cars and patrol some districts on a more personal basis. Some districts. As recently as two years ago, I watched OPD officers regularly patrol the downtown area—Broadway and Franklin between, roughly, 15th Street and 19th Street—in midday, on foot. As recently as a month ago, I watched OPD officers regularly patrol the Fruitvale Transit Village plaza area in the late afternoon, on bicycles, slowly. In both instances, I watched the patrol officers chat with merchants and passersby, seemingly without discrimination, establishing exactly the type of neighborhood repoire which Ms. Herbert believes only happened in a “simpler time.” 

Such daylight, foot-or-bike patrols might have a positive effect along the high-crime, International Boulevard corridor between 82nd and 98th avenues. But if any such patrols have been held out there, I haven’t seem them. Instead, in the past year or so, the OPD has concentrated on traffic stops in that area as one crime prevention measure (see “Operation Impact”), a policy which has led to some disturbing results. 

Ms. Herbert also writes that she is “particularly offended by the libelous assertion [in the Allen-Taylor column] that ‘the Oakland Police Department plays favorites in whom it responds to.’” 

Does the Oakland Police Department discriminate? As if we needed another one, this week brings another example. On Tuesday, the Oakland Police Department’s Racial Profiling Task Force released results of a six-month RAND Corporation-conducted study which found “evidence of racial bias in certain traffic enforcement actions by police” as well as “mixed evidence of [racial] bias in [traffic] stop decisions.” 

While only 35 percent of Oakland residents are African-American, the report concluded that “[w]hen officers reported knowing the race of the driver in advance, 66 percent of the drivers stopped were black, compared with 45 percent when the police reported not knowing the race of the driver in advance.” In addition, the RAND report concluded that African-American drivers were more likely to have stops lasting 10 minutes or more, were more likely to be pat-searched for weapons following a traffic stop, and were twice as likely to be subject of a probable cause search than “similarly situated” white drivers. For those who think that the officers were justified in such higher-than-usual “probable cause” searches of black drivers because it’s mainly black folks who are running around town robbing and murdering, think again. “Only 18 percent of the searches resulted in an arrest,” the RAND report said, “casting doubt on either the officers’ reporting of probable cause or on the reasons a probable cause search was conducted.” 

This comes on the heels on allegations raised last May by Relman & Associates of Washington, D.C., the organization charged with independently monitoring the Oakland Police Department’s compliance with the “Rider lawsuit” reforms [you may remember that in early 2003, the OPD settled a lawsuit by some 100 Oakland residents charging that Oakland police officers had either beaten them, stolen from them, or forged evidence against them]. In its May report, the Relman group noted their concerns about streetside strip searches of “young men” being conducted by Oakland police officers, including allegations “that officers pulled down their pants and underwear, exposing their buttocks and genitalia to passers-by.” “In our professional experience,” the monitors wrote, “such searches are unnecessarily humiliating and dehumanizing (sometimes intentionally) and can immediately alienate citizens and destroy community respect for its police department.” You are free to use your own imagination as to either the race or the color of those young men. 

Perhaps the real problem in this homework thing—as raised by Mr. Link—is that we are reading from different books.›


Letters to the Editor

Friday August 27, 2004

CORRECTIONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Your article (“Governor’s San Pablo Casino Deal Fulfills Hopes of GOP Operatives,” Daily Planet, Aug. 20-26) is accurate in most regards, however, you relied on the Village Voice, who made an error of omission. 

My company IKON did not pay a “fine” to the New York State Temporary Commission of Lobbying. We settled the matter with no admission of violation of the law.  

The issue at hand was a First Amendment issue—the commission claimed that we could not run newspaper and television ads regarding casino gaming even though we had never contacted or spent any money on contacting elected officials in any branch of government. 

We believe our activities were protected under our First Amendment rights. We recognized litigation would be long and expensive and elected to settle for convenience—again, the settlement document specifically contains no admission of violating the law. 

The settlement was paid entirely by Trump Hotel and Casino Resorts. I would have preferred to litigate as I said to the press at the time.  

I would ask you to clarify this in all fairness. 

Roger Stone 

Miami 

P.S.: If you are going to cite my “dirty tricks” for Richard Nixon, also acknowledge my role as regional political director for Ronald Reagan and my role as senior consultant to George Bush Sr.’s 1988 California campaign. Perhaps a little more rounded profile... 

 

• 

LITERARY BERKELEY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Bravo on your “Welcome Back to Berkeley” issue, particularly Joe Eaton’s article “Worshipping at City’s Literary Shrines.” Your readers might also check out the Berkeley Public Library-produced “Fiction Set in Berkeley,” a compendium of fiction, mysteries, science fiction, and children’s fiction set all or in part in Berkeley. Reference copies are available in all five Berkeley Public Library branches, and at the Berkeley History Room at the Central Library.  

Sayre Van Young 

Berkeley Information Network/Berkeley History Room 

Berkeley Public Library 

 

• 

WOMEN’S EQUALITY DAY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thank you for publishing Helen Rippier Wheeler’s superlative article “Coming Upon August 26” (Women’s Equality Day). Wheeler’s article is a comprehensive and inspiring reminder of how far women have come and of how much we have yet to accomplish—among these are the assault weapons ban, basic health coverage and decent housing. 

Nancy Ward 

 

• 

SCHOOL BOARD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The charge of racism leveled at the School Board is offensive. The City of Berkeley is 12 percent African American according to the last census, yet Berkeley High serves a 40 percent African American student body. This remarkable demographic transfer occurs largely because BUSD has voluntarily chosen not to enforce residency requirements for enrollment. No other school board in the region or state has acted with such genuine interest in promoting diversity over the financial interest of its own taxpayers. The education gap would virtually disappear but for the school board’s generosity. To then accuse this liberal body of racism is uninformed. 

David Baggins 

 

• 

EL SOBRANTE DEVELOPMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

There is a valley in El Sobrante with a strange geography—it is hidden from everyone but its immediate neighbors. They can look down into the steep, bowl-shaped valley of Garrity Creek. When in the valley, the houses seem to disappear. It is very quiet and secluded, with vast trees, a few horses, and in the sky overhead a hawk or two circling. It’s as if time has stopped. 

When the Friends of Garrity Creek heard that a housing development was planned here, we looked into the valley structure. We found documents showing it is composed of watery, unstable soil, and that documents the developer submitted to the county were inaccurate. 

When the county did their study, it showed this place as a safe place to build. 

We protested at the county planning hearings and later to the Board of Supervisors. We discovered and introduced important new evidence. 

The Board of Supervisors decided for an environmental impact report, to research this area thoroughly. 

For this, the developer has filed suit against the county. 

The Friends of Garrity Creek are proud and grateful that the Board of Supervisors has stood up for honest development. We hope that they will not let this latest move by the developer intimidate them. 

Gwynn O’Neill 

Richmond 

 

• 

RUFFLING FEATHERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It is refreshing to read your Letters to the Editor section. You provide equal opportunity of expression to all sides of each issue. Today this sort of free speech is all too lacking in this supposedly liberal and progressive community. I am reminded of Bob Dylan’s song, “I Shall Be Free No. 10,” where he states, “Now, I’m a liberal, but to a degree. I want ev’rybody to be free, but if you think that I’ll let Barry Goldwater move in next door and marry my daughter you must think I’m crazy! I wouldn’t do let him do it for all the farms in Cuba.” I believe Dylan was trying to make a point that any philosophy fails when it ignores the very basis of its foundation. That is all too often the prevailing sentiment in this town. “Each of us has the right to free speech as long as that speech agrees with mine.” Again, thank you for moving beyond that mindset. 

This brings me to a recent letter from Michael P. Hardesty. Mind you, I did not read the previous letter from Dan Spitzer to which Mr. Hardesty referred, and can only guess what its subject matter was. What stuck me were Mr. Hardesty’s own words. He stated, “…any dissent from the AIPAC [whatever that is] party line is verboten to the totalitarian mentality represented by people like Spitzer.” He then closes his tirade with, “Maybe the BDP should return the favor and spare us any future letters from Spitzer.” This doesn’t sound very much like a liberal or progressive sentiment? 

His letter may not have ruffled any old Left feathers, but it did ruffle one Right feather. 

Joseph W. Adams 

 

• 

SAN PABLO CASINO 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thanks again, Daily Planet, for being there when it counts! Your article last Friday detailing the governor’s connections to Republican interests in the massive casino proposed for San Pablo under Indian guise was a wake-up call! 

The cities of the East Bay have cooperated mightily with their state legislators in recent years to cut crime and rebuild San Pablo Avenue as an attractive boulevard with new landscaping and apartments to support neighborhood commerce. AC transit has joined in investing in faster bus service. San Pablo is becoming a vital spine supporting livable neighborhoods on both sides and transit and walking become viable options for young, old and workers, service may evolve into frequent streetcars. 

This planning and effort by our representatives is beginning to bear fruit in Emeryville, Berkeley, Albany, El Cerrito and Richmond. 

The arrogance of the governor deciding to preempt local land use plans with a plan to reward Republican money with the largest urban casino franchise must be stopped in the State Legislature next week! If we should want a casino in the Bay Area, there are sites identified that will not jeopardize neighborhoods or environmental treasures (Treasure Island and one of the Richmond sites).  

We hope concerned citizens in the San Pablo corridor will assemble after work Friday at the casino to discuss how best to accomplish this. 

Drive, if possible, to experience traffic impacts to Casino San Pablo on San Pablo Avenue in the town of San Pablo with a “Not Here, Gov.” sign. 

Horst and Eva Bansner 

 

• 

WHERE IS THE JUSTICE? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Where is the justice in not permitting Berkeley citizens to vote for Councilmember Shirek due to misunderstandings, paperwork snafus, sneaky legislation and who knows what underhanded manipulations? This is an outrage. Please correct this gross error. Continuing review of Shirek incident cannot hurt and I appreciate all you’ve printed so far; frankly, one ‘smells a rat.’ Do keep up the good work, please. 

Terry Cochrell 

 

• 

ARISE AND VOTE! 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Bush and Cheney have the advantage of incumbency at a time when our country is at war with terrorists. Consequently, to win in November, John Kerry and John Edwards need significant support from the approximately 50 percent of disaffected voters who fail to go to the polls. This non-voting silent majority has grown justifiably cynical as our democracy lapses into a plutocracy in which only billionaires and millionaires can meaningfully participate. Thus far in the campaign, Kerry and Edwards promise programs and reforms that energize Democratic party loyalists, but politics as usual will not bring the usual non-voters to their cause.  

Now is the time for Kerry and Edwards to take on the real issues: the byzantine complexity and unfairness of the IRS code for individuals and corporations; the absence of universal government-supported medical and dental care; and forfeiture of the legislative process to paid lobbyists. As matters stand, those with little income need to hire a tax preparer, which they can ill afford, to receive the credits, benefits and exemptions to which they are entitled. The middle class pays the way for the super-rich ( which Bush refers to as his political base) and corporations receive a virtual free pass. 

We are on the edge of a political abyss; only support from the non-voting silent majority can save us. Arise and vote! 

Michael S. Esposito 

Richmond 

 

• 

POINT MOLATE 

Editors, Daily Planet 

Point Molate is a spectacular shoreline site where public access and open space should be a priority (“Casinos, Mall and Politics Mix at East Bay Meetings,” Daily Planet, August 17-19). 

Save The Bay supports the Richmond community’s own vision as expressed in the Point Molate Base Reuse Plan, including public shoreline access, a Bay Trail segment, and a public shoreline park. This plan was the result of a citizen’s Blue Ribbon Committee convened to create a vision for the property after the Navy decommissioned it in the 1990s. It also allows for limited development that would be confined to already-built areas, is comparable with existing public use areas, and preserves the registered historic buildings on the site. 

Save the Bay is working with Richmond residents who want their unique and beautiful shoreline areas to be enjoyed by everyone, with public destinations for families, and protection of the site’s unique resources and habitats. This is a priority for our 10,000 members and supporters. 

Save The Bay has not endorsed any private purchase or development of Point Molate. We encourage the City of Richmond to consider any proposal for Point Molate carefully, in an open public process, to ensure that the Base Reuse Plan’s vision will be guaranteed and implemented for the benefit of the entire community. 

David Lewis 

Executive Director, Save the Bay 

ª


Parents and Friends Decry Willard Garden Changes

Commentary
Friday August 27, 2004

A GOOD START 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The following is a letter sent to Superintendent Michelle Lawrence of the Berkeley Unified School District: 

For over a decade, the Willard Greening Project, led by Yolanda Huang, has involved the PTA, neighbors, local nurseries and most of all Willard Students in transforming the once-barren campus. Yolanda wrote the original grant that brought to the BUSD funds to develop Willard’s and several other district schools’ garden projects, where kids grow, prepare and eat fresh produce. 

And for years she and the PTA have labored virtually unfunded and with almost no BUSD help to beautify the front of the school. They’ve enriched and mulched the soil, installed drip irrigation, and dared to plant exuberant roses to soften the look and tie the school to the surrounding neighborhood. 

Sure, they needed help with weeds, and there were some design issues. So last February, when the district finally decided Willard needed sprucing up, PTA president Catherine Durand asked to be part of the Site Committee—which would sign off on the plans—but oddly, neither she nor Huang were included. 

Now, using disabled access as a rationale, but I think more likely in the pursuit of a commercial style, sanitized mow-and-blow look, hundreds of thousands have been spent in the tightest budget times in history. A full-size tractor has criss-crossed two thirds of the site, ripping out beautiful healthy plants and reversing years of hard-won soil building. 

Frankly, I doubt the district would dare to treat its other garden project stalwart, the well known Alice Waters, or her volunteers, this way. 

I gather that, now that most of the damage has been done, the tractor has stopped. This is a good start. I strongly urge the BUSD to contact Yolanda and the Greening Project, and involve them in deciding what comes next. 

Donna Mickleson 

 

• 

DESTRUCTION IS WRONG 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Mark Coplan’s Aug. 20 letter justifying the destruction of the Willard garden contains many inaccuracies. 

The issue of handicap access is a fabrication to justify the destruction of the Willard Garden. The actual architectural plans calls these “maintenance paths.” And these maintenance paths have always existed. There was no need to remove all plants. There is no legal requirement for handicap access through the front gardens.  

For BUSD to suddenly profess such ardent support of handicap rights is curious indeed. Certainly, BUSD didn’t drive a tractor through Alice Water’s garden last summer, during the King renovations.  

Nor was “handicap access” through the front garden ever mentioned until the public voiced its opposition to the destruction of the Willard garden. 

The destruction of the garden is wrong and BUSD needs to make amends. 

Yolanda Huang 

 

• 

MITIGATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

When I walked by Willard Middle School, as I often do on my lunch hour from work, I was shocked to see the bulldozers and sickened to see my favorite field of dreams—tall and ethereal, where I could always see the kids at lunch, yet their privacy to play pirate games, tag, hide and seek or quiet time was not compromised—literally uprooted. 

What disturbs me mightily is the concept that amends can be made after destruction and that the evolutionary past (such as decade-plus natural soil enrichment by integrated pest management and natural mulching and composting) can be “restored” immediately—with $$$. 

Money doesn’t fix everything. As Shakespeare said in Macbeth: “What’s done cannot be undone.” 

The problem is a philosophical one from the world of physics: What does “the same” mean? 

Is it the same thing to put in a Little League field and lawn (calling it a green space) and uproot the 100-year-old continuously cultivated Gill Tract? Is it the same thing to put in a lawn at Willard where native grasses, plants and trees vied for space and made their own natural compromises and peace over time, creating truly organic beauty? 

What’s done cannot be undone, only “‘mitigated.” Try telling a kid you’ll “mitigate” the death of a beloved pet by buying another one. Is it “the same”? 

What we have here is colossal arrogance, colossal insensitivity, and, worst of all, a colossal failure of imagination. Why not ask Andronico’s if a few parking spaces can be rented and reserved for Willard parents at certain times of day? Why not look around the neighborhood and see if any other creative solutions are available? 

Imagine if the Willard Greening Project, with its saint-like Yolanda Huang (modern day St. Francis of Assisi at least) had been allowed to keep organically evolving with the blend of community control other school gardens (Albany Middle School, MLK Middle School) are allowed to have, and a different, nearby but offsite parking solution had been found. 

What about the disabled community of students, parents, teachers and administrators that attend or relate to Willard? What do they say? Are they feeling like PC scapegoats or do they truly want and need that access that is now the fall back position of justification used by the BUSD? Please speak up now as to how you want to see that space fit your needs. Gardens (and access to Willard) are for everyone because they excite all of the five senses we humans possess. 

The answers to the questions Why Why Why are not good enough. It is important to be able to admit a mistake has been made. Not Yolanda Huang’s understanding of why, but rather the act of non-organic destruction itself. 

An admission a mistake has been made by the BUSD, an agreement that Cinderella can go to the ball as well as her wealthy sister...now that is a mitigation that leaves hope for a return to the kind of organic process the Willard Greening Project has been greenlighted on all these years since its inception and loving care by all hands-on parties. 

Wendy Schlesinger, 

Chairman, Gardens on Wheels  

Association, 

Co-founder, Ohlone Greenway,  

People’s Park 

 

• 

RESTORE THE GARDEN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Berkeley Unified School District, instead of apologizing, has instead been defending its destruction of our beautiful Willard garden. The school district claims the destruction was approved by the Site Committee. In February the Willard PTA wrote a letter asking to be included, asked that the construction planning process allow for fuller and more thoughtful community input. BUSD did not respond to the letter. The PTA was ignored. 

The second justification for the destruction of the garden is handicap access. Why does there need to be another path, when there is a perfectly good sidewalk, and BUSD is widening the sidewalk to provide better access. It doesn’t make sense. 

I urge everyone to continue calling the school district until the school district agrees to work cooperatively with the Willard Greening Project to protect and fully restore our garden. 

Catherine Durand 

Past President, Willard PTA 


Many Treats Await Live Theater Lovers: By BETSY M. HUNTON

Special to the Planet
Friday August 27, 2004

So, this being the Daily Planet’s annual celebration of the opening of the new year at the university, it’s more than appropriate to remind anybody who has forgotten—or to tell anybody who doesn’t know—about the really good deals the Berkeley theaters put on for what we blithely call the “young adult community.” (Although whoever decided that the 18-to-35-year-old demographic fits neatly into one huge lump of togetherness obviously had to be under the influence of something not awfully legal). 

But one thing that all of you people do share, is your desirability. The Theater Wants You! They want your bodies there in the audience. People in theater know that if they don’t get you hooked on their product now, while you’re still open to new tastes and ideas, there won’t be any theater at all after a few more decades. No audience equals no theater. Gone. Poof. Shut down after all these centuries. 

And movies just don’t do the same thing. (Think of it: Movies can be great, all right, but nothing ever changes. And there is always the presence of the camera, almost openly commenting upon the action. Every single performance of a live drama is somewhat different than it was the night before. Every single production differs from any one that has ever been done previously. It’s alive). 

When you trek down into the black basement under La Val’s Pizza Parlor, about half a block up Euclid Avenue from UC’s North Gate, you can find plays produced by Impact Theater that are deliberately chosen to appeal to precisely your group: 18 to 35-year-olds. (Not, mind you, that there is any age discrimination practiced by the company, and there are usually a few people of—uh—more “maturity” to be found in the audience). So far, most of the plays have been very funny indeed—and there certainly is nothing wrong with that.  

Christopher Morrison, one of the three original founders, along with Josh Costello (now directing in Los Angeles), and Melissa Hilman (now artistic director), says that when they founded Impact Theatre in 1996, they purposely intended to create a theater for the now more widely-recognized-critical 18-to-30-year-old demographic.  

While many other small companies have served time in La Val’s basement on their way to more pretentious quarters, Morrison says he wants to stay right there; he delights in the fact that people feel they can bring a mug of beer or a piece of pizza downstairs to consume during a performance. It’s exactly the atmosphere they had hoped to establish from the very beginning. 

And cost? The tickets are cheap and even free on certain nights.  

So what’s happening is that almost every theater company in town has worked out some way to make their performances financially accessible to the young adults whose lifetime devotion they’re yearning to hook. It’s very common for productions to go on in full bloom for a couple of weeks before the official “Opening Night.” The difference in performance between the two periods is usually imperceptible. And the tickets are cheap during that time. 

The Shotgun Players who, after years of the usual vagabond route from one temporary spot to another will be opening up the first theater of their own on Ashby Avenue in the coming weeks, are finishing a no-charge performance of Brecht’s great The Caucasian Chalk Circle in John Hinkle Park on Aug. 29. They don’t charge for seats at any of their productions—at least for this year. They just pass a hat at the end of their performances. 

They do good work; give them a try. 

Don’t forget your age and/or your student status. Both are groups that often have special rates.  

Anyway, the situation is this: You’ve stepped into a hotbed of first-rate live theater. Maybe it’s the influence of the University’s excellent drama department; maybe it’s the fact that we share a pool of talent with San Francisco. Quite possibly it’s the presence of a large, well-educated populace. Whatever the reason, we’re spang in the middle of a first-rate, and growing, live theater scene. At least one new theater company has been opening in this area on a yearly basis. And most of them survive.  

Even more to the point, they’re leaning over backward trying to get you into their audiences. Give them a break, won’t you? 

 

 

T


Lakeshore Shakespeare Festival Presents Superb ‘Twelfth Night’ Free in Oakland: By BECKY O’MALLEY

Friday August 27, 2004

There’s still time to catch one of the very best cheap theater events in the East Bay this weekend. The San Francisco Shakespeare Festival has two remaining performances of Twelfth Night as its Free Shakespeare in the Park production in Oakland’s Lakeside Park, on the shores of Lake Merritt. It’s a rollicking comic tale of mistaken identity and misplaced love. 

Free Shakespeare in the Park can always command the services of the Bay Area’s finest actors because they love the chance to do Shakespeare. This year’s festival features several experienced actors from the 2002 and 2003 seasons: Alexandra Matthew as Viola, Stephen Klum as Feste, Julian Lopez-Morillas as Sir Toby Belch, Alex Moggridge as Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Christina Vecchiato as Fabian, and Jack Powell as Malvolio. Newcomers include Joe Wyka as Orsino, Mia Tagano as Olivia, Michael Craig Storm as Sebastian, and Andrew Harkins as Antonio. Music is provided by a three-piece on-stage ensemble, including sax, guitar, and piano. 

Seeing Julian Lopez-Morillas in the rich character role of the roguish Sir Toby is an experience not to be missed. He was one of the founding members of the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival, which had fifteen splendid summer seasons at John Hinkel Park before moving to the ‘burbs and becoming the more pretentious (though not necessarily better) California Shakespeare Festival. Over the last 20 years or more, Lopez-Morillas has routinely gotten rave reviews for appearances with all of the best theater companies in the Bay Area and throughout the state. He now teaches acting and directing—in between gigs—at San Jose State, so making time to work with Free Shakespeare is a real labor of love for him. 

The stage area is a lawn near the park’s wildlife sanctuary. It can be reached via Bellevue Avenue, off Grand Avenue. AC Transit buses No. 58 and No. 12 come close, as does BART at the 19th Street station. Bring a blanket to sit on, and picnic food and drink if you want. Hats and/or sunscreen are optional but strongly recommended. Oh, and the actors will pass the hat, so you really should bring some money, if you can afford it. Maybe what you spent on your last movie… 

The performances this weekend are Saturday, Aug. 28, and Sunday, Aug. 29, at 4 p.m. If you miss these, you can still catch the September performances in San Francisco at the Presidio, on the Main Post Lawn, from Sept. 4-26, Saturdays, Sundays, and on Labor Day (Monday, Sept. 6), all at 7:30 p.m. For more information, visit www.sfshakes.org, or call the information line at (415) 865-4434. 


Great Performers Reanimate Regional Jazz Scene: By IRA STEINGROOT

Special to the Planet
Friday August 27, 2004

The Bay Area jazz scene, often lethargic if not moribund, picked up in the summer months with some great performances that also stretched the envelope. At Yoshi’s, David Murray played his usual spectacular saxophone, but in the context of a jazz plus Guadeloupean gwo-ka drums unit. Also at Yoshi’s, saxophonist James Carter was exceptional playing the music of Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt. Jazz seniors, the Heath Brothers, performed at a benefit for Berkeley’s Jazzschool and erased all questions of age with the diamond-like brilliance of their playing. Bassist Percy Heath, Tuskegee Airman and last surviving member of the Modern Jazz Quartet, played a pizzicato cello version of Charlie Parker’s Yardbird Suite that was as accomplished as Rostropovich and as rollicking as Elmer Snowden. 

Hopefully the fall will provide just as much great jazz and just as many surprises. The two most promising sources of the best jazz locally over the next few months are Yoshi’s and the 22nd Annual San Francisco Jazz Festival. Two performers have just been added to the Yoshi’s calendar for brief engagements in September. Jazz/cabaret singer Jane Monheit appears at the club on the 9th and 10th followed by trumpeter Wallace Roney on the 11th and 12th. Both players evince a knowledge and respect for classic jazz styles and performers without allowing their personal voices to be subsumed in the past. Indeed, Roney is one of the last and youngest musicians to have apprenticed in the bands of Art Blakey, Elvin Jones and Dizzy Gillespie, groups in which journeymen became masters. 

In November, jazz legend Jackie McLean brings his alto to Yoshi’s in the company of the Cedar Walton Trio from the 9th to the 14th. McLean was playing with Sonny Rollins when they were both in their teens. He and Walton played in different editions of Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Walton is one of the greatest hard bop pianists. Later in the year, Yoshi’s will host two top Latin jazz musicians: Cuban bebop trumpeter Arturo Sandoval from Nov. 16 to 21 and Argentinean jazz saxophonist Gato Barbieri, famous for mixing folk instruments and free jazz, from Dec. 9 to 12.  

The SF Jazz Festival runs from Oct. 15 to Dec. 11 with more than three dozen performances, all of which have something to recommend them. The ones that look best to this old jazz fan are: 

• A tribute to tenor sax legend Lester “Prez” Young with clarinet virtuoso Don Byron and drummer Jack DeJohnette. There is not enough space to say all that should be said about Prez, but he recorded some hauntingly beautiful performances on an old metal clarinet and perhaps Byron, who performs everything from klezmer to Ellington to Raymond Scott, will evoke that (Herbst Theatre, 7 p.m., Oct. 17). 

• The Rite of Strings with guitarist Al Di Meola, bassist Stanley Clarke and, most notably, French violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, who is rarely seen in the Bay Area (Masonic Auditorium, 8 p.m., Oct. 22). 

• The music of composer/ pianist Thelonious Monk in memory of soprano saxophonist and Monk alum Steve Lacy featuring free jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd. Rudd and Lacy performed Monk’s music together in the early 1960s (Palace of Fine Arts, 7:30 p.m., Oct.28). 

• Master guitarist and accompanist extraordinaire Jim Hall with his trio. Hall has given phenomenal support on everything from Ella Fitzgerald ballad sessions to an album of Sonny Stitt and John Lewis playing Charlie Parker tunes (Herbst Theatre, 7:30 p.m., Nov. 4).  

• For lovers of Latin jazz there are two key events: the great Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, one of Dizzy Gillespie’s many protégés, (Herbst Theatre, 8 p.m., Nov. 5) and the conga kings featuring two Machito alums, Candido Camero and “Patato” Valdez (Calvin Simmons Theatre, 7 p.m., Nov. 7). 

• The Queen of R & B and just as great a jazz singer when she chooses, Etta James, who has been a giant since she pleaded Dance with Me Henry in the Fifties (Masonic Auditorium, 8 p.m., Nov. 6). 

• You can count the greatest jazz vibraphonists on one hand and one of them is Gary Burton, technically gifted, conceptually original and emotionally nuanced (Herbst Theatre, 8 p.m., Nov. 6). 

• Finally, a 100th birthday bash for stride pianist-organist-composer-singer-bandleader-actor-comedian Fats Waller, a giant in girth and genius, featuring vocalist Ruth Brown; ragtime/stride pianist and master of the upright organ Dick Hyman; Mike Lipskin, student of Waller’s friend and fellow stride pianist Willie the Lion Smith; and piano legend Jay McShann. McShann is not only a major stride stylist in his own right, but Charlie Parker’s first boss in the last of the great big bands to come out of Kansas City (Davies Symphony Hall, 7 p.m., Nov. 7). Bon temps rouler  

 


Arts Calendar

Friday August 27, 2004

FRIDAY, AUGUST 27 

FILM 

Luchino Visconti: “Death in Venice” at 7 p.m. and “The Innocent” at 9:30 p.m. at Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

THEATER 

California Shakespeare Theater, “The Importance of Being Ernest” Tues.-Fri. at 7:30 p.m., Sat at 8 p.m., Sun. at 4 p.m. at the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, through Sept. 3. Tickets are $13-$32. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Butoh & Action Theater Performances at 8:30 p.m. Fri. and Sat. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St. at Telegraph, Oakland, near MacArthur BART. Tickets are $15-$20. 601-7494. www.temescalartscenter.org  

Impact Theatre, “Fluffy Bunnies in a Field of Daisies” a sexually-honest comedy, opens at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean Theater, 1834 Euclid, and runs Thurs. - Sat. through Oct. 2. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. www.impacttheatre.com 

Shotgun Players “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” Sat. and Sun. at 4 p.m. in John Hinkel Park, Southampton Ave., until Aug 29. 841-6500. wwwshotgunplayers.org 

Solo Opera “The Old Maid and the Thief” at 8 p.m. at Dean Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek. Also Sat. at 8 p.m. and Sun at 2 p.m. Tickets are $20-$25 available from 925-943-7469. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Julia Vinograd at 7:30p.m. at the Book Zoo. Open mic will follow. 2556 Telegraph Ave., #7. 883-1332. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Bay World, a celebration of world music in the Bay Area, produced by Iluminado Yaya Maldonado, with performances by Unity Nguyen, Omar Ait Vimoun, and Reunion Boricia, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Trevor Dunn, Ches Smith and Heather Greenlief at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donation $8-$15. www.thejazz- 

house.com 

Dub Congress with Dub FX at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Tom Rush, New England folk singer, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $20.50 in advance, $21.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Rock the Plough with ArnoCorps, The Rulers, El Faye at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Wayne Wallace Quartet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Henry Kaiser, guitarist, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Animal Liberation Orchestra at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$8. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Will Bernard & Motherbug at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Lights Out, The Physical Challenge, Countdown to Life at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

SATURDAY, AUGUST 28 

THEATER 

Shakespeare Festival, “Twelfth Night” at Lakeside Park, Oakland, Sat. and Sun. at 4 p.m. Free. 415-865-4434. www.sfhshakes.org 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“California and the Vietnam Era” an exhibition of more than 500 artifacts, photographs and documents with film clips, oral histories and music, opens at the Oakland Museum of California. www.museumca.org 

FILM 

Luchino Visconti: “The Innocent” at 5 p.m. and “The Damned” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Rhythm & Muse returns with a Neruda Centennial Tribute Open Mic. Open mic sign-up 6:30 p.m., reading/performance 7 p.m. Admission free. Piano & 2 mics available. Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. 527-9753. 

Mitali Perkins introduces her new novel for teens, “Monsoon Summer” at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

The Great Night of Rumi, a celebration of the poetry of Jelaluddin Rumi at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50 in advance, $19.50 at the door. 548-1761.  

www.freightandsalvage.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Folksong Concert a benefit performance for the Friends Committee on Legislation with Janet Smith, Will Scarlett, Steve Mann, Catherine Lucas and others, at 7 p.m. at the Friends Meeting House, 2151 Vine St. Donation $10-$15. 848-7357. 

San Francisco Lyric Chorus sings choral works by Joseph Jongen, Charles Marie Widor, Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff at 8 p.m., Lafayette-Orinda Presbyterian Church, 49 Knox Drive, Lafayette. Cost is $20 at the door; $17 in advance and for seniors. 849-4769. www.sflc.org 

Jyoti Kala Mandir with a selection of Indian classical music at 7 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck at Berryman. Tickets are $10-$12.  

Jr. Reid, Reggae from Jamaica, at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $20. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Darcy Menard, singer, songwriter at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

The Mind Club at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

West African Highlife Band at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. African dance lesson with Comfort Mensah at 9 p.m. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Julio Bravo, traditional Peruvian songs, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Industrial Jazz Group at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Pete Best Experience, Some Girls at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Deanne Witkowski, with Anton Schwartz, at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

The Phenomenauts, The Pepperminds, Strt Sprx at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, AUGUST 29 

FILM 

Luchino Visconti: “Ludwig II” at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Free screening. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“An Evening in Russia” Berkeley Music Cooperative Players perform the music of Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, and Shostakovich at 7 p.m. in the Valley Center for Performing Arts, Holy Names College, 3500 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $5-$20 at the door. 845-2232. 

Flamencos for Peace and Freedom with Yaelisa, La Monica, La Fibi, Felix de Lola & Nina Menendez, Jason McGuire & Ben Woods, at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Benefit for MoveOn.org and theKerry/Edwards campaign. Donation $23 in advance, $25 at the door. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Israeli Folk Dancing with Allan King at 1:30 p.m. Ashkenaz. A benefit for Israeli Dance Library in Tel Aviv. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Scott Amendola, Ben Goldberg and Devon Hoff play interpretations of Thelonius Monk at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donation $8-$15. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Peppino D’Agostino, one-man guitar ensemble, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $16.50 in advance, $17.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Americana Unplugged: The Whiskey Brothers at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Rankin Joe, reggae, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $15. 548-1159.  

MONDAY, AUGUST 30 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Sephardic Horizons” a collection of art work from a 14th century Hanukkah lamp to contemporary photographs by D.R. Cowles, opens at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. 549-6950.www.magnes.org 

CCA Faculty New Work at the Oliver Center, California College of the Arts, 5212 Broadway, Oakland. Gallery hours are Mon.-Fri. 8 a.m.-noon, 1-4:30 p.m. 594-3600.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Cathedrals, Crop Circles and Sacred Space” a slide lecture by British author, Freddy Silva, from 7 to 9 p.m. at 1744 University Ave. Tickets are $10-$20. 845-1767. 

Poetry Express Theme Night poems on bravery and courage from 7 to 9:30 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Claudia Villela with Guinga at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

TUESDAY, AUGUST 31 

THEATER 

Shotgun Theatre Lab “The Faith Project” runs Tues. and Wed. at 8 p.m. to Sept. 15 at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby at MLK. Free with suggested donation. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

FILM 

Cajun Film Night at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. A benefit for Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Time’s Shadow: “Decasia” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“The Gastronomical Tourist” with author Arthur Bloomfield at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Travel Shop & Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave. 843-3533. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Dick Conte Duo at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Jazz House Jam, hosted by Darrell Green and Geechy Taylor at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donation $5. www.thejazz- house.com 

Concert for Amaly featuring John Santos and the Machete Ensemble at 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Wed. Cost is $10-$15. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 1 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Community” works by Sonya Derian, John Kenyon, Ira Lapidus, Biliana Stremska and Vee Tuteur opens at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

“Construction/Paintings and Mixed Media Collages” by Gerald Huth opens at the Berkeley YWCA, 2600 Bancroft Way. 848-6370. 

“Metal Art 2004” an exhibition of wearable, ornamental and artistic metal art opens at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St. 834-2296. 

FILM 

Performance Anxiety: “Vito Accondi” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with Nazelah Jamison and Karen Ladson at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Gerald Landry and the Lariats at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun/zydeco dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Improvised Composition Experiment open jam session at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $5. www.thejazzhouse.org 

Soroa, salsa music, at 8 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Whiskey Brothers at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Jules Broussard, Ned Boynton and Bing Nathan at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. www.downtownrestaurant.com 

Wes “Warmdaddy” Anderson at 8 and 10 p.m., Wed. and Thurs. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$18. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, SEPT. 2 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Time and Place” Kala Fellowship Exhibition, Part II, featuring Paul Cantase, Elizabeth D’Agostino, Eunjung Hwang, and Joan Truckenbrod. Reception for the artists from 6 to 8 p.m., at Kala Art Institute, 1060 Heinz Ave. Runs to Oct. 2. 549-2977. www.kala.org 

“Construction/Paintings and Mixed Media Collages” by Gerald Huth. Reception for the artist from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Berkeley YWCA, 2600 Bancroft Way. 848-6370. 

FILM 

Performance Anxiety: “Heidi” at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Free screening. Chaplin: “Modern Times” at 7:30 p.m. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Lunch Poems Fall Kickoff at 12:10 p.m. in the Morrison Library in Doe Library, UC Campus, with campus luminaries reading and discussing their favorite poems. Admission is free. 642-0137. http://lunchpoems.berkeley.edu 

Janell Moon will read her poems at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, Edith Stone Room, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

Word Beat Reading Series at 7 p.m. with featured readers Molotov Mouths followed by an open mic, at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave., near Dwight Way. For information call 526-5985.  

Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Matirx 212  

A dialogue with Kaja Silverman and Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson at 5:45 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE  

George Pederson and The ReincarNatives at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Connie and Friends at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Gini Wilson, solo piano, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Jazz Mine, string swing jazz quartet, at 6:30 p.m. at King Tsin Chinese Restaurant, 1699 Solano Ave. www.jazzmine.net 

FRIDAY, SEPT. 3 

THEATER 

Alameda Civic Light Opera. “Pippin,” Sept. 3, 4, 10, 11, 17, 18 at 8 p.m. Sept. 12 and 19 at 2 p.m. Kofman Auditorium, 2220 Central Ave. in Alameda. Tickets are $23 in advance, $25 at the door. Child and senior discounts. 864-2256. www.aclo.com 

Aurora Theatre Company, “The Persians” opens at the Aurora Theatre and runs through Oct. 10. Tickets are $28-$45. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

California Shakespeare Theater, “The Importance of Being Ernest” Tues.-Fri. at 7:30 p.m., Sat at 8 p.m., Sun. at 4 p.m. at the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, through Sept. 3. Tickets are $13-$32. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Impact Theatre, “Fluffy Bunnies in a Field of Daisies” a sexually-honest comedy, at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean Theater, 1834 Euclid, and runs Thurs. - Sat. through Oct. 2. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. www.impacttheatre.com 

Woodminster Summer Musicals “Flower Drum Song,” David Henry Hwang adaptation of Rodgers & Hammerstein classic at 8 p.m. at Woodminster Amphitheater in Joaquin Miller Park, 3300 Joaquin Miller Rd. Fri.- Sun. to Sept. 12. Tickets are $19-$31. 531-9597. www.woodminster.com 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Community” works by Sonya Derian, John Kenyon, Ira Lapidus, Biliana Stremska and Vee Tuteur. Reception for the artists at 6 p.m. at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

7th International Juried Enamel Exhibition opens at the ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. Gallery hours are Mon.-Fri. 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sat. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Kathleen Grace Trio at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $10-$15 sliding scale. www.thejazz- 

house.org 

Pharma, 77 El Dora at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Tropical Vibrations play Calypso, Reggae and Soca at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

The Ravines, folkadelic torch blues at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Brian Melvin Trio at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Jose Rizo’s Jazz on the Latin Side at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $12-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Naked Aggression, Toxic Narcotic, Midnight Creeps, New Earth Creeps at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

Kathleen Grace Trio at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $8. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Barbary Coast by Night Join maestro Omar for an evening of authentic music and food from Algeria. Every Sat. at 7 p.m. at Cafe Raphael’s, 10064 San Pablo Ave. El Cerrito. 525-4227. 

Beckett’s Battle of the Bands with The Fated, The Skindivers, Thriving Ivory and Walty at 6 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

 

 

 


Campus Architecture Embodies Living History: By SUSAN D. CERNY

Special to the Planet
Friday August 27, 2004

The University of California’s Berkeley campus was the first for the now 10-campus institution. The state university was created after the College of Agriculture, Mining, and Mechanical Arts, established by the California Legislature in 1866, merged with a private liberal arts college, the College of California, in 1868.  

It was the board of trustees of the College of California who selected the campus site in 1860, for the “benefits of a country location.” They also commissioned Frederick Law Olmsted, America’s great landscape architect, most widely known for his work in New York City’s Central Park, to plan the new campus and design a residential neighborhood east of the college. Olmsted’s 1865 design, on axis with the Golden Gate, was asymmetrical, informal, and picturesque.  

In 1866 a trustee of the college selected the name Berkeley for the campus after Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) of Ireland, who had came to America to establish colleges. The last stanza of a poem he wrote is often quoted: “Westward the course of empire takes its way.” 

When the campus opened in the fall of 1873, only two buildings were complete: South Hall (which still stands) and North Hall (which was located where the Bancroft Library is today.) The university grew steadily, but not dramatically, until the 1890s. Buildings of different types had been built, but without a comprehensive plan.  

By 1895 there was not only a need for new buildings, but a philanthropist willing to pay for an international competition for a campus master plan. Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the wealthy widow of Sen. George Hearst, financed the competition.  

Architect John Galen Howard eventually became the winner and also the campus architect in 1902. He served in that capacity until 1924. Howard designed the central core of the campus as a Classic ensemble of buildings and landscape features. There is a central axis, anchored by Sather Tower, and three cross-axes. The granite-sided buildings have classic three-part compositions and are adorned by decorative detailing, some elaborate, derived from classic sources. He also preserved Strawberry Creek, the Eucalyptus Grove, and the natural glades. Howard said that Berkeley was “the greatest site for a university in the world.” 

The Hearst Greek Theater (1903) was the first of Howard’s buildings completed, and was used in promotions declaring Berkeley as “the Athens of the West.” William Randolph Hearst, son of George and Phoebe Hearst, was its sponsor. It was used for the first time on May 16, 1903, when President Theodore Roosevelt delivered the commencement address.  

The Hearst Memorial Mining Building (1902-7) was a gift from Phoebe Apperson Hearst in memory of her husband, who had made a fortune in mining. It housed the state’s first school of mining. The building, considered Howard’s finest, has recently been retrofitted and restored.  

Sather Tower, also known as the Campanile (1914), has been Berkeley’s most prominent landmark and the physical symbol of the university. The observation loggia has a classically-detailed balustrade with three open arches, inspired by the campanile in Piazza San Marco in Venice. It was financed by a gift from Mrs. Jane K. Sather as a memorial to herself.  

Doe Memorial Library (1911/1917) was conceived as the physical and intellectual centerpiece of the campus. The monumentally-scaled reading room is reminiscent of a Greco-Roman Temple. The library was sponsored by a bequest from the estate of Charles Franklin Doe, a San Francisco lumberman and manufacturer of doors and sashes, who was also a bibliophile.  

Until the 1950s new buildings were generally designed as backdrops to Howard’s classically inspired Beaux-Arts buildings. This is no longer true.  

 

Recommended for further reading: University of California, Berkeley, by Harvey Helfand; John Galen Howard and the University of California, by Sally Woodbridge; Berkeley Landmarks by Susan Cerny. 

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Berkeley’s Cafe Culture Thrives in Many Venues: By ALTA GERREY

Special to the Planet
Friday August 27, 2004

Round tables and moveable chairs. Those are the key ingredients for a great conversational cafe. Small square tables and benches lend a studious air, and those cafes work as study halls. The greatest cafes have both aspects, and thankfully, Berkeley is blessed with some of the finest cafes ever. 

For a cafe to survive here, it helps to have a prime location, as does the Caffe Strada, on the corner of College Avenue and Bancroft Way. The ambiance under the trees is pleasant, and the crowd international; conversations occur mostly outside, while the interior tends toward serious study. The basic cafe fare of espresso drinks, juice and pastries is available, although when a construction worker came in and asked for coffee, the woman behind the counter said, “We don’t have coffee.” She neglected to tell him they do have espresso, and he left, confused. 

The original Berkeley cafe, listed for years in European guidebooks as “the gathering place for 1960s radicals who created People’s Park” is the Caffe Mediterraneum, on Telegraph Avenue near Dwight Way. When students used to ask me what they should do to become writers, I would always answer, “Hang out at the Med.” In one afternoon, 15 years ago, I saw June Jordan, Gary Snyder, Robert Crumb, Jane Scherr, John Oliver Simon, Ruth Rosen and Ishmael Reed. The Med has changed ownership these last few years and the crowd I knew there has dispersed to other cafes. There are other good cafes on all the streets bordering campus, from the International House to the Milano to Nefeli on northside. Most are clean and comfortable, and each has its own ambiance and clientele. The Musical Offering serves simple meals and is popular with professors and visiting musicians, and one can often see clumps of people wander in after a performance or lecture. 

Three-quarters of a mile from campus at Ashby and College is the well-designed Espresso Roma. The outdoor tables offer a lovely view of the hills; the center room is comfortable and tends toward conversation, with fresh salads and good soups as well as coffee and pastries. There is a room off to the side where silent people sit tapping at laptops. The Roma is one of the few that are open on holidays. 

There are also numerous Peet’s Coffee and Tea stores in the area, where the coffee is guaranteed to keep you up as late as you need to for study, and they can be found in Walnut Square on Vine Street, which was the first Peet’s location, on Solano Avenue in North Berkeley, and on Domingo Avenue by the Claremont Hotel, among other locations. I went to the one near the Claremont for a year after the Med got too funky, but in that year, I didn’t make a single friend. There are no tables, so students don’t study there, and on the benches I found conversation very limited, often abrupt. If you need a private, quiet cup, this could be the place. 

A young woman sitting near me a few weeks ago at Saul’s Deli on Shattuck Avenue complained that “Berkeley is the loneliest town on the planet!” When I asked her why she said that, she replied that she had been warned before she arrived that all people do here is read and argue, and that in fact had been her experience. “When I finish this year, I’m going home,” she told me. I suggested that she try my personal favorite cafe—Royal Coffee on College, just over the border of Oakland on 63rd Street. “If you want to meet people, just ask someone if you can sit at their table. I’ve met wonderful friends there; in fact, we know call ourselves the Royal Family.” 

Krista Rogerson, a Royal regular, had these insights: 

“People still have churches and neighborhood bars, I suppose, but since I have neither, the pull of the cafe is a strong one,” she said. “My friend Doug says he doesn’t even like the coffee, but he comes to hear the opinions of people he trusts, a kind of kamikaze intimacy.” 

It’s true that any town can be lonely, but here in Berkeley there are at least places where scholars and book lovers can sit quietly in the company of others, and where noisy politicals can holler at each other in a fairly peaceful environment, all in the same room. 

w


Opinion

Editorials

The Undecided Decide: By BECKY O'MALLEY

Editorial
Tuesday August 31, 2004

Louis Menand has a critical essay in the latest New Yorker which vamps off a thesis in a 1964 book by Philip Converse, The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics: Only about 10 percent of the public has what might be called a political belief system. Menand reports Converse’s interpretation of surveys of the 1956 electorate as showing that voters are perfectly capable of holding conflicting opinions simultaneously, for example wanting both lower taxes and more government programs. Such studies of voter behavior are increasingly rehashed as contemporary polls seem to show the country poised on a knife edge between presidential candidates. Very few voters are still undecided, so how this few will make up their minds is consuming a lot of ink these days. One of our correspondents has suggested that people who haven’t made up their minds yet should be disqualified, presumably as too dumb to vote, and that’s an appealing idea, but it won’t happen. Pundits continue to speculate on what will change the hearts and minds of the remaining voters. 

A new exhibit about how Californians reacted to the war in Vietnam has just opened at the Oakland Museum to rave reviews. The attempt to influence public opinion to end the war consumed most of the sixties for many here and elsewhere. I found Menand’s discussion of Converse’s seminal book particularly interesting in this context, because I best remember Phil and Jean Converse (his wife and intellectual colleague) from Ann Arbor, where we all lived in the ‘60s, as early, vigorous and stalwart opponents of the Vietnam war. I knew that Phil was some sort of a big cheese in the academic world of political science, but being more interested in politics than in political theory I knew little about his work. It’s fascinating now to think that even when his own research told him that voters, as Menand paraphrased it, “don’t really have meaningful political beliefs,” he and his wife still attempted, in their personal life, to influence those beliefs.  

We humans continue to believe that what we do will improve the course of history, despite a good bit of evidence to the contrary. That’s why some hundreds of thousands of good folks marched in New York on Sunday, including many Berkeleyans. Will it make any difference?  

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never Is, but always To be blest.”  

A good number of the marchers, the grannies and the greybeards, some of whose dispatches are in this issue, remember the darkest days of the struggle against the Vietnam war, and hope that their actions now can convince the country that the Iraq war is another big mistake. They hope that voters will be able to translate that belief into, if not exactly a vote for Kerry, at least a vote against Bush.  

Will the small number of remaining unconvinced voters make the connection between what’s happening in their own lives and the policies of the Bush administration? Do they understand that they and their children will be paying for decades to come for a pointless excursion into a distant place to find non-existent weapons of mass destruction? Are they aware that a small group of war profiteers is amassing dollars paid from the pockets of middle and working class taxpayers, and that the rich pay very little of the cost of war? Do they know that invading Iraq has not aided any realistic struggle against genuine terrorism, but has displaced one? Or will they believe the outright lies that they will be seeing from sources like the notorious Swift Boat Veterans, endlessly replayed on the duplicitous Fox network, and reject Kerry based on a vague perception of supposed “character” flaws? Pundits, essayists, academics and pollsters are busy trying to predict what these voters will do in November, but really, no one knows. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Berkeley’s Building Boomers Move In: By BECKY O'MALLEY

Editorial
Friday August 27, 2004

Readers of metro dailies this week are learning what Daily Planet readers have known for more than a year. Berkeley has dramatically overbuilt its supply of luxury student housing. Chirpily cheery stories report what is, of course, good news for luxury students: prices have dropped for units boasting T1 Internet connections and free satellite TV, for students who like the in-your-face togetherness and the slick synthetic surfaces of the new units downtown, which are a lot like dormitories, but much fancier. The UC housing office reports that two-bedroom apartments now can be found for about $1,500 a month, which undoubtedly seems like a bargain to students from L.A, though the luxury buildings are asking more like $2,000. 

But there continue to be a few problems with Berkeley’s overall housing picture. The “smart growth” advocates have been telling us that such buildings would prevent urban sprawl. Cynics like former planning commissioner Clifford Fred have been heard to say that no one ever abandoned their search for a house with a yard in Fairfield in favor of a condo in Berkeley. The occupants of the new buildings in Berkeley—let’s call them our building boomers—have simply traded crowded UC dorm rooms for more spacious privately-owned dorms, and who could blame them?  

UC, never deterred from mechanistic completion of badly conceived plans, is moving forward with cramming still more grim high-rises onto their site at Dwight and College, which now resembles nothing so much as the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex in St. Louis which was finally dynamited because it was so unpleasant to live in. A number of double rooms have been converted to triples, but the unlucky renters are still asked to pay the same price per bed. At some point, even the students with the lowest budgets are going to find other options.  

Many UC students, faculty and staff are already looking for suitable options and not finding them. The Berkeley area continues to lack housing for families with low incomes—most graduate students, a high percentage of university employees, and some junior faculty members. UC, in its infinite wisdom, is relentlessly marching forward with its plan to demolish seedy but large and inexpensive family units in Albany Village, to be replaced by fewer, smaller and more expensive apartments, plus an unneeded UC-developed shopping mall which threatens established locally-owned Albany businesses.  

And no, the new downtown buildings won’t do for families. Even if the prices and the designs were family-friendly, which they’re not, downtown Berkeley lacks most of the practical amenities which real cities have in areas where families live in apartments, notably non-boutique clothing stores and even food markets. Another cherished smart-growth theory is that if there’s a bus line the occupants won’t need to use cars. People who believe this should try a month of buying groceries for a family on the bus, a family being defined as one or two able-bodied working adults plus one or more members who are too young, old or infirm to haul their own groceries. 

And much is lost in this lemming-like rush to build big ugly boxes. UC’s Albany site will displace the Gill Tract, long-term home of outstanding research projects for sustainable agriculture. The Teece-Kennedy construction machine, dba Panoramic Interests, which gets the credit (or the blame) for much of the recent building boom, leveled the University Avenue home of one of Berkeley’s founding fathers in order to build the tenement-like structure now looming on the corner of Milvia behind Au Coquelet, as yet unrentable. 

Panoramic also demolished a historic livery stable, accompanied by legal flim-flam which convinced gullible city mothers that it wasn’t historic, to build the Gaia Building. The Gaia still bears the name of the defunct new age bookstore which the canny builder used to leverage an extra floor out of the city’s “cultural use bonus” zoning. It promptly went belly-up before moving in, and no cultural use has yet replaced it.  

A favorite trick of suburban developers is to name the project for what was destroyed to build it: “Maple Village,” where the maples were all cut down for home sites. Berkeley builders have adapted that trick to the urban setting. Panoramic’s Fine Arts building on Shattuck, featured in Thursday’s cheery Chronicle story, memorializes the now-vanished Fine Arts Theater which was eliminated to erect it. 

And what we’ve gotten in return are tomorrow’s slums. The Gaia building, already coming apart at the seams, is the subject of extensive finger-pointing litigation between the developer and his contractors, but the real loser will be the City of Berkeley, with a decaying eyesore in a prominent location. Others are similarly shoddy. 

Politicians and planners don’t seem to have learned much from the experience of the last five years. Many more Big Ugly Boxes are in the civic pipeline. The Planning Commission, the Zoning Adjustment Board and the Landmarks Preservation Commission have recently been packed with unashamed partisans of the building boom, and the bad appointments have been made by self-styled moderates and progressives alike. The upcoming City Council elections offer an opportunity for new candidates to distance themselves from past mistakes, if they choose to do so. We’ll see if they will. 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Columns

Claremont Hotel Picket Planned for Weekend: By JAKOB SCHILLER

Friday August 27, 2004

After three years of union drives, and urging a boycott of the Claremont Hotel over stalled contract negotiations, workers, union representatives and community supporters want to send a message to the hotel this weekend that they are not going to give up. 

They plan to make that statement by walking a continuous picket in front of the hotel for 27 hours beginning Friday at 3 p.m.  

According to Claire Darby, an organizer for the Oakland-based Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) union Local 2850, workers in the hotel spa have been unsuccessfully trying for three years to get the hotel to recognize a card check agreement that would officially allow them to be part of HERE. 

Two other departments, food and beverage and room service, had contracts with HERE which expired, and have not been re-negotiated because the two sides have been unable to agree.  

“We wanted to do a big action as a way to send a message that we are not getting tired, because that has been their plan all along,” said Darby.  

In a statement released earlier this year the Claremont said it “has been prepared to negotiate a contract with the union since August of 2001,” but “the union continues to stall at the bargaining table.”  

The Claremont recently switched owners when KSL Recreation Corporation sold the hotel to CNL Hospitality Properties Inc., an Orlando-based real estate investment trust, back in February. 

According to Darby, KSL signed a temporary agreement with CNL to stay on as the property management company but that contract expires in December.  

She said the union is hopeful that before KSL’s management contract expires CNL will force them to negotiate with the union because the union expects that whatever company takes over the contract will not want to deal with the union dispute. 

The picket starts this Friday at 3 p.m. and will run until Saturday at 6 p.m. and will take place at the Ashby entrance to the Claremont. 

 


Pygmy Nuthatches Find Homes in Dead Snags: By JOE EATON

Special to the Planet
Friday August 27, 2004

The neighborhood keeps changing. One of my reliable sources tells me that pygmy nuthatches—relative newcomers to the East Bay—now nest in the Berkeley hills. A checklist of Berkeley hills birds compiled about 30 years ago doesn’t include this species even as an occasional visitor. But they’ve found a niche here, especially in places with the dead conifer snags they prefer for nest sites. 

Nuthatches look a bit like miniature woodpeckers, with stout beaks for prying up bark and digging into wood, and stubby tails. Unlike woodpeckers, though, they may work head-down. The “hatch” part of the name seems to be derived from “hack,” which is what nuthatches do to seeds: wedging them into crevices and hammering them with their bills. 

Pygmies are, no surprise, smaller than the other California species, the red-breasted and white-breasted. Their calls are different—higher-pitched peeps and squeaks rather than nasal “yanks”—and so is their behavior. It’s rare to see just one pygmy nuthatch. They’re highly social, almost always in small flocks. What’s most interesting about them is that their sociality extends to the nesting season. 

Ornithologists used to think that the family life of most birds was straightforward. A male finds a territory and attracts a female; they build a nest, she lays her eggs, they raise the kids. It was known that some males—hummingbirds, for instance—shirked nest construction and child care duties, and there were other notorious exceptions like the promiscuous prairie chickens and the polyandrous phalaropes. But the two-parent family was considered to be the norm—like an avian version of suburban life in the Eisenhower Era. 

Things proved to be a lot more complicated than that. Monitoring the actual behavior of birds, researchers found there was a great deal of extra-pair fooling around: male birds may not be the biological parents of the chicks they raise. Ducks and coots dump eggs in neighbors’ nests; swallows commit infanticide; grackles have harems; geese and gulls form same-sex pairs. And don’t even get me started about hedge-sparrows. 

One pattern that kept turning up was the presence of nest helpers—birds that aid the primary pair in defending the breeding territory and provisioning the nest. It’s more common in the tropics, especially in Australia for some reason, but occurs in a few North American birds as well: California’s own acorn woodpecker (with a particularly complex variant), the Southeastern red-cockaded woodpecker, the Florida scrub-jay, the Mexican jay, even the American crow.  

The pygmy nuthatch is part of that small group. Robert Norris, doing a field study on Inverness Ridge in Marin County in the 1950s, found that almost a quarter of nuthatch nests were attended by threesomes. The third bird, always a male, was never seen mating with the female or even coming on to her. But he helped excavate the nest cavity, feed the female while she incubated the eggs, feed the chicks, and sanitize the nest. Norris speculated that threesomes “might on the average succeed in raising more young than pairs,” although he didn’t have supporting data.  

That was before the rise of sociobiology, when scientists didn’t automatically look for genetic explanations of animal behavior. But sociobiologists had a field day with nest helpers. Once it was learned that helpers were usually related to the breeding pair, nest helping became a classic illustration of kin-selection—the notion that animals act to promote the spread of the genes they share with their near relatives. Here we had birds foregoing breeding themselves so their parents or siblings could have a successful season.  

But complications like nest-helping turned out to have their own complications. In Florida scrub-jays, helping appears to be not about perpetuating the family genes, but about waiting in line for prime real estate. Good territories are scarce in the Florida scrub, and helpers stand to inherit when the senior birds die. 

And something similar may be happening with pygmy nuthatches. It wasn’t until 1981 that anyone got around to testing Norris’s speculation that nuthatch nests with helpers were more productive than those without. In a four-year study of nuthatch nests in Arizona’s Coconino National Forest, William Sydeman found that having helpers—usually yearlings from the previous year’s brood—was a good deal for the primary pair, reducing the energetic costs of stuffing those hungry little mouths with insects. But there wasn’t a clear relationship with productivity. Nests with helpers outproduced the others in only one of the four years, which was a good year across the board. Without a direct productivity payoff, it’s hard to see how evolution could have been favoring helping behavior. 

What Sydeman suggested was that helping may be the helpers’ ticket of admission to winter roosts. Pygmy nuthatches, in northern Arizona at least, survive the cold by huddling together in tree cavities. Over 150 may share a space, stacked like cordwood. And Sydeman observed that helpers roosted with the parents they had assisted during the nesting season. There’s an obvious direct fitness value to making it through the rigors of winter. That seems to hold even in relatively mild Marin, where Norris’s nuthatches roosted in family-based winter groups. 

So helping behavior may not be as purely altruistic as scientists used to think. The whole thing should give pause to anyone looking for model family values in the lives of birds—let alone bees. 


Berkeley This Week

Friday August 27, 2004

FRIDAY, AUGUST 27 

Free Compost for Berkeley Residents from 8:45 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. Berkeley Marina Maintenance Yard, 201 University Ave., next to Adventure Playground. 644-6566.  

Young Adult Project Annual All Star Basketball Weekend Come support some of the best basketball players in Twilight Basketball from 7 to 10 p.m. Fri. and 4 to 10 p.m. Sat., at the Martin Luther King Jr. Youth Services Center, 1730 Oregon St. 981-6678. 

Tilden Tots A nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds each accompanied by an adult. We’ll explore the world of reptiles. From 10 to 11:30 a.m. in Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Caltopia 2004 at the Recreational Spots Facility and Evans Field, UC Campus. Fri. and Sat., 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The event is free to all Cal Students, staff, faculty and the community. 

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 7:15 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Players at all levels are welcome. 652-5324. 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. wibberkeley@yahoo.com 548-6310, 845-1143. 

Meditation, Peace Vigil and Dialogue, gather at noon on the grass close to the West Entrance to UC Berkeley, on Oxford St. near University Ave. People of all traditions are welcome to join us. Sponsored by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. 655-6169. www.bpf.org 

Overeaters Anonymous meets every Friday at 1:30 p.m. at the Northbrae Church at Solano and The Alameda. Parking is free and is handicapped accessible. For information call Katherine, 525-5231. 

SATURDAY, AUGUST 28 

San Francisco Mime Troupe “Showdown at Crawford Gulch” at 2 p.m. at Willard Park, Hillegass and Derby. www.sfmt.org 

Berkeley Greens Endorsement Meeting at 2 p.m. at the Grass Roots House, rear meeting room 2022 Blake St., 1/2 block from Shattuck Ave. All Green Party members who reside in Berkeley are welcome. 

Cavalia: A Magical Encounter Between Horse and Man under the big-top at Golden Gate Fields, Tues.-Fri. at 8 p.m. Sat. at 3 and 8 p.m., Sun. at 1 and 5 p.m. extended to Sept. 3. Tickets are $44-$79 available from 1-866-999-8111. www.cavalia.net 

Ancient Medicines A Tour of the Chinese Medicinal Herb Garden at 9:30 a.m. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $12-$17. To register call 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

Rockin’ Solidarity Chorus meets to sing gospel, South African, folk, Broadway, Norteno from 12:30 to 4 p.m. at Laney College, 900 Fallon St., room G189. 415-648-3457. www.laborchorus.org 

Getting Started Garden Design Workshop An introduction to designing and building a green school garden from the ground up, including basic layout and elements of school garden planning,how to obtain and use recycled building materials in your garden; preparing and caring for your soil naturally and strategies for water conservation. Cost is $25. From 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Chabot Elementary School, Oakland. To register send a check for $25 to The Watershed Project, GSGD Registration, 1327 South 46th Street, Bldg. 155, Richmond, CA 94804. 231-9430. 

Herb Walk in Strawberry Canyon Learn to identify and use many edible and medicinal plants that grow wild in the Bay Area. Meet at noon at the Strawberry Canyon Fire Trail head, below the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens on Centennial Drive. Walk lasts about two hours. Cost is $6 to $20 sliding scale, no one turned away for lack of funds. Offered by the Pacific School of Herbal Medicine. 845-4028. www.pshm.org  

Kathmandu Nite 2004: Unity in Diversity from 6 to 10 p.m. at Holy Name University, 3500 Mountain Blvd. Tickets are $15-$20. 487-6399, 223-4641. www.nepalassociation.org 

3-Hour Quit Smoking Workshop from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Alta Bates Medical Center, Ashby Campus, 2450 Ashby Ave. Option to use acupuncture. Follow-up class on Sept. 11 at 9:30 a.m. Sponsored by the City of Berkeley Tobacco Prevention Program. To register call 981-5330. 

Travel Careers Class at Vista Community College, from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., 2020 Milvia. Cost is $9. To register call 981-2931. 

Bringing Spirituality and Activism Together with Rev. Dr. Eloise Oliver, Ericka Huggins, Sidda Yoga, and Keith Carson, Alameda County Supervisor, from 2 to 5 p.m. at East Bay Church of Religious Science 4130 Telegraph Ave. Oakland. 420-1003. 

Sistahs Steppin’ in Pride East Bay Dyke March and Festival. March begins at 10 a.m. at Grand and MacArthur to Snow Park for the festival which runs until 6 p.m. 551-8330. www.sistahssteppin.org 

“The Cup” a film about four young monks trying to watch the 1998 World Cup tournament, at 8:30 p.m. at the Long Haul Infoshop, 3124 Shattuck Ave. 540-0751. www.thelonghaul.org  

The Birds of Home Watch a slide show of East Bay birds, then go out and find them in the field. Binoculars available. From 9 a.m. to noon at Tilden Nature Center. 525-2233. 

The Winter Veggie Garden with Novella Carpenter at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens Nursey, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-2351. www.magicgardens.com 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around the restored 1870s business district. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of G.B. Ratto’s at 827 Washington St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/wallkingtours 

Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tour Broadway Meets the Water From 10 a.m. to noon. Meet at the C.L. Dellums statue in front of the Amtrack station, 2nd and Alice Sts. Cost is $5 for OHA members, $10 for nonmembers. 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org 

Gormet Hot Dog Adventure Annual hot dog, sausage, brat and others tasting from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Tilden Nature Center. Cost is $5-$7. Registration required. 525-2233. 

Family Festival sponsored for the NIA Collective from noon to 6 p.m. at the Big Rock area of Lake Temescal. 869-4403. www.NiaCollective.org 

Kathmandu Nite 04, “Unity in Diversity” at 6 p.m. at Holy Names University Auditorium, 3500 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $15-$20. Sponsored by Nepal Association of Northern California. www.nepalassociation.org 

Berkeley Youth Orchestra Auditions from 8 a.m. to noon. To schedule an audition or to find out more about the orchestra see www.byoweb.org 

The San Francisco Girls Chorus Auditions for girls ages 7-12, at the Interstake Center of the Mormon Temple, 4780 Lincoln Ave. in Oakland by appointment only. For audition information or to schedule an appointment, please call 415-863-1752 ext. 327, or email info@sfgirlschorus.org 

Yoga for Seniors at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St., on Saturdays from 10 to 11 a.m. The class is taught by Rosie Linsky, who at age 72, has practiced yoga for over 40 years. Open to non-members of the club for $8 per class. For further information and to register, call Karen Ray at 848-7800. 

SUNDAY, AUGUST 29 

San Francisco Mime Troupe “Showdown at Crawford Gulch” at 2 p.m. at Willard Park, Hillegass and Derby. www.sfmt.org 

Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association Tour of the Art Deco Harris House from 3 to 6 p.m. at 2300 Le Conte Ave. Tickets are $15, available from 841-2242 or 841-1055. www.berkeleyheritage.com/art_deco.html  

Picture Progress Silent Auction to benefit the League of Pissed Off Voters. Join us to help defeat Bush, promote democracy, and celebrate Bay Area artists, from 3 to 7 p.m. at 1306 3rd St., the old Trax Gallery space. Free admission. www.indyvoter.org 

SacredProfane Auditions from 2-4 p.m. at St Peter’s Church on Broadway and Lawton, Oakland and on Sun. from 7 to 9 p.m. Please call Rebecca Seeman at 415-602-2492 or email seeman@usfca.edu  

Free Sailboat Rides between 1 and 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club in the Berkeley Marina. Bring warm waterproof clothes. www.cal-sailing.org 

History of the Earth, a slide show at 10 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center. 525-2233. 

Kingdoms of Life, nature exploration from 2 to 4:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center. 525-2233. 

Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tour of McClymonds-Clawson from 1 to 3 p.m. Meet at Chestnut Court, West Grand Ave. and Linden St. Cost is $5 for OHA members, $10 for nonmembers. 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org 

“Gay Marriages” with Robert Cromey, social activist and retired Episcopal priest, at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Road, Kensington. 525-0302.  

Get Ready for the Breast Cancer 3-Day Learn about footwear and apparel at 10 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. For more information on the Breast Cancer 3-Day go to www.The3Day.org or call 800-996-3DAY. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Sylvia Gretchen on “Tibetan Teachings on Death and Dying” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, AUGUST 30 

“Decriminalization of Prostitution: Paid Sexual Exploitation” a conference from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College Ave. Pre-registration required. 415-922-4555. conference@ 

prostitutionresearch.com 

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group for people 60 years and over meets Mondays at 10:15 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Join at any time. 524-9122. 

The Committee to Elect Karen Hemphill for Berkeley School Board Kickoff Party/Fundraiser at 6:30 p.m. at La Peña, 3105 Shattuck Ave. 467-3049. 

Fitness for 55+ A total body workout including aerobics, stretching and strengthening at 1:15 p.m. every Monday at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5170. 

Soli Deo Gloria will hold auditions and first rehearsal for experienced choral singers at Trinity Lutheran Church in Alameda, 1323 Central & Morton. To schedule an audition time with Artistic Director, Allen Simon, call 650-424-1242. www.sdgloria.org 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

TUESDAY, AUGUST 31 

“Climbing Yosemite’s Big Walls: Fast & Light” a slide show with Speed Climbing World Champion Hans Florine, at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

“Inner and Outer Peace Through Meditation” with Marshall Zaslove at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble,2352 Shattuck Ave. 644-0861. 

Creating Economic Opportunites for Women Free orientation meetings for training programs for immigrant and refugee women in english, finance and computer skills. Also on Sept. 2, 7 and 9. 655 International Blvd., at 7th Ave., 2nd floor. To register call 879-2949. 

Kurukula Self Defense Class for Girls at 6:15 p.m. in Albany. Drop in for $15. 847-2400. www.albanykarateforkids.com  

Argosy University Open House for those interested in learning about degree programs in the fields of psychology, education or business, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at 999-A Canal Blvd. in Point Richmond. Event is free. 215-0277. www.argosyu.edu 

Cantabile Chorale Auditions from 7 to 10 p.m. at All Souls Episcopal Church, 2220 Cedar St. To schedule at time call 650-424-1410. 

Organic Produce at low prices sold at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon Streets every Tuesday from 3 to 7 p.m. This is a project of Spiral Gardens. 843-1307. 

Phone Banking to ReDefeat Bush on Tuesdays from 6 to 9 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. Bring your cell phones. Please RSVP if you can join us. 233-2144. dan@redefeatbush.com 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers We are a few slowpoke seniors who walk between a mile or two each Tuesday, meeting at 9:30 a.m. in the Little Farm parking lot. To join us, call 215-7672 for information or check our web page, http://home.comcast.net/~teachme99/tildenwalkers.html or email teachme99@comcast.net 

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 1 

WriterCoach Connection (formerly Writers’ Room) seeks volunteers for this coming academic year for Berkeley schools For information on training sessions please contact Lynn Mueller at 524-2319 or writercoachconnect@yahoo.com www.writercoachconnection.org 

Tilden Tots A nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds each accompanied by an adult. We’ll look for fall spiders. From 10 to 11:30 a.m. in Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

“The Future of Food” a film at 7 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Admission is free. Part of the GMOs and Food series sponsored by GMO Free Alameda County. 527-9898. www.gmofreeac.org 

Auditions for the new Arlington Children’s Choir will be held between 4 and 6 p.m. at 52 Arlington Ave. in Kensington. Also on Sept. 8. Children, between the ages 8 and 14, who enjoy singing and performing, are invited to participate. For information and audition time call Shanti at 843-7745. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday, rain or shine, at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes, sunscreen and a hat. 548-9840. 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

Workin’ It Awards Ceremony for the Bay Area’s working women at 6 p.m. at YWCA, 1515 Webster St., at 15th, Oakland. Tickets are $15 in advance, $20 at the door. www.workinit.org 

Berkeley Communicators Toastmasters meets the first and third Wednesdays of the month at 7:15 a.m. at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. For information call Robert Flammia 524-3765. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6:30 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. www.ecologycenter.org 

Fun with Acting Class every Wednesday at 11 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Free, all are welcome, no experience necessary.  

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Vigil at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, SEPT. 2 

Tilden Tots A nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds each accompanied by an adult. We’ll look for fall spiders. From 10 to 11:30 a.m. in Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Tilden Explorers A nature adventure program for 5-7 year olds who may be accompanied by an adult, no younger siblings, please. We’ll learn about spiders and their biology. From 3:15 to 4:45 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Environmental Restoration Program Community Update at 5:30 p.m. at the City of Berkeley Planning Dept., 2118 Milvia St., 1st flr. conference room. www.lbl.gov/community/ 

East Bay Mobile Blood Drive from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Alta Bates Herrick Campus, 2001 Dwight Way. 1-800-GIVE-LIFE.  

Berkeley Farmer’s Market Shattuck at Rose, from 3 to 7 p.m. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

Kairos Youth Choir Auditions for boys and girls age 7-15. For information call 414-1991, info@kairoschoir.org www.kairoschoir.org 

CITY MEETINGS 

Commission on the Status of Women meets Wed., Sept. 1, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Ruby Primus, 981-5106. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/women 

Fire Safety Commission meets Wed., Sept. 1, at 7:30 p.m. at the Public Safety Building, 2100 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, 2nd floor. David Orth, 981-5502. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/firesafety 

Community Environmental Advisory Commission meets Thurs., Sept. 2, at 7 p.m., at 2118 Milvia St. Nabil Al-Hadithy, 981-7461. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/environmentaladvisory 

Housing Advisory Commission meets Thurs., Sept. 2, at 7:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Oscar Sung, 981-5400. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/housing 

Public Works Commission meets Thurs., Sept. 2, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jeff Egeberg, 981-6406. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/publicworks