Features

Letters to the Editor

Tuesday September 28, 2004

ELECTION 2004 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thank you, Daily Planet, for your Sept. 21 editorial (“Whine After the Election, Not Now”), and also for J. Douglas Allen-Taylor’s Aug. 20 piece (“Let Kerry Be Vague Until the Election is Over”). This is the stuff progressives need to hear, and readers who missed either one should look them up on your website. We might easily hand this race to Bush by talking ourselves into impotent despair, and the opposition will cheer us on as we do it. 

I’ll join in gleefully and chew John Kerry to ribbons as soon as he’s president-elect, but until Nov. 3, please, let’s focus on the job at hand. If you can’t bring yourself to take part in the campaign, there’s voter registration and poll-watching (electionprotection.org). At least do nothing now that hinders the effort to get rid of that man.  

If I may wander from the deadly serious to the seriously ridiculous, does anyone but me remember the neon sign by the Bay Bridge approach where, throughout my childhood, a can poured red paint over the globe thousands of times, illustrating the slogan “Cover the Earth?” The proposed Brower monument is similarly absurd, but probably not as appealing to children as that sign was. Unless kids are allowed to climb on it, but even then it would be ludicrously at odds with the environmentalist ideal: “Take only pictures; leave only footprints.”  

Instead, if we’re making a better wildlife habitat of the Berkeley Meadow, couldn’t that be dedicated to Dave Brower? 

Daryl Ann Sieck 

 

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NOTICES OF DECISION 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Decisions of the Zoning Adjustments Board can be appealed only for 14 days after the Planning Department has posted the relevant notice of decision (NOD) on a particular project’s application for a use permit.  

So it’s troubling that, at a time when the department no longer mails out notices to interested parties, it’s also stopped posting NODs on its website. The website has a menu that includes “Notices of Decision,” but when you click on those words, no such notices can be found.  

Or so it seemed to me for a month or two this summer. Wondering if I’d missed something, I called the Planning Department on Sept. 23 and asked if the NODs were being posted on the website after all. Turns out, they’re not. The reason given was that the website is being reconfigured. “You could call the office,” said the staff person.  

Yes, I could call the office—and actually, that day I already had called about a particular project. But why should I or any other citizen have to call—and, in all likelihood, call and call and call—when notices of decision could simply be posted on the website? All we’re talking about is a list of projects by address and the date of the NOD posting. That should be feasible even while the website is being revised.  

And while you’re at it, City of Berkeley zoning staff, could you please restore the names of project applicants—another important item (though not nearly as important as the notice of decision) that’s also disappeared from the Planning Department website?  

Zelda Bronstein  

 

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AESTHETIC MISFORTUNES 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

I recently revisited my childhood haunts in northern Minnesota, home of Paul Bunyan and his companion Babe the Blue Ox, a duo commemorated by numerous colossal statues. On my way home I followed a substantial portion of the Lewis and Clark trail, marked by the conventional 19th-century image: “explorer pointing with outstretched arm.” Imagine my surprise when I returned to Berkeley to be greeted by a marriage of the two in the form of the proposed David Brower sculpture: a colossal Brower with outstretched arm (exploreresque or from The Mummy? Hard to say), confidently (or is it precariously?) astride a huge blue globe. 

When I was 5 or 10 I gazed awestruck at the colossal incarnations of Mr. Bunyan, but my taste has matured since then. As for things carved out of stone, they range from tacky to sublime, so I withhold judgment on the big quartzite ball. More dubious is attaching bronze to rocks, but I’m willing to give that a chance. But the sleepwalking figure? Surely you jest. If the drawings are accurate, it is a clumsy aesthetic afterthought, laughably trite as both literalism and symbolism. I ask you, does Berkeley really need this “Bunyan on a Beach Ball”? 

Like so many of the recent aesthetic misfortunes that are coming to define the public space and public face of Berkeley, is this going to be yet another insider/autocratic decision made against the public will? If so, then—as usual—hundreds of hours of citizen labor will probably be spent trying to stop another ill-conceived stupidity. Or, if people are too tired to fight City Hall, Berkeley can, again, “act in haste, repent at leisure.” 

Sharon Hudson 

 

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BUSD PROJECTS 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

I am responding to the letter from Dean Olson (Daily Planet, Sept. 24-27) regarding the school construction that has taken place in the BUSD within the last decade. The incredible bond measures that Berkeley voters approved followed the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that devastated many of our schools. When the work began, my son entered kindergarten at John Muir Elementary School, so I can answer to the quality of work that took place there. Thank goodness that we did not have to level John Muir, because it is one of the Berkeley Unified School District’s oldest—and, we felt, one of our most beautiful—schools. It was probably the wood structure that saved it from complete earthquake destruction like Cragmont and Thousand Oaks. The district put $1,945,590 into retrofitting to save this historical landmark and modernized the facilities, meanwhile adding much needed new classrooms. With work still ongoing, the total price tag will be $2,360,590. The John Muir community will tell you that it was worth it. 

Work started at LeConte Elementary a few years later, coinciding with my son beginning the fourth grade there. The work in progress or completed today at LeConte totals $3,818,108, with $693,000 in future projects scheduled. The cost of all of the work on Emerson has a total price tag of $2,955,848. The new buildings unveiled at Berkeley High School last year was $35,000,000 and if you had been at the open house in April, you would have seen the value. With the opening of the new Berkeley Adult School this year, the BUSD can proudly say that every one of Berkeley’s public schools are safer then ever before, and that Berkeley is the first city in California able to boast that our schools are 100 percent retrofitted. The BUSD will be opening up a new website in October, and one of the added pieces is a complete facility page for each school that outlines every stage of their construction: 

www.berkeleypublicschools.org. The current site (same address) already has good information about our schools, including photos of the Willard Middle School beautification project. 

Mark A. Coplan 

Public Information Officer, BUSD 

 

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A GLARING OMISSION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The principal of Willard wrote a nice, polite letter to the editor (“Principal’s Perspective on Willard Garden,” Daily Planet, Sept. 21-23). But she made one glaring omission. She did not invite the community to work with the school in partnership to repair the damage, and to complete the work. Once again, the school and school district’s attitude is that they and they alone get to make the decisions. It’s the theme of the school district these days. It reflects the way government, including the federal government operates. 

In the Measure B, which they are busy touting, they have removed all citizen input into decision making. They eliminated all elected school committees and the district Planning and Oversight Committee. The school district, and the school district alone, will make the decisions on how the increased taxes (if the Measure B passes), will be spent. 

I heartily voted for BSEP, twice, because of the citizen input and oversight. The school district has shown itself incapable of proper fiscal management. The school district has gone into bankruptcy, and fiscal deficit over and over. BSEP works because of its wonderful, democratically elected committees to provide input and oversight. Measure B has none of this. 

For this reason I urge you to vote NO on measure B. 

Jennifer Havens  

President, Seniors for Fair Taxation 

 

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STREET SHRINES 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Mr. Allen-Taylor seems to think that it is OK for what amounts to unsightly trash to be left in front of someone’s residence that just happened to be the location of the latest tragic homicide (“Police Chief Oversteps Bounds in Banning Shrines,” Daily Planet, Sept. 24-27). I must disagree. These shrines of candles, balloons and yes liquor, drug paraphernalia and the like are unsightly and should not be tolerated for more than a couple of days if at all. Do you actually live in urban Oakland? If you were paying attention instead of driving through really fast in your Subaru, you’d notice the crazy behavior under the auspices of mourning such as impromptu sideshows, public drunkenness and conspiracy to commit more violence in retribution takes place at most of these shrines. Please spare me the condescending sociology lesson on mourning traditions in black culture. We are not talking about the African village or plantation, but a large cosmopolitan area with thousands of people per square mile. 

You are more than welcome to allow your front lawn host the many monuments to urban crime. As for me, I have instructed my loved ones that should the unthinkable ever happen to me (especially while visiting family on 93rd Avenue) to not allow a shrine in front of someone’s home. Remember me at the cemetery or local park or seashore and clean up after yourselves. 

Anthony Moore 

Oakland