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Just one week after the City Council approved the tallest building to hit downtown Berkeley in decades, an appellant has charged that Mayor Tom Bates’ meeting with the project’s developers before the crucial vote violated city rules on ex parte contact. 

The Seagate Building, approved overwhelmingly by the council last week, will rise nine stories at Center Street and Shattuck Avenue, complete with 149 apartments and rehearsal space for the Berkeley Repertory Theater. 

Visitor log records at city hall, first searched by Seagate opponent Zelda Bronstein and verified by the Planet, show that that Darrell de Tienne, the lead developer of the project had meetings at the mayor’s office as early as Jan. 20, 2004. After a second meeting Feb. 25, de Tienne and his partners with Seagate Properties, Inc. had another one-and-a-half hour meeting with the mayor and staff members April 26. 

All three meetings came while the council was supposed to be adhering to a strict law limiting contacts with advocates or opponents of projects on which the council might serve as the final arbiter, as it did on the Seagate project. 

Mayor Bates said he only met with de Tienne and Seagate principals on April 26 and that he didn’t violate the rule because they never discussed specifics of the proposed building. 

“We were very guarded not to talk about anything that might be a problem under the rule so I don’t think it was a problem,” Bates said. 

“Does anyone expect you to believe that [Bates] sat down with Darrell de Tienne for and hour and a half and never talked about the specifics of the plan?” charged Bronstein, a former chair of the Planning Commission, and the main author of an appeal to Seagate’s use permit. 

She called Seagate, which due to two space bonuses rose from five stories to nine, “the most flagrantly illegal project in Berkeley history. It’s just another example of people making decisions in high places not following the rules.” 

At the center of the controversy is a much criticized long-standing rule that limited so called “ex parte” contacts—private conversations with advocates or opponents for items on which the council might vote as an appellate body. Such contacts could prejudice a vote by giving a councilmember information not part of the public record. 

Until the council officially changed the law effective July 23 to allow for such contacts as long as councilmembers divulged their contents before a public hearing, some members of the council were known for going to great lengths to avoid any discussions of pending developments. Councilmember Kriss Worthington said he would walk out of neighborhood meetings if the participants began discussing a proposed development. 

“Prior to changing the policy, there was an iron clad prohibition on communicating with anyone about projects,” said Worthington who in past years questioned office visits by developers to his political rival, former Mayor Shirley Dean. 

But City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque said Monday that the rule was never intended to preclude any contacts with project applicants or opponents, only conversations specific to the development in question.  

“Unless the mayor gathered information about the project that was not a part of the public record, it’s really irrelevant,” said Albuquerque, adding that the Seagate appeal operated under the current rules. 

Since the council changed the rule July 23, city hall logs show three occasions—Aug. 10, Sept. 27 and Dec. 9—when de Tienne visited the mayor’s office with no corresponding disclosure form filed at the city clerk’s office detailing the content of the meeting. 

Calvin Fong, an aide to Bates assigned to the project, said the Aug. 10 meeting was with Richard Robbins, head of Wareham Development, who works with de Tienne and owns several properties in West Berkeley, but is not a partner in Seagate. Fong said he did not have a record of the other two meetings, but said Mayor Bates was on vacation Sept. 27. 

Even though de Tienne’s name appeared in the log as visiting the mayor’s office those days, Fong said the developer might have made a brief visit, while meeting with other city officials that wouldn’t require that he fill out a disclosure form. Fong did himself fill out seven disclosure forms relating to Seagate, six describing his own conversations with de Tienne, and the other his conversation with neighborhood activist Tim Hansen, who supported Bronstein’s appeal of the use permit granted by the Zoning Adjustment Board.  

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