Features

Berkeley and Albany share a friendly border in our northern corner of Alameda County. The border zig zags through multiple residential, commercial, mixed use/light industrial, and industrial neighborhoods. Usually a “Welcome to ____” sign is the only obvious marker of a change in municipality. Many of North Berkeley’s residents are immediately adjacent to Albany to the north and west. We share friends, favorite restaurants, and cherished artists with Albany residents. 

However, the story at the city government level is completely different. There’s no obvious sharing of long-range planning capabilities or short-term dispute resolution processes between Albany and Berkeley. This means issues and developments go forward in one city while wreaking havoc in the other city. This has got to end.  

When I walked Berkeley City Council District 5 in my campaign for Berkeley City Council last year, a number of neglected, resentment-producing issues along the border became clear to me. One major on-going one is the parking, traffic, and expansion issues surrounding St. Mary’s, the high school whose campus is wholly in Albany but whose main entrance and main parking/traffic issues are in Berkeley. Another is the new Target in Albany, which has an entrance/exit into Berkeley but whose tax receipts and mitigation fees go solely to Albany. A third is the controversy over bicycle lanes and traffic/pedestrian safety on Marin Avenue. Going back in history, a fourth contentious cross-border issue in the mid-1990s was the card room proposal at Golden Gate Fields. This issue galvanized Berkeley neighborhoods to band together and fight the Albany city government of the time.  

Early in my campaign, I asked Berkeley City Manager Phil Kamlarz what the legal way to have our two cities coordinate such issues is. He replied that a task force is the only method available on the municipal government level.  

We—the citizens and city workers of Albany and Berkeley—need to form an Albany/Berkeley Task Force to coordinate various border issues that affect both of our cities. Cross-border issues must be dealt with democratically, efficiently, and publicly. They should be a priority issue for Berkeley’s City Council, especially Councilmember Linda Maio (District 1) and Councilmember Laurie Capitelli (District 5), as District 1 and 5 share a border with Albany.  

The task force’s role would be to help resolve current border issues. It would offer an open, cooperative forum in which future developments, restriping, rezoning, or other possible controversies could be proposed, discussed, amended, fine-tuned, and either perfected or rejected by a team of Albany and Berkeley residents and officials before one city or the other go too far to turn back on a project or initiative. The task force would meet publicly, much like a city commission, and public participation would be strongly encouraged. The task force would report to each City Council directly, which would then have the collaborative information, reports, and recommendations of the two-city task force in hand when making decisions. 

The task force could be made up of one City Councilmember from each city, one member of the planning or zoning department from each city, perhaps one or two interested commissioners, and between four and eight interested residents of both cities (evenly divided).  

In terms of budget, the costs of the task force, especially when split between both cities, should be no more than one or two regular Berkeley commissions. The savings, in staff time and in costs associated with law suits, project appeals, paperwork, and so on, would be astronomical. Perhaps some of the benefits of development in one city can be shared with the other city, providing more savings. How much staff, City Council, commission, and community member time and effort did the recent Marin Avenue restriping issue cost? Hundreds of hours? Thousands of hours? If this task force or an equivalent had been in place before Albany made the decision to go ahead with the restriping, then much more information would’ve been available a lot sooner to the entire community. 

We need to, as Berkeley community members and government officials, step across the street to our neighbors in Albany and set this task force in motion. The details of membership and the exact role of the task force can certainly be tweaked, but it’s vital that this get done as soon as possible. The sooner we do this, the sooner long-time controversies like the St. Mary’s issue will be resolved. The sooner we do this, the sooner we can avoid future controversies like the Marin Avenue reconfiguration. The sooner we do this, the sooner we can move forward, as neighbors, to plan our shared future.  

Jesse Townley is a member of the Disaster Council and was a candidate for City Council in Berkeley’s District 5.›