Responding to the engine failure of two city trucks last year, city leaders in January scrapped its two-year-old program to power its fleet of nearly 200 trucks entirely on a derivative of vegetable oil. 

The move, Public Works Director Renee Cardinaux said, came after consultant Randall Von Weder determined bacteria mold found in the cleaner burning fuel had clogged engine filters and fuel injection pipes. 

Von Weder, of Point Richmond-based CytoCulture, said despite the city’s troubles with biodiesel, he never recommended that the city return to diesel, and said the best solution would be for the city use a 50-50 blend of biodiesel and a clean burning regular diesel. 

In January 2003 Berkeley won much acclaim by becoming the first U.S. city to convert its fleet to 100 percent biodiesel, which emits 50 percent fewer cancer and asthma-causing particulate emissions than regular diesel oil. Last year the federal Environmental Protection Agency awarded Berkeley the Environmental Award for Outstanding Achievement for the program. 

But after smooth sailing for the first year, Cardinaux said the city started receiving fuel of degraded quality from its vendor Golden Gate Petroleum. 

“Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to get a biodiesel fuel recently that is consistently clean,” Cardinaux said. Presently, he added, the city has returned to using a blend of 80 percent diesel and 20 percent biodiesel. 

For next year, Cardinaux has proposed switching the city’s fleet to ultra-low sulfur diesel, a move he said would save the city $160,000 on fuel cost as compared to 100 percent biodiesel. 

Any switch away from biodiesel would meet opposition from the Ecology Center, which has operated the city’s recycling program with trucks powered on 100 percent biodiesel since 2001. 

“We’re still committed to it,” said David Williamson, the center’s assistant director. 

Because the Ecology Center uses the same pump as the city, Williamson said that its trucks are now also running on a blend of mostly regular diesel. 

Biodiesel and ultra-low sulfur diesel each have their deficiencies, said Mark Jacobson, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. He said biodiesel emits up to 10 percent more nitrogen oxide, which produces ozone and contributes to smog, while ultra-low sulfur emits more hydrocarbons which contribute to global warming and have been shown to cause cancer. 

“The bottom line is that they’re both polluters,” he said. 

Ultra-low sulfur’s competitive advantage comes both from its lower price and its support from the California Air Resources Board. Next year all commercial diesel pumps in the state will have to switch to the fuel, said CARB spokesperson Gennet Paauwe.  

Biodiesel will still be permitted for sale and use in California, she added, but institutional users like Berkeley will run the risk of a penalty if their biodiesel doesn’t meet ultra-low sulfur emission standards. 

“If we find consistent problems with an individual fleet, the owner will get slapped with a fine,” she said. 

Because of biodiesel’s higher nitrogen oxide emissions, Paauwe said, the CARB still doesn’t distinguish biodiesel from regular diesel. 

Algae-like bacteria that have sidelined Berkeley trucks also live in regular diesel fuel, Williamson said, but are more common in biodiesel. 

“Since biodiesel is so close to vegetable oil, the microbes just eat it,” he said. 

Since converting to biodiesel, city trucks have experienced high instances of sludge build-up under their engine valves and fungus growth affecting fuel pumps, said Ed Silva, the city’s senior equipment supervisor. He added that the two trucks to experience engine failure were 18-wheel hauling rigs and that the city has had to upgrade the fuel line systems in its garbage trucks to make them impermeable to the corrosive effects of the fuel. 

“We never had these problems when we were using regular diesel,” Silva said. 

Williamson said the Ecology Center recently had trouble with one of its recycling trucks attributable to biodiesel bacteria growth. Williamson though said the Ecology Center still favored biodiesel, because unlike ultra-low sulfur the fuel is not refined nor does it require energy to be extracted from the earth. 

Von Wedel, Berkeley’s biodiesel consultant, said that bigger city trucks had experienced problems with 100 percent biodiesel and that the fuel appeared to decompose a lot of their rubber components. He attributed the problems to a lack of quality fuel and the overall youth of the industry. Although European cities use biodiesel, he said, Berkeley was the first city worldwide to use the fuel for its entire fleet.  

Golden Gate Petroleum Operations Manager Claude Brown said his company was working to address Berkeley’s concerns, but contended that biodiesel sold to the city was top quality. He said the city’s problem could stem from the presence of water in their storage tanks, which promotes algae growth. 

Since Berkeley became the first city to go 100 percent biodiesel, two cities, Telluride, Colo. and Coconut Creek, Fla. have followed suit, said Jenna Higgins of the National Biodiesel Board. 

¨

Berkeley’s era of budget deficits could be over by 2009, City Manager Phil Kamlarz told the City Council Tuesday. But to get out of the red, which the city has been in since 2003, Kamlarz is proposing a litany of cuts this year to close an $8.9 million deficit. 

If the council approves Kamlarz’s recommendations, city residents can expect fewer school crossing guards, no winter pool access, fewer youth recreation programs, reduced fire service, monthly closures at City Hall, and fewer citizen boards and commissions. Nonprofits will face 10 percent cuts in city funds. 

City employees will also will be asked to sacrifice. The city is budgeting zero raises for its unionized employees for two years after their current contracts expire. 

“This all hinges on controlling our labor costs,” Kamlarz said. 

Seniors’ programs were left untouched in the budget plan due mainly to a city proposal to start a case management program that would receive $300,000 in Medi-Cal reimbursements. 

Berkeley’s budget plunged into deficits three years ago as stagnant revenues failed to keep pace with rising employee benefit costs. Under the city manager’s revised budget forecast, Berkeley faces structural deficits of $8.9 million for fiscal year 2006, which would decrease to $1.6 million in 2007, $1.3 million in 2008 and $0 in 2009 under his recommended cuts. The council must pass a balanced budget, and is scheduled to vote on a final plan in June, before the new fiscal year begins in July. 

The city will have an extra $3.4 million to spend this year from higher than anticipated property taxes. Kamlarz recommended the council dedicate the money to several projects, including $2.4 million for a new computer dispatch system, but councilmembers delayed a vote on that until next week.  

“I don’t see why we have to allocate this money tonight,” Councilmember Darryl Moore said. 

Kamlarz has been insistent that the council not use the money to reduce this year’s deficit because he believes that will only mean delaying hard cuts to future years. 

The council voted Tuesday to set aside $100,000 to move ahead with a plan to put the city, not PG&E, in charge of buying its energy.  

Kamlarz’s plan assumes that the housing market will remain strong, local business revenue will stabilize, pension costs will level off and that federal and state aid will hold steady. The projections, which Kamlarz said “weren’t all conservative,” drew concern from Councilmember Laurie Capitelli. 

“It looks like we’re using spit and chewing gum to hold this together,” he said. 

The city is already facing the potential loss of up to $4.2 million in funding from the proposed elimination of a federal urban development program and next year will lose McKevitt Volvo, one of its top sales tax generators. 

Berkeley’s $8.9 million deficit for 2006 is comprised of a $7.5 million gap in the general fund and a combined $1.4 million shortfall in funds for street light repair, parking meter oversight and paramedic services. Most of the savings will come from shrinking the city’s work force. Kamlarz proposed eliminating 84 full-time positions—most of which are vacant—that will comprise 77 percent of budget cuts over the next two years 

The city limited cuts to the city attorney’s office, Planning, Transportation, and the Office of Economic Development, Deputy City Manager Lisa Caronna said, because they are seen as necessary to manage the council’s top priority projects. 

Kamlarz also announced that the Police Review Commission will not face cuts this year after commissioners warned that they could not afford to lose another staff person. 

On school crossing guards, Kamlarz backed off his initial recommendation to eliminate the program entirely. Instead he is calling to cut city funding from $256,000 to $103,000. The plan, he said, will mean that some city schools located on relatively quiet streets won’t have any crossing guards.  

To save $1.1 million on employee overtime costs, the Fire Department is proposing to rotate engine and truck company closures throughout the year. The plan gives the department more flexibility than taking one of its ladder trucks out of operation, said Chief Debra Pryor. 

For the first time, Berkeley swimmers might have to leave the city to find an open pool next winter. All three city pools are scheduled to be closed from Oct. 1 through April 15 because the city can’t afford the estimated $92,000 to keep any one pool open, said Parks and Recreation Director Marc Seleznow. 

Seleznow also proposed that the city scale back an after school program at Willard Middle School, raise fees for recreation programs and eliminate a program to drive kids home from the Young Adult Project. 

“We are truly a no-frills operation at this point,” Seleznow told the council. 

Kamlarz is also recommending that the city eliminate two of the city’s 45 citizen commissions—Disaster and Solid Waste—and scale back meeting frequencies for 26 others. The move would relieve city employees of 5,412 annual hours spent staffing the commissions. 

Additionally, he is proposing cutting an animal control officer from the Berkeley shelter, which drew the ire of a couple of councilmembers. Concerned that the move would force the shelter to close its doors one day a week, councilmembers Betty Olds and Dona Spring proposed cutting the shelter’s volunteer coordinator instead. 

l

The Berkeley Unified School District settled a potentially embarrassing expulsion discrimination class action lawsuit this week, leaving Superintendent Michele Lawrence “pleased that we could reach an agreement” and plaintiffs’ representatives praising Lawrence and the district’s cooperation. 

The Stanford Law School’s Youth Education Law Clinic, the San Francisco-based Legal Services for Children organization, and Pillsbury Winthrop law firm joined together to file the lawsuit last August in federal district court in San Francisco. 

The lawsuit alleged that school district discriminated against an unknown number of African-American and Latino students by expelling them from school without a state-mandated hearing. Superintendent Lawrence, Director of Student Services Gerald Herrick, and the five members of the Berkeley School Board were all named as defendants. 

Three Berkeley High School students—Juan Muñoz, Summer McNeil, and Yarman Smith—were named plaintiffs in the lawsuit. 

Under a consent decree agreed to by the parties, but not yet ratified by the federal judge assigned to the case, Berkeley Unified will conduct affirmative outreach to identify students expelled from the district during the 2002-03 and 2003-04 school years without an expulsion hearing, and students who were placed in alternative programs or excluded from school for more than 5 consecutive days or 20 cumulative days during those two years. 

“If any student or their parent feels these actions were taken against them without due process,” Lawrence said in a telephone interview, “the district will conduct an investigation into the merits of their claims.” 

The consent decree provides a mechanism to redress the grievances of any students who are found to be improperly expelled or transferred out of regular school programs during the two-year period, and sets up a three year court-supervised monitoring process to make sure the district complies. Among the remedies listed in the decree are reinstatement to school and tutoring to compensate for lost time. The agreement calls for the establishment of a Students’ Rights Monitoring Committee to periodically review the district’s actions called for in the settlement. 

The agreement also contains a provision that the decree “is not and never shall be considered an admission of any fault, error, or wrongdoing” by the district. 

Plaintiffs’ representatives refused to speculate on how many students might be affected by the decree. Lawrence said she expected the number “will be very small.” 

The mother of student plaintiff Yarman Smith, Lagertha Smith, said in a prepared statement that she was “very pleased with the settlement because it not only affects my son, but it will prevent other students from being mistreated in the future. Being involved in this lawsuit has given my son more self esteem, since he was empowered to stand up for his rights.” 

“To Superintendent Lawrence’s credit, the Berkeley School district recognizes that students are entitled to due process,” Bill Koski, director of the Stanford Youth and Education Law Clinic, said in a prepared statement. “The agreement…shows that the District is committed to ensuring that students will no longer be wrongfully excluded from Berkeley schools.” 

In a later interview, Koski praised the three student plaintiffs “for having the courage to lend their names to the lawsuit,” as well as “commending” Lawrence for the actions of the district once the lawsuit was filed. “Every time we identified a student who was wrongfully excluded, the district moved forward immediately to offer them a place back in school,” Koski said. 

Lawrence said that lack of paperwork during student reassignment caused many of the district’s problems during the lawsuit. 

“In many cases, the staff believed that they had an agreement with the parents to move the students to another school,” she said, “but we got sloppy, and didn’t put it in writing.” 

The superintendent said that in most cases, transfers from regular school programs to such programs as the Berkeley Alternative High School or the county-run continuation school were beneficial to the students. 

“The staff did what they thought was in the best interest of the students,” Lawrence said. “What they did wrong was to cut corners.” 

B

After several weeks in which both sides maintained silence about contract mediation, the Berkeley Unified School District abruptly changed tactics this week, providing partial information on its latest offer to the Berkeley Federation of Teachers in an e-mail news release. 

BFT officials immediately labeled the district’s decision to go public “counterproductive and dangerous.” 

The exchange of public statements came a day after district and union representatives held a Tuesday bargaining session in their two-year-old contract dispute, and as teachers entered their third week of a “work to rule” job action. 

Negotiations are being conducted through a state-appointed mediator. Berkeley teachers have been working under their old contract since it expired two years ago. 

Another mediation session is scheduled for Monday. Meanwhile, the union’s executive committee met on Thursday for the first time in a month to evaluate its “work to rule” action and to discuss possible further plans. 

Up until this week, both the district and the union have confined their public statements and printed handouts to analyses of the district’s budget and comparisons of teacher salaries, but have steered clear of talking about what was actually being offered in the contract negotiations, and what was being refused. 

But in an e-mail released to the press entitled “Negotiations Update,” the district announced that it had offered “increases [to] all teachers’ salaries despite the need to cut the budget in order to do so,” as well as additional salary increases to veteran teachers and stipends for counselors and speech pathologists, increases in the district’s monetary contribution to medical benefits, and dental coverage for “many hourly teachers who are currently without [such] coverage.” 

The district provided no dollar figures or percentage increases in the e-mail release. 

“The board and superintendent believe they moved as far as they can without jeopardizing the solvency of the district or cutting critical programs,” the release concluded, and added that “the union has not accepted the district’s offer.” 

BUSD Superintendent Michele Lawrence said in a telephone interview that the district decided to release its proposal details “because our community has been critical of the fact that they have not been kept in the loop in regards to what has been going on in mediation. Because so many of our children are being affected by the ‘work to rule’ action, it seemed prudent that we let the community know that the school district is doing everything they can short of bankruptcy to put an end to this contract dispute.” 

At a Monday evening meeting at Longfellow Middle School called by the Berkeley PTA to provide information on the contract dispute, several parents expressed frustration at not knowing what was happening in the negotiations. 

After first hearing that the district was considering releasing negotiation details, BFT President Barry Fike spoke cautiously in a telephone interview, saying that “there were a lot of things going back and forth during the negotiation session, some of them in writing, some of them as verbal proposals. It wasn’t anything remarkably different coming from either side that hasn’t been heard in previous sessions.” 

But Fike said that he was reluctant to talk further about the negotiations since “in order to make it work, people have to be sensitive in not disclosing too much,” only saying that the union had yet to “cost out” the district’s salary increase proposal. 

“We’re still running the numbers,” he added. 

A day after receiving the district’s release, the BFT position had significantly hardened. 

“When the district goes public with proposals in the midst of highly sensitive mediation sessions, they can’t help but paint themselves into a corner and reduce opportunities for flexible solutions at the table,” the BFT release said. “It may be that the district’s negotiations team just momentarily lost their cool in releasing this information or it may be that their misguided strategy is to try to end mediation and push for a strike.” 

The BFT release said that the district’s salary increase proposal “does nothing to reverse Berkeley’s plummeting teacher compensation level rankings and keep our salaries competitive in either the short or long term.” 

The statement called the district proposal to increase veteran teacher pay “a thinly veiled attempt to try to divide teachers by offering larger salary increases to just a few of us” that “mysteriously appeared out of nowhere for the first time at the end of the day last Tuesday.” 

The BFT also said that the statement that the district offered to increase its monetary contribution to medical benefits was “simply not true.” 

Fike said in a telephone interview he did not think the union and the district were anywhere near that point of having negotiations break down. 

“If we were, it would be up to the mediator to decide that,” he said. 

At that point, the dispute would go to a three-person fact finding panel which would make a settlement recommendation. 

“If either side rejected that recommendation, the district would give us what is called its ‘last final offer,’ and the union would vote either to accept or bring the matter to our members for a strike vote,” he said. “From our point of view, getting to that point would be a worst-case scenario. That’s why we’re doing our darndest to come up with solutions now, to try to settle this in mediation.” 

¨

Fifteen South Campus neighbors have won a $67,500 judgment against Le Chateau, a UC Berkeley student co-op they blame for years of strewn trash, late night noise and a plague of vermin. 

In a ruling issued Tuesday Berkeley Small Claims Court Judge Jon Rantzman wrote, the student co-op association “has permitted the growth of a rogue mentality” at Le Chateau. 

Rantzman awarded 12 of the 22 plaintiffs in the case the maximum damage award of $5,000 for, among other things, “the loss of the right to quiet enjoyment.” Three plaintiffs received smaller awards and five plaintiffs who did not testify received nothing. 

“I’m overjoyed to have some sort of resolution reached after all these years,” said Michelle Pellegrin, who lives just north of 82-person student cooperative located in three buildings at the corner of Hillegass and Parker streets. 

“It’s great to have a verdict from the court that they need to change,” she added. 

Le Chateau is reputed to be the most raucous student co-op operated by the student-run University Students’ Cooperative Association. 

USCA General Manager George Proper said his board had not yet decided whether it would appeal the ruling to Alameda County Superior Court. Monetary damages from small claims court are typically hard to collect, but Proper said the UCSA, with an annual budget of $8 million, planned to pay the plaintiffs should the ruling stand. 

“In one format or another, it’s going to result in higher rents,” he said. Currently all student co-op residents pay $2,586 a semester for their rooms. 

The ruling again raises questions about the future of Le Chateau. Last semester, the UCSA board rejected proposals to change its demographics to better fit into the surrounding neighborhood. Proposals included graduate student housing or all female housing. 

“The board will probably reconsider those alternatives, probably with enthusiasm,” Proper said. 

Le Chateau co-manager Ian Latta said the co-op would oppose any change to its use and said that it has done much to reform itself. “There’s such a gulf between the house’s reputation and what it is really like,” he said. “We’re walking on tiptoes most of the time.” 

Le Chateau neighbors charged that from 2001 through 2004 they were subject to ever-present noise including breaking glass, amplified rock bands, loud music, power saws and wild swimming pool parties, according to court records. They also attributed a neighborhood rat problem to the co-op, saying that rats had “so many places for nesting.” 

The neighbors’ claims were backed by a 44-page correspondence from the Berkeley Police Department, outlining calls for service to Le Chateau. In 2003, the BPD received 77 calls for service to Le Chateau compared to 28 for UCSA’s Cloyne Court, seven for Lothlorien and four for The Convent, other student co-ops.  

In his report to the court, BPD officer Steve Rego recalled a visit to the house: “I saw marijuana ‘bong’ pipes in plain view on a table...The overall cleanliness of the house was deplorable...There were piles of garbage stacked all over the place. There were empty bottles and cans left littered throughout.” 

The neighbors hired Oakland-based Neighborhood Solutions to handle their case. Recently the company won a nuisance case for neighbors against a homeowner at Ninth Street and Allston Way. 

Despite the legal action, neighbors and co-op residents agreed that a 2003 agreement between Le Chateau and neighbors had improved conditions. Under the plan, Le Chateau has moved its pool table and social room to the basement and reserved its back building for quiet study. The house also doesn’t hold parties and co-op managers have given their cell phone numbers to neighbors to issue complaints. 

Latta said he receives about two complaint calls a month, all from Pellegrin. “We’ve been working really hard with neighbors to enforce our contract,” he said. “We’re being good neighbors.” 

George Lewinsky, the lead plaintiff in the case, however, said that previously improved conduct at the house ended when different student managers took over. He reiterated the neighbor’s request that the UCSA install a permanent manager and assume greater responsibility for the house. 

“Now it’s up to them to figure out how they want to manage this thing so it’s not a nuisance to neighbors,” he said. “As long as it’s quiet and kept clean, we don’t care what they do.” 

+

Patrick McCullough, the Oakland man who shot a 16-year-old boy in the arm during a fight outside his house last month, will not face criminal charges, Assistant District Attorney James Lee said Wednesday. 

“We are unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Patrick McCullough did not act in self-defense when he fired his weapon striking Melvin McHenry,” Lee wrote in a prepared statement. 

Furthermore, Lee said since McCullough was on his own property during the incident, he couldn’t file charges on weapons possession. 

McHenry will also not be charged, though some neighbors demanded that he face assault charges for attacking McCullough. 

The Feb. 18 incident caused a firestorm in McCullough’s North Oakland neighborhood, where McCullough is a member of a citizen anti-crime group that works closely with Oakland police. According to McCullough, McHenry, backed by 14 other youths, called him a snitch, attacked him and then asked his friend for a pistol before McCullough reached for his. 

Ivan Golde, McHenry’s attorney, insisted that McCullough instigated the incident and that McHenry never reached for a gun. 

“Basically the DA’s office threw its hands up because it’s a politically unpopular case,” Golde said. He added that McHenry planned to press ahead with a civil case against McCullough. 

Fearing for McCullough’s safety after the incident, Oakland officials have agreed to let McCullough out of his shared equity mortgage with the city for his house at 59th Street and Shattuck Avenue as long as he stays in Oakland. Under terms of the mortgage, McCullough stood to lose a share of the equity in his house if he sold it before 2014.  

McCullough could not be reached for comment by press time. 

›

Two young women slashed the throat of a 75-year-old Berkeley woman Wednesday evening as she and her husband strolled along Euclid Avenue past the Berkeley Rose Gardens. 

Though the victim is expected to recover, “there is no indication that it was a robbery or attempted robbery and we are treating as a homicide,” said Berkeley Police spokesperson Office Joe Okies. 

According to Sgt. Howard Nonoguchi of the BPD Homicide detail, the victim didn’t know the suspects, who walked directly up to her and slashed her throat without uttering a word at 6:40 p.m. Wednesday. 

The pair then fled in a light blue BMW M3 convertible. 

“The random and violent nature of this attack” are of great concern to police, said the homicide detective. “We are aggressively investigating this case to identify the people responsible for this attempted homicide.” 

The suspects are described as two women between the ages of 17 and 29. The knife was wielded by a thinly built black-haired African American woman 5’5” to 5’10” tall. She was wearing gray sweats, said Officer Okies. 

The second suspect was described as thinly built of indeterminate ethnicity with brown hair approximately five inches shorter than her companion. 

Their victim was rushed to Highland Hospital, where she remains under treatment. 

The attack “seems to be totally random,” said Okies. 

Detectives are asking anyone with information on the attack to calls the homicide detail at 981-5741 or e-mail police@ci.berkeley.ca.us. Callers may remain anonymous, Okies said. 

Police will hold an informational meeting on the attack next Thursday at 7 p.m. in the cafeteria of the Oxford Elementary School, 1130 Oxford St.›

Rock Attack 

Police are seeking the heavyset fellow who lobbed a rock at the head of a 34-year-old pedestrian near the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Dwight Way about 12:25 p.m. Monday. 

Though the rock connected with its intended target, the victim was not seriously injured. 

Going Batty 

A 19-year-old man called police to report that two fellows armed with a bat—or maybe a pipe—had confronted him near the corner of Ninth Street and Bancroft Way about 5:58 p.m. Monday. He fled before things got worse. 

Stabs Mate 

Police arrested a 42-year-old Bonar Street resident on charges of spousal abuse and assault with a deadly weapon after he inflicted a minor knife wound during the course of a fracas. The victim refused medical attention, said Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies. 

Hoodie Hoods 

A pair of young men clad in hoodies and other dark garb threatened grievous bodily harm unless a 20-year-old pedestrian walking along the 1900 block of Milvia Street forked over his cash early Tuesday afternoon. 

Instead, the intended victim darted into a nearby building and called police while the erstwhile robbers departed for safer turf. 

Leaf It Alone 

A distraught resident of the 100 block of Parkside Drive called police just before 8 a.m. Wednesday to report that a fellow in a dark SUV had just slashed off some of the branches of a much-favored tree and departed with them. 

By the time police arrived, the thief had branched out. 

Kicker Cuffed 

Police arrested a 22-year-old man on a charges of assault with serious bodily injury Wednesday night after he kicked a 25-year-old man in the head during the course of a fight in the 2500 block of Telegraph Avenue, said Officer Okies.›

City officials have issued a formal call for a consultant to help reshape the streetscape and traffic flow around the Berkeley BART Plaza. 

The project is a joint effort of the city, the Bay Area Rapid Transit District and the Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District (AC Transit) with the help of a grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC). 

“There are a number of ideas out there, and we are seeking to engage a planner who will integrate them into one design,” said Peter Hillier, assistant city manager for transportation. 

“Redesign of the existing BART rotunda has to be part of the project,” said Hillier. “BART wants it, as do we.” 

The circular structure at the southwest corner of Center Street and University Avenue sits across the plaza from the Power Bar Building, one of two existing high-rises at the intersection. 

The plan will also incorporate a third high-rise planned at the intersection, the proposed UC Berkeley hotel and accompanying convention center and museums’ complex. 

A fourth high-rise is planned to rise nearby, the nine-story Seagate building a half-block west on Center Street. 

The city’s Request for Proposals sets a maximum expenditure of $90,000 for a design that will improve bus, taxi, paratransit, bicycle and pedestrian flow in the city center, focused on the area immediately surrounding the Downtown BART station. 

The city issued the request on March 9 and applications are due by April 12, with the City Council slated to award the contract on May 11. The final plan will be expected within the following year. 

Citing the increasing central city population density spurred by the city’s “smart growth and transportation policies” as a primary reason for the plan, the proposal also takes note of the other projects that could further increase pressures on the existing infrastructure, including: 

• AC Transit’s planned northern terminus for its Bus Rapid Transit system now in development. 

• The UC Berkeley hotel complex. 

• Potential closure of Center Street between Shattuck and Oxford Street to accommodate the daylighting of Strawberry Creek. 

• Additional downtown residential development. 

• Further intrusion of the university into the city center. 

Hillier also said the designer would look into proposals to open one of the two unidirectional lanes of Shattuck Avenue on either side of Shattuck Square to two-lane traffic. 

Designers would work with the city, BART, AC Transit, UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as well as a group of engineers, planning and landscape architects, safety experts and staff from the various transit agencies, to formulate a plan to send to the City Council. 

“Before now, there’s been no mechanism to bring all these concerns into focus and relate them one to another,” Hillier said. 

The proposal calls for creation of a citizen advisory committee drawn from the Downtown Berkeley Association, property owners, arts and cultural groups, business owners, street vendors, neighborhood residents and young people to assist the project and conduct a public outreach program. 

The whole process will be carried out under the supervision of the city Office of Transportation. 

Once the design is completed, the next question is funding. 

“The city has a $5 million placeholder with the state regional transportation funding,” Hillier said, “and the city is putting in a proposal for a $600,000 or so Housing Improvement Grant,” funds awarded based on the number of affordable housing units in the city. “Hopefully we’ll be able to get additional funding beyond that.”?

Berkeley Unified School District Academic Performance Index (API) scores released this week by the California Department of Education contained “no surprises,” according to BUSD Superintendent Michele Lawrence, and show that district schools continue their placement in the mid-to-top level among California schools. 

The Berkeley scores were part of the Education Department’s annual report comparing test scores in more than 8,000 California schools. 

“I was really pleased,” Lawrence said. “It shows we’re doing a pretty decent job despite incredible odds.” 

The API compiles state test scores in a range from 200 to 1,000, with a score of 800 or more considered excellent. The API comparison also lists how schools rank statewide, as well as compared to demographically similar schools, with a rating of 1-10, with 10 being the highest. 

Three Berkeley elementary schools—Jefferson, Emerson, and John Muir—scored above 800. Six other schools—Cragmont, Malcolm X, Oxford, Thousand Oaks, and Whittier elementaries and King Middle School—scored between 750 and 800. Four Berkeley schools—Cragmont, Emerson, Jefferson, and John Muir—scored either 8 or 9 when compared to other schools statewide, and two Berkeley schools—Longfellow Middle School and John Muir—scored 10 when compared to schools with similar demographics. 

Two Berkeley schools performed poorly. Both Leconte Elementary, with a rating of 4, and Rosa Parks Elementary, with a rating of 3, ranked below the midway point when compared with schools statewide. Parks also ranked at the bottom when compared with schools of similar demographics. 

Schools were not listed in the report if less than 95 percent of their students took the state achievement test. 

›

California lawmakers took action against the genocide in Darfur Wednesday, aided by three East Bay teenagers who read written testimony submitted by U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee. 

Afterwards, the Assembly Committee on Public Employees, Retirement and Social Security passed legislation that calls on the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) to divest from stocks of firms that do business in the Sudan. 

Lee’s testimony was read by Natalia Casella, 16, of Berkeley, Veronica Gutierrez, 17, of Oakland, and Laura Byrne, 15, of Richmond. 

According to Rep. Lee’s office, CalPERS holds $7.5 billion in investments in firms doing business in Sudan. 

Similar legislation was adopted last month in New Jersey and other measures are working their through the legislative process in Texas, Massachusetts, Illinois and Arizona. 

In 1986, California led the way in divestment in the apartheid South Africa, and by the time the regime was voted out eight years later, 113 state, county and local governments had followed suit. 

Because California has the largest public employee pension fund in the nation, the Assembly action carries special weight. 

In her written testimony, Rep. Lee recalled her own visits to camps housing refugees from the North African violence. 

“I witnessed first-hand the depths of the human suffering; I saw the missing limbs, and I looked in the eyes of the girls who had been raped,” she said. 

“The experience only strengthened my conviction that we must take every action to end the ongoing genocide in Darfur. And it only strengthened my conviction that we need to go beyond diplomacy to end the killing.”

Three new measures designed to control the spread of casinos took forward steps this week, including one federal law and two proposed amendments to the California Constitution. 

The federal measure, which was debated Thursday in the House Resources Committee, is the brainchild of U.S. Rep Richard Pombo, chair of the House Resources Committee. His 6th District includes the southwest portion of San Joaquin County and parts of Contra Costa and Alameda counties. 

Oakland City Councilmember Jean Quan attended Thursday’s hearing to testify about the impact of casinos on her city and the East Bay. 

Pombo’s proposal would restrict off-reservation casinos to “Indian Economic Opportunity Zones,” restricted to a maximum of two per state. 

Pombo’s bill doesn’t stop the construction of new casinos, and multiple tribes could concentrate their new gambling ventures into what some critics have called “mini-Las Vegases.” 

In California, two proposed constitutional amendments calling for a moratorium on new casino construction are in the works, one jointly sponsored by Bay Area Assemblymembers Joe Nation and Loni Hancock, and the other by a collection of local elected officials spearheaded by Fairfax City Councilmember Frank Eggers. 

Both proposals call for creation of special task forces to examine gambling related issues during the moratorium. 

Nation’s amendment would bar the governor from concluding any new tribal gambling compacts until January 2008 and inaugurate a 13-member commission to examine issues of local governmental control, social and economic impacts and the possible consolidation of several tribes into one casino operation. 

“Instead of 10 casinos spread through the Bay Area, there might be only a couple,” Nation said. “One tribe with a proposal contacted me and said they would be willing to consolidation operations with other tribes.” 

The Nation-Hancock measure is presently in the Assembly Rules Committee. Once the proposal passes muster in the requisite committees, it will come before both house of the state Legislature, where it must receive a two-thirds endorsement by both houses before it can be sent on to the voters for the final decision. 

In Washington, House Resources Committee Press Secretary Jennifer Zuccarelli said Pombo’s proposed legislation had been spurred by numerous complaints from local officials as well as long-established tribes concerned about casino proposals by out-of-area tribal groups. 

“Local communities are telling us they never anticipated having casinos because they had no reservations in the area, but now tribes are coming in from out of state,” she said. “They’re telling us that they stayed on their homeland and played by the rules, yet now tribes with no history in the area are setting up casinos by promising fees to local governments.” 

Pombo’s concern is that while the Indian Gaming Act specifically precluded taxing tribal casinos, out-of-area tribes are paying a percentage of revenues in exchange for local government acquiescence to their gambling plan. 

Zuccarelli said Pombo’s proposal would stop tribes moving across state lines to create casinos, while allowing the Secretary of the Interior to designate two Economic Development Gaming Zones in each state, one on tribal land and one a so-called “fee” zone. 

The measure would allow multiple tribal casinos in each zone, creating so-called mini-Las Vegases. 

“There would be no limit on the numbers of casinos in each zone,” Zuccarelli said. 

However, a fee zone could be created only with the endorsement of tribes and communities within a 200-mile radius of the site. 

Armando Viramontes, the member of Loni Hancock’s staff who has been handling casino issues for the Assemblymember, said that while the approval requirement should effectively limit the zones to rural areas of the state, Hancock solidly opposes the creation of mini-Las Vegases anywhere in California. 

Eggers unveiled the latest version of his proposed amendment Thursday, which calls for a five-year casino moratorium with an extension of up to three more years. 

His measure calls for creation of the California Tribal Casino Planning Commission, which would prepare a California Tribal Casino Gambling Casino Plan to be presented to the governor and state Legislature by the end of 2010.

Berkeley’s program that allows city employees and residents to share city cars was named as one of 50 semifinalists for the Innovation in American Government Award. 

The award, referred to as the “Government Oscars,” puts Berkeley in the running for a $100,000 grant from Harvard University. 

Through a partnership with City CarShare, Berkeley retired 15 vehicles and replaced them with four hybrid cars operated by City CarShare. City employees have exclusive use of the cars during business hours, while any City CarShare member has access to them on evenings and weekends. 

“This innovative program is saving Berkeley taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars, improving government efficiency, reducing pollution and providing an alternative to car ownership for Berkeley residents,” said Mayor Tom Bates. 

Now it its 18th year, the award is a program of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The school will announce the six winning programs in July. 

—Matthew Artz

Major changes now being planned at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) include a major move off-campus and a step toward demolition of one of the facility’s major structure. 

The off-campus move sends several LBNL programs into 72,000 square feet of newly leased space near Aquatic Park. 

The other move came in the form of a notice of preparation for an environmental impact report (EIR) required before the lab can demolish Building 54, the home of the facility’s long-retired Bevatron, the particle accelerator credited with four Nobel Prizes for work done on the machine. 

The long-term lease, signed earlier this month, on the second floor of a former warehouse building at 717 Potter St. in Wareham Development’s Aquatic Park Center, means another hunk of Berkeley real estate has moved off the tax rolls. Under state law, private property rented to a government or non-profit agency is removed from the tax rolls for the duration of the lease. 

Other tenants of Wareham’s 15-acre center include Bayer HealthCare, Dynavax Technologies, Xoma Ltd. and the state Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC). As with the lab, the DTSC pays no property taxes. 

Among the LBNL tenants occupying the newly acquired space will be experts in cancer research, advanced microscopy and computational modeling. The new quarters will also house the Synthetic Biology Department, a joint venture of LBNL and UC Berkeley under the director of Professor Kay Keasling. 

Wareham is a major East Bay property owner whose other Berkeley holdings include a 106,000-square-foot building now under construction at 700 Heinz Ave., the landmark Durkee Building at 800 Heinz Ave., and the Constitution Square Building on Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley. 

In Richmond the firm owns the state Department of Justice DNA lab, the building that houses the UC Technology Transfer Center and headquarters for Region IX of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Point Richmond Tech Center. 

Emeryville holdings include the Churn building, the 20-acre EmeryStation complex, the Amtrak Intermodal Station, Heritage Square, the Emeryville Research and Development Center, the Hollis Street Center and the Federal Express building. 

UC Berkeley published notice of the EIR Tuesday, including the announcement of a public scoping meeting to address concerns raised by the demolition to be held from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. March 31 in the North Berkeley Senior Center. 

According to the notice, the lab doesn’t need the building or the massive particle accelerator, which was used between 1954 and 1993. 

Because four Nobel Prizes in physics stemmed directly from work conducted on the 180-feet-in-diameter Bevatron, the structure is eligible for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places. 

Soil and groundwater contamination has been detected under the building, including toxic volatile organic compounds, PCBs and mercury. 

If approved, demolition would begin in one or two years and be completed by 2010-12. 

While some building materials could be recycled, portions of the Bevatron and its shielding as well as the adjacent concrete are radioactive at low levels and would have to be taken to Department of Energy approved disposal facilities. 

Officials from Wareham and LBNL did not return calls for this article. The information was taken from the Wareham web site and the LBNL EIR notice.

When Alameda County progressives recently got wind of President Bush’s resubmission of seven federal judicial nominees previously rejected by the U.S. Senate for being too extreme, they did what many progressives all over the country did: They decided to party. 

Ten Alameda County residents opened their homes and hosted parties for scores of people they did not know on the night of March 10 in Berkeley, Oakland, Emeryville, and beyond. These parties were part of a larger wave of parties across the nation that began at 7 p.m. Eastern, Mountain, and Pacific times attended by approximately 15,000 people. 

Vincent Casalaina of North Berkeley hosted a party off College Avenue. 

“This is a big deal,” Casalaina said of the wave of parties across the country. Casalaina decided to host a party because he wanted to see “how MoveOn is going to make its first big foray into organizing grassroots action at the local level.” 

Garth Shultz decided to host a party in South Berkeley because “all the other parties were filled up and I really wanted to be at a party.” 

Shultz added that he believes getting people into local action is crucial. 

The party at Casalaina’s spacious Berkeley home transitioned quickly from friendly introductions with the typical unease one finds when meeting strangers to all attention focused on a streaming videocast coming over the Internet. The videocast piped in two phone calls from Senate minority leader Harry Reid and Democratic Party leader Howard Dean. 

Senator Reid told the people sitting in the living room off College Avenue—as well as people sitting in living rooms in Contra Costa County, Nevada, Colorado, and beyond—that the President “is once again using fear to push his extreme policies” by saying there is a judicial crisis in the Senate. 

Reid said that the Senate’s record of confirming judicial nominees—with 204 nominees confirmed and only the ten most extreme rejected—is better than that achieved by President Clinton, President George H. W. Bush, and President Reagan. 

He also said that Senate democrats “will not capitulate to threats” and will fight every step of the way against Bush’s seven renominated judicial nominees who have “already been found too extreme by the members of this [Senate] chamber.”  

Howard Dean spoke of reshaping the Democratic Party. He said “the core of the progressive message is going to be social and economic justice.” 

Closing remarks on the videocast were made by MoveOn PAC organizer, Adam Rubin. Rubin told the party-goers that they were “like the minutemen in the American Revolution,” willing to stand up against those who control our government. 

He said that the 3,000 neighborhood action teams now forming around the country mark the launching of a nationwide campaign, called “Operation Democracy.” He said the campaign’s purpose is to “confront policies that put corporations first and people second.” 

“With tens of thousands of us around the country now, and later hundreds of thousands of us all standing together, I know we can win,” Rubin said. 

After the videocast the party-goers separated into neighborhood action teams, and they rehashed what they had heard on the videocast. 

Edward Shipwash, 48, of North Berkeley, said he had read about a few of the judicial renominees the Senate had rejected last year. 

“I read the backgrounds of three of those guys and they seemed greedy and self-serving,” he said. 

Operation Democracy’s first activity was neighborhood action teams enlisting citizens in every state to call their local Senators March 16 to tell them they care about having fair-minded judges, they understand these judicial appointments are for life, and they are watching. 

o

BROWER CENTER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

James Doherty is right on target when he notes the terrible irony of building the Brower Center over a huge parking garage (Daily Planet, March 11-14). It makes a mockery of the effort to achieve a LEED Platinum designation for the structure, dishonors the life and work of a great environmentalist, and serves the citizens of Berkeley badly. Most of us understand that burning fossil fuel is bringing on rapid, deleterious climate change, and the efforts to get the last pockets of oil and gas from Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, and other western states will destroy the little remaining habitat for wildlife. How then can we allow the planning of the Brower Center to go forward designed for housing cars instead of insisting that it be based on 21st-century needs. Mr. Doherty’s forward-looking proposal that the high cost of an underground garage be redirected towards a light rail connecting downtown to the Berkeley Marina deserves serious consideration. Make Berkeley a model for other cities by recognizing the necessity of new approaches to transportation in our city center. 

Charlene M. Woodcock 

• 

GOLDEN GATE FIELDS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am writing to respond to numerous inaccuracies contained in a recent story regarding Golden Gate Fields. 

I have been the General Manager of Golden Gate Fields for 25 years. This track has a proud history of generating revenue for the City of Albany and in contributing to numerous charitable causes over its 68 years. We have opened our beautiful property to our Albany neighbors to walk their dogs, ride their bikes and teach their kids to drive in our parking lot. It is with this same sense of community and partnership that we enter into discussions with Albany residents about how to improve and expand public access to the land and shoreline, create new open space, while generating much needed revenue for the city. 

Here’s the truth about the track and possible development: 

Golden Gates is not closing. In fact, we have been investing to improve our facilities. We have spent more that $1 million in the last several years to upgrade and renovate the grandstands, not to mention building a brand new state-of-the-art medical facility for the horses on our grounds. 

The statement that a “600,000-800,000 square-foot” development is planned is completely false. In fact, there is no plan yet. That’s why we’re out in the community meeting with organizations and individuals to ask what people would want in a new project on our property. We are ready and willing to meet with Albany residents to hear their ideas and concerns. 

The story states that the development plans have “provoked strong opposition” from the Albany City Council and the Albany Chamber of Commerce. The truth is that the Albany Chamber passed a resolution recently, stating in part, “The Albany Chamber of Commerce supports thoughtful community-minded development at Golden Gate Fields” and we have heard a broad range of opinions from others with whom we have met. 

Those of us at Golden Gate Fields share the view that our property is a great resource, and that any plans should be carefully considered, well done, and be a benefit to the people of Albany by creating a wide range of opportunities to enjoy the waterfront. We are all in this together. Striking the right balance between development and open space is our only goal. Our actions are guided no by what is good for business, but equally by what is good for Albany—its residents, businesses, and schools. 

Peter Tunney  

Manager, Golden Gate Fields 

• 

UNDERCURRENTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

With regards to Jesse Allen-Taylor and most of his columns including the last two weeks, he seems to be long on opinion and short on fact. After all why let a few facts get in the way of an opinion piece? It’s a Grand Old Tradition of right wingers such as Ann Coulter and William Safire not to bother with facts. Few, it appears have the guts to take him to task. After all it’s Berkeley and it would be so un-PC to criticize a black writer. Racism or something, no doubt. Or is it that most Daily Planet readers just aren’t familiar enough with what goes on in Oakland? However when the ball is in the other court, it doesn’t seem to stop criticism. Several months ago there were several scathing letters aimed at Susan Parker telling her they didn’t care for her narratives on her daily life in her “gentrified” (it’s far from that) neighborhood and to get out. But she after all is easy to take pot shots at, since she is just a white woman.  

J. Sierra  

North Oakland 

• 

ECON 101 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I don’t know who this Bob Burnett fellow is and I am sure he is a fine fellow but he ought to at least take freshman Economics 101 or at least engage his brain before putting fingertips to the keyboard. I recall folks of Mr. Burnett’s ilk crying that the sky is falling because of high deficits during the Reagan years, shortly after I graduated from business school. The scare then was that deficit spending was going to cause inflation which of course was and is nonsense which anybody who bothered to study the matter knew. The economy needed priming then and lo and behold it grew out of the deficit hardly a decade later. And it is especially disingenuous to read Mr. Burnett’s disdain of Keynesian spending under the current administration when his liberal lot cursed the conservative spending under Hoover but loved the deficit spending programs of the New Deal under FDR. Face it Mr. Burnett the deficits we are running as a percentage of GNP are about what they have been for much of the last century and guess what there is no need for alarm they are not even near the worst we have seen. Your real beef is you do not like the policies of the Bush Administration; you are looking for validation from Chairman Greenspan when it is inappropriate for him to suggest how we lower deficits just that we do lower them eventually which just as before we will. Mr. Burnett, the other party won the elections. Get over it and even better if you wish to make suggestions, please do but in the context of the current political reality, not your what you might like to see in you Utopian World which ain’t going to happen now. 

Steve Pardee 

• 

DERBY STREET FIELD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

First of all, let me say that, like virtually all neighbors of the East Campus, I was very pleased with the School Board’s decision not to consider closing Derby Street, and hence not to consider the possible installation of a hardball field in the East Campus, at this time. The School Board deserves the highest praise for sticking to the East Campus process it had decided upon, and not allowing itself to be derailed by the machinations of hardball field proponents.  

Second of all, and even more important, let me try to make clear why this controversy is not really about a proposed hardball field, but is rather about a  

fundamental question that concerns all citizens of Berkeley, namely, does any public agency have the right to force a non-essential project on a neighborhood which not only is strongly against it, but which already is the site of three public facilities (the East Campus, a UC maintenance warehouse, and the Farmers’ Market)? 

In order to understand why I feel the answer to this question must be no, consider the following: 

In recent years, the theory has been publicized that listening to (and if possible playing!) Mozart, raises the intelligence of children and young people. Let us assume that further research reveals that listening to, and if possible playing, any classical music raises the intelligence of children and young people—even 20th century classical, like that of Stravinsky, Bartok, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Webern, music that most people consider to be “just noise.”  

Let us assume that the School Board, which is always up on the latest educational research, decides that, for the good of the students, a section of a park in North Berkeley is to be set aside for classical music performances. A stage is to be built, with loudspeakers and lights, and students are to be allowed to perform, as soloists or in groups, 8 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days a week, 365 days a year (same as for the proposed hardball field). 

Let us assume—reasonably, I think—that when word gets out about this project, the neighbors of the park are almost unanimously opposed to it, arguing that the School Board has no right to destroy their peace and quiet, and has no right to force upon them a project that will almost certainly lower their property values, which represent a major portion of their life savings in many cases.  

Proponents of the stage scorn these protests, accusing the neighbors of being “against youth” and of being “selfish” for thinking of property values when the intellectual development of Berkeley’s youth is at stake. 

I hope that every reader can see that this is not an argument about whether classical music is good for Berkeley’s youth or not. It is an argument about the rights of neighbors relative to a non-essential public project that the vast majority of the neighbors are against. 

Most of the neighbors would, I am sure, not say that Berkeley’s youth should be deprived of classical music, but instead would simply ask the School Board to find other locations for its stage.  

The parallels to the hardball field are obvious.  

Let me conclude by repeating what I said in a previous letter to the editor: If the hardball field goes through, no neighborhood in Berkeley will be safe, because every public agency will take it as a green light to do whatever it wants anywhere in the city, regardless of the feelings of the neighbors. 

Peter Schorer 

• 

MORE ON DERBY FIELD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am writing in response to the travesty of a decision that the Berkeley Public School Board reached last Wednesday, March 9. 

My name is Eli Flushman. I am proud to say that I am a complete product of the Berkeley public school system, from kindergarten (Cragmont School) through college (UC Berkeley). I am currently the junior varsity baseball coach at Berkeley High. I am 23, and don’t think I have or ever will be as disgusted with the School 

Board and its members as I am now (With exception to Duran and Rivera, thank you for your attempts). 

The Berkeley High School Athletic department, one of the largest athletic departments in the country (something our board should be embracing not discouraging), has lacked space for over 40 years. East Campus, the site of which this discussion is based, is property of the BUSD and also the logical choice to improve the athletics space dilemma. 

The Berkeley High baseball team and its students are in dire need of a baseball field after sharing one at San Pablo park with other baseball and softball leagues, as well as soccer, rugby, lacrosse, and other people who otherwise would want to use a public park (i.e. not property of the BUSD). East Campus, could alleviate this burden of lack of space so prevalent our many students endure every day. 

If this land truly is BUSD property, why then are all the compromises coming at the expense of the students that by fault own the land? If it is property of the BUSD, then the board should make decisions that benefit the students that the land is intended to be used by, not the neighbors that live near it, or the Farmers’ Market that barrows its space. 

The resolution that was voted down, was there to find more information, nothing more. Not one shovel was going to be used because of a “yes” vote. Information was to be gathered as to what project could be done, and what would it cost. That is it. 

The three board members who decided against the needs of a large number of students did so while hiding behind excuses of a lack of timing, and that going 

back on their word lacked integrity, and was unethical. 

In my 23 years in this city I find that timing is never going to be good to make any decisions in this city because there will always be tough decisions to be made. Citing timing as a reason is a cop-out on making a decision and those who use that as the basis of their decision should be stripped of their role as a public servant as they are not fulfilling it. Further, there is always going to be opposition in this city, and someone will always be on the “short end of the stick,” so citing “angst” is even worse of a barrier to hide behind. 

What is unethical, what lacks integrity is the fact that the decision was made without knowing all the facts, that the decision was made without knowing the 

benefits it could bring our students. I voted for some of the board members who voted this resolution down, and I am hurt because I voted for them because I 

thought that they were running for the position to improve the Berkeley public schools, obviously I was wrong. Issel, Riddle, Selawsky, you all disappointed 

me greatly, as well as many others. 

To use an analogy, here is the decision they came too. Say you were a homeowner and you wanted to renovate your bathroom. Would you go over to your neighbors and ask them what they think you should do? Sure, why not? They may use your bathroom. But if they told you that you can’t do it unless it looks like they wanted it, you would tell them, “Too bad, it is my bathroom, and I am the one who uses it.” Unfortunately, three of our School Board members don’t want to make a decision that will benefit the people that would use it the most. 

Please, understand that the needs of the students of our community need to come first, contact the school board and tell them you believe so too. 

Eli Flushman 

• 

STUDENT’S PERSPECTIVE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Some might say I have a biased view of the pros and cons of building a regulation size baseball field on the Derby Street site because I’m a member of the Berkeley High baseball program.  

It is true that I would welcome such a field, but that does not make me indifferent to the protests of the neighbors. What surprises me is how unwilling some are to seriously discuss the possibility of a real baseball field being included on the Derby Street site.  

I’ve heard the “skinned infield” proposal and rumors of batting cages, but what’s the use of having a limited facility that wouldn’t even support a full practice? Are the infielders to practice at Derby Street and the pitchers and outfielders at San Pablo? That would make for just the kind of team the school board seems to envision, a nice of enough idea as long the board can continue to get away with selling out the student athletes.  

Alex Day 

BHS junior 

• 

PARTS ONE AND TWO 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It is very telling that nowhere in the recent letter from East Campus neighbors do the words “interim” or “temporary” appear. 

Part one of the Derby Street project was to include nothing that couldn’t be removed or used if the school district decided to build a full size ball field there. It was the drifting away from that requirement that worried so many supporters of a field and sparked Terry Doran’s awkward but necessary motion to explore the part two endorsed by most of the school board, a full-sized baseball field. 

The neighbors talk a lot about alternatives, but this just serves to avoid discussing Derby Street as one of the possible sites. Frankly, anyone who really explored what a team needs would see that East Campus is by far the best site. It would be silly to not discuss it. To envision bifurcated practices, with batting cages one place and full practices another is hardly realistic. 

The writers say the space would languish if the ball field were considered. Once again, there is a part one, with its busy uses, and then (I hope) a field, maybe sooner, maybe later, certainly not immediately.  

I do have to wonder, though, if this new space without a field isn’t going to be the biggest hang-out place in town, a People’s Park south. Maybe we could all get behind that. Believe it or not, a ball field is a good open space to be near. 

As someone who was deeply involved in the Adult School fight, I know how much trust counts and how carelessly the school board and superintendent sometimes treat that trust and how easily they can screw up a process.  

For all sorts of reasons, that was a different fight, no matter how much some board members strain mightily to turn an apple into an orange. For one thing, we never had a board member whose first and foremost job is to bring home the bacon to his neighbors and political base. There was never really any bait to be part of a bait-and-switch (except for the legal blackmailing of a couple of neighbors to drop a lawsuit). Almost all of us were ready to accept the adult school (as if we had any choice) if there were no other options, if the process was thorough and fair and if the planning was better. The neighbors and a local architect made sure it was. We did not become, we didn’t want to be, a fearful, exclusive neighborhood. 

Unfortunately for everyone, the Derby Street process was always too patched together and one-sided to work. There was never a good time to make corrections. The school board’s vote just means there’s more anguish to come. The leadership in this city tortures both sides to avoid making a decision. If Michele Lawrence or Shirley Issel or some council member says one more time that it’s the other’s responsibility to go first, we should sit them in a corner until they grow up. 

So, with respect, I have to ask the East Campus neighbors, are you keeping faith with the rest of the city by whistling past a possible part two, by pretending it hasn’t always been part of the process, just wishing that it isn’t something that has to be discussed for the benefit of our kids? 

James Day 

• 

STATE BUDGET 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a parent and as President of the Berkeley PTA Council, I am deeply concerned about the effects on children of the governor’s 2005-2006 state budget proposal. The proposal funds education below the Proposition 98 guaranteed minimum and further harms public schools that already suffer from inadequate resources. Legislators must consider the long term, negative effects of inadequate funding on California’s children as they deliberate the proposal. 

California’s schools are among the lowest funded in the nation and have suffered $9.8 billion in cuts in the last several years. Our average class size is the largest in the nation. We are last in the nation in the funding of school nurses, librarians, and counselors. Yet we have the most rigorous academic standards and one of the most stringent accountability systems in the nation. These high standards point the way to academic success for our students and future workers, but schools require adequate funding in order to fulfill that promise. 

The governor and legislators must meet their responsibility to California’s children, on whose success the future of California rests. They need to consider all necessary actions, including state budget structural reform, to ensure a budget serves the needs of children, schools and families. Our children, in Berkeley and throughout California, deserve the best educational opportunity we can give them. 

Roia Ferrazares 

President, Berkeley PTA Council 

• 

MESSAGE TO BHS TEACHERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Berkeley High can feel like a huge, impersonal place to many youngsters. If a student is not part of some special program or special group, it can be hard to feel like part of anything. For my son who will be graduating this June a few of you have made a difference. Your personal interest has helped him feel a sense of belonging even in this giant institution. Though he sometimes looked as if he just stepped out of a rap video you have looked past stereotypes and into the heart of a fine young person. Though his size and growing beard make him look like an adult, you have realized that he is not. He has needed you to reach out with an occasional reminder, a little encouragement and a bit of understanding. And you have provided these.  

His good verbal skills may even have lead you to believe that he is more sophisticated than he is. You could have been annoyed and believed that he wasn’t really trying. But you didn’t. You realized that he was sometimes clueless, a work in progress and you gave him the benefit of the doubt. Not all teachers are willing or able to see distinct individuals in the mass of teenage bodies that is Berkeley High, but a few of you have done so. You have tutored him at lunchtime, trusted his explanations, or encouraged him to rewrite papers for a better grade. And sometimes you have just talked to him and listened to him. 

There is no book or curriculum that is as powerful in teaching youngsters as a teacher is. And what some of you teach the students that is more important than any content is that they are worthwhile people and capable of success. 

My son has had his share of challenges dealing with teachers of differing levels of competence and commitment. Fortunately he has also had the opportunity to grow from the skill and kindness of others like you. 

It may be years before you see the positive outcomes that you have brought about and in many cases you won’t see them at all. But I want you to know that the time you have spent on my son and other kids like him has not been wasted. He already appreciates it and so do we his parents. 

Susan DeMersseman 

• 

BUDGET PRIORITIES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I strongly oppose the proposal to spend $2.4 million for a Public Safety Computer Dispatch System for the following reasons:  

• It is not a good investment and will require further staff-time and City money before it becomes fully operational; and  

• The reasons that a new dispatch system is needed are not transparent.  

I recognize the Herculean task that is required of City Council to make hard decisions on the city budget. In considering the many worthy competing priorities for continued service to our diverse population, I believe that spending this large sum for a dispatch system is not appropriate. Having some experience in developing information systems for public health purposes, I have learned that several criteria must be met before an information system can be successfully developed and/or used effectively. The system was advertised as “off-the-shelf” and will presumably be usable immediately after purchase. My experience is that no such item in information systems exists. There are always reasons why specific new functionalities need to be programmed; and/or bugs need to be “fixed.” I read recently in the Berkeley Daily Planet that a $1 million computer dispatch system was bought a few years ago and had to be abandoned because it did not serve the department’s needs. Was this also advertised as an “off-the-shelf” system?  

It is important for the public to understand the reasons for the need of a new computerized dispatch system that will be used by the police department. In the climate of information-sharing with fewer human rights protections, I believe the citizens of Berkeley deserve a detailed description of the rationale for this new police tool, what it will accomplish, potential limitations of the system, and potential adverse impacts on privacy and human rights.  

I strongly urge City Council to spend $2.4 million of our money on continued services rather than on this dispatch system.  

Lisa Pascopella 

• 

PROTECTING RETIREMENT SECURITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The governor’s proposal to overhaul the pensions that millions of California’s public employees depend on for a secure retirement is bad news for working people and tax payers throughout the state. Under the current CALPERS system, public employees get a guaranteed pension and the choice to contribute to a 401(k) plan. The governor proposes to make it illegal to provide traditional pensions to new employees, leaving them with only risky 401(k) type plans. Given that 401(k) plans lost 40 percent in the recent stock market crash, its clear that investing all of one’s retirement savings in a 401(k) is a risk that working people should not be forced to take. And when investments go sour and workers’ retirement savings go belly up, its taxpayers who will be forced to foot the bill. So who wins if working families and taxpayers lose? The big winners will be the Wall Street brokers who will reap billions in fees and commissions.  

CALPERS currently provides what all working people have a right to expect: a secure retirement. Instead of working to destroy retirement security for millions of working people in California, the governor should strive to ensure that every working person in California has the retirement security that the current CALPERS system guarantees. 

Michael Marchant 

Albany

Click here to view the latest work by Planet cartoonist Justin DeFreitas 



A recent UnderCurrents column was linked in Mayor Jerry Brown’s new online blog (http://jerrybrown.typepad.com/), but do you think maybe this one was a mistake? 

In a March 11 entry on Oakland’s sideshows called “Culture Crash,” Mr. Brown writes, “A sideshow, for the uninitiated, is a homegrown version of a demolition derby, except it takes place illegally on city streets—often under the influence of drugs and violence.” 

The word “violence” in the mayor’s sideshow description links to an online report of a Feb. 11 NBC-11 news story (“Expectant Father Fatally Shot At ‘Sideshow’”) concerning the death of Eric Ramon Baeza. 

We can’t let Mr. Brown’s sideshow description pass without a comment. A “demolition derby” is an event in which cars deliberately bang into each other, the purpose of the exercise being to bash all the other cars into submission, so that yours is the only one able to drive away. A sideshow is an event in which drivers attempt to do intricate maneuvers with their cars—spinning donuts, for example—without hitting anything. One can be against the sideshows or for them; that’s your choice. But we ought to at least describe them as they are. 

It gets worse, friends. 

In the next paragraph, Mr. Brown writes, “The spectacle has its share of apologists. They believe government has failed to provide ‘youth’ with suitable evening amusement—thus the need for late night hijinks.” The word “apologists” links to a recent UnderCurrents column. 

Reading Mr. Brown’s comments, you would think that I—as a sideshow “apologist,” in the mayor’s words—support the sideshows as they are now operated in Oakland’s streets. I don’t, and I’ve made that clear in my columns. In a June, 2001 “Oakland Unwrapped” column in the now defunct Urbanview newspaper, for example, I wrote that sideshows are “sometimes dangerous, and it’s almost always annoying to older folk (like myself) who have to put up with the noise and the inconveniences.” 

Over the past few years, I have also written often about how the sideshows ended up in the streets in the first place, driven by Oakland police and politicians out of the parking lots at Eastmont Mall and Pac’N’Save on Hegenberger—where they bothered almost nobody—and into East Oakland’s residential neighborhoods—where they are bothering almost everybody, and costing us more than a million dollars a year in police overtime trying to curtail them, besides. 

I have also advocated solutions to the problem, writing in this column in June of 2003, again for example, “The trick, I think, is to try to take the most positive aspects of the original sideshows—the excitement, the music, the dancing, the boys-getting-phone-numbers-from-girls thing, the tight cars—some of the things that even Oakland Police Traffic Division head Dave Kozicki has said, on occasion, that he might be able to support—and out of that create something new and productive that both the city and the youngsters can live with.” 

You would think that the mayor’s staff would have linked to one of these two columns—both of which are available on the web—as a fair presentation of my position on Oakland’s sideshows. Instead, oddly, Mr. Brown’s “apologists” link sends you to a Feb. 11 UnderCurrents column (“Applying Critical Thinking to Another Oakland Shooting Death”) concerning the Eric Ramon Baeza death that was the subject of the NBC-11 story. The column does not state my position on the sideshows. Instead, it raises the question of whether or not it was actually a sideshow at which Mr. Baeza was killed. 

One might argue that Mr. Brown included the “Critical Thinking” column to be fair, but fairness has not been one of his hallmarks in his approach to the sideshows. Another—more likely—theory is that it is typical of the sloppiness with which Mr. Brown typically approaches Oakland issues. Rather than actually going through and reading my various columns on sideshows until they came to one that proved his point, it appears that whoever provided the “apologists” link on the mayor’s blog simply came to the first sideshow UnderCurrents column they found, assumed that it must involve “apologizing” for the sideshows since they had already decided I was a sideshow “apologist,” and stuck the link in. 

Anyways, let me make it easy for the folks at the top of the stairs in the big building on Frank Ogawa Plaza. 

I am not in favor of the illegal street sideshows currently taking place in East Oakland’s neighborhoods. 

On the other hand, I am not in favor of the methods used by Oakland police to halt them. I believe that Oakland’s current police suppression tactics to try to halt the sideshows have made the situation worse, rather than making it better. 

In addition it is my belief that you do not make young people responsible by merely constantly talking about how irresponsible they are, as the mayor has done. You help make young people responsible by giving them responsibility-as much as they can handle-and working with them to handle it. 

Therefore… 

I believe that the City of Oakland should partner with African-American and Latino youth in a serious attempt to develop a form of sideshows that is acceptable to city officials, the East Oakland neighborhoods, and the youth themselves. There would have to be give and take on all sides, and there is no guarantee that such an effort would work. But the effort itself would force all sides in this dispute to deal with each other as partners working for a common goal rather than adversaries in the streets. I think such an effort would cause Oakland to look at these youth in a different light, recognizing that they are citizens of this city whose needs have to be accounted for just like any other citizen, people who should not be dismissed simply because we have the power to dismiss them. And I think such an effort would cause the youth themselves to take on more responsibility for their own actions, realizing that they can play a major role in how they are viewed, and understanding that how they are viewed goes a long ways toward whether or not their goals are realized. 

Would all the young people participate in such an effort? Nope. Neither would all the politicians, or all of anybody else. So what? If you waited around for all of anybody to participate in something, you’d never get anything done. 

I think there is tremendous potential in such an effort to mediate the sideshow problem and create an acceptable alternative, potential to heal old wounds, potential to open up partnerships that can be beneficial to all Oakland citizens, spiritually, financially, and in many other ways. 

And, finally, I think it’s stupid not to try. 

This shouldn’t be a news soundbite or a slogan on a campaign mailer. This can’t be left to be a wedge issue in somebody’s political race. These are not statistics. These are our children. These are our neighborhoods. These are our lives. 

Link up with that, Mr. Brown.?

While parked on Shattuck Avenue, sipping a latte and waiting for the Berkeley Public Library to open, I eyed two well-worn women as they ambled by, deep in conversation. One, with grayed-brown curls seeping out of her frayed knitted cap, clutched an overstuffed garbage bag to her side. She seemed quite intense as she spoke to her companion: “I think back in time to when things have disappeared and you’ve been drunk and you didn’t know you lost it…” 

That’s all I heard through my half-opened window but it was enough to get me to thinking about how many things have slipped through my fingers and out of my life when I wasn’t paying attention. 

It’s March already and I haven’t made a single New Year’s resolution. Yeah, I’d like to eat healthier, get more exercise and in general, be a happier, kinder, more fulfilled individual. But, what else is there? What’s missing from my miserable life? 

Well, I’m not truly miserable. I have much to be grateful for and I am grateful. I count my blessings every day. On the other hand, I peer out at these two haggard crones, and I wonder, could that be me 10 years from now, waddling down some small town street without a comb or a cup of coffee, full of wonder and regret? 

“I think back in time to when things have disappeared and you’ve been drunk and didn’t know you lost it…” 

It keeps running through my head, nudging me, taunting me. I think back on missed opportunities, both career-building and romantic. I think back on all the times I kept my mouth shut when I was burning up inside, wanting to scream or to hit somebody. I think back to all the times from early childhood through elementary school and even in college when I tried to make myself small, invisible, so as not to draw any attention to myself that would cause me pain. 

And finally, I think to myself, here I am, middle-aged and still thinking about all this crap. Perhaps what I need to do is to stop thinking about all this old stuff and just let it go. It’s done, over with, there’s nothing I can change about the past. All I have is right now, this moment. And if I’m ever going to become truly fulfilled, I had better get up off of my behind and do whatever it takes to become so and be quick about it. Certainly no one else can do it for me.  

So, what do I want from what’s left of my life? When we were young and invincible, we all thought we’d not only see the world but would change it, profoundly, for the better. We were going to conquer mountains and all manner of evil foes. Some of us thought we would become rich and famous, write the next great American novel, discover the cure for cancer or teach children how to read. Others just wanted to live in peace, free from artificial, man-made constraints of any kind (so long as we’re not hurting anybody else, we’d always add). The point is that we all had dreams that we believed in then and that many of us have dreams we still believe in now and that it’s not too late. It can’t be. What would be the point if there’s no point? 

I look around and think, okay, what’s happening right now? And I am surprised to find myself contemplating many of the same “Who am I and what am I doing here?” type of questions I pondered as a 16-year-old hippie hanging out on Venice Beach. I then ask myself, if I’m not exactly where I want to be at this stage of my life, what steps am I taking to get there? And therein lies my New Year’s Resolution: To actively take whatever steps are necessary, even if my own timeworn and weary mind and body can only manage one such step per day. I will take that small step and then another and another until each one of my dreams—leftover and newly emerging—comes true. 

Time’s a-wastin’. Get on with it, already. Happy New Year!  

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi didn’t wait for the result of the joint American-Italian probe into the killing of Italian secret service agent Nicola Calipari, and the wounding of Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, before announcing the withdrawal of Italian troops from Iraq. Combined with a hastily arranged Ukrainian departure and a planned Romanian retreat, Berlusconi’s announcement shatters the so-called Coalition of the Willing, rendering the Iraq occupation a de facto Anglo-American operation.  

Berlusconi made his announcement carefully, so as not to embarrass and further infuriate his American allies. Withdrawal will start in September and take place only after the Iraqi parliament nominates a national government. Still, the announcement makes it very difficult for Berlusconi to backtrack. He was already facing political difficulties. First, the Italian mission in Iraq was recently extended to next June only because the center-left coalition abstained. Berlusconi also is now sandwiched between two elections, the regional polls of April 3-4 and the national election of June 2006.  

Varied factors convinced Berlusconi to unhitch his political destiny from Washington’s fortunes in Iraq. First is the obvious fallout from the Calipari-Sgrena shooting. Berlusconi found himself on the defensive and isolated. He was attacked by the left and by the center-left coalition, and some of his key political partners also undercut him.  

While Berlusconi reacted with guarded caution to the incident, calling U.S. Ambassador Mel Sembler to Palazzo Chigi for what was seen as a ceremonial “eye-to-eye” meeting, Italy’s Foreign Minister Giancarlo Fini—the vice-prime minister and leader of Alleanza Nazionale, Italy’s second-largest political formation—was spewing fire at the House of Representatives, denouncing the Calipari-Sgrena incident.  

Fini insisted that Italy not only had the moral obligation to bring back its kidnapped citizens, but also to not reveal the kidnappers’ identities. Fini went further, stating that the “Italian government will not hand over hostages to the Americans.” While he was holding forth in parliament, his party’s youth organization was planning a street protest right in front of the American embassy in Rome, marking one of the first times in many years when youths from the left and the right found themselves on the same side of the barricade.  

Polls taken in the days following the Sgrena incident showed that 70 percent of Italians did not believe the Americans were telling the truth and did not trust the U.S. investigation. A similar percentage believed Italian troops should leave Iraq. Another poll taken by La Stampa, one of Italy’s major daily newspapers, found that if elections were held the government would be voted out of office.  

Berlusconi, therefore, was in danger of coming off as a lackey of the Americans. The risk was greatly increased by reactions from the United States, where neoconservatives accused the Italians of financing Sunni terrorism by agreeing to negotiate with Sgrena’s kidnappers.  

A flurry of bilateral contacts—telephone calls from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Fini, from Bush to Berlusconi, and letters from Bush to Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, Italy’s president—failed to convince the Italian public that the United States was accepting shared responsibility for the incident. Berlusconi had to recall Ambassador Sembler to Pallazzo Chigi two more times, and only then did the United States agree not to leave its ally hanging by the thumbs and to name a joint Italian-American investigating commission.  

By then the damage had been done. The United States was irritated. The Italian left, though not through its own merit, was finally able prove to the Italian public that the Iraq coalition was just a masquerade for the unilateral U.S. bid to dominate Middle East politics.  

“The bilateral (Italy-U.S.) commission is a Pyrrhic victory,” says Giovanni Russo-Spena, House Speaker for Rifondazione Comunista, Italy’s fifth largest political force. Recalling the Cermis case—when a U.S. fighter jet severed the cables of a mountain lift, killing 20 persons—Russo-Spena said the joint probe will not produce any relevant result, “but it gives Berlusconi the possibility to regain the ground he was losing to Fini.”  

Besides the shakiness of U.S.-Italian relations over Iraq, additional domestic factors led to Berlusconi’s decision to withdraw the troops. There’s turmoil on his right. Alleanza Nazionale, Fini’s party and Berlusconi’s main ally, recently split into two fractions, with Alessandra Mussolini—Benito Mussolini’s granddaughter—taking the helm of Alternativa Sociale, a more rightist group. Mussolini’s party was recently accused of falsifying signatures to get on the ballot and barred from taking part in Lazio’s regional election—Lazio is one of Italy’s 21 states—by the president of that region. On the eve of nationwide local elections, this could spell big trouble for Berlusconi’s coalition. The announcement of the troop withdrawal provides a convenient popular distraction.  

To outflank his center-left opposition, Berlusconi had to distance himself from the United States. As a result, he is enjoying a rise in his personal ratings. Withdrawing the troops from Iraq may allow him to tap further into popular good will, depriving his center-left opponents of a fortuitous advantage.  

Paolo Pontoniere is the San Francisco-based correspondent of Focus, Italy’s leading monthly magazine.  

c

Ann and Dean Metzger’s op-ed “Why UCB Should Follow the Lead Of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor” (Daily Planet, March 4-7) was very frustrating. It begins in the first two paragraphs by seeming to seek a middle ground in the present fight between the City of Berkeley and UC Berkeley by examining the relationship of Ann Arbor, Mich. to the University of Michigan (UM). After those two paragraphs though, the article takes a different tone, implying that UM bends over backwards for Ann Arbor and thereby implies that UCB should act likewise. Worse though than the articles faux-unbiased stance, is that it is based on a false premise. Namely that Ann Arbor and Berkeley are in similar situations. Having spent roughly four years living in both cities, I feel I am qualified to point out the failings in the Metzgers’ premise. 

Before I proceed, I will admit my own bias in this situation. If you are uninterested in such, proceed directly to the next paragraph. I do not feel that UCB is innocent in the town-gown fight, but I feel the City of Berkeley holds the greater guilt in the current incarnation. Whomever the instigators of the situation, the town is taking it to the higher level (by way of litigation). The thing that separates Berkeley from El Cerrito, Richmond, and Oakland is not physical proximity in the San Francisco Bay Area, but the presence of a top tier university. That university is a good thing for Berkeley, and it should be helped to grow instead of being forced to stagnate (as stagnating things often quickly become dying things). So as I see it, it comes down to a fight where UCB seeks to continue its growth while the City of Berkeley seeks for it to maintain the status quo (if not become less intrusive). That being said, I shall proceed to point out the differences between Ann Arbor and Berkeley. 

The first difference between the situation of the two universities can be seen through an examination of the layout of UM (www.umich.edu/~info/maps.html). A quick study reveals that Ann Arbor has ample physical space for UM to expand. UM’s north campus in particular is sparse in a way that Berkeley simply cannot be. Without any deep search, I am aware of the construction of a life sciences building, a computer science building, and more dormitory space on campus that did not require the demolition of existing housing or parking all within the last five years. With as much breathing room as UM has, comparing its relationship with Ann Arbor to that of UCB and Berkeley is like comparing apples and oranges. 

A second point of comparison is the local populations attitudes towards college football. Its a reality of modern society that college football is big business. A successful college football program can pay for a university’s entire athletic department (such as UM). In Ann Arbor, people know this. Every fall Saturday with a home game results in some 110,000 people coming to Ann Arbor for the football game. This isn’t a huge problem though, since the like has been happening for years now (Michigan hasn’t had a losing football season in over 30 years). The high school kitty-corner to the stadium never bothered to develop on a large tract of its land since it can use this land for parking (and at $10 a spot as of four years ago, they can do well). Other parts of the surrounding area have adapted to thrive off the numbers attending each game. With a strong alumni presence in the south eastern Michigan area, it’s not hard to see why Ann Arbor is happy to have the masses come out each week for the game. Now compare to Berkeley, where the recent increase of crowds to around 70,000 have turned the locals into a raging frenzy. From the comments I read in the press, it seems the Berkeley locals would rather that the football team draw no one at all. The gapping differences in how these towns react to college football makes comparisons between the cities irrelevant. 

A third difference between Ann Arbor and Berkeley is the make up of the population living immediately adjacent to campus. Throughout my time in Ann Arbor, the only times I would run into people without a current tie to the university would be when I traveled miles out of my way to get away from campus. Even recent graduates I knew wishing to continue living in Ann Arbor would move away from the campus. Its simply understood that student housing should be close to campus, and that only students would really want to live in it. Compare this to Berkeley, where students can’t even afford to live in apartments just a block or two from the northern border of campus. As a result, in Berkeley, students must constantly move around near the homes of locals, making neither happy. Sure its easy for Michigan and Ann Arbor to get along well in comparison to Berkeley and UCB. The town is laid out so that they don’t get in each others’ ways. 

Finally, when considering the Metzgers’ article, it is important to note the differences in California’s budgetary methods. Thanks to Proposition 13, California significantly reduces the property tax revenue it should take in. As a result, people are motivated to stay in homes on valuable land. When the land’s value has been arbitrarily inflated by the presence of a premiere public university, this creates undue resentment against the university. Michigan is not held down by any similar laws. This and other points of California’s tax law makes the comparison between Ann Arbor and Berkeley invalid. 

For these reasons, the Metzgers’ article makes an irrelevant point. Sure, UM gives money to Ann Arbor, but that says nothing about how UCB and Berkeley should interact. There is one point the article does make though, and that is this: “Just because you find some facts on the Internet, it doesn’t mean you understand the situation.” 

Daniel Schonberg is a Berkeley resident.?

Ann and Dean Metzger write in the March 4-7 Daily Planet that the University of Michigan has been “a partner in many capital improvement projects” in the city of Ann Arbor and that the University of California campus in Berkeley should follow Michigan’s lead. 

It already does. For the past three quarters of a century the University of California has partnered repeatedly with the City of Berkeley in planning and financing public street improvements. 

In the early 1930s, the university gave the city of Berkeley land to widen Bancroft Way west of Dana Street, based on the recommendations of a transportation consultant who had been jointly engaged by university and city to evaluate the impacts of constructing Edwards Stadium. 

Later, when the Student Center/Student Union complex was built north of Telegraph and Bancroft, the university again apparently contributed land to widen additional blocks of Bancroft, from Barrow Lane to Dana. 

And again, in the mid-20th century, when the city wanted to reconfigure Oxford Street to carry through traffic around downtown Berkeley, the university cooperated by cutting into the western edge of the campus to provide space for the street widening. Today, Oxford is four lanes wide with a landscaped median, thanks to this contribution of university land. 

More recently, in the 1990s, the university encouraged the city to apply for a Federal ISTEA grant to improve the pedestrian streetscape on Center Street, between the BART Station and Oxford. 

The university put up matching funds which resulted in the highly successful sidewalk improvements. When the city didn’t have sufficient staffing to administer the design contract for the work, the university provided staff, gratis, to work with the design consultants; the city exercised ultimate approval over the design. 

The university also cooperated with the city and students in the mid-1990s to fund an extensive Southside Pedestrian Lighting Study. Part of the outcome of this was a university contribution of a quarter of a million dollars to improve the street lighting along Piedmont Avenue, a city street. 

The university has also contributed to various intersection improvements on city streets, including current pledges of hundreds of thousands of dollars to help improve intersections along Hearst Avenue. 

In fact, in May of 2004 the Northside Neighborhood Association wrote to city officials applauding this project and stating “this is a great example of how the city, the university and the community working together can achieve positive solutions for the challenges that we face.” Mr. Metzger, in his capacity as a member of the Transportation Commission, was one of the recipients of that letter. 

The university also maintains, for free, the landscape of part of at least one city owned street, the historic portion of Piedmont Avenue north of Bancroft Way. And a few years back the university pledged matching funds for a city grant application to restore the historic streetscape on Piedmont from Gayley to Dwight; unfortunately, that grant was not funded by the state. 

Last but not least, the Metzgers—and you, dear reader, and I—should remember that every time we, as Berkeley residents, drive on Gayley Road across the eastern edge of the campus or take a jaunt up Centennial Drive through Strawberry Canyon to get to Grizzly Peak Boulevard or Tilden Park, we’re driving not on city streets but on campus roadways that have been made available for public use for several decades. 

Berkeley citizens regard those throughfares as vital parts of the public street network but they are, in fact, entirely constructed, maintained, and improved by the university. Last summer, for instance, the university repaved much of Gayley Road. 

Finally, the Metzgers applaud the University of Michigan’s contribution of some $14,000,000 annually to the City of Ann Arbor but apparently don’t 

realize that $6 million of that money represents the University of Michigan’s annual water bill, presumably paid to the City of Ann Arbor as the local water district. 

I suppose if the University of California were to claim the water payments it makes to East Bay MUD as part of its “contributions” to local government 

it could assert an equally heroic figure. 

I wish I could claim my water bill as a public spirited “contribution” to local government! 

It just goes to show that if the grass seems to be greener elsewhere, Michigan for instance, someone is probably paying to water it. 

Steven Finacom is an employee of UC Berkeley and a Berkeley resident.?

If you wanted to know what Jewish music sounds like, would you turn to a beatboxing hip-hop artist? An avant-garde string quartet? A master of ancient Middle Eastern musical traditions? 

To discover the many ways the range of Jewish identity can be reflected in music, or simply to dance, or explore new musical worlds, Bay Area listeners can turn to the 20th annual Berkeley Jewish Music Festival, which begins this weekend and runs for two weeks. It is the country’s largest Jewish music festival and organizers have assembled a rich and varied lineup of performers and events for this special anniversary.  

The concerts begin Saturday night at Wheeler Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus, with a joint performance by Israel’s East West Ensemble and Turkish Sufi master Omar Faruk Tekbilek and his ensemble. True to their name, the Israeli group mixes Western instruments with such sounds as the Persian ney flute, stirring up an entrancing mix of Jewish, Arab and Asian music with rock, jazz, and Western classical touches. They’re beautifully matched by Tekbilek’s ensemble, which draws on music of Turkey, Arabia, Greece, Persia and Spain, and has worked with musicians as diverse as Don Cherry and Ginger Baker. 

“It’s our 20th year, so we wanted to start with an opening night that would have more meaning than just a concert,” said Festival Director Ellie Shapiro. “It was to make a statement that we wanted these two rich cultural traditions to come together in music, so this is a collaboration between Sufi Muslim and Jewish mystical traditions, with 14 world-class musicians.”  

For the first time, the festival features an artist-in-residence, the Israeli composer, oud (Middle Eastern lute) player and violinist Yair Dalal. Of Iraqi-Jewish descent, Dalal has done much to teach audiences about the intertwined music and cultures of Arabs and Jews. 

“He’s made it his life’s work to perpetuate the unique culture of Iraqi and Middle Eastern Jews in general,” Shapiro said.  

Dalal has been giving public lectures and performances in the Bay Area since February, introducing Middle Eastern music to 19 Bay Area schools, including a workshop with the Berkeley High orchestra. 

“This is our fourth year in the Berkeley public schools doing workshops on Jewish music. Part of what we do is preserve and perpetuate Jewish culture, so this is also an important part of what the festival is about,” Shapiro said. 

Dalal’s residency concludes with a performance at the Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station on Sunday, March 20, at 4 p.m. 

The festival also features the high-energy Klezmatics. Described as the cutting edge of the klezmer revival, the band has taken their mastery of this Eastern European Jewish dance music and merged it with jazz, rock, and many strains of world music, in the process collaborating with everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Itzhak Perlman to Arlo Guthrie.  

This time around, they’re joined by Joshua Nelson, an African-American Jewish gospel singer who has performed with Wynton Marsalis and Aretha Franklin. 

“He’s incredible. He has a voice that channels Mahalia Jackson,” Shapiro said. “This is a CD release party for a live album they did last year in Berlin, so you have the energy of an African-American Jewish concert in Berlin, and everything that means.” 

The concert will take place at 4 p.m., Sunday April 3, at Wheeler. The Klezmatics will head down the road for a 7:30 p.m. dance party that night at the festival’s home base, the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, where Jewish dance expert Steven Weintraub will lead a festival finale. 

The festival will feature the great singer/actor Theodore Bikel on March 20 at 4 p.m. at San Francisco’s Temple Emanu-El. A leader of the ‘50s folk revival and an Oscar-nominated actor often seen as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, Bikel will be joined by klezmer luminary Hankus Netsky, leader of the Klezmer Conservatory Band. 

“I’m here today doing what I’m doing because when I was six years old, I was dancing around the dining room table to his music,” Shapiro said of Bikel. “In the 1950s he was one of the first people to introduce world music, and now it’s a genre unto itself. It’s a real honor having him here for our 20th year.” 

Another special visitor from Israel is Moroccan-born countertenor Emil Zrihan. The singer, who has been compared to Pavarotti, will be performing with none other than San Francisco’s eclectic new music stalwarts, the Kronos Quartet. The celebrated foursome heard Zrihan and initiated the collaboration, drawn in by the singer called the “Moroccan Nightingale.” Zrihan and Kronos will preview their upcoming world premiere of new arrangements of Zrihan’s classic Arabic-inspired material. 

An all-ages Community Music Day at the JCC will be held on Sunday, March 27, from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Kicking off with a family concert by children’s performer Gary Lapow, guests can delve into 15 workshops, nine performances, and an instrument petting zoo.  

“From the beginning we’ve had the festival as a project of the Berkeley Richmond JCC because the founder of the festival, who was also a founder of the center, recognized the power of music to build community,” Shapiro said. “There’s everything from learning to beat box to learning how to chant Torah. It’s really the gamut of Jewish music today.” 

On March 28 at 7:30 p.m., the JCC will host vocalist and Sephardic music scholar Judith Cohen, in a concert/lecture with her daughter, Tamar Cohen Adams. The program will explore the musical traditions of Spain’s Jews, which survived through centuries of official prohibition. The festival will hold more than a dozen additional concerts, workshops, classes, and panel discussions.  

Altogether, the festival is a Berkeley event, with art, culture, ideas and community coming together. As Shapiro says, “I grew up back east, and I don’t think a festival like this could have happened anywhere else. It’s a cosmopolitan community with an openness to other cultures, and that has allowed us to experiment and be more creative than we could have in many other places.” 

For more information on the Jewish Music Festival, visit www.brjcc.org or call (415) 276-1511. 

Going into the foolsFURY Incubator/Shotgun Lab staging of Monster in the Dark is, in a number of ways, like walking in the dark. The publicity for the work-in-progress, playing Mondays and Tuesdays at the Ashby Stage, dwells on the theme, ‘what are you irrationally afraid of?’—and that the show is a work-in-progress, an exploration, and not much more than that. 

Wondering what you’ll be seeing, trying to anticipate, is a big element of the audience’s role in any type of theater, particularly approaching more experimental, movement-oriented troupes like foolsFURY, founded by Ben Yalom in 1998. “Our work is immediate and visceral,” reads the company credo. But foolsFURY doesn’t eschew text. 

Ben himself comes from a literary background, and the group has performed adaptations of older dramatic and literary classics (Jacques and His Master, from Diderot’s novel, and The Illusion, after Corneille’s play), as well as contemporary works, like Mrozek’s short, absurdly humorous social allegories or last year’s staging of Don DeLillo’s Valparaiso. Their ongoing exploration of new themes and modes of production development is always worth following. 

Entering Monster in the Dark is an unusual experience in itself. Each spectator receives on entrance, well, personal treatment—a little reminiscent of a haunted house, or carny sideshows without the barking. There’re attractions to be experienced, and at the end, in a real eye-opener, the spectator finds him-or-herself watching—already in the audience, but more like a voyeur gawking at other spectators still among the grotesques, an overview of what was just a personal foray into this hall of shadows and whispers.  

The show itself is no more immediately frameable—vignettes, tableaux, routines are played out in succession as if on a revolving stage. Soon it becomes apparent there’s continuity, three situations or storylines and that there’s some connection between them: on the dungeon set for Shotgun’s The Just (playing on weekends), a little group gathers at sunset around a black cube in a square of light, muttering things like: “It’s not today.” “Today IS today!” and begins to perform an obscure ritual. 

Meanwhile, there are ongoing episodes of a caregiver addressing the audience of her growing distaste for the helpless old woman she takes care of, acted out in jagged (and strangely humorous) poses, intercut with people in a cellar listening to weather reports on the radio as flood waters rise and others literally stream in, some praising the maker (“Thank you in advance for a sign!”), alternating with a row of instructors right in the audience’s face, voicing explanations from flood myths. 

The ensemble is tight and expresses great range in performing, including Davina Cohen, Deborah Ben-Eliezar, Ben Eckstein, Brian Livingstone of foolsFURY, and Emily Jordan, who’s collaborated with Shotgun. 

Maybe least integrated into the web of interrelated stories, but a gem on its own, is the feminized take on Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” with remarkable timing, lights and performance, from the first utterance of “vulture’s eye” to the tableau the trench-coated detectives are presented with when the “ringing in the ears” becomes unbearable. 

The designers—Alex Lopez, lights; Patrick Kalinski, sound (snatches of music, insinuating whispers—and effects made by the cast on kitchen utensils); Lindsey Peck Scherloom, costumes (the detectives’ first appearance reveals her work in puppets and sculpture)—have given a work-in-progress the feel of a professional show, developing great textures for all the senses.  

Ben Yalom commented on the collaboration with Shotgun, “the first real joint project for the Shotgun Lab ... It’s a great collaboration, coming at a time when we’ve brought new actors into our company, a new sound designer and literary manager, and plan regular training sessions—it’s infused the existing company with new energy.” 

Yalom says the “talkback” sessions after the performances have been the most fruitful he remembers. 

“There’s an audience developing of those who go out to see works-in-progress, whether at Shotgun Lab, foolsFURY or wherever, who enjoy having a voice, have something to say about what they’ve seen,” he says. 

With the increase in staged readings all over the Bay Area in recent years, it could be the beginning of a new era of audience participation in the process of making theater—and Shotgun Lab and foolsFURY are right at the forefront. 

Poets David Gitin and Jack Marshall—both long involved with poetry in the Bay Area, and long acquainted with each other—will read their poems at 7:30 p.n. Monday, March 21 at Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue.  

David Gitin—cofounder of Poets’ Theater at the Straight Theater in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, and past participant in music shows (with Charles Amirkhanian) and poetry programer on KPFA—is author of eight books of poems, including two by Berkeley’s Blue Wind Press (This Once and Fire Dance) and his new selection, Passing Through (Linehan Press, in Monterey, where Gitin lives and teaches), his first book in 15 years. 

This will be Gitin’s first Bay Area reading in a decade. The reading is part of the Monday at Moe’s Poetry Series organized by Owen Hill. Admission is free.  

Gitin’s work has been widely praised by older contemporaries, including Robert Creeley, late longtime Berkeley resident Larry Eigner, John Cage, and Allen Ginsberg, who said of Gitin’s poems, “Maybe the clearest sort of writing anyone can do.” 

Gitin characterizes his poetry as lyric (“the blue/rain the/silky descents,” from “In The Wrists”) spurning not only the attribution of his poems to various schools, but also the cliche of dubbing his brief poems “minimalist.” 

“The trouble with the whole ‘gang’ approach to literary history is that it leaves too many people out,” he says. “Jack Marshall, for instance.” 

The poems in Passing Through range in mood from elegiac (“the door/slopes of light/your body/a delay/in glass”) to wry humor (“chuckle down/fear//year/after year//smile/like a porpoise”); both are complete poems, titled by the first two and three words, respectively. 

Gitin went to university at Buffalo, where he met poet Charles Olson, but he majored in philosophy. His advisor was Marvin Farber, student of Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology—an interest he shared with poets Carl Rakosi and George Oppen (who appointed Gitin his bibliographer). Rakosi and Oppen are two of the poets (along with Louis Zukofsky, Bunting and Charles Reznikoff) in An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology, edited by Zukofsky, which Gitin discovered through reading Pound. Trained as a pianist and a violinist, Gitin has spoken of his conflicting ambitions in working with words or music—something he also shared with Rakosi, and with Marshall. 

Marshall, another longtime friend of Carl Rakosi, read a poem about music at Rakosi’s 100th birthday celebration at the San Francisco Public Library in November 2003. After Rakosi’s death last year, Marshall wrote a poem, “To My Friend,” including the lines, “If we had to do it over again,/we agreed, we’d be composers.” 

Marshall’s poems seem more discursive than Gitin’s, and longer. “One of Jack’s poems is as long as seven or eight of mine, at least,” jokes Gitin, “I’m reading first!”) They also tend to be autobiographical. 

His prose memoir From Baghdad to Brooklyn, Growing up in a Jewish-Arabic Family in Mid-Century America, will be published by Coffee House Press in October. Yet Marshall talks about a memoir being “all fiction, whether called fiction or nonfiction; it’s what you inherited; you choose on the run what you’ll explore—as much to do with desire as recounting actual facts.” 

He says, “Poetry’s something else; it creates a reality of its own, independent of what happens. I like that quote from Wittgenstein: ‘To create a language is to create a form of life.’” 

Marshall offers what he calls “a very small definition of poetry: precise perception and feeling propelled ... a continual transformation. I’m drawn to the way lines change sinuously, speeding one perception to another.” 

In his poem “The Lie of Health,” he writes: 

From a height, the sea 

right now looks like all windows 

thrown open at once. 

Any second now birds, strewn  

breadcrumbs on shore, will rise, mass. lock 

together in fluid flying jig- 

saws tight as an Escher. 

Perfect 

fit of having no ties, being the weather. 

Marshall has travelled and worked in many places. His first book of 10, The Darkest Continent (1967), was written, he said, after “working as a seaman on a freighter going to Africa, up the Congo, stopping at many different ports ... a voyage to origins ... I wished Rimbaud had written after he’d gone to Africa ... there’re things in my book about the Watusi, Rwanda 30 years before [the massacres]—it all keeps looping back,” 

Marshall, who has taught writing at Iowa and SF State, will read at Moe’s from his collected poems, Gorgeous Chaos (Coffee House, 2002). 

In the book, from a poem called “Angels II,” he writes, “Winter run-off babbling on/at the edge of an ocean vast enough to get lost in .... /You don’t need to be in it/to get lost in it’s way of making many things return/major that were once/incidental.” He will also read more recent poems, “about what’s going on politically, more straight on, angrier than those in Gorgeous Chaos,” he said. 

“Poetry creates an alternative to the way things seem to be, attempts to make something new out of what’s been given,” Marshall says. “Any line would contain a whole ethos, a whole world encapsulated in a single line ... no beginning or end—the center is everywhere.” 

FRIDAY, MARCH 18 

THEATER 

Berkeley Repertory Theater “For Better or Worse” at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. through April 24. Tickets are $20-$55. 647-2949.  

Central Works, “Enemy Combatant” opens at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Performances are Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. through March 26. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1381. www.centralworks.org 

“Frank Oliver’s Twisted Cabaret 2005,” Fri., Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets are $12-$20. 925-798-1300. 

Impact Theatre, “Othello” at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean Theater, 1834 Euclid. Thurs.- Sat. through March 19. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468.  

Shotgun Players “The Just” by Albert Camus. Thurs.- Sun. at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. through April 10. Tickets are sliding scale $10-$30. 841-6500.  

Un-Scripted Theater Company “You Bet Your Improvisor!” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. through March 26 at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St. at Telegraph. Tickets are $7-$10. 415-869-5384. www.unscripted.com 

Youth Musical Theater Company, “Jesus Christ Superstar” Fri. and Sat. at 7:30 p.m. and Sun. at 3 p.m. at Longfellow Middle School, 1500 Derby at Sacramento. TIckets are $12 general, $6 student. For reservations call 595-5524. www.YMTCBerkeley.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Spring” paintings by Michael Grady and Judy Poldi. Reception for the artists at 7 p.m. at Artbeat Gallery, 1887 Solano Ave. Exhibition runs to April 23. 527-3100. 

“Bucky Printers” A group printmaker show with works varying in styles from the traditional woodblock to experimental stitching and stencil. Opening reception at 7:30 p.m. at Boontling Gallery, 4224 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. boontlinggallery@hotmail.com 

FILM 

Edgar G. Ulmer: “The Black Cat” at 7 p.m. and “Strange Illusion” at 8:30 p.m. at Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

John Rowe featured poet at 7:30 p.m. at at the Fellowship Café, Cedar & Bonita Sts. Donation $5-$10. 841-4824. 

“Divine Madness - Women Poets” with Kathryn Waddell Takara, Opal Plamer Adisa, Karla Brundage and others at 7 p.m. at Barnes and Noble, 5604 Bay Street, Emeryville. 325-4055. 

Joel Olsen on “The Abolition of White Democracy” at 7 p.m. at AK Press Warehouse, 674-A 23rd St. 208-1700. www.akpress.org 

“Althea Thauberger/Matrix 215” Conversation with Matthew Higg and Shannon Jackson at 3:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave. 642-1295. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble at 7 p.m. at the Florence Schwimely Little Theater, BHS.  

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$54. 642-9988.  

Oakland East Bay Symphony performs Verdi, Tchaikovsky Armienta and Chabrier at 8 p.m. at Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $15-$60. 625-8497.  

Celebrating Vernal Equinox Organ concert at 7:30 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway. Donation $10. 444-3555.  

WomenSing Concert “A Musical Odyssey” featuring Josef Rheinberger’s “Regina Coeli” and Benjamin Britten’s “Missa Brevis,” at 8:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $16-$20. 925-974-9169.  

Contra Costa Chorale at 8 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. Tickets are $12-$15, children under 16 free. 524-1861.  

“Tomorrow is Today” dance and martial arts by Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company at 7:30 p.m. at the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice St. Tickets are $5-$20. 597-1619. www.destinyarts.org 

Steve Lucky & The Rhumba Bums with Ms. Carmen Getit at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $13. 525-5054.  

Magic City Chamber of Commerce at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Darryl Henriques at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

7th Direction, Hobo Jungle, Saul Kaye Band at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082.  

Akira Tana & Jon Wiitala Trio at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Megan McLaughlin at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Diego’s Umbrella, funk, jam at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$7. 548-1159.  

Andrea Maxand’s Ban, Lisa Dewey, Clevergirl at 9:30 p.m. at The Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $5. 444-6174.  

Faye Carol, jazz vocalist, at 7 p.m. at Maxwell’s, 341 13th St., Oakland. 839-6169. 

Pipedown, Shadow Boxer, Romans Go Home, Desa 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. 

SATURDAY, MARCH 19 

CHILDREN  

East Bay Children’s Theater “Shoemaker and The Elves” at 10:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. at Oakland Museum, 10th and Oak Sts. Tickets are $6. 655-7285. www.childrens-theatre.org 

The Shamrock Ceili, Celtic music at 11:30 a.m. at Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge St. Cost is $5-$6. 647-1111. www.habitot.org  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Giving Form to the Formless” calligraphy by Ronald Y. Nakasone. Reception form 2 to 5 p.m. at UNA Information Center, 1403 B Addison St. 849-1752.  

THEATER 

Magical Arts Ritual Theater, “Oracles from the Living Tarot” at 8 p.m. at Arts First Oakland, First Congregational Church, 2501 Harrison at 27th. Tickets are $15-$30 available from 523-7754. 

FILM 

International Asian American Film Festival “Evolution of a Filipino Family” at 12:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Kala Artist Gallery Conversation with David Hamill, Jonn Herschend and Sarah Smith at 3 p.m. at Kala Art Institute, 1060 Heinz Ave. 549-2977. www.kala.org 

Prose Open Mic featuring Jan Steckel, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Lakeview Branch Library, 550 El Embarcadero, Oakland. 238-7344. www.jansteckel.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 2 and 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$54. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Four Seasons Concerts with Yin Cheng-Zong, pino, at 7:30 p.m. at Calvin Simmons Theater, Oakland. Tickets are $25-$35. 601-7919. 

Philharmonia Baroque “Mozart’s Quartet” at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, Dana and Durant. Tickets are $28-$62. 415-392-4400.  

Magnificat Baroque “Passion and Ressurection” at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. Tickets are $12-$25. 415-979-4500.  

Solaris Quartet with Bryan Baker, piano, at 8 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church, One Lawson Road, Kensington. Donation $15-$50. 525-0302.  

New Millenium Strings with Joseph Gold, violin, and Kurt Rapf, organ, at 3 p.m. at Lake Park Methodist Church, 281 Santa Clara Ave., Oakland. Donation $10-$20. 528-4633.  

Bay Area Classical Harmonies performs Bach’s B Minor Mass at 7:30 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave., Oakland. 866-233-9892. www.berkeleybach.org  

“20 Going on 21” With the San Francisco Choral Artists at 8 p.m. at Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church, 3534 Lakeshore Ave. Tickets are $17-$22. 415-979-5779. www.sfca.org 

Jewish Music Festival with members of East West Ensemble and the Omar Faruk Tekbilek Ensemble at 8 p.m. in Wheeler Auditorium, UC Campus. Tickets are $25-$60. www.brjcc.org  

“Tomorrow is Today” dance and martial arts by Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company at 7:30 p.m., and Sun. at 3 p.m. at the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice St. Tickets are $5-$20. 597-1619. www.destinyarts.org 

Mujeres/Women: Cava and Claudia Tenorio at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$14. 849-2568.  

The Vowel Movement, Beatbox showcase, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Chris Skyhawk at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Melanie O’Reilly at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

The Look, World Wide Spies, Nation of Two, rock, nu wave, at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0886.  

Madeline Eastman “The Miles Davis Project” at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $18. 845-5373.  

The Fenians, Gerorge Pederson & the ReincarNatives at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082.  

Pitch Black, Enemy You, Teenagebottlerocket, at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

David Benoit at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $15-$26. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SUNDAY, MARCH 20 

CHILDREN 

Nigerian Brothers at 3 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Tickets are $4-$6. 525-5054. 

THEATER 

“Beowulf” The epic translated and performed by Philip Wharton at 7:30 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid. Tickets are $10-$15. 415-608-9683. 

“The Boy Who Lost His Laugh” performed by Stagebridge senior theater company at 3 p.m. at Arts First Oakland in the First Congregational Church, 2501 Harrison Ave., at 27th St. Tickets are $5-$10. 444-4755. www.stagebridge.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens” guided tour at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave. 642-1295.  

“Shtetl” A multi-media exhibition by Naomie Kremer. Reception from 2 to 4 p.m. at Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. Exhibition runs to July 31. www.magnes.org 

FILM 

Edgar G. Ulmer “People on Sunday” at 7 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Julie Carr and Evelyn Reilly at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 3 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$54. 642-9988.  

Miró Quartet at 3 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $38 available from 642-9988.  

Philharmonia Baroque “Mozart’s Quartet” at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, Dana and Durant. Tickets are $28-$62. 415-392-4400. www.philharmonia.org 

Organ Music performed by Ether Criscuola at 4 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Donation $15. 658-3298. 

Berkeley Youth Arts Festival Performances by young musicians at 4 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center. 644-6893.  

Gil Chun’s Bay Area Follies at 2 and 7 p.m. at the Roda Theatrer, 2015 Addison St. Tickets are $10-$15. 526-8474. 

Tezkatlipoka Aztec Dance A Spring Equinox Celebration at 7 p.m. at Studio Rasa, 933 Parker St. Cost is $10. 843-2787.  

Darren Johnston’s United Brassworkers Front at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$15. 845-5373.  

Pappa Gianni and the North Beach Band from 2 to 5 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198. 

Rahim AlHaj, Iraqi oud music, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50. 548-1761.  

Allegiance, Down to Nothing, Stand and Fight at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

Hemlock at 9:30 p.m. at The Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $5. 444-6174.  

MONDAY, MARCH 21 

THEATER 

The Shotgun Players Theatre Lab, “Monster in the Dark” Mon. and Tues. at 8 p.m. through March 29, at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. at MLK. Tickets are $10. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The Dreaming Mind, The Conscious Mind” a collaborative exhibition between NIAD Art Center and JFK Univ. School of Holistic Studies at 2956 San Pablo Ave., 2nd flr. Exhibition runs to Mar. 31. Gallery hours are 11 a.m.-5 p.m. 649-0499. 

“Overcoming Faceless Labor” Farmworkers through the lens of Almudena Ortiz opens at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. Through June 15. 981-6233. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

PlayGround “Retelling of an Urban Legend,” readings by emerging playwrights, at 8 p.m. at Berkeley Rep, 2025 Addison St. Tickets are $15. 415-704-3177. www.PlayGround-sf.org 

Ishmael Reed, Tennessee Reed and others at at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Anne Lamott describes “Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith” at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Donation $10. Sponsored by Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Poetry Express with Tom Odegard from 7 to 9:30 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

David Gitin and Jack Marshall read their poems at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books on Telegraph Ave. Admission is free. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Trovatore, traditional Italian songs, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Natasha Miller at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $8-$12. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

TUESDAY, MARCH 22 

THEATER 

The Shotgun Players Theatre Lab, “Monster in the Dark” Mon. and Tues. at 8 p.m. through March 29, at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. at MLK. Tickets are $10. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Karsten Huer describes “Walking in the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bears’ Trail” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Tom Rigney & Flambeau at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Teada at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $16.50- $17.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Jug Free America, Pinebox Boys, Toshio Hirano, darkgrass and cowboy, at 9:30 p.m. at The Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $5. 444-6174. www.storkcluboakland.com 

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

Tomasz Stanko Quartet at 10 p.m. Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200.  

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23 

CHILDREN 

Berkeley Youth Arts Festival Emerson First Graders perform an original musical inspired by “Where the Wild Things Are” at 6:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Deborah Santana describes “Space Between the Stars” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Andrew Schelling reads from “Erotic Love Poems from India: A Translation of the Amarnshataka” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Whole Note Reading Series presents Judy Wells and Dale Jensen at 7 p.m. at The Beanery, 2925 College Ave. 549-9093. 

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

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley High Jazz Gala with the BHS Jazz Ensemble, Lab Band and small combos, from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Berkeley Rep Theater. Tickets are $25-$75. 527-8245. www.berkeleyhighjazz.org 

Wednesday Noon Concert, with In Black and White, music by Jorge Liderman at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Free. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

Music of Holy Week An organ concert at noon at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway. 444-3555. www.firstchurchoakland.org 

Ned Boynton Trio at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Balkan Folkdance at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $6. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Salsa Caliente All Stars at 8 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Chris Smither, country blues tradition, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Fabulous Disaster, Oc Toons, Riot A Go-Go, punk, at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $5. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Keiko Matsui at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $16-$28. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com

Just as some city planners behave as though a brand new museum with no budget left for art, and a brand new library without librarians, are just fine, so some gardeners seem to think that a manicured garden without wildlife—often called pests—is also acceptable. This seems to be true of some environmentalists, too. 

Yet research, as well as common sense and a little knowledge of how we got here, show that wildlife is just as necessary for our mental well-being as it is for our physical survival. 

Indeed, some years ago I met a landscaper who told me he brought himself back from a severe depression by allowing his own garden to run wild. He said he just sat in it, surrounded by so-called weeds, day after day and often into the night, letting his feelings wash over him. After about a year—one in which he had surprised an opossum, who played dead, spraying her infants, presumably riding on her back, in all directions, and photo’d a pair of them frolicking in an unpruned apple tree, and found a white-footed rat living in a huge pile of twigs, and watched all kinds of insects and other creatures doing wondrous things, like the female spider who lunched on a suitor—he was cured. The fee for this therapy was a commitment to wildlife landscaping, one which I share.  

It took me a while to realize that one can cohabit with the larger mammals. Racoons may be kept out of the house by shrinking the cat door so it’s a slight squeeze for one’s fattest cat. Vegetables can be wired so that they are not dug up in the racoons’ search for worms. Squirrels it must be said are a challenge, and have to be considered an opportunity to practice tolerance. James Goren, who writes about nature occasionally in the New York Times, added squirrel to his birdwatching list. 

For finches, the base of a metal thistle feeder can be wired to its cylinder, so that a squirrel can not knock it off and spill the seeds. Thistle seeds attract the small dark olive-backed lesser goldfinch as well as the American, and if the feeder is hung in the branches of a Cecile Brunner whose thorns will deter cats, these birds make a charming Chinese painting of bright gold flickering among pink blossoms, enough to raise anyone’s spirits. 

Providing for birds in this way is the most obvious if not the most natural strategy for inviting wildlife into one’s garden. Sugar solutions for hummingbirds can, I believe, induce a fungus disease. Hummingbirds are not only attracted to the color red. In my garden they enjoy white privet, purple buddleya and wild yellow radish. Anna’s hummingbird stays here all year. Before we cut everything native down, they got through the winter on early-flowering currant species. Now they survive on eucalyptus. Ecology is about the interconnection of everything, and environmental purists would do well to pause before removing species that are not native. 

Birds do of course arrive adventitiously, and so do their nests. If you find a hummer’s, a mossy cup the size of an acorn’s, holding three tiny bumble bees with long black threads for beaks, you are in luck. I learned the hard lesson of never revealing the location of any nest, having once shared a hummingbird’s. Next day, the nest was gone. For this reason, I will just say that once, my neighborhood was graced with kites whose nest was at eye level with my bedroom. I watched three hatchlings grow into glowering adolescents, until finally the day for flight arrived. There had been the usual bouncing up and down on branches, until one morning one parent glided in slow motion around the crown of the tree, visibly conveying, “This is how it’s done.” Next day they had gone.  

These kites will not return because the tree has been cut down. I have noticed kites nesting by the bay, but not since the marina environmentalists razed the meadow. 

Let us not kid ourselves, manicuring the land means habitat-destruction, and it is our habitat we are destroying. My landscaper friend recognized this, just in time to save his mind. 

FRIDAY, MARCH 18 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Greg Delory, Senior Fellow, Space Lab, on “Life in the Solar System.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925.  

ACCI Seconds Sale Ceramics, jewelry, glass, metal, textiles and fine art, Fri.- Sun., 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

Solo Sierrans Inspiration Point Hike A nice walk on a paved path with beautiful views. Meet at 4 p.m. in the large parking lot at Inspiration Point off Wild Cat Canyon Rd. Optional dinner in Orinda after the hike. 525-3933. 

“Three Beats for Nothing” a small group meeting weekly at 10 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center to sing for fun and practice, mostly 16th century harmony. No charge. 655-8863, 843-7610. dann@netwiz.net 

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 7:15 p.m. at the East Bay Chess Club, 1940 Virginia St. Players at all levels are welcome. 845-1041. 

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 

SATURDAY, MARCH 19 

Global Day of Action No to War & Occupation March begins at 11 a.m. in Dolores Park, SF with a rally at 1 p.m. at Civic Center. To volunteer call 415-821-6545. 

Compost Happens A workshop on how to create a compost pile and create fertilizer for your garden. From 9 to 11 a.m. at the Visitor Center, Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Cost is $30 members/$35 nonmembers. 845-4116. 

Compost Give-Away at 10 a.m. the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Center St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Bring your own container. 548-3333. 

“The Wood-Wide-Web and Others Stories of Life Underground” with Prof. Ellen Simms, UCB, on the influence of microorganisms on the evolution of native and exotic plants at 12:30 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. 238-2220. www.museumca.org 

Berkeley Alliance of Neighborhood Associations meets at 9:15 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, Sproul Conference Room, 1st Floor, 2727 College Ave. www.berkeleycna.com  

A Conversation with Danny Glover in a benefit for Vista College, at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Rep. Tickets are $50-$100. 981-2851. vistatix.com 

Annual Crab Festival at the South Berkeley Community Church, Fairview and Ellis, from 5 to 7 p.m. with crab dinner and music by the Stacey Wilson Trio. Tickets are $35, $17.50 for children. 652-1040. 

LGBT Family Night with pizza, ice cream and a raffle, from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Downtown Berkeley YMCA, 2001 Allston Way. Cost is $3, $10 for families. RSVP to 848-6834, ext. 541. ccostello@baymca.org 

Paper Making Workshop Learn how to recycle used paper into re-usable paper. For ages 7 to 11 years, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $3, registration required. 525-2233. 

Berkeley Youth Arts Festival Block Printing with Karen Weil, for children age 7 to 13, from 10 a.m. to noon at the Berkeley Art Center. Cost is $5-$15 sliding scale. 644-6893.  

Historical and Botanical Tour of Chapel of the Chimes, a Julia Morgan landmark, at 10 a.m. at 4499 Piedmont Ave. at Pleasant Valley. Reservations required 228-3207.  

“Expanding Your Horizons in Math and Science” a conference for middle school girls, from 8:30 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. at Mills College. To register call 430-2226. http://eyh.mills.edu 

Car Seat Checks with the Berkeley Police Dept. Learn how to install your child’s car seat correctly, from 10 a.m. to noon at the UC Garage on Addison at Oxford. Free. 647-1111. 

“String Fling” Cazadero Performing Arts Camp Benefit Auction at 6 p.m. at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Tickets are $75. 527-7500, ext. 11. www.cazadero.org 

Youth Volunteer Day at the Oakland Zoo for youth ages 12-18 who are interested in helping animals and the zoo. From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. 632-9525, ext. 202. www.oaklandzoo.org 

Seed Saving for Gardeners Learn the basics of savings seeds from your own garden vegetables from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $10-$15, no one turned away. 548-2220, ext. 233.  

“Jesus & the Bible in Quaker Faith & Practice” with T. Canby Jones, at 9:30 a.m. at the Berkeley Friends Church, 1600 Sacramento St., at Cedar St. 524-4112. 

See & Feel the Aura Workshop with Cynthia Sue Larson from 2 to 4:30 p.m. at Change Makers, 6536 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $10-$20. 655-2405. 

SUNDAY, MARCH 20 

Let There Be Light Celebrate the extra hours of daylight by learning how to make candles. From 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Ring in Spring Celebrate International Earth Day and the Spring Equinox with a public ringing of Berkeley’s Peace Bell at noon, in the Civic Center Building courtyard, 2180 Milvia St. Councilmember Kriss Worthington hosts.  

Memorial for Karl Linn With music, speakers and films. Pot- 

luck meal. From 3 to 5 p.m. at Berkeley Adult School, 1701 San Pablo Ave. 798-8148. www.karllinn.org/MemorialService 

Labyrinth Peace Walk at 3 p.m. at the Willard Community Peace Labyrinth, at Willard Middle School, Telegraph Ave. btwn Derby and Stuart, enter by the dirt road on Derby. Free and wheelchair accessible. 526-7377. 

Interfaith Observance of Peace with the Rev. William Sloane Coffin and others, at 3 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. 848-3696. 

Interfaith Vigil and Prayer for Peace Service at 5 p.m., candle lit prayer walk at 6:30 p.m., with Rabbi David Cooper and Rev. Michael Stevens at All Nations Presbyterian Church, 1300 Grand Ave., Piedmont. 658-7700. 

Berkeley Youth Arts Festival Word and Image with poet Tobey Kaplan, a creative writing workshop for all ages, from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center. Cost is $5-$15 sliding scale. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Lost Waterfall in Spring Learn the history of the waterfall that used to be on this easy 3.5 mile hike. Meet at 1 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Bring water and a snack and be prepared for muddy trails. 525-2233. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Spring Equinox Gathering at 5:30 p.m. at the Interim Solar Calendar, Cesar Chavez Park, Berkeley Marina. 666-8663. www.solarcalendar.org 

“Sun-Earth Day: Ancient Observatories, Timeless Knowledge” Activities on equinoxes and solstices from noon to 5 p.m. at Chabot Space and Science Center, 10000 Skyline Blvd., Oakland. 336-7300. www.chabotspace.org 

Carpentry for Kids A Family Exploration Day from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. Free with museum admission. 238-2220. www.museumca.org 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Tibetan Buddhism with Lama Palzang and Pema Gellek on “Great Buddhist Masters: The Sixteen Arhats,” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, MARCH 21 

Tea and Hike at Four Taste some of the finest teas from the Pacific Rim and South Asia and learn their natural and cultural history, followed by a short nature walk. At 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Cost is $5-$7, registration required. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Berkeley High School Site Council meets from 4:30 to 6 p.m. in the school library. www.bhs.berkeleypta.org/ssc 

Town Hall Meeting on the Kensington Library with Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia and Contra Costa County Library Director Anne Cain to discuss the possibility of a new or renovated building for the Kensington Library, at 7 p.m. at 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-3043. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Training workshop for volunteers interested in helping in Berkeley Public schools at 1:30 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. 644-8833. 

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group for people 60 years and over meets Mondays at 9:45 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Join at any time. Cost is $2.50 with refreshments. 524-9122. 

“Who Me Stressed?” An exploration of the various avenues one can use to deal with stress, at 8:30 p.m. at the Women’s Cancer Resource Center, 5741 Telegraph Ave. at 58th St., Oakland. Free, pre-registration requested. 420-7900, ext. 111. margo@wcrc.org 

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

TUESDAY, MARCH 22 

Early Morning Bird Walk Meet at 7:30 a.m. opposite the Pony Ride to celebrate “gloomy winter’s now awa” with Robert Tannahill. 525-2233. 

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll learn about the water cycle from 10 to 11:30 a.m. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684. 

“Climbing Mt. Shasta” a slide presentation with Tim Keating at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Argosy University Information Sessions for degree programs in Psychology, Education and Business at 6 p.m. at 999-A Canal Blvd., Point Richmond. To RSVP or for directions to the school, call 215-0277. 

“Forgetfulness: Is It Normal Aging or Alzheimer’s?” with Brian C. Richardson, M.D. at 4 p.m. at Jewish Family & Children’s Services, 828 San Pablo Ave., Suite 104, Albany. To register call 558-7800. 

Tap Into It Jazz and Rhythm Tap classes at Montclair Recreation Center, 6300 Moraga Ave., Oakland. Experienced at 6:30 p.m., beginners at 7:30 p.m. 482-7812. 

Meditation Class at 7 p.m. at Dzalandhara Buddhist Center, in Berkeley. Donations accepted. For directions call 559-8183. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 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. Carl Arnault will show slides of the world’s coral reefs at 11 a.m. 845-6830. 

Sing-A-Long every Tues. from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic. All ages welcome. 524-9122. 

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23 

Military Recruitment Teach-In for Berkeley High students, 2nd through 5th periods in the Little Theater. For more information go to BHS Room C324. Sponsored by CAS Social Action Committee. 

Great Decisions 2005: “Widening Poverty Gap” with Prof. David Levine, Haas School of Business, from 10 a.m. to noon at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. Cost is $5. For information and reservations call 526-2925. 

Honoring Rosie’s Sisters-Women Veterans During Women's History Month Gray Panthers celebrate women who served during WWII, Korea, the Spanish Civil War, and any time. At 1:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 548-9696. 

“Unlocking Horns: Healing & Forgiveness in Burundi” with David Niyonzima at 7:15 p.m. at Berkeley Friends Church, 1600 Sacramento St. 524-4112. 

Martial Arts Demonstration for children and teens with John Burn and students of Berkeley Cuong Nhu Karate-The Rohai Dojo at 4:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, West Branch, 1125 University Ave. at San Pablo. 981-6270. 

AARP Free Tax Assistance for taxpayers with middle and low incomes, with special attention to those 60 years and older. From 12:15 to 4:15 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. Appointments must be made in advance. 526-3720, ext. 5. 

“Who Bombed Judi Bari?” documentary at 7 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., midtown Oakland. Donation of $5 requested.  

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

Artify Ashby Muralist Group meets every Wed. from 5 to 8 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center, to plan a new mural. New artists are welcome. Call Bonnie at 704-0803. 

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

vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, MARCH 24 

Early Morning Bird Walk Meet at 7:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park to look for birds of the Bible. 525-2233. 

Tilden Explorers An after school nature adventure for 5-7 year olds who may be accompanied by an adult. No younger siblings please. We’ll learn about the weather. From 3:15 to 4:45 p.m. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684. 

Bird Walk along the Martin Luther King Shoreline to see marsh birds at 3:30 p.m. For information call 525-2233. 

“Raptor Winged Migration” a lecture and photo presentation with Don Jedlovec, East Bay Regional Parks, on the Lower Klamath Flyway at 7 p.m. in the Marian Zimmer Auditorium, Oakland Zoo. Cost is $8-$10. 632-9525, ext. 142. www.oaklandzoo.org 

Golden Gate Audubon “Saving the Wild Cheetah” at 7:30 p.m. at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda, between Solano and Marin. Dr. Laurie Marker will give an illustrated presentation on her 30-year effort to save the wild cheetah. Meeting is free and accessible. 843-2222. ggas@goldengateaudubon.org 

”The Future of Food” A film on genetically engineered foods at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. 548-2220. 

Community Budget Workshop with City staff on the two-year City budget cycle which begins July 1, at 7 p.m. at the West Berkeley Senior Center. Co-sponsored by the League of Women Voters. 981-7004.  

Berkeley Retired Teachers Assoc. General Meeting at 1 p.m. at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Topic for this meeting is “Health Issues.” 

“Building the Bond Between Cops and Kids” A Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Social fundraiser for the Berkeley Boosters PAL at 6 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College Ave. Cost is $100. 925-798-1300. www.berkeleyboosters.org 

Tsunami Relief for Small Businesses in Sri Lanka A slide presentation and discussion at 7 p.m. at Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. Benefit for SecondAid. 525-9533. 

Older People United A discussion and support group for elders over 75 at 1:30 p.m. at the Gray Panthers, 1403 Addison St. 548-9696. 

“Caring for Yourself While Caring for Others” at 7 p.m. at Jewish Family & Children’s Services, 828 San Pablo Ave., Suite 104, Albany. To register call 558-7800. 

Easy Does It Disability Assistance Board of Directors Meeting at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, Classrooms A/B. Meeting is accessible and open to the public, with time for public comment. 967-4003. 

Celebrate Purim With Chabad at 7 p.m. at Bancroft Hotel, 2680 Bancroft Way. Cost is $4-$8. Reservations required. 540-5824. 

ONGOING 

United Way’s Earn It! Keep It! Save It! Program provides free tax assistance now through early April to families that earned less than $36,000 in 2004. To find a free tax site near you, call 1-800-358-8832 or visit www.EarnItKeepItSaveIt.org. 

“Half Pint Library” Book Drive Donate children’s books to benefit Children’s Hospital. Donations accepted at 1849 Solano Ave. through March 31. 

Spring Break Program for Children offered by the City’s Recreational Division, March 28-April 1, for children ages 5-12, at the Frances Albrier Community Center, 2800 Park St. For information call 981-6640. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Creeks Task Force meets every Monday at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center through April 4. Erin Dando, 981-7410. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/planning/landuse/Creeks/default.html  

City Council meets Tues. Mar. 22, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Citizens Budget Review Commission meets Wed., Mar. 23, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7041. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/budget 

Civic Arts Commission meets Wed., Mar. 23, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Mary Ann Merker, 981-7533. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/civicarts 

Disaster Council meets Wed. Mar. 23, at 7 p.m., at the Emergency Operations Center, 997 Cedar St. William Greulich, 981-5502. www.ci.berkeley.ca. us/commissions/disaster 

Energy Commission meets Wed., Mar. 23, at 6:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Neal De Snoo, 981-5434. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/energy 

Planning Commission meets Wed., Mar. 23, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Janet Homrighausen, 981-7484. www.ci.berkeley. ca.us/commissions/planning 

Police Review Commission meets Wed. Mar. 23, at 7:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-4950. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/policereview 

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs. Mar. 24, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/zoning 

When Berkeley’s only foster care and adoption agency learned that its office was seismically unsafe, it faced an uncomfortable choice: find money for repairs by May 2006 or face city fines. 

Now, if the City Council approves, A Better Way will receive the final $99,000 it needs for the $185,000 project through the federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Program. 

“We didn’t have any other funding source,” said Shahnaz Mazandarani, executive director of A Better Way, which owns its Adeline Street office. “Our grants are for the services we provide so when something happens to the building, God only knows where we get the money.” 

Next year the money might be harder to find for Berkeley nonprofits. 

In his 2005-06 budget, President George Bush proposed eliminating the $4.7 billion CDBG program altogether. If Congress agrees, Berkeley would lose approximately $4.2 million a year in federal dollars.  

“The funding is extremely important for us,” said city Housing Director Steve Barton. 

Established in 1974, CDBG is the leading federal program to fund public works projects in low income neighborhoods in eligible cities and counties. In Berkeley, however, most of the funds go to nonprofits, mainly for housing rehabilitation programs and job placement services. Twelve of the 27 programs in Berkeley recommended for funding next year are housing related. 

Under the president’s plan, funding for CDBG and 17 other programs would be cut in half and transferred from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to the Commerce Department to support economic development programs. 

Barton said the plan would disqualify many of the programs Berkeley chooses to fund with CDBG money. However, he remains optimistic that the Republican-controlled Congress will vote against the president on CDBG. 

Last year, the Bush administration proposed a $1.6 billion cut to the federal Section 8 housing program, only to see Congress restore funding. It didn’t propose cuts to Section 8 this year. 

But even if Congress keeps CDBG intact and fully funded, Berkeley funding could still be drastically cut under four new funding formulas HUD has submitted to Congress. 

The current funding formula, in place since 1978, has a bias favoring both cities with an older housing stock and university towns, said HUD spokesperson Brian Sullivan. Under the current system, most college students, even those supported by their families, count as low-income residents, making university towns appear far poorer than other evidence would suggest. 

A recent HUD report showed that College Station, Penn., home to Penn State University, had a poverty rate of 48 percent, due mostly to its large student population. Berkeley receives more than twice as much CDBG money as Richmond, a city with an equivalent population, but far greater poverty. 

“We determined that the program was not effectively targeting need, so we have offered Congress four alternatives to correct some of the inequities,” Sullivan said. Congress will consider the proposals along with the future of CDBG before approving a budget by the end of June. 

To close the university loophole, HUD has proposed counting only low-income “persons living in family households or elderly-headed households living in poverty.” 

That leaves out poor single people, who comprise most of Berkeley’s homeless population. 

“HUD is using too broad a brush,” Barton said. Of the four alternatives floated by HUD, Barton estimated that three would cut city CDBG funding in half and the other would cut it by 38 percent. 

Congress could choose to keep the current funding formula, and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) worries about any changes. 

“I'm concerned that changes in the funding formula would jeopardize the ability of countless communities to create jobs and affordable housing opportunities for those who need it most,” she said. 

Berkeley nonprofits dependent CDBG funds are bracing for the worst. 

“We’re going to have pull some other funding together,” said Gerald Baptiste, assistant director of the Center For Independent Living. The organization has received annual CDBG grants of $142,675—its only source of funding for that program—to build ramps and chairlifts at the homes of disabled residents. 

“Without that money a number of people would have to go into institutions without a doubt,” he said. 

Last year, the city spent $4.2 million in CDBG money on six anti-poverty organizations, eight affordable housing providers, 19 service providers to the homeless, seven agencies committed to further fair and accessible housing, 32 social service agencies and eight child care providers. 

The greatest single recipient of CDBG funding is the city of Berkeley itself. Approximately $850,000—roughly 20 percent of the federal funds—pays for city staff. Berkeley’s staff allocation is a higher percentage than Oakland’s, which uses 15 percent of its $9 million CDBG allocation on staff, said CDBG Administrator Danny Wong. 

If CDBG is cut or eliminated, Barton said one of the immediate consequences would be a contraction of Berkeley’s housing department.

Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) members and planning commissioners both wrestled with the same subject last week, the incentives that let builders create larger structures in Berkeley than would otherwise be allowed. 

Neither group came to any firm conclusions, beyond one: Something has to be done to make sense of what now amounts to legislative chaos. 

ZAB members confronted a controversial incentive that allows apartment and condominium builders to add extra height to make up for losses caused by building “inclusionary” units priced to make them affordable for lower-income tenants. 

The issue they faced Thursday was the proposed condo complex at 1698 University Ave., the site of the old Tune-Up Masters franchise. 

Having once approved the project, it was back in ZAB’s lap after the City Council refused to supply its endorsement and handed it back to ZAB because of an appeal of the project over the inclusionary bonus. 

The day before ZAB met, the Planning Commission pondered the creation of a new incentive that would clear the way for construction of the David Brower Center complex, a pair of eco-friendly buildings proposed for Fulton Street between Allston Way and Kittredge Street. 

Both those structures are taller than allowed under the city’s Downtown Plan, even with existing incentives added. The commission mulled the notion of creating yet another incentive that would grant additional extra height in exchange for building “green.” 

Thus, buildings that included environmentally friendly building materials and technology that reduced consumption of gas and electricity would be allowed to add height above plan standards. 

In the Tune-Up Masters case, city planning staff originally awarded the project a 25 percent size increase bonus for including condominium units to be sold at a price affordable to people making at or below 125 percent of the Oakland Metropolitan average median income. 

That ruling was shot down four months ago after planning staff agreed with former Planning Commissioner Gene Poschman that the correct interpretation allowed only 10 percent. 

However, city staff Thursday pointed to another section of state law that mandates that builders who add state-mandated inclusionary units must be allowed a margin of profitability that would be equivalent to what the project would have made without the mandatory inclusionary units. 

The city staff calculated that for the 1698 University project to be made whole for the inclusionary units, the only solution was a building the same size as previously rejected, namely 25 percent larger. 

Poschman was on hand to argue against the bonus, while Principal Planner Deborah Sanderson and David Baar, an attorney on the city housing staff, upheld the numbers as meeting the legal requirements of state inclusionary law. 

All sides agreed that the state legislation was murky and ill-organized. 

“It’s definitely a problem,” said ZAB Chair Andy Katz. 

“An analytical solution is not possible with what the law gives us,” said Rick Judd, a land use attorney and the board’s newest member. “We were given a deck with 37 cards, and two or three of some of them seem to be alike. I’m not comfortable that we’re forced to give a developer what he’d have if there was no inclusionary bonus at all.” 

ZAB member David Blake said, “There’s a long history of changes in the way we look at density bonuses. When we had Seagate, staff told us they would be entitled to two-and-a-half times the bonus they sought.” 

In the case of the recently approved Seagate condominium project at 2941-67 Center St. in downtown Berkeley, Housing Director Tim Stroshane calculated that the developer was entitled to a 14-story building to make good for the inclusionary units, in spite of a city plan and codes that allow for half that figure—a maximum of five floors and two additional floors as bonus space. 

Stroshane’s calculations were based on plans that called for minimal returns and massive construction costs based in large part on a unique and highly expensive seismic reinforcement system well above that required by city and state codes—a level of construction that developer representative Darrel de Tienne later conceded might not even be implemented. 

In the case of the University Avenue project, Judd noted that “this project wasn’t very realistic economically based on the price of the land with or without the density bonus.” 

Blake repeatedly questioned city staff with his concerns, at one point remarking, “It stretches credibility that the staff analysis of this project gives us a number that exactly matches state law.” 

“I don’t agree with the staff interpretation,” said member Chris Tiedeman. “The state law is a complicated and messy statute.” 

“Until the City Council has reached a decision about how this law should be applied, we’re going to be seeing it again and again,” said member Dean Metzger. 

“ZAB is very much at fault,” said Poschman. “Two of the five votes that originally approved this project were made under protest by members who said they felt obliged to vote that way.” 

Eric Cress appeared for Pacific Bay Investments, the firm behind the University Avenue project, to answer questions about the project. 

Cress noted that because of neighbor objections, the project’s height had been reduced from 38 units to 25 and the height had been cut by 14 feet to the current 50 feet. 

“When we changed the project from apartments to condos at the request of the neighbors, we didn’t know it would reduce the density bonuses,” he said. “I can’t help but feel it backfired on us in some respects.” 

State law mandates a maximum of 25 percent for inclusionary apartments but only 10 percent for condos. 

“We’re in a terrible, terrible bind,” said Blake. 

In the end, ZAB postponed a decision until April 14, to give staff sufficient time to analyze the proposal along with the state and city inclusionary law and policy.

One day before the cutoff of local registration for Golden Gate Elementary Charter School in North Oakland, only 60 percent of students’ families had signed their children up to attend the new school. 

Some parents say they are skeptical about the new charter program and have registered their children only because they felt they had no other good options.  

State-appointed Oakland School Administrator Randolph Ward announced earlier this year that he was closing the San Pablo Avenue school as an Oakland Unified School District-run facility because of lagging attendance rates and a drop in the school’s Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) scores. 

The school, which is 90 percent African-American, sits between 62nd and 63rd streets near the Berkeley border. Gold en Gate has been turned over to a charter school run jointly by UC Berkeley and the Oakland-based Aspire Public Schools nonprofit organization. Entrance to the new school is by application, with UC Berkeley announcing in a press release earlier this year that first priority for acceptance would go to students currently attending Golden Gate. 

Golden Gate parents were given until today (Tuesday) to exercise that option. 

On Monday, outgoing Golden Gate principal Katherine Hunter-Hendon said that of the 140 students not graduating from the elementary school this year, only 85 had registered to attend the charter school. She said she had no idea how many of the remaining students would attend Santa Fe Elementary on Market and 54th streets—the nearest OUSD school—and how many might simply leave the district to attend schools in other areas. 

Two Golden Gate parent volunteers said they were not satisfied with any of the choices, and feel that the district should have done more to save Golden Gate as a distr ict-run public school. 

“Golden Gate has been a good school,” said School Site Councilmember Laura Tallie. “The teachers were good. The principals were good. They served my children well.” 

A 30-year neighbor of the school, Tallie has already put two children through Golden Gate, including a daughter who is now 29. Her third child—a foster son currently in the second grade—has been reluctantly signed up for the charter school. She said her main reason was “so he can eventually walk to school by himself.” 

“I’m not totally for the charter school, but I’m accepting it,” Tallie said. “It’s better than having no school here at all. If they just padlocked the doors, then it would probably be vandalized.” 

Tallie said that she had attended two of the meetings h eld by Aspire to describe its new program and though “it sounded good, you never know what it’s going to be like until the program is in place and the staff is there. It will take some time to see exactly how it will work out.” 

Joyce Blackwell, a grandmo ther who volunteers at Golden Gate, was more blunt. 

“First of all, I think [closing the public school] is ridiculous; it’s awful,” she said. “I’m sick about it. I’m heartbroken. I don’t understand why it’s taking place. I’m just not pleased at all.” 

Bla ckwell, who put her daughter through Golden Gate and now has a fourth-grade granddaughter at the school, also said the only reason she signed her grandchild up at the charter was the proximity. 

“It’s a nice little walk over to Santa Fe,” she said. “You’d have to go up Alcatraz to Sacramento, and then over to Market Street, and across Stanford and Adeline, I think. I’m not comfortable with her traveling all the way over there. I don’t have a car, and I can’t walk it. I registered because I felt I had no o ther choice. We’re close enough to Berkeley to send her to school there, but you have to get a permit to transfer to Berkeley, and it’s tough as nails to get one.” 

Blackwell also expressed concern that there would have been no real security in sending he r granddaughter to Santa Fe. 

“Suppose Mr. Ward decided to close Santa Fe next year, just like he closed Golden Gate this year?” she asked. “Where would I send her, then?” 

Picking her words carefully, second year principal Hunter-Hendon said, “I need som e clarification” why Golden Gate was closed by Oakland state administrator Ward despite only a one-year drop in its AYP score. 

“Our scores were up 80 and 50 points for the year before,” she said. 

Golden Gate is not part of the 13 Oakland schools schedul ed to be reorganized by Ward under the federal No Child Left Behind act after four years on the federal “identifying program improvement” list. 

“I would have felt better about the closure if we had been on that list,” she said. 

And Hunter-Hendon said th e 35 student school enrollment drop from last year to this was partly the fault of the district’s not doing more to encourage students to transfer to Golden Gate. 

Last year, when the district closed the nearby elementary schools of Marcus Foster and Long fellow, Hunter-Hendon said that Golden Gate was not put on the district’s “redirect list” steering students to that school, even though the district knew at the time that Golden Gate was experiencing declining enrollment. 

“If many of the Foster and Longf ellow students had been redirected here, we would not be having the enrollment problem,” Hunter-Hendon said. 

She also said that Golden Gate was inexplicably not initially placed on last year’s district list of available schools during the district’s open enrollment period. “We got that corrected and we were put on the list,” she said, “but it was too late to do much good. A few students transferred over, not enough to make a difference.” 

Hunter-Hendon blamed the declining school enrollment on a change i n the community’s demographics as well as competition from a district-sponsored charter school. 

“A lot of people are moving into the neighborhood who don’t have school-age children,” she said. In addition, she said, a charter school on nearby Alcatraz Av enue opened by the East Bay Conservation Corp “took away some of the students that we had.” 

She added that the Golden Gate closure as a public school is having a disruptive affect upon her staff as well. The nine teachers at the school were “originally t old they would be placed first by seniority into other Oakland schools,” she said. But with the pending conversion of 13 other Oakland schools into charter, “there could be some bumping of our teachers down the list.” She called it “a possibility” that some of the present Golden Gate teachers could lose their jobs. Hunter-Hendon herself will have to apply for a new position if she wishes to remain with the district.  

Berkeley Unified School District has been put on a list of 150 California school districts needing “program improvement.” 

The district’s public information officer said that the listing is part of bureaucratic wrangling between state and federal agencies and is not indicative of the quality of education in the district. 

“It really doesn’t mean anything different as far as the district is concerned,” said Mark Coplan, district spokesperson. 

Schools and districts are subject to severe penalties under the federal No Child Left Behind Act if they stay on the so-called Program Improvement “watch list” for several years. 

Coplan said that entire districts can be put on the “watch list” if the district is considered a low-income Title I district and the district’s students fall below state-monitored Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for two consecutive years. 

In Berkeley’s case, however, the district was one of several state districts put on the list because a certain number of schools have been placed on the Program Improvement list. 

“The state superintendent and members of the state school board went up to Washington recently to lobby against that provision,” Coplan said, “but the federal government has insisted that districts under that category—like Berkeley Unified—are placed on the watch list.” 

Eight Berkeley public schools are on the Program Improvement list: Berkeley Alternative High, King, Willard, and Longfellow Middle, and Oxford Elementary are in their first year on the list; Cragmont Elementary is in its second year; Washington Elementary in its third year; and Rosa Parks Elementary is in its fourth year. Schools face escalating mandated corrective action the more years they remain on the list, with restructuring of the school beginning in the fourth year. 

“All of our corrective efforts and money are already being put into the individual sites,” Coplan said, including the “dedication of 10 percent of the district’s allocation to high quality professional development” as required by the federal government for Program Improvement schools. 

He also said that several Berkeley schools are on the watch list not because of poor academic performance, but because they did not meet the No Child Left Behind requirement of 95 percent participation in state-mandated tests. 

“A lot of Berkeley parents choose to have their children opt out of state tests for political reasons,” Coplan said. “We can inform the students about the tests, but state law requires that we not make them take the tests. To show you how absurd the situation is, if Berkeley High were a Title I school and came under the PI program, the school would be put on the Program Improvement list because it didn’t meet the testing percentage requirement. And last year, Berkeley was named one of the top one hundred high schools in the country.” 

After negotiations with the U.S. Department of Education, the California School Board passed new criteria at its March 9 meeting for school district inclusion on the PI list. Coplan said that new criteria should have taken Berkeley Unified off the watch list “and we’re still looking into why it did not.”Ã

The Berkeley Waterfront Commission rejected landing rights to Spaceship Earth in their bailiwick last week, leaving the 350,000-square-foot blue sphere still in search of a home. 

The panel’s action Wednesday marks the second time the sculpture has been denied a proposed location. The first rejection came in San Francisco, where that city’s Visual Arts Committee rejected the work at any site in the city. 

Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates is a big fan of the orb, and the Civic Arts Commission (CAC) has the task of finding an appropriate site. 

A CAC site subcommittee with representatives from the Waterfront and the Parks and Recreation committees proposed the waterfront as their first choice. 

Brad Smith, the waterfront representative on the CAC panel, made no secret of his disdain for the creation of Finno-American sculptor Eino’s creation, referring to it as “the Brower object.” 

Smith was out with the flu Wednesday, but it didn’t matter when the sculpture came up for a vote. Only commission chair Paul Kamen voted to accept it, while the others offered enthusiastic thumbs down. 

“There wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm for the Brower object,” said David Snippen, the CAC chair. 

The panel had pinned their hopes on the waterfront, but with that option off the table, the remaining sites fall within the purview of the Parks and Recreation Commission. 

Those sites are Cedar Rose Park and the westernmost end of Ohlone Park. 

Plans for a site at the Lawrence Hall of Science were rejected by UC Berkeley, as was another proposed location at Tilden Park. 

Snippen says he hopes to schedule another site selection panel meeting before the whole commission meets again on March 23. 

“The parks commissioners said that if we go for a site recommendation in the parks, they’ll want to hold a public hearing to get community input,” Snippen said. 

The CAC chair says he’s also considering taking his short list recommendations to the City Council “with the qualification that public hearings will be held.”

If you drive west on Center Street into the Shattuck Avenue intersection, you encountered two permanent signs reading “No Left Turn—Except Buses and Bicycles.” But because of Vista College construction on the next block of Center Street, you also encountered a temporary sign ahead saying “Road Closed Ahead.” 

Having blundered into this trap, there was absolutely nothing you could legally do. You couldn’t turn left or go straight. You couldn’t turn right, because that’s the wrong-way (southbound) branch of Shattuck Square. You couldn’t back up, because that would be nuts. And you certainly couldn’t stay put. 

Fortunately, the flagman at the “Road Closed Ahead” sign was helping motorists intelligently disobey one or both of the posted signs. But why did the city set this insane trap? 

—Michael Katzz

Berkeley Design Review Committee will get its final look Thursday at plans for a four-story mixed-use condominium and retail project at 2700 San Pablo Ave. 

Developer Patrick Kennedy originally planned to build on the site but sold the land and permit approvals to Curtis + Partners, LLC, of San Francisco, headed by Charmaine Curtis. 

The project will include 30 residential-only units, four mixed-use units and a retail space at the northeast corner of San Pablo Avenue and Carleton Street. 

The committee will also give preliminary review to an addition of 7,724 square feet of office space to a building at 2107 Dwight Way and exterior renovations, including window bays, to an office building at 1625 Shattuck Ave. 

The meeting begins at 7:30 p.m. in Workshop B of the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave.  

—Richard Brenneman›

Fans and foes of East Bay casino proposals have had reasons both to celebrate and to fret in recent days. 

Two Richmond casino projects took significant steps forward while another in San Pablo was dealt a major setback. 

Plans for the Sugar Bowl Casino advanced Friday when the Sacramento office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) sent federal, state, local and tribal officials a 12-page notice about the Scotts Valley Band of Pomos’ plans for building a major casino in unincorporated North Richmond. 

While the notice isn’t an approval, the information it generates can help the BIA negotiate the terms of an accord on the project, according to Kevin Bearquiver of the BIA’s Sacramento office. 

The final decision rests with Secretary of Interior Gale Norton, and the BIA request is designed to gauge the impact of removal of the project site from local tax rolls.  

Berkeley developer James D. Levine’s plans for a massive luxury casino resort at Point Molate also took another step forward when the BIA announced a date for a Richmond scoping session on the project’s environmental impacts. 

That session, open to the public, will occur on March 31 in the Richmond Memorial Auditorium, 403 Civic Center Plaza. 

The scoping session on the Sugar Bowl was held last Aug. 4, which would place the Scotts Valley Pomos about seven months ahead of the Guidiville Rancheria Pomos in the race to build the first Richmond casino. 

Meanwhile, the Lytton Band of Pomos’ plans to transform a San Pablo cardroom, a struggling casino just off Interstate 80 at San Pablo Boulevard, into a Las Vegas-sized casino were dealt a major setback Friday. Rep. George Miller, the House Democrat who inserted a clause granting the tribe rights to buy Casino San Pablo, notified two state legislators about his second thoughts on the project. 

The San Pablo casino project soared into the headlines last year when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a pact that would allow the tribe to build a 5,000-slot-machine operation at the site. 

When legislators in the state Senate and Assembly—who must give their approval to gambling compacts—rebelled, the tribe and governor came back with another proposal that halved the number of slots. 

Miller expressed his reservations in a two-page letter to California Senate President pro tem Don Perata and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez. 

“[S]omewhere between when Congress approved the land transfer and today, the project that was originally brought to me and to the Congress by the city and the tribe changed dramatically,” Miler wrote, “What was then described as a modest casino with 1,000 slot machines, to be developed within the context of the existing card room facility, instead was turned into a (5,000-slot machine) proposal. . .that would make Casino San Pablo one of the three largest casinos in the nation.” 

Miller said the process “has been grossly distorted by those who have sought to use the casino to achieve their own particular goals rather than the local goals of the community,” and blamed Schwarzenegger in particular for attempting to use casinos to solve the state budget crisis. 

Expressing reservation about the later 2,500-slot proposal, Miller noted that while federal law requires the state to negotiate in good faith with the tribe, it “does not guarantee the tribe a casino of any size nor does it obligate the governor to approve a casino of any size.” 

Miller’s letter drew an immediate rebuttal from Lytton Tribal Chair Margie Mejia, who praised the project’s ability to create 6,600 jobs and alleviate the fiscal crises of the city and Contra Costa County. 

San Pablo city officials said approval of the compact is a prerequisite to the poverty-ridden city’s continuing survival as a legal entity. Absent casino revenues, they say, their city would be forced to disincorporate. 

Schwarzenegger’s 2,500-slot proposal remains alive in the state legislature, where senators and assemblymembers have been busily writing up counter-proposals. 

East Bay Assemblymember Loni Hancock, who has been at the forefront of urban casino opposition, hailed Miller’s letter.›

A vocal opponent of a plan to decrease the number of car lanes on Marin Avenue has filed suit against Berkeley and Albany to stop the project. 

But before he takes on both cities, he needs a lawyer to take the case and some co-plaintiffs to help pay the bills. 

Raymond Chamberlin, who like many Berkeley hills residents relies on Marin Avenue as his quickest route to the flatlands and freeway, filed suit in superior court last month. He argues that the cities needed to perform a more extensive environmental review before reducing car lanes on the street. 

Should Chamberlin obtain a lawyer, he might seek an injunction to stop the project currently scheduled to begin this summer. 

“My main reason for doing this is that the proposal is so devious,” he said. “It doesn’t solve the problem of pedestrian safety. It’s just a bicycle boondoggle.” 

In an effort to slow traffic on Marin Avenue and improve pedestrian and bicycle safety, Berkeley and Albany approved a joint project to re-stripe the street from four lanes of traffic, to two lanes of traffic with a center turning land and two bicycle lanes. The avenue runs through both cities. 

Chamberlin contends the cities relied on inadequate traffic surveys and made findings inconsistent with the surveys. 

The Marin Avenue reconfiguration was wildly popular in Albany, but faced fierce resistance from many Berkeley residents who feared the project would divert traffic to their side-streets or slow their commute times. 

Chamberlin said he believes he can sign up other opponents of the plan to the lawsuit, but not until he finds an attorney willing to take the case. 

Without an attorney, Chamberlin said he might drop the case rather than bear the complete costs of the legal effort. Also, he added, as a Berkeley hills resident who doesn’t live in the immediate vicinity of the section of Marin Avenue affected by the plan, he doesn’t have as strong legal standing as residents who live on side-streets that could face traffic impacts. 

?

After weeks of briefings on the city’s looming $7.5 million shortfall, Berkeley’s City Council today (Tuesday) will get its first look at next year’s proposed budget. 

As part of Mayor Tom Bates’ strategy for giving extra attention to budgetary issues, the budget presentation is the only item on the council’s agenda slated for debate. 

The budget plan was not available at press time Monday. 

City Manager Phil Kamlarz’s recommendations, as listed on the meeting agenda, include implementing a two-year approach to eliminate the structural budget deficit, minimize layoffs, maintain a general fund reserve at a minimum of 6 percent of revenues, and use unexpected revenue for capital improvements like street repairs. 

Kamlarz has previously proposed that the council spend $3.5 million from higher than expected property tax revenues on a new police dispatch system, the city’s lawsuit against the UC Board of Regents over the UC Berkeley’s Long Range Development Plan, street repairs and a match for a solar bond fund. 

Councilmember Kriss Worthington is asking that the council also set aside $100,000 to develop an implementation plan to take over the purchasing of electrical power from PG&E. He believes if the council acts quickly to show they have a plan in place, Berkeley would face lower exit fees from the utility company if it opted to negotiate its own power contracts. 

The combination of rising employee benefit costs and a sluggish economy have resulted in a structural deficit that forecasts shortfalls through at least fiscal year 2009. Kamlarz has ordered city department heads to cut budgets 10 percent for fiscal year 2006, which begins in July, and 6 percent for 2007. Additionally the council has given Kamlarz authority to consider closing non-essential city services once a month starting in July to save approximately $2.1 million in salaries. 

The council must adopt a balanced budget by the end of June.

San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board members will hear the latest developments at Richmond’s Campus Bay waterfront Wednesday morning in downtown Oakland. 

Curtis Scott, who has been supervising the site, will give his report when the board meets at 9 a.m. in the first floor auditorium of the Elihu M. Harris Building at 1515 Clay St. in Oakland. 

Excavations of toxics-laden muck from the shoreline marsh ended March 1 and are scheduled to resume in September. Removal of already excavated muck continues. 

The March stoppage deadline—originally set for Feb. 1—was imposed to protect the endangered clapper rail shorebird which nests on the site. 

Meanwhile, the state Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), which assumed jurisdiction over the upland portion of the site in December, is still seeking applicants to serve on its Community Advisory Group, which is charged with serving as a conduit between the public and the state agency. 

In a review of site-cleanup activities released Monday, the DTSC reports that most of the site has been surrounded by a fence labeling the property as a hazardous waste site. 

The report also notes that 11,000 tons of excavated marsh sediment were trucked off the site last week to the Altamont and Keller Canyon landfills, while 4,000 cubic yards of highly contaminated muck remained stockpiled at the site.  

DTSC also reports that concentrations of dangerous volatile organic compounds exceeding state action levels by 2.2 times were recorded briefly on March 8 during the loading and transport of excavated sediments.

This week will mark the 36th anniversary of the My Lai massacre in which more than 560 men, women and children, all Vietnamese civilians, were murdered by soldiers of Company C of the U.S. Army 20th Division.  

The slaughter was a watershed in the history of modern American combat, and a turning point in the public perception of the Vietnam War.  

But this was not the first time American soldiers ran amok. Some 60 years before America entered Vietnam, a far larger but now forgotten bloodbath took place on the remote Philippine island of Samar. And, by eerie coincidence, the military unit involved was also Company C—but this time they were the first victims.  

Facing directly into the Pacific and unprotected by coral reefs, Samar suffers the worse weather in the 7,000-island archipelago. Lashing rains and typhoons regularly sweep in from the sea. The poorest and probably least developed island in the Philippines, Samar is a place where people come from rather than go to.  

Its tragic story begins in August 1901, at the end of the Spanish-American War, which began a world away in sunny Havana. The United States had quickly defeated Spain’s force in the Philippine capital of Manila, then proceeded to claim the Philippines, betraying its ally, the anti-Spanish Filipino independence movement. Filipino resistance continued throughout the far-flung islands for almost four years. Thousands of Americans and Filipinos were killed in the bloody jungle fighting of what became know to Filipinos as the Philippine-American war, and to Americans as the “Filipino Insurrection.”  

But by mid-1901, the Americans believed they had finally crushed Filipino resistance. In fact, thousands of peasants vowed to fight on.  

On Aug. 11, 1901, 74 soldiers of the Ninth U.S. Infantry Division, Company C, landed at a remote village in southern Samar, called Balangiga. Aside from a crumbling old Spanish plaza, a church, a convent and town hall, Balangiga was a mere collection of 200 thatched-roof huts standing on a rain-swept shore, accessible only by boat.  

Balangiga’s Spanish mayor had specifically petitioned the U.S. government in Manila to send American troops to protect the town from what he called “bandits and pirates.”  

As their transport ship lifted anchor and sailed back to Manila, Company C was billeted in the town plaza. They were exceedingly well armed. But to encourage trust among the locals, the company commander ordered that only sentries carry weapons.  

Eight weeks after arriving, the troops settled in into local life feeling safe.  

Then, on the evening of Oct. 6, a score of battle-hardened Filipino resistance fighters—dressed as old women to attend a child’s funeral—quietly slipped into Balangiga at dusk. At dawn the following day, a Sunday, amid the ringing of church bells, the disguised rebels and several hundred townspeople rose up against the U.S. troops. Only three of the 74 soldiers were carrying arms as they ate their breakfasts.  

The Filipinos used native razor-sharp machetes called bolos. The Americans wielded shovels, knives or whatever was at hand. In the ensuing massacre, only 26 of Company C’s original contingent survived long enough to reach the beach, most of them suffering ghastly wounds. The bloodied Americans staggered onto native boats and headed north for reinforcements.  

One surviving soldier was overheard quoting the Bible: “They have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind.”  

The massacre surprised and appalled the U.S. colonial government in Manila. The first U.S. governor of the Philippines, Howard Taft (later to become president) wrote his wife: “It comes like a clap of thunder on a clear day.”  

Despite his shock, Taft insisted that a civilian government must still rule in the Philippines.  

For its part, the U.S. Army was determined to crush further resistance in Samar by sending a veteran of the savage Plains Wars against the American Indians, General “Roaring Jake” Smith.  

Arriving on Samar, Smith, 66, tells his men: “I want no prisoners. I want you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn, the more it will please me.”  

Asked the age limit, the general replies: “Ten years and older. The interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness.”  

In the ensuring months, hundreds of villages are burned, all crops and livestock destroyed. Thousands of Filipinos are shot as suspected rebels. Other civilians are rounded up and put in “concentration camps”—so called because they are “concentrated” into a small area making it easier to guard.  

Word of Smith’s murderous methods later hits Washington like a bombshell. The disgraced general is dismissed from the army amid great controversy regarding the U.S. presence in the Philippines—strikingly similar to later arguments about American involvement in Indochina.  

The U.S. campaign in the Philippines was vicious on both sides; neither Americans nor Filipinos gave, or expected, mercy. But in the end, as in most wars, it was the non-combatants who paid the highest price. Exact figures of how many Filipinos were killed in Samar were never made public. But it is estimated that 10,000 were killed or starved to death over a two-year period following the massacre, the majority women and children.  

And even today, more than a century after the fighting ended in the summer of 1902, Samar is still a forlorn place. The wild, uninhabited interior never recovered from the whirlwind of war; it remains, as Smith wanted, a howling wilderness.  

Steven Knipp is the Washington, D.C., correspondent for the South China Morning Post. He visited Samar in 2003.

TEN COMMANDMENTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have no quarrel with the Ten Commandments being displayed in public areas, as long as Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism etc., are also represented along side them. 

Carol Beth 

• 

DANGEROUS INTERSECTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

At the intersection where Adeline and Shattuck split, the pedestrian sign says “GO” at the same time that oncoming traffic has a green light. Eventually someone is going to killed or maimed. I’ve written and called about it to various city officials and never got a response. Perhaps the Planet would go to the intersection and experience this risky matter for itself. And then a life saving editorial might be in order.  

Robert Blau 

• 

DECRIMINALIZE DRUGS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Don Link’s comments (“Column Misrepresented North Oakland Shooting,” Daily Planet, March 11) on North Oakland crime, emphasizes that “being able to work with police to eliminate street level crime without fear of retaliation” is the “most basic fact” in solving this ongoing violence. 

We go on ignoring that the actual basic fact is the elimination of a profit motif in these drug crimes. If these drugs are not federally decriminalized, it is a fantasy to go on seeking other solutions to the nightmare—spending billions on more policing and more incarceration—rather than on treatment, jobs, and education! 

Gerta Farber 

• 

AC TRANSIT BUSES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

So AC Transit’s Van Hool busses have “low-floor entry” and other “passenger-oriented features.”  

Big whoo. Once past that entry, you are faced with a honking big step up to the seats. At least with the old high-entry buses, you could do your climbing while the bus was stationary. And when you want to signal for a stop, you may have to negotiate that step again in order to find one of the poorly located buttons. The old pull-cord system may have been low-tech, but it worked from every seat in the bus.  

Letters like AC Transit Director of Marketing and Communications Jaimie Levin’s (Daily Planet, March 8-10) make me want to require by statute that AC Transit wonks actually ride a bus on a daily basis. Go visit the trenches and hear the constant complaints from both riders and drivers. Had this been the case to begin with, there would have been no need to survey 500 passengers on these elements—you would have recognized the flaws on your own.  

By the way, I have ridden in Van Hool busses in London (a city that understands mass transit), and yes, they do have a low-floor entry similar to AC busses; however, with the exception of the legendary and traditional double-deckers, they do not require an additional step to reach seats near the doors. No pull-cords, however. Even London fell for those dumb buttons.  

Nina J. Hodgson  

• 

TAX BASE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Matthew Artz’s article about Volvo rolling on (“City Looks to Boost Tax Base as Auto Dealer Announces Departure,” Daily Planet, March 11-14) tells us that City Manager Phil Kamlarz states clearly and bluntly what has been too long ignored: Increasing revenue from business taxes is pivotal to preserve city services. And this flash of rationality is endorsed by Mayor Bates’ wish to create commercial zones along major traffic corridors. The most obvious candidate may be the foot of Gilman, where everything west of Seventh Street is a wasteland of shanties and scrapyards. This freeway access could be a bustling hub of car dealerships and big-box retail. 

Artz then states another obvious truth: “Increasing commercial development in West Berkeley is sure to meet opposition from artists and industrialists who fear that encroaching retail shops will drive up rent and force them out of Berkeley.” Well—maybe they don’t belong in Berkeley. The corollary of that statement is that all business owners and homeowners in Berkeley, through exorbitant taxation, are subsidizing the low rents of those artists and industrialists. Maybe art studios and little industrial job shops belong in Hercules? Mendocino? Somewhere affordable? 

Jerry Landis 

• 

PESTICIDES IN OAKLAND 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The parks are Oakland’s crown jewel. This time of year they are lush with vegetation which includes banks covered with ivy and ferns cascading down to the roaring creeks fresh with the seasonal runoff. The smell of springtime takes your breath away, the promise of yet another spring filled with wildflowers, song birds, butterflies and all the wildlife that inhabits this majestic garden. 

City dwellers will flock to the park on weekends for family outings, weddings, company picnics and other recreational socializing. Along Joaquin Miller Park the kids will play in the newly formed playground and soon the familiar goats will be back gorging on weeds. 

Please help keep the parks free of pesticides. Don’t let politicians mess the delicate ecology that took decades to develop in spite of all the foot traffic. Don’t let them tell you that because EBMUD, et al, does it that it is safe and harmless for us to use herbicides. Don’t let them turn this into another city fiasco. 

Tori Thompson 

Oakland 

• 

TURTLES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thanks to Joe Eaton for his informative article on the plight of turtles, both locally and internationally (“Climate Change Creates Survival Crisis for Turtles,” Daily Planet, March 8-10). As Mr. Eaton noted, the western pond turtle is California’s only native freshwater turtle species, and continues to lose ground for a number reasons.  

A major problem are the many live animal food markets in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and elsewhere, where live turtles and frogs by the thousands are sold for human consumption, and kept in horrendous conditions. None are native to California, and when bought and released into local waters (a frequent but illegal occurrence), they displace and prey upon our native wildlife. (I have a photo of an American bullfrog eating a baby western pond turtle.) Ten years ago an Oakland importer testified before the State Fish and Game Commission that she imports four tons of these frogs every week, all commercially raised in Taiwain. That’s about a million frogs annually And a Fish and Game warden told me that probably 15,000 turtles are passing through the Bay Area markets every week, though no one is really keeping count. And for what? Soup and superstition: Many of those who eat the turtles believe they’re gaining the animals’ wisdom and longevity. Others believe turtle meat to be an aphrodisiac. 

The non-natives also introduce foreign diseases and parasites when released into the California environment. In 1995 the San Francisco SPCA had 15-19 necropsies performed on the market frogs and turtles, and routinely found E. coli, salmonella, pasturella (all potentially fatal in humans), plus giardia, blood parasites, even one case of malaria. State health codes require that any diseased or parasitized animals sold for human consumption must either be destroyed or returned to point of origin, yet the sales continue unabated. Safeway would not be allowed to sell these sick and diseased animals, yet the markets get a free ride. How come? 

Worse, all of the market turtles are taken from the wild in other states, depleting local populations. Adding insult to injury, many of the market animals are routinely butchered while fully conscious. Anyone doubting this should tour the markets, then demand that changes be made to protect the animals, the environment and the public health. 

Eric Mills 

Coordinator, Action for Animals 

Oakland 

• 

MARIN AVENUE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Recent articles and letters have expressed concerns that the Berkeley City Council was somehow in error when it agreed to the upcoming reconfiguration of traffic on Marin Avenue. The council, it is claimed, did not take into consideration the traffic jams, the increased difficulty for pedestrians trying to get across the avenue, the added pollution, or the wasted extra 30 seconds to get to San Pablo Avenue, etc., etc. 

What seems to get lost in this concern is the fact that it was the Albany City Council that made this decision, not Berkeley. 

The Albany reconfiguration of one lane rather than two in each direction from San Pablo Avenue eastwards is 17 blocks long, ending at Tulare Avenue. This was not another Berkeley idea to remake the world. The problem that the Berkeley City Council had to decide was what to do about the five blocks that go through Berkeley to The Alameda. If Berkeley voted to leave things as they are, west-bound traffic would have to suddenly go from two lanes to one lane. People who have experienced this nightmare on the freeways did not think it to be the best option on Marin. The council reluctantly voted to continue the Albany pattern though our short stretch to maintain a unified pattern for motorists. 

So those who are critical of the whole idea should better aim their arrows toward the powers-that-be in Albany. Methinks our Berkeley councilmembers should be spared these particular arrows (and slings) of local outrage. 

Victor Herbert  

• 

CLASS SIZE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Recent letters and comments from Superintendent Michele Lawrence and School Board directors would have us believe that they want nothing more than to compensate Berkeley’s teachers competitively and maintain low class sizes for students. They just need more money from Sacramento, and they will immediately devote those revenues to the community’s consistently expressed priorities of competitive compensation for teachers and low class sizes. But what in their recent behavior should lead us to have confidence in that “promise”? 

This past year the School Board asked Berkeley voters to tax themselves additionally with Measure B in order to (among other things) lower class size. Now that the community has selflessly answered that request, the School Board refuses to guarantee class size maximums and is, instead, trying to sell us class size “averages.” Basic mathematics tells one that those are two very different things. For example, a class size “average” of 26 for fourth grade could give us four different classrooms with enrollments of 24, 24, 24, and a last class of 32. I don’t think that is what Berkeley voters want for their money. That is why the BFT is insisting that the board make good on their promise to teachers, students, and the community with guaranteed class size maximums. 

Five years ago, when the BFT negotiated its last contract, the district had quite a bit of increased revenue available from the state. At that time, however, the School Board still did not choose to make competitive teacher compensation a priority for those funds without strong and forceful “encouragement” from the community. The BFT had to resort to the same “work to rule” action we are currently in the midst of, and the wonderful Berkeley community had to come out in droves to demand fair treatment for their teachers. Only after those “demands” was the board willing to devote increased revenues to teacher salaries. 

When Michele Lawrence first came to our district she often repeated, “We can have anything we want, but not everything we want.” No one who has managed even a small household budget can disagree with that common sense approach. Priorities must be set. Our School Board has set a priority of attracting and maintaining a highly qualified superintendent by paying a $185,000 yearly salary. This is about $50,000 more than superintendents in other districts with a comparable number of students. In addition to this, the district supports a housing subsidy for the superintendent. I, myself, have no problem with the idea of offering a highly competitive salary in order to attract and maintain the “best and brightest” personnel to work for our students. My question is why funding this philosophy is a priority at the administrative level, but not for the teachers and other personnel working most closely with and most directly delivering education and care to Berkeley’s children. The current Board proposal is to give teachers no raise, but ask them to shoulder increased medical insurance payments - essentially a pay cut.  

Indeed, we cannot have “everything we want,” but Berkeley teachers, students, parents, and community wonder which priorities (beyond the superintendent’s salary) could be more important than making good on Measure B’s promise of small class size and not insulting and demoralizing teachers by cutting their total compensation.  

Marguerite Talley-Hughes 

Berkeley teacher and resident 

Click here to view the latest work by Planet cartoonist Justin DeFreitas 

In Michelle Carter’s Writing in the Public Context class at San Francisco State we are to listen for and write down overheard dialogue that intrigues us, or that we find mysterious, impenetrable, or loaded with hidden meaning. 

This is an easy assignment for me because I find a lot of conversations in my own house to be curious and confusing. When I ask certain individuals who live with me where they went or what they were doing that kept them out until 4:30 in the morning, I am met with a blank stare and the reply, “That ain’t none of your business now, is it?” 

I get a similar response when I’m asked if I can make a loan of 10 dollars to someone who I have just paid three hours prior. 

“Well,” I say, “if you want a loan I think it’s only reasonable that I know what it’s for.” The standard reply is a repeat of the line, “Ain’t none of your business,” accompanied with the following explanation: “You can loan me the money, I’ll let you do that for me, but you can’t tell me what to do with it, cuz once you give it up to me, it’s mine to do with what I want, you dig?” 

When the loan is finally negotiated, I am sometimes told about its future. “This is my ‘ain’t goin’ nowhere money” the loan-ee will inform me. 

“What’s that?” I ask. “It’s money that ain’t goin’ nowhere but my pocket.” A few hours later another request for a cash infusion makes it obvious that the ‘ain’t goin nowhere money’ went, in fact, into someone else’s pocket.  

On my weekly walks with Willie to Doug’s Barbecue, we engage in a wide range of topics, that include tidbits on Willie’s life before he came to live with my husband and me, factoids about myself, and information about the people we encounter. Willie tells me that he’s got a doctor’s appointment next month at Highland Hospital. “What for?” I ask. “I got a hernia,” he replies, “and they gotta see if it’s cancer, but don’t trip now, cuz I ain’t trippin’.” But I literally do trip, over a crack in the sidewalk, and this prompts Willie to ask, “No offense now Suzy, but was you uncoordinated when you was a child?”  

At Fair Deal Meat Company we make our regular stop for sliced cheese and pressed ham. “You try that head cheese I gave you last week?” asks one of the men behind the counter. I crinkle up my nose in response. “It’s an acquired taste,” he tells me. Then he whispers, “I don’t like it all that much myself.” 

Willie and I stroll around the corner and I leave him at Doug’s doorway. “You gonna be alright walkin’ home by yourself?” asks Willie. “Of course,” I reply, turning to go. “Don’t trip, now,” he warns and I wonder if he has intended a double meaning.  

Walking past Acucare Spa at the corner of Market and 39th streets a man pushing a shopping cart asks me if I’m going in for a massage. “Not today,” I say. “Why not?” he asks. “It’s a stress reliever, and you look like you could use it.” 

I turn the corner, and run into the same woman I see every week when I walk with Willie. She is striding down the block with purpose. “How’s by you?” she asks. “Pretty good,” I answer as she passes. “Be sweet now,” she says in return.  

Yesterday morning at Temescal Pool I follow a part of a conversation between two naked women in the shower. I can barely contain my excitement at the discussion and spend much longer soaping up than intended. “I did my dissertation on the ecology of the vagina,” explains one of the women. “How interesting,” says the listener. “I suppose it’s a real forest down there, full of all kinds of things.” “Yes,” says the woman with the dissertation, “and when I lecture my students I always start by saying that fifty percent of the world’s population needs to know about this stuff because they have a vagina, and the other half should know about this because they want one.” 

I get out of the shower, dress, and run from the locker room to my car where I keep a notebook under the front seat. Maybe the same two women will be at the pool tomorrow. I can hardly wait.›

Big boss man, 

Can’t you hear me when I call? 

You ain’t so big, 

You’re just boss, that’s all. 

For 18 years, America has had its own version of the “Big Boss Man” that bluesman Jimmy Reed famously decried. First appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in 1987, Alan Greenspan has served four presidents and, in the process, become a celebrity, the most famous American economist in history.  

Despite a tendency to cloak his pronouncements in convoluted prose, Greenspan’s public statements typically have had a huge impact: When he speaks markets hold their breath and grown men tremble. Now, nearing the end of his career, the Fed chairman has a unique opportunity to use his clout to do something that would greatly benefit the United States and cement his place in history. 

Greenspan can seize this critical moment and tell the truth about our financial situation. Big Boss Al is the one person that all of us—Republican, Democrat, or Independent—would take seriously if he leveled with Americans about, first, stopping our reckless decline into debt, and second, adopting an austerity diet in order to eventually return to fiscal sanity. 

Throughout the world, there are two aspects of American culture that are continuing sources of amazement. One is our seeming endless love of violence of all sorts: our appetite for unfettered aggression in movies, TV shows, and video games; our advocacy of gun ownership; our espousal of capital punishment and blood retribution; and our militarism. The other aspect that bemuses friend and foe alike is our societal delight in living beyond our means. Americans, as individuals, carry the highest debt load in the world. Moreover, many of our largest companies are deeply in debt, the result of either baroque financial arrangements, such as leveraged buyouts and the associated use of “junk” bonds, or simply terrible management. And, of course, our biggest debtor is the federal government, which continually spends more than it takes in.  

So extreme has this malaise become that the Bush administration recently submitted a fiscal “budget,” which will take the United States deeper into debt, and intentionally excluded the $100 billion cost of the ongoing war in Iraq. (This outrage provoked hardly a murmur of protest from the press.) 

Most American economists see our financial course as disastrously unsustainable. Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman warns that the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude about our national debt risks plunging us into a depression. 

Because, of course, our national profligacy depends upon the largesse of others: China and Saudi Arabia, for example, buy huge amounts of our Treasury bills and bonds; for political reasons they are satisfied with the relatively low interest rates we pay, compared to equivalent international offerings, such as Euro bonds. If these lender countries decided to quit being such easy marks, then America would have to pay prevailing interest rates. Forcing the Federal government to actually be competitive in its borrowings would have a domino effect, causing all interest rates to spike upward. This would have a devastating affect on the economy.  

As if playing Russian roulette with the national debt weren’t bad enough, the Bush administration continues to feed American’s addiction to petroleum. This is also an unsustainable policy, one that makes our economy even more vulnerable to geopolitical perturbations, such as a terrorist attack on the oilfields in Saudi Arabia. 

The big question is: who will step forward and warn Americans about our precarious situation? Who will tell citizens the truth that we have to alter our lifestyles dramatically and begin living within our means?  

For obvious reasons, the Bush administration isn’t going to do this. Their entire 2004 campaign was based on the leitmotif that America is the best country in the world, where everything is dandy, and will stay that way as long as George is president. And, of course, Bush and his close advisers are oil people; they aren’t going to warn the country about its addiction to fossil fuel, because they are raking in big bucks from their roles as “pushers.” 

Furthermore, reversing their predilection for deficit spending would violate two cardinal rules of the administration: It would mean admitting to a mistake, confessing that continually running in the red is bad for the country, and it would shortcut the Neo-Conservative dream of shrinking the Federal government by making things so awful that Congress has no choice but to eliminate entitlement programs. As a final reason, we should remember that while George W. Bush is our first MBA president and was a CEO before entering the world of politics, the businesses he was responsible for typically were unsuccessful, suffering from severe financial problems. 

Bush, it seems, was not paying attention at Harvard Business School and, therefore, never learned the importance of balancing a budget. 

That’s where Alan Greenspan comes in. Big Boss Al is 79 and nearing the end of his remarkable tenure as Fed chair. It seems reasonable to ask that he use his supposedly non-partisan position to tell the nation the truth it desperately needs to hear. He had an opportunity on March 3 when he testified before the House of Representatives Budget Committee. 

In fact, he did warn that Federal budget deficits are “unsustainable,” and action must be taken immediately. Greenspan observed that the longer the current pattern of annual budget shortfalls continues, the more difficult it will be to make the necessary changes. He layered this warning with the observation that demographic trends, particularly the aging of baby boomers, will likely drive up costs of Social Security and Medicare. In other words, he spelt out the basic elements of America’s sorry condition—except for our petroleum addiction. 

The problem was that he stopped short; he identified the problem but not the solution. Apparently, Big Al values his role as America’s own version of the Delphi Oracle and understands that soothsayers are supposed to cloak their pronouncements in ambiguity. Thus, when pressed on how to remedy our national fiscal crisis, Greenspan took the easy way out, pontificating that America could either choose to raise taxes or to cut programmatic expenses.  

Duh! 

Big Boss Al squandered his opportunity to speak clearly and instead offered a series of Byzantine options: For example, he opined that the United States might levy a consumption tax, a proposal that immediately gained the support of economic conservatives, such as Steve Forbes, and few others. 

Rather than be a real leader and tell Congress and Americans that the Bush Administration must tell America the truth about the Federal budget and our long-term deficit, rather than signal that as a first step to fiscal sanity, tax cuts for the rich should be rescinded, Greenspan chose to play it safe. He chose to call attention to the problem but not to stick his celebrity neck out and propose a workable solution. 

The Fed Chairman’s performance displayed a leadership style that many observers have complained about for years: When the going gets tough, he’s not around. In other words, “You ain’t so big. You’re just boss, that’s all.” 

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer and activist. He can be reached at bobburnett@comcast.net. 

›

Hot Time on Adeline 

Berkeley firefighters rushed to an apartment building at 3252 Adeline St. at 11:13 a.m. Monday morning to battle a burning sofa on a burning balcony. 

Deputy Fire Chief David Orth said he suspects the sofa fire resulted from the effects of wind on a smoldering cigarette butt. 

The interior sprinkler contained the flames when they started to spread to the interior of the building and firefighters quickly extinguished the balcony blaze. 

Two building residents were treated on the scene for the effects of smoke inhalation. 

Orth estimated the damage to the balcony and one apartment unit at $30,000. Besides the occupants of the affected unit, no other residents were rendered temporarily homeless by the blaze, Orth said. 

And Almost Another 

Ten minutes before the Adeline fire, another crew rushed to the corner of Kentucky and Maryland avenues in the Berkeley hills, where a construction crew accidentally ruptured a four-inch gas main. 

Because of the severe fire danger, a full crew was required to stand by for the 90 minutes it took to repair the breach. 

“Fortunately, we didn’t have another fire at the same time,” said Orth. 

Roof Repair Ignites Wall 

A roofer doing repair work on a sun porch at 116 Southampton Ave. last Tuesday apparently triggered a smoldering blaze inside one wall of the adjoining home, which residents only discovered at 11 p.m. that night when they began to smell smoke. 

Orth said firefighters had to open a sizable section of wall to extinguish the blaze. 

Chimney Catches Fire 

Residents of 1554 Acton St. discovered their chimney was ablaze at 8:49 a.m. Wednesday, and by the time firefighters left, they were facing a hefty charge for an inspection and the possibility of a bigger bill for repairs. 

“It’s amazing that people let creosote build up in their chimneys,” Orth said, “but fires like this aren’t that uncommon in Berkeley.” 

Crash Fatality 

Jie Wang, the 24-year-old UC Berkeley graduate student whose car was broadsided by a suspected drug dealer at the intersection of Ashby and San Pablo avenues Feb. 24, died Thursday at Highland Hospital. 

A native of Shanghai, China, Wang was crossing Ashby when his car was struck by a Honda Civic driven by Adam Jones, 29, who had fled Albany Police when they attempted to question him following a suspected drug buy. 

Police chased him onto Interstate 80, where the California Highway Patrol joined in. Both Albany Police and the CHP said the high speed chase had been abandoned by the time Jones took the Ashby exit into Berkeley. 

An Albany officer took the same exit. 

Wang sustained serve brain injuries in the accident. 

Reward Offered 

The C ity of Berkeley is offering a $15,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of a suspect in the Feb. 8 beating death of Maria King, 39. 

A homeless woman, King was severely beaten and left unconscious near the corner of University Av enue and California Street. She died 12 days later in Highland Hospital without recovering consciousness. 

One suspect was arrested nearby at the time of the crime, but a second assailant, described only as a man dressed in dark clothing, remains at large. 

Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies asked anyone with information about the crime to call the Homicide Detail at 981-5741 or to e-mail police@ci.berkeley.ca.us. 

All tipsters will remain anonymous, Okies said. 

Stinky Surprise 

The burglar w ho smashed a window to loot at car parked near Russell and Kelsey streets early Thursday morning soon discovered that the bag he’d looted wasn’t a purse after all. 

When police arrived, they discovered the missing item, contents intact, not far from the s cene. 

Seems the thief had copped a diaper bag. 

Armed Robbers 

Two bandits, at least one of them packing a pistol, robbed a 25-year-old man of his cash near the corner of Francisco and Chestnut street shortly after 6 p.m. last Thursday, said Berkeley Pol ice spokesperson Officer Joe Okies. 

During the course of the robbery, one of the bandits smashed the victim in the face with his weapon, thereby elevating a robbery to an assault with a deadly weapon. 

The victim sustained only minor injuries. 

Beanie Mea nie 

A tall heavyset bandit wearing a beanie pulled a gun on a clerk in Video Maniacs and 1484 University Ave. at 6:07 p.m. Thursday and made off with the cash in the till. 

Unpleasant Discovery 

A 15-year-old woman walked along the 1900 block of Mc Gee Avenue called Berkeley Police late Friday afternoon after she spotted a masturbater parked in a green car. 

Rat Pack Robbers 

A gang of five juveniles robbed a 15-year-old West Berkeley man of his wallet during a ratpack attack in the 2100 block of Eighth Street shortly after 11:30 p.m. Friday. 

Armed Robbery Injury 

Berkeley and UC Police are seeking two men, aged 16 to 20, who shot a 29-year-old man during a robbery in the 2200 block of Derby Street shortly after 2 a.m. Saturday. 

The wound was not life-threatening, reports Officer Okies. 

The suspect and a 25-year-old friend were walking along the sidewalk when they were approach by two young men, both African Americans. 

During the encounter, one of the men fired a shot, inflicting a minor injury. The robbers and their victims promptly fled on foot in opposite directions, Okies said. 

The first suspect is described a 5’3” to 5’4” tall and of medium build. He was wearing a dark sweatshirt with lettering across the front and gray trim. 

The second suspec t was described as a thin man about 6’1” tall wearing a dark baseball cap and a dark jacket with white strips along the sleeves. 

Robbery Try Injury 

A 19-year-old man received a minor cut during an armed robbery attempt by three women in the 2400 block o f College Avenue at 1:11 a.m. Sunday, said Officer Okies. 

The victim declined medical attention. 

Balloonatics? 

Irate motorists were pelted by water balloons in the 1300 block of Piedmont Avenue at 5:21 p.m. Sunday. 

“They wanted to file a report to doc ument the incident,” said Officer Okies. 

The suspects were described as five to eight males standing on the rooftop of a building at the corner of Piedmont and Durant avenues.

The Berkeley Creeks Task Force has now met five times. According to Planning Director Dan Marks, the task force will meet, at most, only 20 more times. If Berkeley's citizens want input on the final creeks legislation they would be wise to address the task force at the March 21 meeting, held at the North Berkeley Senior Center. This is currently the only remaining scheduled meeting specifically designated to take citizen input. 

At the Feb. 28 meeting of the Berkeley Creeks Task Force, Chairperson Helen Burke asked the appointed members of the task force to consider whether the City of Berkeley needed a “Creeks Ordinance.” While numerous members of the task force were eager to articulate the reasons they believed Berkeley should have such an ordinance, not one member of the 15-member panel—a panel supposedly representative of all of the citizens of Berkeley—was willing or able to articulate a clear opposition to regulating creeks on a municipal basis. This certainly doesn’t represent the public sentiment stated during the November Berkeley City Council meeting held at Longfellow Middle School, where more than 600 angry Berkeley citizens attended. In the interest of providing a divergent perspective from the unanimous assent of the Berkeley Creeks Task Force, please allow me to offer the following answer to “Does Berkeley Need A Creek Ordinance?” 

Myth 1: If Berkeley doesn’t have a Creeks Ordinance bad things will happen 

Despite the erroneous statements by Creeks Ordinance advocates on the task force, every creek in Berkeley is currently protected by numerous laws, regulations and restrictions. Regional authorities, including the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, and the California State Department of Fish and Game, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, currently regulate all activity on all of Berkeley’s creeks. Any work in a creek bed or on a creek bank in Berkeley requires a permit from the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), called a Joint Aquatic Resource Permit Application (JARPA). This permit must be submitted to and requires the approval of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, and the California State Department of Fish and Game, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. 

I know this because I was required to give each of those agencies an application in order to repair a few feet of the ancient concrete riprap covered creek bank beside my son’s house, work that was required because a tree fell over and tore it out. I’ve had to fill out an ABAG JARPA for each of those agencies. Each of those agencies must approve, inspect, and sign off on any work done along side of, or in any Berkeley creek. 

These agencies aren’t just regulating new construction or development. I’ve been told by the Berkeley Building Department we’ll have to go through the whole regional permitting process again if we decide to seismically upgrade the foundation; if we want to repair any of the exterior or interior structure of our 60-year-old garage; if we want to replace the supports for our deck; if we want to expand our kitchen, repair our bathroom or add a bedroom upstairs. It doesn’t matter that the building has been there since 1942. It doesn’t matter that we’re not expanding the footprint of the building. It doesn’t matter that what we might want to do would have no additional impact on the creek. 

These are not the only regional authorities enforcing riparian friendly practices on Berkeley’s creeks, at the Feb. 28 task force meeting, Lorin Jensen, City of Berkeley public works supervising engineer, stated that the State of California has regulations coming into force this year and additional more restrictive regulations coming into force over the next few years that will restrict any work or development done creekside. 

Least there be a question regarding the scope of regulations safeguarding Berkeley’s creeks, the regional regulations currently in existence oversee all construction on or near creeks, regulate water quality in the creeks, regulate the aquatic viability of our creeks, and make illegal the dumping of toxics or polluting materials (including building materials or any other foreign objects) into our creeks. These regulations require property owners to restrain earth and other natural debris that may fall into the creeks as a result of acts of nature. 

The issue isn’t the lack of creek regulations, it’s the lack of enforcement of the existing regulations. Despite statements made by task force members and city staff regarding “troubling” construction on Berkeley’s creeks, including Planning Director Dan Marks’ statement that “someone” recently attempted to “just fill in a creek with a bulldozer,” all construction impinging on or degrading creeks is already highly regulated and uniformly illegal. Even the historic bugaboo sited in an earlier task force meeting regarding a woman on Strawberry Creek who wanted to enclose the creek on her property is irrelevant in today’s highly regulated creekside environment. 

Myth 2: A Berkeley Creeks Ordinance will solve Berkeley’s creeks problems 

Despite Berkeley’s idealistic (or imperialistic) desires, a Berkeley Creeks Ordinance will have little or no effect on creeks within UC Berkeley, or creeks bounded by Albany, Emeryville or Oakland, or creeks within or bounded by East Bay Municipal Utilities District lands, East Bay Parks District lands or within or bounded by unincorporated Alameda county. In each of these cases, only a super regional authority would have the necessary power to effect change. Typically creeks are not contained within a single municipality so a Berkeley Creeks Ordinance will have no relevance or import outside its boundaries. 

Additionally Berkeley is not in any shape financially to take responsibility for the substantial creek footage that is within the city’s possession or right of way. The city acknowledges that even the culverts it is responsible for are no longer safe, yet there is neither money, nor the political will to address this critical problem. 

City staff have acknowledged in these task force meetings that despite the fact that the citizens of Berkeley authorized a tax measure specifically for capital improvements to the city’s storm drain sewer system, a tax that produces $1,9 million in revenues per year, not one thin dime has been spent in the last two years on capital improvements to that system, and only a minor portion of the revenues garnered over the life of the tax have been spent on the very thing that tax was authorized for! It is clear that the City of Berkeley is not responsible enough to manage its own finances let alone what are reasonably regional issues. 

Lastly, when the City of Berkeley was recently asked to address a creek related construction situation at 2323 Glen Ave. in North Berkeley, according to statements made by city staff at the most recent task force meetings, the city’s response was to modify the existing law to exempt a single property owner from the constraints of the 1989 Creeks Ordinance. Despite that municipal laws must be equitably enforced, both historic and recent examples show that the city does not have the will to create or enforce laws equitably when responding to Berkeley’s creek problems! 

Myth 3: Berkeley has something unique to contribute to the body of creeks ordinances 

What does the City of Berkeley have to offer to the body of existing regional, state and national watershed regulation? What extra expert authority does Berkeley have when it comes to California’s and the Bay Area’s shared water resources? Berkeley can’t even accurately identify where many of these creeks are located. Berkeley can’t unimpeachably prove that these creeks are actually running in their historic locations. Berkeley can’t daylight its own creeks, nor can it maintain its culverted creeks. Berkeley can’t even manage the money it does get for infrastructure maintenance! Clearly creek regulations are not well suited to city specific solutions, especially this city. There is little of real value that the little City of Berkeley can add to these issues, but there is much harm that can come to Berkeley’s citizens from ill-advised, pie-in-the-sky ordinances. This task force would do the least harm and the most good by sending a recommendation back to 

Council that the entire Creeks Ordinance be rescinded, allowing the regional authorities to do the job they’re best suited for. This is exactly what a similarly charged creeks task force did in Santa Barbara. But that’s not going to happen because a fair and equitable Creeks Ordinance is not what the majority of task force members are looking for. 

Myth 4: Berkeley wishes to restore its creeks 

The elephant in the living room here is the word “restore.” As Public Works Engineer Lorin Jensen stated at the March 7 meeting, in an ideal world the city would not allow any development within 100 feet of the center of a creek. Even simple restoration is tremendously expensive and Berkeley simply doesn’t have the money. Nor is the City of Berkeley likely to have sufficient money to restore its creeks anytime in the foreseeable future. But more importantly, there is no agreement on what the word “restore” means. Some members of the task force use the word “restore” when they’re really talking about “daylighting.” Daylighting Berkeley’s creeks will be many, many times more expensive and intrusive in Berkeley’s urban core than simple creek restoration. Daylighting will mean the necessary removal of public and private property structures that too closely adjoin Berkeley’s numerous creeks. Daylighting Berkeley’s numerous creeks will turn Berkeley into a very different community, resembling more affluent Woodside than livable Oakland. Daylighting Berkeley’s creeks will create an idyllic, exclusive park-like community for those fortunate enough to not live too close to a creek and those wealthy enough to be able to buy whatever suits their fancy. It’s a pretty park fantasy but it’s not Berkeley. This all became painfully transparent at the March 7 task force meeting When member Diane Crowley (Wozniak) asked the task force to request that a portion of the city’s current $3.5 million transfer tax windfall be used to repair the city’s failing culverts. There was no love for the proposal and immediately task force member Joshua Brandt suggested that setting money aside for daylighting creeks would be as useful. Numerous task force members began nodding their heads and smiling. Only a fool would not have noticed this response. 

Fred Dodsworth lives near Schoolhouse Creek. 

In 1997 Oakland banned the use of pesticides on city-owned property. Since then, the city has made either two, a dozen, nine (according to an IPM document), or about half a dozen exemptions. It all depends on which day you hear Jean Quan or her policy analyst, Sue Piper, make their pesticide presentation. Bad news. Now there’s a push to employ herbicides in the hills, specifically Glyphosate (Roundup) and Triclopyr (Garlon). We urge people to speak up for alternatives to renewed dependence on toxics, the same old Monsanto snake oil. After pesticides have been applied, goat-herders wait a year plus another rainy season before they’ll let goats graze. Good move, as about 20 goats keeled over and died in the Spring of 1998, in the Carneros District of the Southern Sonoma Valley, immediately after drinking runoff from the neighbor wine grape grower’s vineyard. He is a user of Roundup, as well as other herbicides and other pesticides. Let’s not climb the toxic treadmill. Make weeding community service instead..  

Recently, Oakland City Councilember Jean Quan and the Wildfire Prevention Assessment District held a meeting at City Hall to discuss this latest roll-back. Presenters included Tom Klatt (UC Berkeley Office of Emergency Preparedness); Nancy Brownfield (IPM specialist, East Bay Regional Parks), representatives from East Bay MUD, and a former president of the California Native Plant Society. No organization identifying pesticides as poisons was allowed to make a presentation.  

I knew we were in for a ride when the Native Plant Society man asserted, “We need chemicals as one tool in our arsenal. …you cannot do it without it,” boasting he’s been using pesticides for five decades. He doesn’t know how privileged he is. At 77, he’s of the last generation grown in his mother’s womb, living his delicate years without toxic pesticides.  

East Bay Pesticide Alert gave panelists and attendees toxicological profiles full of authoritative references, many of them government studies. Unfortunately, panelists ignored these profiles. Instead, they parroted words originating with chemical companies: small quantity; least toxic; minimal risk; reasonable; proper; limited; judicious; careful. Now imagine a child in the ER, gasping for air due to pesticide drift; hikers tracking residues home to pets; wild animals dying brutal chemical deaths; native plants dying, inviting non-natives to take over—the bleak reality of pesticide use. 

Pesticide manufacturers want to focus the public’s attention on their products’ so-called “active” ingredients. But we also need to look at the so-called “inert” ingredients, and the break-down products of both, the metabolites. For instance, a surfactant added to Roundup, POEA, is routinely contaminated in manufacturing by the carcinogen dioxane. One of Roundup’s metabolites is formaldehyde, another carcinogen. Triclopyr breaks down into TCP. In lab tests, TCP exposures as small as 0.2 parts per million inhibited the growth of neurons. And TCP appears to accumulate in fetal brain tissue. Tumors in rats and mice, kidney problems in dogs, the list goes on and on (see links to profiles at www.eastbaypesticidealert.org). 

But you wouldn’t know this from listening to Nancy Brownfield, who just goes by the labels. No wonder every ranger I talk to is agitated by her forcing pesticide use in the Regional Parks. 

Proponents of herbicide use say we must poison the environment in order to save it. 

But soil health is key to getting rid of fire-welcoming non-natives. Mycorrhizal fungi colonize about the roots of native plants, funneling them nutrients, while starving non-natives of nutrition, tying off the tumor, so to speak. But herbicides inhibit this crucial work. Pesticides are not the answer. 

We’ve demanded an environmental impact report. Both the Friends of Sausal Creek and the Sierra Club had made the same request, back in November of 2003, as vegetation management had been done in such a way as to cause some problems due to lack of proper oversight by the city. Now the city is ready to unleash poisons, and still has produced no EIR. Are they trying to weasel out of a process intended to make sure damage is not done to the environment, people or animals, a process we would expect based on the California Environmental Quality Act? What about the fact that we are talking Prop 65 chemicals here? How about the endangered Pallid Manzanita and Alameda Whipsnake? How about pollinators whose work would be lost to the whole region? What about acclimated species which depend on eucalyptus, for instance? 

Where is their list of alternatives tried? Oh, yeah. That’s right: The Wildfire Prevention Assessment District body was just formalized in November of 2004, with monies from assessees being due in early January, 2005. The Oakland Tribune’s article of Jan. 14 was the first clue most anyone, including those who were assessed, got about the plan for pesticide use (and yes, Jean and Sue, we are glad you recently, finally, acknowledged that herbicides are a category of pesticides, as are fungicides, rodenticides, etc.). Interesting to hear from Ms. Quan that she and Friends of Sausal Creek had been working together for over half a year already on drafting the pesticides plan… the plan preceded even the formal existence of the WPAD body! They say timing is everything. So between November, 2004 and Jan. 14, 2005 were they out like busy beavers trying alternatives to toxics? One thing we do know is that we have never been told how they could have determined, before the existence of the WPAD body, that no alternatives to toxics were viable. People have been told that the city is doing this as a last resort. How, exactly, did they get from A-Z in one and one-half month’s time? Why, they didn’t even leave themselves a full winter, or any spring, to try out a hot foam system employing corn and coconut as its base, or a high-pressure hot water system which shows great promise? A simple flaming machine (backpack and wand system) used in many municipalities could be a great alternative for paths. What about good, old-fashioned discing, or using a weed wrench? Maybe controlled burns which native people’s used successfully without burning down their much more quickly-flammable homes? Corn starch could prove a good option, as could 10 percent vinegar. Mowing is an old fave, and cherry pickers to avoid creating erosion on sensitive hillsides could work in some settings.  

The $1.7 or $1.8 million available yearly (again, they’ve been loose with numbers…. as I told them, I could put that $100,000 discrepancy to good use here) would buy over 80,000 hours labor, based on $20/ per hour, representing $15 hourly wage, plus $5 hourly to make up for lack of benefits paid independent contractors…. to do hand pulling and other non-toxic methods. With reasonable wages you could retain the knowledge base season to season. Make the job financially-worthwhile enough that people plan their years based on working certain months for the WPAD. Maybe put $30,000 into a serious volunteers coordinator, whose job and therefore wage (but not benefits) would be scaled back after the first couple years of outreach. Keep the benefits intact, again, to retain the knowledge base. Sue Piper suggests over $124,000+ might be paid to someone to oversee the program. Who would that be? Who would decide on criteria used to judge someone’s appropriateness for such a job? Do assessees really want that kind of wage given? Is someone already sitting in the wings, chosen? How about attracting serious people who want to make sure no one uses pesticides, ever, in the hills? People paid reasonably, drawn by the issue, not the wage?  

Denmark has banned the use of Roundup, and Triclopyr has been contaminating watersheds all over the place. What the heck is this reckless behavior going to mean to our precious green spaces and our very lives in the long run? Are we ready to dump more toxic problems on our kids?  

This is a regional issue. What Oakland does will influence municipalities around the Bay Area. Information is available. No compromising around health! Stop toxic pesticide use. 

Maxina Ventura is a chronic effects researcher for East Bay Pesticide Alert. 

?

• 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

If you ever wondered why the Berkeley Public Schools are in such a state of chaos, you don’t need to look farther than the School Board’s pathetically inept handling of the East Campus/Derby Street Park issue at the March 9 meeting. The meeting opened with a series of student speakers, clearly and passionately articulating their need for adequate facilities and how the board needed to move forward on the Derby Street Park project to fill that need. The opposition: a series of speakers unaffiliated with the schools, who all professed their concern for the student’s plight, their personal or professional unwillingness to do anything about it that might effect their own personal interests, and their belief that the process could only be fair as long as it excluded any option other than the ones they could personally accept. So, who did the School Board choose to support? If you guessed the students and their needs, you haven’t been around Berkeley politics very long. While some (Doran and Rivera) stood firm on principle to the board’s historical commitment to the larger, multi-purpose, Derby-closed plan, the majority decided to duck and run. Why? Well, John Selawsky—always reliably more loyal to his wife’s Ecology Center friends than to the students he has sworn to serve—seemed to think that a baseball field would cost $3 million (actual cost estimate of closing Derby street on top of the current Derby-open plan: about $500,000). Of course, the motion John voted against was to come up with an actual cost estimate for the field, but why bother to learn the facts when you can use wild exaggeration so effectively. (By the way, if you are wondering how John and his wife can be “neighbors” of East Campus for purposes of arguing against the field, but not close enough a “neighbor” to be legally precluded from voting on the project as a conflict of interest, well, John answered that question last night: You aren’t officially a neighbor of a school district project unless you live within 300 feet of the project. Good news in a way: This view will reduce the number of people who can publicly oppose any project as a “neighbor” to a handful.) Shirley Issel mumbled something incomprehensible about trust—maybe someday she will be able to explain her feelings more articulately to the students who trusted her previous public commitment to the Derby-closed project. Nancy Riddle seemed to support the Derby-closed project, but think that the City Council needed to do something before the School Board did, then effectively took the whole issue off the table for everyone by voting against it. Go figure. It fell to Michele Lawrence to explain the real reason the district won’t address the needs of its students: The administration is so mired in other crises of mismanagement that they just don’t have time right now to do anything difficult or time-consuming for their core constituency, the students of Berkeley. 

The truest and most significant moment of this whole sorry affair was the third vote cast for moving forward on the Derby-closed plan, the articulate and powerful statement of the student director, Lili Dorman, who restated what had become obvious from the rest of the evening: At the Berkeley School Board, students (and their votes) just don’t count. 

Will Hirsch 

• 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Now that the shock is starting, barely, to subside, it’s obvious that what’s needed to eventually build a high school ball field is a single, joint public commitment from the schools superintendent, the mayor, the school board and the City Council to build the field. 

Without such a commitment, the issue will remain a political hot potato, officials can duck and mumble, and the city will remain divided. Such a commitment would ensure that the interim part one of the project, which will come before the board fairly soon, remains interim and does not create politically charged facts on the ground—for instance, a tot lot or other neighborhood oriented facilities that have a permanent feel to them. 

Such a commitment would not mean that a field would be built tomorrow. It would mean that the city and the school district could begin costing out the project, set timelines for decisions and keep the momentum going. 

James Day 

Phyllis Orrick 

• 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

On March 9 the School Board voted down a resolution to study the design of a regulation baseball field on the East Campus site, a plan that would require closing Derby Street between Milvia and Martin Luther King Jr. Way.  

For the last several months representatives of the East Campus Neighborhood Association (ECNA) and other Berkeley residents have participated in a community design process led by the school district and their architects to design new sports fields that fit within the boundaries of the existing block bound by Derby, MLK Way, Carleton and Milvia. This group is close to reaching consensus on a plan that features a much-needed practice field for football, soccer, lacrosse and field hockey varsity teams as well as provides a practice infield and batting cages for the baseball teams. To raise the issue of closing Derby Street at this late stage threatened community trust built up through this design process. We are encouraged that the School Board recognized the importance of remaining faithful to the process that they themselves set into motion six months ago. 

The members of ECNA were also impressed by the testimony of Berkeley High School baseball players regarding the lack of adequate facilities for their sport in Berkeley, and it is clear that all members of School Board place a high priority on finding better accommodations for the baseball team. As parents and residents, we support the school district and city efforts to improve athletic facilities for all of our students. 

It is critical that these decisions be grounded in the realities of Measure A funding. The worst outcome, in our view, is for the school district to pursue a plan for a regulation baseball facility that there is no funding for, let alone neighborhood support. To allow the East Campus site to continue to languish as it has for the last five years, unused and unusable, benefits no one. The current plans for new playing fields within the borders of the existing site are relatively affordable and could be built now. Our students, including the baseball players, need all the fields we can afford to build. 

ECNA supports an on-going discussion of these issues in a setting that favors an open, respectful exchange of ideas and issues rather than contentious debate. We would like the opportunity to explain in detail why we strongly favor keeping Derby Street open and to discuss city-wide alternatives. Likewise the baseball field advocates deserve an opportunity to explain their concerns and goals to the neighborhoods and community members. We think there is room for cooperation on this matter, and that cooperation will best serve the needs of our kids and of the community. 

Peter Waller, Susi Marzuola and members of the  

East Campus Neighborhood Association 

• 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

After attending the School Board meeting last Wednesday night, I was perplexed that neighbors of the Derby baseball field were opposed to a field in their backyard because of the threat of drugs and traffic to the area. Of course, drugs are an issue in any neighborhood and nobody likes traffic. But fear should not be used to turn neighbors against the issue. The farmers market posses similar issues. This land is suppose to be School Board property and used for the best interest of the students and the students needs aren’t being addressed. No one mentions that the students have been without a field for far too long and this is a necessity. Whose needs are being served here anyway?  

Dan Clark 

• 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I’m really disappointed that the School Board is refusing to build a baseball field at Derby Street. Instead, the School Board is listening to neighbors who are not open to other peoples’ needs. Isn’t school money supposed to be used for the students? 

Years ago, lots of really great ball players came from this area: Frank Robinson, Joe Morgan, Rickey Henderson, Gary Pettis, Dave Stewart and the great Joe DiMaggio. 

We still have many talented players on the Berkeley High team, but we don’t have a good field to play on. Baseball is one of those sports that anyone of any build can play. You don’t have to be 6’5” tall and you don’t have to weigh 250 pounds. The one requirement of baseball is that a team have a field that will help them to be as good as they can be, and San Pablo doesn’t meet that requirement. 

It seems to me that many who are in a position to make decisions about Derby Street are in favor of the proposal put forward to build a baseball field for Berkeley High. Why can’t they get their act together and make it happen? 

Grant Long 

Berkeley High baseball player 

• 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I’m writing to you about the most important thing in my life: baseball. More specifically about how the Berkeley High Baseball program requested a new baseball field that is badly needed, at Derby Street. Our request to the Berkeley Unified School District Board was denied March 9. It was voted down 3-2. I was the only remaining player when this verdict was reached along with the head of the baseball program Tim Moellering and a few other coaches and parents. When I heard that it was voted down my heart sank. The night started off with about 60 players from all three teams, freshman, varsity and junior varsity, and around 20 parents and coaches. Four players spoke and made compelling arguments about why we need this baseball field. Many of the people who were opposed to the baseball field spoke as well, and in my mind, made invalid arguments or suggestions that were inadequate. 

At the board meeting all of the members of the board spoke. Two of the three members of the board who voted against the proposal of the Derby Street Field said that they were in favor of closing Derby and building a regulation size baseball field, but they said that they couldn’t vote for it because the change in the proposal was made at the last minute. If you are for it why not for vote for it. What kind of example does this set for the students of Berkeley? 

The Berkeley School Board was created to make decisions based on the needs of Berkeley schools, teachers, and students. Now don’t you think if Berkeley High baseball, made up of Berkeley High students, needs a baseball field then the School Board would support them if they asked for one? But in the meeting on March 9 the School Board supported the people opposing the field (the neighbors in the area) not the students. Yet the neighbors never provided a reason for why they opposed the baseball field. Why not have a well maintained baseball field with a bunch of nice kids rather then a bunch of falling down buildings? 

There are about 60 students who participate in Berkeley High baseball. Currently, we have one field, San Pablo Park, that is the only one useable for our three baseball teams. How are we expected to have sixty kids practice on one field? San Pablo Park doesn’t even belong to Berkeley High, it belongs to the city. We have no priority over the field. We get kicked off of it by people like Albany Little League. Most of the teams in our league that we have to compete against, have not only one field but multiple fields for their team’s. 

The decision on March 9 made it so that I won’t be able to play on the Derby Street field before I graduate. However, I will still fight for it for the future students of Berkeley High. I hope that the School Board comes to realize that after giving the basketball players a new gym, we need a new baseball field. And the next time that they make a decision on a new field they vote yes. 

Saul Sutcher 

• 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

On May 5, 2004 the BUSD Board passed a motion, 4-0-1, stating “their support for pursuing the development of a large multi-purpose athletic facility that would include a regulation sized baseball field.” On March 9, 2005, less than one year later the board voted down, 3-2, spending a relatively small sum ($10,000) to amend an ongoing planning process for East Campus to obtain the information required to make a decision about building this baseball field. What happened? 

After the May 5 vote a fair amount of effort by a number of people went into helping BUSD achieve its stated goal. Prior efforts to develop a baseball field at East Campus met stiff resistance from surrounding neighbors. In past years the neighbors enlisted the support of the Farmer’s Market who in previous plans was to be relocated off the site.  

After the vote, during the summer of 2004, talks were held about a land swap, Derby Street going to the school district while the school district would give up their western frontage along MLK. The Farmers’ Market would be moved off Derby and relocated along MLK. In the relocation the Farmers’ Market would have the same or greater square footage than they currently occupy; frontage along a very busy street; a shed roof with lights built to cover their farmers who were still selling during the wet months and; access to water, power and bathrooms from a restroom/equipment building adjacent to their site. Easily a superior facility to what they currently occupy.  

In the fall of 2004, new council people were elected. The issue of the baseball field was discussed and in the opinion of many people familiar with city hall, the votes were there to approve the closure of Derby and the potential land swap. But the council wasn’t going to take on this political hot potato without some serious commitment by the school board.  

What were needed next were a plan and an accepted financing package by the school board to build the field. The field was well on its way.  

Enter Michelle Lawrence, superintendent. Now there are many things going on at Berkeley High and building a baseball field, much less a controversial one, is just not something that is very high on her list of things to do. But feeling some pressure to do something with East Campus in late fall she had BUSD, with board approval, enter into a design contract for East Campus that specifically excluded dealing with the issue of closing Derby and building the regulation size baseball field the board said it wanted only a few months ago.  

In the board’s mind this plan would result in the demolition of some buildings on site that had become a neighborhood blight as well as the development of a “temporary” athletic field. But in the Berkeley way, this “temporary” field took on a life of its own and now includes such things as a practice infield, basketball courts, community garden and tot lot, etc. Lew Jones, who is overseeing the planning and development of East Campus for BUSD acknowledges it makes no sense to undertake this “temporary” development if BUSD intends to build a baseball field within a few years.  

By early February of 2005 it had become clear to the larger community that this was no temporary field that was being planned. Indeed this was THE field and the regulation baseball field the board said they wanted wasn’t even being looked at. Given that this was the permanent field, the consultant contract needed to be amended to include developing a plan for a baseball field along with the costs for closing Derby. Cost $10,000. Seemed like a relatively mild, good management idea. After all, who in the world would say they wanted to build a baseball field and then reject spending a small sum to find out what it would cost? The board of BUSD. 

Nancy Riddle and Shirley Issel, school board members who had previously voted to develop a baseball field only nine months ago, now voted against spending the money to add a baseball field to one of the East Campus options. Altering the 4-0-1 votes for to 3-2 against. As they voted against the change, their stated reason was that they didn’t want to disrupt the community process that had been put in place. However, according to them, they still supported the baseball field.  

Now you might wonder how these school board members can say they support putting in a baseball field but vote against spending a small amount of money to have plans and costs developed so they can make a good management decision as to whether the costs of building this field are in keeping with the perceived benefits.  

The answer lies in the power of Michelle Lawrence and the inability of these elected officials to take responsibility for controversial decisions. If Derby Street is an example of how BUSD functions, it’s Michelle Lawrence that sets priorities and determines what is going to happen in the schools, not the School Board. There is nothing wrong with this other than that many people in the community are under the impression that it worked the other way around. 

As for the two school board members when they agreed to the initial contract, according to Nancy Riddle, “Our linear thinking was that we would first develop a temporary field and then a permanent field later.” The process that emerged was one that specifically excluded the entire segment of the community that wanted a baseball field while including only those people who didn’t want a baseball field. What kind of public process looks at only one side of an issue? Not a very good one.  

But these two elected officials facing not only Michelle’s reluctance but the wrath of surrounding neighbors, could not bring themselves to agree with the obvious, that the community process that was set up by BUSD was fundamentally flawed. It didn’t serve a large segment of the community who had as much right to have their views presented and discussed, as did the neighbors. Somehow, those of us who are used to Berkeley politics have always thought that one of the benefits and nightmares of Berkeley was that public officials would always support a process where the views of all members of the community were heard and weighed before decisions were made. Not in this case.  

Go ask Nancy and Shirley why they felt it was important for BUSD to continue the one sided community process and only pay to develop a plan with no baseball field while it was not important for them to consider the needs of their students and the rest of the community and develop a plan for the baseball field they stated they wanted on May 5. Elected officials need to be able to see when the path chosen is headed in the wrong direction and have the backbone to push for corrections when required. This inability should concern all of us as it transcends the issue of the baseball field.  

Doug Fielding 

™

The San Francisco Flower and Garden Show takes place this week, replete with rare plants, elaborate and unusual display gardens with themes ranging from high concept to the horticultural equivalent of comfort food, and a myriad of garden-related products and services for sale. 

Full garden displays, thematic displays, and sales areas make up three major elements of the five-day show inside San Francisco’s Cow Palace.  

If you go, a sensible agenda is to start with the big garden displays, take a swing through the thematic exhibits, and finish up with the sales areas. Allow at least half a day—there are six acres of displays and sale booths. 

The main oval arena of the Cow Palace is geographically central to the show.  

The arena floor is subdivided into irregular garden plots. Each garden is planned and assembled by a different designer or design team. Curtains block off the surrounding galleries of seats, and the displays are brightly and artificially lighted from above.  

Look up above the arena floor and a bit of the effect is lost, but seen up close the displays do give a pretty convincing impression of outdoors. 

Most of the exhibitors are in professional practice as landscape architects or designers; a few are teams of students from landscape design programs (including that at UC Berkeley), and this year there’s even a display garden sponsored by the Mycological Society of San Francisco. 

These are opulent productions. Whole ponds, working fountains, and waterfalls often appear, along with woodland glades, room or cottage-sized garden structures, tons of soil, mulch, and decorative stone, lawns and patios, meandering paths, and full sized trees and shrubs in either ornamental planters or boxes concealed by hardscape and other plantings. 

The styles of the gardens are very eclectic, but if these displays could talk, most would probably say one of two things. “You can have me, but only if you have enough money.” “Never seen anything like THIS before, have you?”  

Some displays are just landscape eye-candy with little connection to reality. For example, plants that require a bit of room to spread their roots and leaves are sometimes shown packed impossibly close together for visual effect.  

In other displays in recent years, “outdoor rooms” complete with fine wooden or upholstered furniture looked enticing at first glance. In the real outdoors moisture, sun, and insects would quite quickly make them less attractive and useable, unless the owner is a Martha Stewart with endless money and staff to keep up appearances. 

Still, the displays are fun to walk through, and some can be quite simply beautiful for their specimen plants or overall design.  

This year some of the more intriguing display descriptions include “a contemporary San Francisco Garden,” “Waterfall Fantasy with Countryside Comforts,” “American Arts and Crafts Garden,” a garden inspired by a Petrarch love poem, and a Japanese tea garden layout planted with succulents, called “Succulent Origami.” 

At each display there should be someone on hand to answer questions if you want to know what that stunning flower is or who built the remarkable pergola, or why “enormous bales of aluminum scrap” are incorporated in one garden. 

Beyond the big exhibits, smaller thematic displays are scattered in the outer pavilions and even the hallways. The San Francisco Bonsai Society’s display is worth a lingering look, as is an annual display of newly introduced plants.  

A section of one pavilion is devoted to educational organizations, mainly government programs, and non-profits. Spend some time there if you want to bond with fellow iris, rhododendron, or native plant lovers or to learn about water conservation, bee-keeping, invasive plants, or mosquito abatement. 

More than 60 free seminars, demonstrations, and presentations will be offered by various gardening experts during the show, and several food service areas. Check the program for exact schedule. 

Next, the shopping. The show offers hundreds of vendors and dealers with booths. A sizable pavilion is devoted to orchid dealers and another contains mainly garden furniture and outdoor spas and cooking equipment. 

The “Plant Market” houses specialty nurseries and growers from big companies to backyard operations, most offering hard to find and good quality potted plants. Some of these dealers sell direct to the public only at shows like this. 

Besides plants, vendors offer bird feeders and bird houses, hot tubs, pole pruners, concrete pavers, ornamental stones and fountains, miracle fertilizers, amusing and weird garden sculpture, outdoor lighting, greenhouses, benches and barbecues, and almost any other garden product you can imagine.  

Some shopping tips. If you see a type of item you’re interested in, take a quick turn around the rest of the sales area to see whether anyone else has the same thing at a different price.  

Ask yourself whether that plant will really do well in your home and garden. Instant allure can easily turn into disappointment or regret. 

Scattered package check areas can temporarily relieve you of your purchases; just make sure you get back to pick up your items before the show closes each day. 

Finally, if you are interested in something that’s beyond your budget at full price, Sunday afternoon, the last day of the show, is the time to look for discounts. 

Dealers who have traveled long distances or don’t want the cost or bother of hauling merchandise back home, especially if it’s heavy, bulky, or perishable, can offer enticing discounts on all or part of their remaining stock. 

The show runs Wednesday, March 16, through Sunday, March 20, 9 a.m.-8 p.m., except Sunday, when the show closes at 6:30 p.m.  

Tickets are $20, free for children under four, $7 for children 4-11, $13 “half day” discounted ticket if you arrive after 3 p.m. 

Call 1-800-569-2832 for ticket information, or visit www.gardenshow.com. 

The Cow Palace is on Geneva Avenue in southeastern San Francisco, west of Highway 101. Pay parking is available in lots at the Cow Palace.  

F

When successful Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo refused to testify before the 1947 House Committee On UnAmerican Activities, he became the stuff of legend—one of the Hollywood Ten, imprisoned for 11 months in 1950, condemned to the blacklist—and selling scripts through third-party “fronts.”  

Years later, he would explore this period of duplicity and shame in his book, The Time of the Toad. 

But a more immediate legacy is in the letters he wrote—from prison, from exile both internal and foreign (for a time, the Trumbos lived in Mexico City)—letters to family, friends, and in response to those voices, public and private, he regarded as hypocritical. 

These letters form more than the hook, the pretext for Trumbo—Red, White and Blacklisted (now playing a very limited engagement at San Francisco’s Post Street Theatre). They are the texts of the monologues delivered brilliantly by Brian Dennehy, from Trumbo’s desk (or cell) to the world. 

There have been collections of Trumbo’s letters, but the present theatrical was conceived by Trumbo’s son, Christopher, and overcomes the objections and prejudices that usually come with solo performances. Even such a fine actor as Dennehy (who goes to London next week to repeat his celebrated portrayal of Willie Loman in the late Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman) would seem to be doing only a spirited reading of Trumbo’s letters; he never gets up from behind the desk he’s stationed at, nor does he take off his reading glasses. 

That pre-interpretation doesn’t come to terms with the professionalism and taste of all concerned with this production, from Christopher Trumbo to director Peter Askin, to Dennehy and his colleague William Zielinski, who plays Christopher—part-narrator, sometimes-straightman who sets up the circumstances in which the letters were written, and reacts to them—a character framing a one-character show. 

There’s no real interaction between the players (once, Dennehy touches Zielinski on the sleeve without looking at him)—but the value of the letters, both as document and as literature, translate through Dennehy’s careful presentation of Trumbo’s persona and spirited delivery of his pithy verbiage into that theatrical convention Eugene O’Neill (of whose plays Dennehy is one of the great living exponents) imported into American drama—the Strindbergian monologue, a monologue spoken to another character who doesn’t reply. 

Whether blasting a false friend in the industry as “a moral hermaphrodite,” or responding to calls to give in to the reality of the blacklist, or writing the mother of a young friend who fronted a script that sold (the friend had died, so Trumbo had to explain who he was and why he had a claim to the property under another man’s name), or sending his son at college the sex manual of Albert Ellis, M. D., Trumbo addresses his reader (and Dennehy the audience) with a dense, wryly humorous, sometimes outrageous diction that goes to the quick of whatever situation that attracted his beacon-like attention. 

He excoriates hypocrites (reminding everyone that the government could not enforce punishment beyond jail--only members of the industry with blacklisting and gossip), writes tenderly to his family from prison (with his prisoner’s number following a full signature) and discusses the hopes and the failures they’ve shared with the friends and colleagues of his generation. 

His fearless, contentious stance—especially regarding institutional oversight of the hazing of his daughter at school—gives more than a hint of the obloquy the unrepentant blacklistee (and his family and friends) had to suffer. 

Director-screenwriter Samuel Fuller (whose iconoclastic films earned him the simultaneous slurs of “Commie” and Fascist) recalled in his memoirs, A Third Face, how he found himself brandishing a bottle in the face of a conservative columnist who was trying to bait Trumbo into a fight at a Hollywood restaurant bar. Fuller later remarks that Trumbo was one of those whose company he came to prefer to the industry’s cocktail party camaraderie. 

Fuller’s widow, Christa Lang—who introduced Angela Davis to Jane Fonda at Trumbo’s house—remarks, “What Sam appreciated was that Trumbo was an idealist, yet at the same time open, humorous, with great lucidity about human nature—no pretentious intellectual. He was one of the real Hollywood Ten—not, as Billy Wilder said, one of those whose complaints were later fashionable, ‘when the Hollywood Ten became the Hollywood 360.’” 

Trumbo’s script for The Brave One, under the name of Robert Rich, won a 1956 Oscar. A producer picked up the award for the fictional Mr. Rich; Trumbo never got the statuette. In 1960 his name appeared on the scripts for Exodus and Spartacus. A speech given at the Screenwriters Guild has him commenting that everyone—left, right and center—was either hurt by the blacklist or collaborated with it—often under duress. 

In a final letter to a colleague and friend, Trumbo speculated on the lasting value of his novels (only accepting Johnny Got His Gun) and the business of screenwriting (stating his belief that the average Hollywood script was better than the average Broadway play), He recalled the accomplishments they’d hoped for when younger, that he’d be able to climb a hill a little higher than the ridge he believed he was standing on. 

After the show, Trumbo’s letters seem to be perhaps his best contribution, both to American literature and to the memory of his generation—their hopes for social justice, eulogized in these lines from “Pro Nobis” by poet George Oppen, another ‘50s exile in Mexico: “Tho’ I had hoped to arrive/At an actuality/In the mere number of us/And record now/That I did not.//Therefore pray for us/In the hour of our death indeed.” 

8 p.m. Tuesday, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday through March 20.  

Post Street Theatre 

450 Post Street, San Francisco 

(415) 771-6900 or  

www.poststreettheatre.com?

Saxophonist Branford Marsalis said recently that jazz musicians are scared of playing John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. 

Coltrane’s most sacred work, Supreme is deceptively simple sounding music, and, of course, therein lies its power. It has the power to move listeners (“dear listeners” as Coltrane begins the liner notes, the word “dear” clearly meant to be taken in its dual role as both a salutation and an endearment) to tears of acknowledgment, resolution, pursuance and praise (psalm). 

It also has power to move most musicians aspiring to play it scurrying to the woodshed for cover, daunted and haunted by the demands of this composition. What is demanded of listener and performer alike is an application of the heart. 

For musicians the dual threat of either sounding too corny or too abstract looms large over any attempt to re-create this unique masterpiece. Coltrane wanted any intellectual approach to Supreme to be gotten out of the way (hence “Acknowledgment,” the name of the first movement) so that all may begin absorbing Supreme through the core of every soul: the heart. 

Fine for the listener, for the heart’s ears are always more in tune than the mind’s ears. But for musicians, listening and learning with the heart requires a discipline that is foreign to their training. For the Branford Marsalis Quartet, including the leader on tenor sax, Joey Calderazzo ( piano), Eric Revis (bassist), and Jeff “Tain” Watts (drums), the challenge on opening night of the 2005 spring season of San Francisco Jazz’s concert series was to touch all the right keys, strings and skins in an even more organic way than they are used to, that they might convert a captured audience into an enraptured congregation. 

As evidenced by the constant standing ovations throughout followed by the beatific quiet of the exiting human flow, the Branford Marsalis Quartet ultimately touched hearts, sending the “dear listeners” away in silent contemplation of the remainder of San Francisco Jazz’s Coltrane tribute concert series. The band’s approach was successful because they achieved a perfect balance of rhythmic groove and compelling free jazz. The solos and accompaniments often settled into comforting gospel-like sways. Yet, also offered at subconsciously appropriate moments was the liberating abandonment of each musician’s Coltrane-inspired (but not Coltrane-imitated) speaking in tongues. 

In the early to mid-1960s the language of the “new thing,” supported by releases on Bernard Tollman’s appropriately named ESP label (short for esperanza), such as Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity, Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz and the spiritually toned compositions of Charles Mingus (Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting) and Sun Ra (and Ra Arkestra saxman John Gilmore who initially inspired Coltrane’s forays into out playing) had begun to take on biblical proportions among black jazz artists. 

In this atmosphere, John Coltrane recorded jazz’s holiest of the holy. The careful griot-like passage of this music and its type through the hands of artists like Branford Marsalis continues in all its permutations, surfacing March 12 at the Masonic auditorium to attract and keep a multitude looking for a source of lasting warmth. 

The San Francisco Jazz Spring Festival opened March 12 and continues through June 26, comprising 42 concerts and more than 200 musicians. For schedule and ticket information, call (415) 788-7353 or see www.sfjazz.org.

TUESDAY, MARCH 15 

THEATER 

The Shotgun Players Theatre Lab, “Monster in the Dark” Mon. and Tues. at 8 p.m. through March 29, at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. at MLK. Tickets are $10. 841-6500. 

FILM 

International Asian American Film Festival “62 Years and 6500 Miles Between” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

John Kelly discusses “the Great Morality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Chamber Performances Baguette Quarette at 8 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. 525-5211. www.berkeleychamberperform.org 

Creole Belles with Andrew Carriere at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054.  

Jeremy Cohen Duo at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

René Marie at 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Also on Wed. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 16 

THEATER 

Berkeley Repertory Theater “For Better or Worse” opens at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. and runs through April 24. Tickets are $20-$55. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

“Bright River” A hip-hop retelling of Dante’s Inferno, at 8 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Tickets are $12-$35 available from 415-256-8499. www.inhousetickets.com 

FILM 

Cine Contemporaneo “25 Watts” the story of three young people bored with life in Montevideo at 7 p.m. in the CLAS Conference Room, 2334 Bowditch St. 642-2088.  

International Asian American Film Festival “Cavite” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Azadeh Moaveni describes “Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

“‘The Road to Calvary’ by Peter Paul Rubens” a conversation with Alejandro Garcia-Rivera and David Stedman at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave. 642-1295.  

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

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Music of Lent An organ concert at noon at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway. 444-3555. www.firstchurchoakland.org 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$54. 642-9988.  

“Lalo” and Jack West at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Red Archibald & The International Blues Band at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

La Verdad at 8 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

The Black Brothers at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

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

Rutro and the Logs at 9:30 p.m. at The Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $5. 444-6174.  

THURSDAY, MARCH 17 

EXHIBTITIONS 

“Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens” guided tour at 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave. 642-1295.  

FILM 

Film and Video Makers at Cal: “Radical Drifts” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

Conversations on “Art and Meaning” A screening and discussion of the short films of Dickson Schneider, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center. Free. 644-6893.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“The Pre-Columbian in Contemporary U.S. Latina Art” with Prof. Laura E. Perez at 4:30 p.m. at the Phoebe Hearst Museum, Bancroft at College. 643-7648. 

“Mark Manders: Matrix 214” Curator’s Talk with Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson at 12:15 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave. 642-1295.  

Tom Reiss discovers “The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life” at 7:30 p.m. at at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Word Beat Reading Series with featured readers Cathy Barber, Ben-David Seligman and Tom Odegaard at 7 p.m. at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. 526-5985. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$54. 642-9988.  

Jake Amerding, folk and bluegrass, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $16.50-$17.50. 548-1761.  

St. Patrick’s Night with Blind Duck at 7:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $4. 843-2473.  

St. Patty’s Day Celebration with Irish music, step-dancing and bagpiper at 5 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

Dave Bernstein Duo at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

David Benoit at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $15-$26. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Selector with Drunken Monkey at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Lozen, Genghis Khan at 9:30 p.m. at The Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $5. 444-6174.  

FRIDAY, MARCH 18 

THEATER 

Berkeley Repertory Theater “For Better or Worse” at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. through April 24. Tickets are $20-$55. 647-2949.  

Central Works, “Enemy Combatant” opens at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Performances are Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. through March 26. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1381. www.centralworks.org 

Impact Theatre, “Othello” at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean Theater, 1834 Euclid. Thurs.- Sat. through March 19. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468.  

“Frank Oliver’s Twisted Cabaret 2005,” Fri., Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets are $12-$20. 925-798-1300. 

Shotgun Players “The Just” by Albert Camus. Thurs.- Sun. at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. through April 10. Tickets are sliding scale $10-$30. 841-6500.  

Un-Scripted Theater Company “You Bet Your Improvisor!” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. through March 26 at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St. at Telegraph. Tickets are $7-$10. 415-869-5384. www.unscripted.com 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Spring” paintings by Michael Grady and Judy Poldi. Reception for the artists at 7 p.m. at Artbeat Gallery, 1887 Solano Ave. Exhibition runs to April 23. 527-3100. 

“Bucky Printers” A group printmaker show with works varying in styles from the traditional woodblock to experimental stitching and stencil. Opening reception at 7:30 p.m. at Boontling Gallery, 4224 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. boontlinggallery@hotmail.com 

FILM 

Edgar G. Ulmer: “The Black Cat” at 7 p.m. and “Strange Illusion” at 8:30 p.m. at Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

John Rowe featured poet at 7:30 p.m. at at the Fellowship Café, Cedar & Bonita Sts. Donation $5-$10. 841-4824. 

“Divine Madness - Women Poets” with Kathryn Waddell Takara, Opal Plamer Adisa, Karla Brundage and others at 7 p.m. at Barnes and Noble, 5604 Bay Street, Emeryville. 325-4055. 

Joel Olsen on “The Abolition of White Democracy” at 7 p.m. at AK Press Warehouse, 674-A 23rd St. 208-1700. www.akpress.org 

“Althea Thauberger/Matrix 215” Conversation with Matthew Higg and Shannon Jackson at 3:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave. 642-1295. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble at 7 p.m. at the Florence Schwimely Little Theater, BHS.  

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$54. 642-9988.  

Oakland East Bay Symphony performs Verdi, Tchaikovsky Armienta and Chabrier at 8 p.m. at Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $15-$60. 625-8497.  

Celebrating Vernal Equinox Organ concert at 7:30 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway. Donation $10. 444-3555.  

WomenSing Concert “A Musical Odyssey” featuring Josef Rheinberger’s “Regina Coeli” and Benjamin Britten’s “Missa Brevis,” at 8:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $16-$20. 925-974-9169.  

Contra Costa Chorale at 8 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. Tickets are $12-$15, children under 16 free. 524-1861. www.ccchorale.org 

“Tomorrow is Today” dance and martial arts by Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company at 7:30 p.m. at the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice St. Tickets are $5-$20. 597-1619. www.destinyarts.org 

Steve Lucky & The Rhumba Bums with Ms. Carmen Getit at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $13. 525-5054.  

Magic City Chamber of Commerce at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Darryl Henriques at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

7th Direction, Hobo Jungle, Saul Kaye Band at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082.  

Akira Tana & Jon Wiitala Trio at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Megan McLaughlin at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Diego’s Umbrella, funk, jam at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$7. 548-1159.  

Andrea Maxand’s Ban, Lisa Dewey, Clevergirl at 9:30 p.m. at The Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $5. 444-6174.  

Faye Carol, jazz vocalist, at 7 p.m. at Maxwell’s, 341 13th St., Oakland. 839-6169. 

Pipedown, Shadow Boxer, Romans Go Home, Desa 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. 

SATURDAY, MARCH 19 

CHILDREN  

East Bay Children’s Theater “Shoemaker and The Elves” at 10:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. at Oakland Museum, 10th and Oak Sts. Tickets are $6. 655-7285. www.childrens-theatre.org 

The Shamrock Ceili, Celtic music at 11:30 a.m. at Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge St. Cost is $5-$6. 647-1111. www.habitot.org  

THEATER 

Magical Arts Ritual Theater, “Oracles from the Living Tarot” at 8 p.m. at Arts First Oakland, First Congregational Church, 2501 Harrison at 27th. Tickets are $15-$30 available from 523-7754. 

FILM 

International Asian American Film Festival “Evolution of a Filipino Family” at 12:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Kala Artist Gallery Conversation with David Hamill, Jonn Herschend and Sarah Smith at 3 p.m. at Kala Art Institute, 1060 Heinz Ave. 549-2977. www.kala.org 

Prose Open Mic featuring Jan Steckel, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Lakeview Branch Library, 550 El Embarcadero, Oakland. 238-7344. www.jansteckel.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 2 and 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$54. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Four Seasons Concerts with Yin Cheng-Zong, pino, at 7:30 p.m. at Calvin Simmons Theater, Oakland. Tickets are $25-$35. 601-7919. 

Philharmonia Baroque “Mozart’s Quartet” at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, Dana and Durant. Tickets are $28-$62. 415-392-4400.  

Magnificat Baroque “Passion and Ressurection” at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. Tickets are $12-$25. 415-979-4500.  

Solaris Quartet with Bryan Baker, piano, at 8 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church, One Lawson Road, Kensington. Donation $15-$50. 525-0302.  

New Millenium Strings with Joseph Gold, violin, and Kurt Rapf, organ, at 3 p.m. at Lake Park Methodist Church, 281 Santa Clara Ave., Oakland. Donation $10-$20. 528-4633.  

Bay Area Classical Harmonies performs Bach’s B Minor Mass at 7:30 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave., Oakland. 866-233-9892. www.berkeleybach.org  

“20 Going on 21” With the San Francisco Choral Artists at 8 p.m. at Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church, 3534 Lakeshore Ave. Tickets are $17-$22. 415-979-5779. www.sfca.org 

Jewish Music Festival with members of East West Ensemble and the Omar Faruk Tekbilek Ensemble at 8 p.m. in Wheeler Auditorium, UC Campus. Tickets are $25-$60. www.brjcc.org  

“Tomorrow is Today” dance and martial arts by Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company at 7:30 p.m., and Sun. at 3 p.m. at the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice St. Tickets are $5-$20. 597-1619. www.destinyarts.org 

Mujeres/Women: Cava and Claudia Tenorio at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$14. 849-2568.  

The Vowel Movement, Beatbox showcase, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Chris Skyhawk at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Melanie O’Reilly at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

The Look, World Wide Spies, Nation of Two, rock, nu wave, at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0886.  

Madeline Eastman “The Miles Davis Project” at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $18. 845-5373.  

The Fenians, Gerorge Pederson & the ReincarNatives at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082.  

Pitch Black, Enemy You, Teenagebottlerocket, at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

David Benoit at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $15-$26. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SUNDAY, MARCH 20 

CHILDREN 

Nigerian Brothers at 3 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Tickets are $4-$6. 525-5054. 

THEATER 

“Beowulf” The epic translated and performed by Philip Wharton at 7:30 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid. Tickets are $10-$15. 415-608-9683. 

“The Boy Who Lost His Laugh” performed by Stagebridge senior theater company at 3 p.m. at Arts First Oakland in the First Congregational Church, 2501 Harrison Ave., at 27th St. Tickets are $5-$10. 444-4755. www.stagebridge.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens” guided tour at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave. 642-1295.  

“Shtetl” A multi-media exhibition by Naomie Kremer. Reception from 2 to 4 p.m. at Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. Exhibition runs to July 31. www.magnes.org 

FILM 

Edgar G. Ulmer “People on Sunday”at 7 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Julie Carr and Evelyn Reilly at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 3 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$54. 642-9988.  

Miró Quartet at 3 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $38 available from 642-9988.  

Philharmonia Baroque “Mozart’s Quartet” at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, Dana and Durant. Tickets are $28-$62. 415-392-4400. www.philharmonia.org 

Organ Music performed by Ether Criscuola at 4 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Donation $15. 658-3298. 

Berkeley Youth Arts Festival Performances by young musicians at 4 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center. 644-6893.  

Gil Chun’s Bay Area Follies Tap, ballroom, hula, at 2 and 7 p.m. at the Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St. Tickets are $10-$15. 526-8474. 

Tezkatlipoka Aztec Dance A Spring Equinox Celebration at 7 p.m. at Studio Rasa, 933 Parker St. Cost is $10. 843-2787.  

Darren Johnston’s United Brassworkers Front at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$15. 845-5373.  

Pappa Gianni and the North Beach Band from 2 to 5 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198. 

Rahim AlHaj, Iraqi oud music, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Allegiance, Down to Nothing, Stand and Fight at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

Hemlock at 9:30 p.m. at The Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $5. 444-6174.  

›

It’s not often that you see a bird that doesn’t match anything in the field guides—even in Sibley’s Bible of bird identification. But there it was, hanging out with a raft of overwintering common goldeneyes and Barrow’s goldeneyes at the Bayward end of Lake Merritt: a midsized duck with a dark head (showing a purple gloss when the sun hit it) and a backswept crest, a dark back, and pale sides with two vertical hash marks.  

I did find a similar bird illustrated in a treatise on North American waterfowl: a hybrid between the common goldeneye and hooded merganser. Local birders have speculated that one of the parents of the Lake Merritt duck was a Barrow’s goldeneye; Barrow’s has a purple gloss to the head, common a green gloss. But there’s more of a range overlap between the merganser and common goldeneye, and more records of that hybrid combination. In any case, one goldeneye or the other must have gotten together with a hooded merganser to produce the anomalous duck. 

Ducks are prone to that kind of thing. You’ve seen the genetic scrambles among flocks of domestic ducks: part Peking white, part Muscovy, part wild mallard. And hybridization happens with some frequency in the wild. Years ago at Coyote Hills, I saw the mallard-gadwall cross that Audubon had described as a distinct species, the “Brewer’s duck.” It not only looked odd, it sounded odd.  

“Mack?” it said. Hybrid ducks are often fertile; only mandarin ducks are incapable of producing fertile offspring with another species. Conservationists are concerned about mallards genetically swamping some of their closer relatives: black ducks on the east coast, mottled ducks in the South, koloas in Hawai’i.  

But ducks aren’t alone. A few years ago ornithologists in the South Bay spotted an “avostilt,” the apparent offspring of an American avocet and a black-necked stilt. Shorebirds like stilts and avocets rarely hybridize, but it happened at least once. Some eastern and western species pairs of birds have hybrid zones where their ranges overlap.  

A friend recently asked me if the Lake Merritt goldeneye-merganser cross (goldanser?) was a new species. No, although hybridization sometimes leads to the formation of a new species among plants. The phenomenon does raise questions about the way we define species, though.  

Back when Darwin was pondering how species originate, naturalists had a kind of Platonic notion of what a species was. There was some essence of, say, mallardness, and any variation from that deviated from the ideal type. And as Darwin found, there was a whole lot of variation. He was hard put to draw a distinction between species and varieties. 

Some 90 years after The Origin of Species was published, Ernst Mayr—who died this February at the age of 100, still cranking out books—came up with a better idea. Mayr defined “species” in population terms. According to his Biological Species Concept, species are groups of interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups. This made a lot of sense and was widely accepted by biologists, although it didn’t work for organisms like self-cloning sea anemones or parthenogenic whiptail lizards, and wasn’t the best fit for plants. Mayr was careful to point out that the concept applied to wild creatures with a free choice of mates. Cage a tiger and a lion together and you may get a hybrid “liger,” but this would be an improbable outcome even in the small area of India where lions and tigers coexist. 

Ducks don’t seem to fit, though. Duck species, which will hybridize at the drop of the hat, are clearly not reproductively isolated from each other. There seem to be limits to the process, because we haven’t wound up with just one generic type of duck; but the species boundaries do seem fuzzy. 

In the 1980s, a South African entomologist named Hugh Paterson proposed a rival definition, the Recognition Species Concept: a species is a population of biparental individuals with a shared mate recognition system. Fertility can be part of the system—at the level of egg recognizing sperm—but it’s not essential to the definition. It can also be a matter of the organism recognizing another individual as an appropriate mate, through simple visual cues or the elaborate song-and-dance routines that birds have evolved. 

The nice thing about the Recognition Species Concept is that it’s field-testable. Peter Grant has spent years working with the Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos Islands, as described in Jonathan Weiner’s fine book The Beak of the Finch. Most of the 14 finch species look much alike to the casual human observer. But Grant’s experiments showed that male finches could differentiate between stuffed models of their own species and those of a very similar neighbor species. It was harder to run the tests with live female and dummy male finches because the females’ mates kept attacking the dummies. 

With male ducks, the visual cues—the sharp dark-and-light patterns, the colors, the crests—are obvious. But mistakes do get made. 

Ducks of different species tend to have broadly similar courtship displays; maybe that confuses the issue.  

What interested me most about the goldanser was that it was not just a mosaic of goldeneye traits and merganser traits. Males of both the parent species have white head markings, but this duck’s head was all dark, and its crest was unlike either a merganser’s or a goldeneye’s. Goldeneyes have standard duck bills, while mergansers have narrow, saw-edged bills for snagging fish. The hybrid’s bill was intermediate in shape. I saw it eating mussels along with the goldeneyes, and it seemed to have no trouble handling them—and its equipment had been functional enough to allow it to survive to adulthood. 

When I last saw them, the goldeneyes were gearing up for the mating season with head-pumping displays. How a female goldeneye or female merganser would respond to the goldanser remains an open question. ?

TUESDAY, MARCH 15 

Berkeley Garden Club “Propagation for the Home Gardener” with Kathy Echols, Diablo Valley College Horticulture Dept. at 1 p.m. at Epworth Methodist Church, 1953 Hopkins St. 524-4374. 

Celebrity Waiter Luncheon & Silent Auction to benefit the Berkeley High Althletic Program at 11 a.m. at Hs Lordship’s Restaurant, Berkeley Marina. Tickets are $60 per person or $500 for a table of 10. 526-8885. www.berkeleyathleticfund.org 

“Eat in Season” for National Nutrition month with cooking demonstrations at 3:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Derby St. at MLK, Jr. Way. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

Information on the Draft, CO Status, Selective Service Registration and other issues for Berkeley High students and their parents at 7 p.m. in the BHS College and Career Councelling Center. 

“Integrating City, School, & Community Student Support Services” with Prof. Howard Adelman and Linda Taylor, UCLA, at 7 p.m. in the Berkeley High Library, corner of Addison and Milvia Streets in Berkeley. Jay_Nitschke@berkeley.k12.ca.us 

“Solar Power and Social Change in Rural Kenya” with Arne Jacobsen, Humbolt Univ. at 4 p.m. at 652 Barrows Hall, UC Campus. 642-8338. www.ias.berkeley.edu/africa 

Choices for Sustainable Living A 9-week discussion course meeting Tues. at 6:30 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Free. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

“A Year on the Road: Cycling Through Siberia, Mongolia and China” with Lori Lewis and Ilya Pratt at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

“Crossing Borders: Trade Policy and Transnational Labor Education” with Prof. Harley Shaiken, at 4 p.m. in the CLAS Conference Room, 2334 Bowditch St. 642-2088. www.clas.berkeley.edu  

Magic with Magician Alex Gonzalez at 6:30 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Tickets required. call 524-3043. 

Group Singing at 1:30 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 masonic. 524-9122. 

Berkeley Salon Discussion Group meets to discuss “Beliefs and Believers” from 7 to 9 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. Please bring snacks and soft drinks to share. No peanuts please. 601-6690.  

“Pool Exercise for Pain and Stiffness” a video at the Fibromyalgia Support Group at noon at Mafffley Auditorium, Herrick Campus of Alta Bates Hospital, 2001 Dwight Way. 644-3273. 

“The Challenges of Aging” with Alice Wilson-Fried, author of “Menopause, Sisterhood, and Tennis: A Miraculous Journey Through ‘The Change’” at 7 p.m. at El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave. 526-7512.  

WriterCoach Connection Volunteer Training Help students improve their writing and critical thinking skills. Training session from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. To register call 524-2319. www.writercoachconnection.org 

“Purim: A Meeting Point between Cyclical & Linear Time” with Avital Plan at 7:30 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $5. 848-0237, ext. 110. 

Free Fitness Tests for people 50 and over from 1:30 to 3 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. You will receive personalized scores and tips on how to maintain or improve your fitness. 981-5367. 

“On the Rediscovery of Buddhist Sanskrit Texts” with Michael Hahn, Visiting Prof. in Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley, at 5 p.m. at 2223 Fulton St., 6th Floor. Sponsored by the Center for Buddhist Studies. 643-6492. 

“Personal Stories of Survival and Spirit” at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery, 2304 McKinley Ave., at Bancroft. 

American Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation at 6 p.m. at 6230 Claremont Ave. Advance sign-up needed, 594-5165.      

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

St. John’s Prime Timers at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Nick Brown will sing and play folk music at 11 a.m. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 16 

Great Decisions 2005: “Sudan’s Crisis in Darfur” with Prof. Martha Saavedra, Center for African Studies, UCB, from 10 a.m. to noon at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. Cost is $5, $40 for the series. For information and reservations call 526-2925. 

Outstanding Women of Berkeley honored at the Commission in the Status of Women at 7:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5347. 

Community Meeting with the Mayor Come meet District 2 Councilmember Darryl Moore and Mayor Tom Bates to discuss current issues and concerns, at 7 p.m. at Frances Albrier Center, San Pablo Park, 2800 Park St. 981-7100, 981-7120.  

Honoring Rosie the Riveter All Rosies Invited! The video, “Rosie the Riveter” will be shown at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Gray Panthers, 1403 Addison St. 548-9696. 

“Island Nations: Limited Space, Mounting Trash” with speakers from Japan, Puerto Rico and the UK at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

“Moveon’s Spin on Global Warming and How Cyclists Can Help” with Joan Blades, founding member of Moveon.org, at 8:15 p.m., at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Sponsored by the Grizzly Peak Cyclists. 527-0450. 

Remembering Rachel Corrie An evening of words, song and activism with Peter Camejo, Julia Butterfly Hill, Pratap Chatterjee, Barbara Lubin and many others at 7 p.m. at King Middle School, 1781 Rose St. Donation $20, reception at 6 p.m. for a donation of $50. A Benefit for the International Solidarity Movement & The Rachel Corrie Foundation. 236-4250. www.norcalism.org 

“Judi Bari Discusses her FBI Case” videos at 7 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St,. midtown Oakland. Donation of $5 requested.  

East Bay Asian Local Development Coproration 30th Anniversary at 4 p.m. at Swan’s Marketplace, 901 Washington St., Oakland. Festivities include tours of the new facility and entertainment. 287-5353. 

“Faith and the Church” at 7:30 p.m. at All Souls Parish, 2220 Cedar St. Part of the Journey of Faith Lenten Series. 848-1755. 

“Cosmic Sacramentality” A New Age Invention or the Church’s Living Heritage? A discussion with Eddie Fernandez at 5 p.m. at the Jesuit School of Theology, 2401 Le Conte Ave. 549-5021. 

AARP Free Tax Assistance for taxpayers with middle and low incomes, with special attention to those 60 years and older. From 12:15 to 4:15 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. This service will continue through April. Appointments must be made in advance. 526-3720, ext. 5. 

Berkeley Communicators Toastmasters meets the first and third Wednesdays of the month at 7:15 a.m. at Au Cocolait, 200 University Ave. at Milvia. 524-3765. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Training workshop for volunteers interested in helping in Berkeley Public schools at 4:30 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. 644-8833. 

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

THURSDAY, MARCH 17 

Bird Walk along the Martin Luther King Shoreline to see marsh birds at 3:30 p.m. for information call 525-2233. 

Biodiesel Film Festival with documentaries on this alternatives fuel, including “Fat of the Land” at 7 p.m. at La Peña, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10, benefits Berkeley Biodiesel Collective. 849-2589. 

LeConte Neighborhood Assoc. meets at 7:30 p.m. at the LeConte School. 843-2602.  

Oregon Street Community Meeting at 7 p.m. in the East Conference Room, 1720 Oregon St. Part of a series of BUSD site planning meetings. 

“The Ethno-Class Experience in the Age of Bush” with Michael Parenti at 7:30 p.m. at the Laney College Forum, Laney College, 900 Fallon St. Free. 464-3156. 

“A Green Planet Torah” with David Cohen at 7:30 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $5-$8. 848-0237.  

Stagebridge presents a St. Patrick’s Day sing-a-long at 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center.  

“The Gifts Of Grief” screening of a film on the transformational possibilities that come through experiencing the loss of a loved one, at 7:30 p.m. in the State Building Auditorium, 1515 Clay St., Oakland. Cost is $10. 

Simplicity Forum “The Joys and Frustrations of Cutting Back Car Usage” with Dawn Raymond on her transition to Car Share and bikes, at 6:30 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, Claremont Branch, 2940 Benvenue Ave.  

FRIDAY, MARCH 18 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Greg Delory, Senior Fellow, Space Lab, on “Life in the Solar System.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925.  

ACCI Seconds Sale Ceramics, jewelry, glass, metal, textiles and fine art, Fri.- Sun., 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

Solo Sierrans Inspiration Point Hike A nice walk on a paved path with beautiful views. Meet at 4 p.m. in the large parking lot at Inspiration Point off Wild Cat Canyon Rd. Optional dinner in Orinda after the hike. 525-3933. 

“Three Beats for Nothing” a small group meeting weekly at 10 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center to sing for fun and practice, mostly 16th century harmony. No charge. 655-8863, 843-7610. dann@netwiz.net 

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 7:15 p.m. at the East Bay Chess Club, 1940 Virginia St. Players at all levels are welcome. 845-1041. 

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 

SATURDAY, MARCH 19 

Global Day of Action No to War & Occupation March begins at 11 a.m. in Dolores Park, SF with a rally at 1 p.m. at Civic Center. To volunteer call 415-821-6545. 

Compost Happens A workshop on how to create a compost pile and create fertilizer for your garden. From 9 to 11 a.m. at the Visitor Center, Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Cost is $30 members/$35 nonmembers. 845-4116. 

Compost Give-Away at 10 a.m. the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Center St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Bring your own container. 548-3333. 

“The Wood-Wide-Web and Others Stories of Life Underground” with Prof. Ellen Simms, UCB, on the influence of Microorganisms on the evolution of native and exotic plants at 12:30 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. 238-2220. www.museumca.org 

Berkeley Alliance of Neighborhood Associations meets at 9:15 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, Sproul Conference Room, 1st Floor, 2727 College Ave. www.berkeleycna.com  

A Conversation with Danny Glover in a benefit for Vista College, at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Rep. Tickets are $50-$100. 981-2851. vistatix.com 

Annual Crab Festival at the South Berkeley Community Church, Fairview and Ellis, from 5 to 7 p.m. with crab dinner and music by the Stacey Wilson Trio. Tickets are $35, $17.50 for children. 652-1040. 

Paper Making Workshop Learn how to recycle used paper into re-usable paper. For ages 7 to 11 years, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $3, registration required. 525-2233. 

Berkeley Youth Arts Festival Block Printing with Karen Weil, for children age 7 to 13, from 10 a.m. to noon at the Berkeley Art Center. Cost is $5-$15 sliding scale. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Historical and Botanical Tour of Chapel of the Chimes, a Julia Morgan landmark, at 10 a.m. at 4499 Piedmont Ave. at Pleasant Valley. Reservations required 228-3207. www.chapelofthechimes.com 

“Expanding Your Horizons in Math and Science” a conference for middle school girls, from 8:30 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. at Mills College. To register call 430-2226. http://eyh.mills.edu 

Car Seat Checks with the Berkeley Police Dept. Learn how to install your child’s car seat correctly, from 10 a.m. to noon at the UC Garage on Addison at Oxford. Free. 647-1111. 

“String Fling” Cazadero Performing Arts Camp Benefit Auction at 6 p.m. at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Tickets are $75. 527-7500, ext. 11. www.cazadero.org 

Youth Volunteer Day at the Oakland Zoo for youth ages 12-18 who are interested in helping animals and the zoo. From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. 632-9525, ext. 202. www.oaklandzoo.org 

Seed Saving for Gardeners Learn the basics of savings seeds from your own garden vegetables from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $10-$15, no one turned away. 548-2220, ext. 233.  

“Jesus & the Bible in Quaker Faith & Practice” with T. Canby Jones, at 9:30 a.m. at the Berkeley Friends Church, 1600 Sacramento St., at Cedar St. 524-4112. 

See & Feel the Aura Workshop with Cynthia Sue Larson from 2 to 4:30 p.m. at Change Makers, 6536 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $10-$20. 655-2405. 

SUNDAY, MARCH 20 

Memorial for Karl Linn With music, speakers and films. Pot- 

luck meal. From 3 to 5 p.m. at Berkeley Adult School, 1701 San Pablo Ave. 798-8148. www.karllinn.org/MemorialService 

Labyrinth Peace Walk at the Willard Community Peace Labyrinth, at Willard Middle School, Telegraph Ave. btwn Derby and Stuart, enter by the dirt road on Derby. Free and wheelchair accessible. 526-7377. 

Interfaith Observance of Peace with the Rev. William Sloane Coffin and others, at 3 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. 848-3696. 

Carpentry for Kids A Family Exploration Day from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. Free with museum admission. 238-2220. www.museumca.org 

Let There Be Light Celebrate the extra hours of daylight by learning how to make candles. From 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Berkeley Youth Arts Festival Word and Image with poet Tobey Kaplan, a creative writing workshop for all ages, from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center. Cost is $5-$15 sliding scale. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Lost Waterfall in Spring Learn the history of the waterfall that used to be on this easy 3.5 mile hike. Meet at 1 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Bring water and a snack and be prepared for muddy trails. 525-2233. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Spring Equinox Gathering at 5:30 p.m. at the Interim Solar Calendar, Cesar Chavez Park, Berkeley Marina. 666-8663. www.solarcalendar.org 

“Sun-Earth Day: Ancient Observatories, Timeless Knowledge” Activities on equinoxes and solstices from noon to 5 p.m. at Chabot Space and Science Center, 10000 Skyline Blvd., Oakland. 336-7300. www.chabotspace.org 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Tibetan Buddhism with Lama Palzang and Pema Gellek on “Great Buddhist Masters: The Sixteen Arhats,” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

ONGOING 

United Way’s Earn It! Keep It! Save It! Program provides free tax assistance now through early April to families that earned less than $36,000 in 2004. To find a free tax site near you, call 1-800-358-8832 or visit www.EarnItKeepItSaveIt.org. 

“Half Pint Library” Book Drive Donate children’s books to benefit Children’s Hospital. Donations accepted at 1849 Solano Ave. through March 31. 

Spring Break Program for Children offered by the City’s Recreational Division, March 28-April 1, for children ages 5-12, at the Frances Albrier Community Center, 2800 Park St. For information call 981-6640. 

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tues., Mar. 15, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Berkeley Housing Authority meets Tues., Mar. 15, at 6:30 p.m. in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/housingauthority 

Citizens Humane Commission meets Wed., Mar. 16, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Katherine O’Connor, 981-6601. www.ci.berkeley.ca. us/commissions/humane 

Commission on Aging meets Wed. Mar. 16, at 1:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. William Rogers, 981-5344. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/aging 

Commission on Labor meets Wed., Mar. 16, at 6:45 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Delfina M. Geiken, 981-7550. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/labor 

Human Welfare and Community Action Commission meets Wed. Mar. 16, at 7 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Kristen Lee, 981-5427. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/welfare 

Design Review Committee meets Thurs., Mar 17, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Anne Burns, 981-7415. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/designreview  

Transportation Commission meets Thurs., Mar. 17, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Peter Hillier, 981-7000. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/transportation?

This week, in honor of Women’s History Month, Berkeley’s Commission on the Status of Women recognized at its monthly meeting some “outstanding women in Berkeley who have contributed to making our community a better place to live,” in the words of the chair’s letter requesting nominations. One nice aspect of attending the event was getting a chance to put faces to people I’d previously known only as voicemail messages or e-mail addresses. In the audience as well as on the platform were many women who have been active in all sorts of important endeavors, and have told the Daily Planet about them.  

What impressed me most about the honorees and their achievements is that in large part they were being recognized for what has been traditionally considered “women’s work”: feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, taking care of young people and old people, comforting the afflicted and making peace. The commission’s roots are in the feminism of the early ‘70s, but members seem to be saying today that it’s not enough for women to do just what men have traditionally done, but that they have more to contribute to society. The women who received citations this year were not chosen because they’ve made partner in a major law firm that specializes in defending insurance companies, or because they’re highly paid spokespersons for oil companies, or because they’ve put together big real estate empires, all jobs increasingly open to women as well as men. Condoleezza Rice was not held up as a role model to be emulated.  

Not, of course, that some of the honorees don’t have outstanding records of accomplishments in standard professional capacities as well. I know Donna Lasala, for example, as the public’s liaison to the city of Berkeley’s Department of Information Technology, where she does a stellar job, but her citation spoke instead of work she’d done with Iranian wheelchair users and all sorts of other good works I’d never even heard about. And the same is true of most of the others. 

One sad note: At the meeting I learned of the recent death of Eva Bansner, a stalwart participant in community-based environmental planning in many organizations, including the League of Women Voters, and a contributor to these pages. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer just a few months ago, but continued to make her valuable contributions to the public discourse throughout her illness. Eva, like those cited by the commission, took the welfare of the world to be her job, and she did it well. 

Second-wave feminists were justifiably concerned with making sure that women had equal access to levers of power. That goal hasn’t yet been reached—shall we discuss Lawrence Summers one more time? But more troubling is that the employment market now leaves even less room for “women’s work,” for women or for men. Parents, both men and women, have even less time to do a good job with their children. Supporting a family seems to mean either a high-powered 80-hour a week job for one person or two people working full-time, with no time to spare. Yet society still needs caregiving.  

It was once believed that government would be able to take the major role in providing for the common good. But as we get further into the Bush/Schwarzenegger era, it seems that more and more responsibility will fall on citizens to do the hands-on works of mercy and the educational tasks that have been traditionally shouldered by women. Since women are now often breadwinners, men should be encouraged to share in the kind of essential “civic homemaking” that still needs to be done. The Commission on the Status of Women has played an important role by recognizing the value of women’s contributions to society at large. Now it might also be time for the commission to acknowledge those men who have taken up “women’s work” for the benefit of the community. I can name 10 Berkeley men without thinking very hard who deserve this kind of citation.  

—Becky O’Malley 

?

There was no editor’s column in this space last Friday because I was in Concord on Thursday, serving as a judge in the California Newspaper Publishers’ Association’s annual awards contest. Every paper that enters the competition is required to submit a judge for the regional entries, so I went. My assignment, with one colleague, was to review two categories: investigative/enterprise stories and environmental/“ag” reporting, both for less-than-daily papers above 25,000 circulation, the next group above the Daily Planet’s 2004 figures. Next year, we might be in this group, since our circulation is increasing.  

What’s going on in the rest of northern California? Well, it’s surprising how much that’s going on elsewhere is like what’s going on right here in the East Bay. A previously unknown group of Native Americans wants to build a casino, and they’ve asked their congressman to float a special bill to give them early recognition. A school district has gotten way in over its head with costly building projects and has no money to pay for them or staff them. Agribusiness is pushing for genetically modified food, and environmentalists are pushing back. Developers are trying to convince locals that what pays off for their own bottom line is also good for the public interest, and anyone who demurs is called a NIMBY. As the French would say, plus ça change, plus la même chose—the more things change, the more they remain the same. 

I’ve been threatening for years to write a journalism textbook which would consist of outlines for perennial stories which could be endlessly revisited. I thought it was a joke, but when I mentioned it to a j-school professor it was received with genuine enthusiasm. The classic evergreen piece is scandals at nursing homes, on the front page of the Chronicle this very week. Another old standby is “Pollution, Pollution!” Any town, almost any time, can provide a pollution story. In the immortal words of Tom Lehrer: 

They got smog and sewage and mud 

Turn on your tap 

And get hot and cold running crud.  

One sexy story which popped up in the group was extra-marital carryings-on among public officials. That’s still big news in small towns, evidently. I haven’t heard much on the topic around here for a while, though it was big in times gone by. Either it’s stopped, or no one cares enough to report on it any more.  

My colleague and I must have read 40 stories in five or six hours, though I didn’t keep an exact count. From these, we were supposed to choose four in each of the two categories to be forwarded to the state level for the final round of judging. This was not an easy task. Some could be rejected out of hand, but for each final four we chose, there were at least four credible candidates we had to leave behind. As the afternoon wore on, my eyes started to cross and my critical faculties got a bit blunted by fatigue, so I hope I did justice to all comers.  

Despite all odds, reporters for some of these little papers are doing a lot of good work. Many of the publications I saw did seem more like weekly magazines than like newspapers. Many consisted of a big entertainment calendar plus one or two pieces which seemed to be at least 2,000 words long, as contrasted with the Planet’s philosophy of doing a larger number of shorter news stories in each issue. There must be a reason for this trend, and it’s probably financial. 

Reporting is expensive. The very interesting facts in many of these magazine-type stories were often padded with long discursive introductions, extensive descriptions and colorful character profiles. But a number of the reporters also did the harder and more tedious work of public records searches, aided in some cases by local sunshine ordinances which went beyond the state of California’s provisions for disclosure. They insisted on attending meetings where they were not exactly welcomed by officialdom. They took full advantage of the new opportunities the Internet offers for getting a broader perspective, both geographic and historical.  

What I didn’t see was many small newspapers like ours. Presumably a few towns still have local dailies, which wouldn’t show up in our stack. But the old-style community weekly or semi-weekly which reported on all local news seems to be disappearing in many northern California towns, probably because the competition from regional and even national papers has affected their advertising base. That’s too bad, because, as we’ve said many times in this space, democracy depends on people knowing what’s going on. A lot of coverage of entertainment, even when supplemented by the occasional big story about a major scandal, can’t provide citizens with everything they need to know to do their job of watching out for the common good. 

—Becky O’Malley›