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Board Vetoes Jefferson School Name Change By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR

Friday June 24, 2005

Following dramatic remarks by a clearly conflicted Board President Nancy Riddle, the Berkeley Unified School District Board of Directors voted 3-2 Wednesday night to deny a petition to change the name of Jefferson Elementary School to Sequoia. 

Her voice breaking up and visibly close to tears, Riddle told a hushed crowd that “I know that I will be disappointing some people who I care about, but I can’t support this.” Riddle’s succeeding no vote on the petition broke the 2-2 deadlock on the board that was known two weeks ago when the remaining board members publicly announced how they would vote on the issue.  

As expected, Board Vice President Terry Doran and director John Selawsky voted to accept the results of the Jefferson vote, while directors Shirley Issel and Joaquin Rivera voted against the proposed name change. The vote followed an hour-long hearing that preceded the board meeting, along with another half-hour of public comment time during the meeting itself that was dominated by supporters and opponents of the name change. 

The decision rejected a district-authorized vote held during the last week in May that saw the name Sequoia beat out Jefferson among students, staff, and parents and guardians at the school. 

Division over whether the board should honor the results of that school community vote was reflected in the board vote itself. Selawsky and Doran argued that the board’s name change policy only gave the board the latitude to determine if the petition process had been properly followed. Riddle, Rivera, and Issel all said that the board had the discretion to accept or reject the school community vote using the criteria of whether the name change was best for Berkeley as a whole. 

Berkeley’s difficulty in coming to a decision on the emotionally charged issue was summed up by long-time Berkeley political and environmental activist Elliot Cohen, who said he was torn on what to do about the proposed name change from the slaveowning father of American democracy to a stately California tree. “I like trees,” Cohen told board members. “I don’t like slavery. I like Jefferson.” He put up his hands in a gesture of uncertainty. 

Supporters of the name change in attendance at the board meeting appeared to outnumber opponents by a large margin. 

During the public presentations, each side accused the other side of engaging in tactics of intimidation. 

Carrie Adams, a white Jefferson parent and a name-change opponent, said that she had not participated in much of the two-year name-change discussions at Jefferson because “I felt intimidated. I have been held emotionally hostage, and I’m not the only one who feels this way.” She said that Jefferson school community members who did not support the name change were accused of racism, and “I am not a racist. I abhor slavery. But anyone who can look 200 years in the past and pass judgment, it’s like armchair quarterbacking. When do we move on?” Calling the name-change campaign “a disaster,” Adams said that “it has pulled apart something that was together.” 

That was countered by Maggie Riddle, a white Jefferson teacher and a name-change proponent, who said that she “felt intimidated as a teacher advocate for this change. Two weeks ago in these same chambers, I was called an emotional terrorist. Supporters of the name change have received threatening e-mails and veiled threats. After I announced my support for the name change, many of my fellow teachers stopped talking to me.” Riddle added that “if anybody has been the victim of emotional terrorism and intimidation in this country, it’s been the African-American and the Native American community.” 

Supporters and opponents also sparred over whether adoption of the name change would signal a diminishing of both Jefferson as a historical figure and Jefferson’s ideas in Berkeley’s education process. 

“We don’t name things after people to celebrate those people,” Bruce Poropat said. “We name them as a way of recognizing their role in history. And no one had more of a role in American history than Jefferson. We need to preserve our history, good or bad.”  

And Barbara Wittstock, who said she attended the Jefferson-founded University of Virginia, said that “if you start doing name changes” solely on the basis of the holding of slaves, “you might end up with teachers refusing to teach the Declaration of Independence” because it was written by a slaveholder. 

But Deborah Ager, a Jefferson parent, said that “no one has suggested that we launder our history. No one has said that we shouldn’t teach continue to teach about Jefferson. No one has said that we not teach the Declaration of Independence.” And other name-change supporters argued that in honoring the Jefferson school community’s democratic vote to change the school’s name, the board would be honoring Jefferson’s ideal of respecting democracy. 

The board’s rejection vote set off an emotional scene in the council chambers at Old City Hall that simultaneously captured both the beauty and the bitter divisiveness of the failed two-year attempt to change the school name. As soon as the vote was announced, many of the disappointed supporters of the proposed name change stood and sang the civil rights standard “We Shall Overcome,” holding lime green printed flyers reading “Support Democracy. Approve Sequoia.” Already beginning a victory celebration, at least one opponent of the name change turned to the supporters and sang back, derisively, “Get over it.” 

Meanwhile, other name-change supporters stormed out of the chambers, berating board members as they left. “Unbelieveable! Unbelievable!” one supporter said, over and over. “An almost all-white board has told African-Americans that you only want to hear from us what you want us to say,” an African-American teacher told anyone who was willing to listen, including name change opponents who shouted back, “All African-Americans don’t support changing the school’s name.” A white-haired African-American man shook his finger at board members and declared, several times, “White people win! Niggers lose! That’s the message.” BUSD Public Information Officer Mark Coplan ran and placed himself between the board dais and another name-change supporter, Zachary Running Wolf, leading to a heated exchange between the two men. Short, sharp arguments broke out between supporters and opponents, both inside the chambers and outside in the hallway as both sides filed out. One young Jefferson student, who had spoken in favor of the name change, was led out in tears. With the board meeting itself halted for almost 15 minutes by the display, several board members—among them board vice president Terry Doran and director Shirley Issel—left their seats at the dais to walk among the slowly dispersing crowd, holding calming conversations. 

Through it all, the singing of “We Shall Overcome” through several stanzas continued for many minutes. 

When the name change petition came to the board two weeks ago Riddle had indicated that she was divided on the issue, and that internal conflict was evident throughout her remarks. “I knew when the petition first appeared two years ago that it was going to be a difficult decision,” she said, “mostly because of my ties to Jefferson.” Riddle, whose children attended the school, had said two weeks ago that much of her educational philosophy was based upon Jefferson’s work. She added that “I’ve gone back on forth on what my decision will be several times in the last two weeks” and, in fact, appeared to be still wavering even as she spoke. 

In the end, she said her mind was made up by the fact that her children had attended schools named after both Thomas Jefferson and black nationalist leader Malcolm X, both of whom she called “flawed.” “I think the juxtaposition of these two men is important,” she said. “I think our children will benefit from studying these complex men.”›


BART Employees Authorize Strike By MATTHEW ARTZ

Friday June 24, 2005

On Thursday BART employees gave their unions the green light to strike as early as July 1 if they can’t come to terms on a new agreement with the transit agency. 

Union representatives, however, said that a strike was not assured and that they would give commuters 72 hours notice before walking off their jobs. 

A strike by BART’s three largest unions, which represent roughly 2,700 workers, would grind East Bay’s primary public transportation system to a halt. “One would assume there will not be any trains to speak of,” said BART Spokesperson Linton Johnson. 

Commuters shouldn’t rely on AC Transit to pick up much of the slack in the event of a strike, said Clarence Johnson, AC Transit manager of media relations. The bus company could increase the frequency of transbay routes during off peak hours, but otherwise lacks the resources to boost service. 

“We don’t have any more buses, not to mention operators to run them,” he said. 

When BART last went on strike in 1997 the agency ran minimal service, Johnson said. BART currently serves 310,000 passengers every weekday. 

Contracts for BART’s three largest employee unions expire June 30. Stalled negotiations prompted the unions to vote overwhelmingly Thursday to authorize a strike.  

The Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555, which represents about 830 train operators, voted 95 percent to authorize a strike. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3993, which represents nearly 200 supervisory employees voted 93 percent and SEIU Local 790, which represents about 1,400 custodians and maintenance workers, voted 957 to 18 for strike authorization. 

The votes come one month after ATU, Local 1555 President Harold Brown and SEIU, Local 790 BART Chapter Vice President Bud Brandenberger told The Planet they didn’t expect to strike. 

BART’s Johnson called the strike authorization, “a negotiating ploy. The story would have been if they voted against authorizing a strike,” he said. 

Thomas Dewar, press officer for SEIU, Local 790, said the union hoped that the strike authorization would break the stalemate.  

Facing a $24 million deficit this year, BART has offered the unions four-year contracts with zero pay raises and reduced medical benefits. The unions did not disclose their counter offer. The current four-year contract expiring next year gave the unions 24 percent pay increases. Johnson said the average union employee costs BART over $100,000 in salary and benefits. 

Dewar said that SEIU did not plan to petition the state for 60-day cooling off period to avert a labor action. “We want to get this behind us,” he said. “We’re not trying to play games with the public keeping them on pins and needles over how they get to work.” 

Johnson declined to comment if BART would seek a 60-day reprieve. If neither side requests the cooling off period the state would lack the authority to prevent a strike.  

Last month to reduce its deficit from $53 million to $24 million, BART approved charging for parking at ten stations and raising ticket prices 10 cents in January. The agency also cut 115 positions, about half of which were vacant. 

 

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Emery Unified: From Takeover to Makeover By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR

Friday June 24, 2005

Emery Unified School District wants to set itself up as a hub of public school excellence in the East Bay. 

It seems an audacious and ambitious plan, considering that with only 788 students in two schools, the district is dwarfed by the 8,000 student Berkeley Unified and the 45,000 student Oakland Unified. In 2003, the district’s middle school was closed down due to declining enrollment, the grades divided up between the single high school and elementary school. Four years ago, only 16 percent of the district’s students were passing the math portion of the California High School Exit Exam. In addition, the district is only one year removed from a 2001 state takeover caused by a declaration of fiscal emergency and a $1.3 million state bailout. 

But those days seem far away, now. 

83 percent of the district’s class of 2006 have passed the math portion of the high school exit exam. 

The Similar Schools state Academic Performance Index (API) ranking for Anna Yates Elementary—the city’s only elementary school—jumped two points (between three and five on a 1-10 scale where one is the lowest ranking) between 2003 and 2004. In that same period, Emery High’s Similar Schools ranking leaped five points (from two to seven). 

This is in a district that is almost entirely nonwhite: 73 percent of the district’s students are African-American, with the remainder divided between Latinos and Punjabi. 

With the state administrator’s role reduced to that of a trustee and the district running its own financial affairs again, Emery Unified is now operating in the black. 

And with narrow city boundaries and in an era when public school enrollment is dropping in most East Bay districts west of the hills, Emery Unified is trying to figure out ways to attract new students to its schools. 

One of the reasons for this turnaround is a youth development partnership between Emery Unified and the City of Emeryville. 

In nearby Oakland, city officials did virtually nothing to provide financial assistance for the Oakland Unified School District once a $100 million state line-of-credit bailout caused it to be taken over by the state in 2003. 

In May of that year, Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown joked to a meeting at the Los Angeles Bar Association that the state takeover of Oakland Unified was a “win-win for everybody.” “ We spent $100 million we didn’t have,” Brown said, “and now we’re getting a fresh $100 million to start all over again and we get to throw the superintendent out and get a new one, called the state administrator. And we don’t have to have a school board." 

In Emeryville, in contrast, the city stepped in after the state takeover to help bail the school district out of its financial problems. In 2002, a $1.5 million 40-year agreement was reached in which the city leased the Emery High School sports facilities from the district, but allowed them to continue to be used by the schools. In effect, the citizens of Emeryville drew money from one of their government accounts to cover bills owed by another of their government accounts. The loan paved the way for the school district’s rapid financial turnaround and its recovery from the state takeover. 

Part of the reasons for the Emeryville recovery is Superintendent Tony Smith, the popular, burly, energetic former captain of the UC Berkeley Golden Bears football team who came to Emery Unified a year ago from his job as program director of the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools (BayCES). 

While he was still at BayCES, Smith helped craft the City of Emeryville/Emery Unified School District Education and Youth Services Plan, the 2002 document that now drives the cooperative effort between the city and the district. The plan calls for a joint city/school acquisition of a central youth-oriented community center in Emeryville—possibly in the location presently occupied by AC Transit—as well as a restructuring of the city’s schools through the Math, Science Technology Initiative (MSTI) to make them centers of technology teaching. 

The district hopes to use the Math, Science Technology Initiative to build a cooperative technology teaching effort with other East Bay School districts, with Emeryville at its center. Emeryville Unified is counting on assistance from locally-based technology-oriented companies—Pixar Animation Studios, for example. Last week, Pixar held a showing for short films developed by fifth grade Yates Elementary students at the studios. 

Smith’s school coalition-building work with BayCES was a major reason why—with a Ph.D in education but no experience as a classroom teacher or a school administrator—he was recommended for the superintendent’s position by a search committee that included the city mayor, and later was unanimously selected by the school board. The school board audience reportedly stood en masse and applauded when his appointment was announced. 

“He [was] key in building the unique collaboration between the city, Emery Education Foundation (EEF), BayCES and the school district to support the students and families of our community,” Emery School Board President Forrest Gee said last year. 

For his part, Smith minimizes his own part in Emeryville’s revival. “The reason this is working is that more people are taking responsibility for leadership in the Emeryville schools,” Smith said. “Many different groups have mobilized and organized around this effort. Staff has stepped up and done an excellent job; they’re committed to our vision. And people have made a commitment to stay at the table and work on these problems. It hasn’t always been easy. It’s sometimes ugly. But it’s working.” 

 


Council Declines to Save Drayage Amid Late-Night Confusion By MATTHEW ARTZ

Friday June 24, 2005

The clock appeared to run out on the City Council last night. But the weary lawmakers, none of whom will ever be confused with night owls, refused to adjourn until most of their business was settled. 

Under council rules the session should have ended at 11:50 p.m. when no councilmember asked for the meeting to be extended. But at 11:51 p.m. Mayor Tom Bates insisted that the meeting continue and, thanks to some questionable time keeping by the city clerk, he got his wish. 

With new life the council all but sealed the fate of 11 tenants refusing to leave their homes at an illegal West Berkeley warehouse. Councilmembers narrowly defeated a proposal requesting the city to hold a pubic hearing before issuing permits to demolish the living units. 

Berkeley issued the demolition permits Thursday, giving landlord Lawrence White a green light to proceed with 60-day eviction notices. As a gesture to the tenants, the council voted to consider giving them a portion of the $145,000 in fines the city has charged the building owner. 

Then, after midnight, the council by a bare majority voted to reduce sewer fees for UC Berkeley as called for under a recent agreement that settled a city lawsuit against the university.  

The only casualty of the late hour was a proposal from Mayor Bates and Councilmember Kriss Worthington to require that future settlement agreements, like the one with UC, be available for public scrutiny before the council acts on them. 

Despite the mayor’s push for a vote, councilmembers at 12:14 a.m. requested more time to consider the proposal, which will return on their agenda next week. 

The late night debates were the product of a nearly three-hour public hearing. With the council set to approve a budget next week, Tuesday’s meeting was the last chance for community agencies and interest groups to protest scheduled cuts as the city works to close an $8.9 million deficit. 

When the hearing ended, Mayor Bates pledged to retool his budget proposal for allocating the roughly $700,000 the city now has available to fund programs slated for cuts. A final vote is scheduled for next week. 

Bates’ current plan calls for spending $267,974 in July and the remainder of the money in December on the condition that tax revenues from property transfers remain strong.  

The Berkeley Animal Shelter seemed to make the most persuasive case among councilmembers for receiving some of the extra revenue. Threatened with the loss of an animal control officer or the shelter’s volunteer coordinator, a parade of shelter supporters defended the need for both positions and at times disagreed over which job was more vital. 

“This is like which child do you kill,” said Judy Brock, who runs a Berkeley animal rescue group. “It’s amazing to see all these animal lovers here infighting.” 

The council appeared unwilling to slash either position. Joining Councilmembers Dona Spring and Betty Olds, the two lawmakers who have traditionally championed animal welfare issues, Councilmembers Laurie Capitelli and Worthington said they would also vote against any cuts to the shelter. 

Other community organizations pleaded for reduced cuts. RISE, a 30-year-old teen mentor and academic support program for local high school students is facing a $20,000 cut, which could cost them a staff member, said Adriana Betti, the group’s executive director. 

Yolanda Gibson told the council that her daughter’s SAT score jumped 260 points after attending a RISE test prep course. “She’s going to a four-year college this fall and we owe it all to RISE,” she said. 

Several acupuncturists also urged the council not to cut a program that provides free acupuncture and social services to substance abusers. 

“The treatment is designed to reduce dependence for drugs,” said Jane Weinapple, an acupuncturist with the program now it its tenth year.  

“If you’ve never had it you should try it,” Langston Hazard, a client, told the council.  

The city is threatening to cut the program $57,000— approximately 21 percent. The cut would force the organization to lay off a case worker and possibly close its doors two days the week, said Executive Director Hope McDonald. 

Several library workers and residents urged the council not to approve a 4.8 percent increase to the library tax next week unless the library reverses course on using controversial radio devices to track books. 

Also members of Berkeley BudgetWatch and Friends of the Fire Department criticized the proposed budget and called on council to use extra money to restore fire department services. 

After the public hearing, the Drayage took center stage as the clock ticked away.  

Although City Manager Phil Kamlarz told the council that it lacked the authority to force a public hearing on the permits, and that he would issue them this week no matter what their vote was, the council nevertheless debated the issue. 

Drayage owner Lawrence White needs the permits to have “good cause” to evict the tenants from the building. He is facing daily fines of $2,500 for not evacuating the building after a snap fire inspection turned up over 200 code violations. The residents meanwhile had insisted that city zoning law entitles them to a public hearing before the Zoning Adjustments Board before they are evicted from their homes.  

The hearing would also have given them more time and leverage to pressure White to sell the building to the Northern California Land Trust, which has pledged to give the tenants the right to reoccupy their homes after they are brought up to code. 

But as the council wound down its debate, it neglected to keep track of the time.  

Council meetings are set to adjourn at 11 p.m. unless councilmembers agree to extend it. The council had voted to extend to 11:50 p.m., but right as the vote was about to take place, the clock struck 11:51. 

“Motion to extend the meeting,” Mayor Bates said. 

“The meeting ended at 11:50,” Councilmember Worthington replied. 

“We just made it by my watch,” said Bates, calling for the meeting to be extended until midnight. 

“I do not vote yes when the meeting already ended,” Worthington said. 

City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque intervened, “Unfortunately, I think the meeting is adjourned by operation of law.” 

“We’ve got to stay,” Bates replied. “If anyone wants to sue us over this they can.” 

City Clerk Sara Cox, whose watch was apparently running a minute slower than the two clocks in the chambers, entered the fray. “It was 11:50,” she said.  

“If the city clerk says it’s 11:50, I defer to the clerk,” Albuquerque said. 

Now free to vote on the Drayage, the council voted 5-4 (Bates, Capitelli, Olds, Wozniak no) to reject the city manager’s position that the permits did not require a public hearing.  

But the council also failed to muster a majority to ask the city to require a hearing, opening the door for the city to issue a demolition permit (Spring, Anderson and Moore supported the proposal, while Worthington and Maio abstained).  

The council then switched gears to sewer fees. The approval seemed to be a foregone conclusion since the council voted 6-3 last month to accept a deal with UC that reduced the city’s claim to sewer fees from the university from $2.1 million to $200,000. 

But Councilmember Olds questioned why they city had to lower the fees, Councilmember Max Anderson, who had voted to approve the full settlement agreement, now withdrew his support for the fee reduction, and Councilmember Spring demanded legal rationale for charging UC less money. 

“Come on,” Bates said. “We voted 6-3 to do this. You may not all agree, but we did.” A call of the roll produced only four votes in favor of lowering the fees. All eyes turned to Councilmember Moore, who had passed on his first opportunity to vote. 

“Sure, I’ll vote yes,” he said. The fee decrease for UC Berkeley passed 5-3-1 (Olds, Spring Worthington, no Anderson, abstain). 

Finally Bates came to a proposal that he believed would guarantee that future lawsuit settlements, unlike the recent settlement with UC, would go before the public for review and comment before the council voted. 

When councilmembers called for holding over the proposal for next week’s meeting, Bates initially declined. “I’d like to get rid of it please,” he said. 

“But I’m not sure I’ll vote for it,” said Councilmember Capitelli, prompting Bates to back down on a quick vote. 

“Well I may have to find votes elsewhere,” Bates replied. “The meeting is adjourned.”›


Berkeley Welcomes Back Bearden Mural By MATTHEW ARTZ

Friday June 24, 2005

It’s the dream behind every public art project. 

Spend a paltry sum for a work that becomes the city’s signature piece of art and appreciates in value faster than a home in the hills. 

Little did the Berkeley officials know when they commissioned renowned Harlem artist Romare Bearden to paint a 12-foot by 16-foot mural for the City Council chambers that their dream would come true. 

Not only is the work, “Berkeley—The City and Its People, 1973,” now cemented as the city’s logo, but the project which cost $16,000 in 1972 was most recently valued between $750,000 and $1 million. 

“It is possibly the most valuable asset the city has that is not nailed to the ground,” said Mayor Tom Bates. “It’s a real sense of pride and joy.” 

On Friday (today) the city welcomes back its esteemed mural from a nearly two-year national tour as part of the National Gallery of Art retrospective on Bearden’s work. Bearden died in 1988 at the age of 76. 

“I don’t know of any other city that has a work from a major artist in its council chambers,” said Peter Selz, a retired UC Berkeley art history professor and the founding director of the Berkeley Art Museum. 

The push to install a mural at the council chambers was sparked by two African American councilmembers, Ira Simmons and D’army Bailey. After they were elected in 1970, they protested that the chamber walls were decorated with pictures of Lincoln and Washington, but no people of color, said Carl Worth, founding director of the Berkeley Art Center and coordinator for the mural project.  

Around that time, Bearden happened to be in Berkeley for an exhibit of his work. Worth and Selz immediately decided that he was man for the job. 

“I suggested that instead of a token photograph of a black person, why not have an accomplished black artist do a mural?” Selz said. 

The two discussed the project with Bearden, who lived in Harlem, and he expressed his enthusiasm for the job. 

“He loved the idea of working with Berkeley because he was a person of strong social conscience,” Worth said. 

For a week in 1972, Worth toured the city with Bearden visiting black churches, Telegraph Avenue festivals, UC Berkeley faculty meetings, and a city council meeting. 

“Romare was a man who loved people and he responded very intensely to the people he met,” Worth said. 

For Bearden, the mural was a departure from his past works. He had never before painted a mural, and most of his work was biographical from his childhood in North Carolina and his adult years in Harlem.  

Bearden worked for 30 years as a social worker for New York City, painting at nights and on weekends. By the 1960s he came up with a collage process in which he blew up images in scale and integrated them into the collages. 

“He was ready for a mural,” Worth said. “It was an opportunity for him to make a collage on a larger scale.” 

The work debuted in January 1974, to a typically mixed Berkeley review, Worth said. “Some people thought it was too avant-guard, others had wanted there to be an open process that included local artists, but a lot of people liked it from the start.” 

“I was delighted with it,” Selz said. “That he managed to get so many aspects of the life of the city into one space was incredible.”  

The most brilliant feature, he added, were the four different colored profile heads on the bottom center, which symbolized the city’s diversity.  

The design would later replace UC’s Sather Tower as the city’s logo. 

“The fact that this has become part of the fabric of the city is a pretty good measure of the quality of the work,” Worth said. 

A welcome-back ceremony will be held today at 4 p.m. (Friday) at Old City Hall, 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

 

 

 


City Attorney Wins Distinction By MATTHEW ARTZ

Friday June 24, 2005

Berkeley City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque has been named 2005 Public Lawyer of the Year by the State Bar of California. 

Albuquerque, who has served as city attorney for nearly 20 years, will receive the award from Chief Justice Ronald George at the state bar’s annual meeting in September. 

She was selected by the executive committee of the Public Law section of the State Bar, on which she previously served. The section website praises Albuquerque’s work on legal ethics, calling her “a major force” as author of Practicing Ethics: A Handbook for Municipal Lawyers, published by the League of California Cities. 

Currently, Albuquerque is working with the State Bar Rules revision committee to amend rules addressing the concerns public attorneys face when adversaries seek to speak directly with public officials about on-going litigation. 

 


Downtown Plan Changed to Allow Brower Center, Housing By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Friday June 24, 2005

Planning Commissioners Thursday voted unanimously to ask the City Council to amend the Berkeley’s Downtown Plan to allow construction of the David Brower Center complex. 

Two buildings will rise above the site of the city’s Oxford Plaza parking lot along the west side of Fulton Street between Kittredge Street and Allston Way, and a one- or two-level underground parking structure will be dug into the earth beneath the site. 

The Brower Center itself will be one of the world’s “greenest” buildings, incorporating the latest technology to minimize energy consumption, while the solar panels that will form the structure’s parapet will generate a significant part of the power consumed within. 

The adjacent Oxford Plaza building with 96 units will provide the city’s largest collection of apartments for low- and very low-income tenants, including three-bedroom units. 

“This is a really great project,” said Commissioner Rob Wrenn. “It’s one of the few that actually provides affordable family-size units. You can count on two hands the number of affordable three-bedroom apartment built here in the last three years.” 

Principal Planner Aaron Sage told the commissioners the changes were needed “because it doesn’t quite fit within the Downtown Plan standard.” 

The plan sets specific height limits in the “Oxford Edge” sub-area—the stretch of Fulton/Oxford Street facing the University of California campus. 

Bonuses allowing additional height are available only to projects that devote 75 percent of their space to residential units and to those providing at least 5,000 square feet of cultural and/or fine arts space. 

The Oxford Plaza housing component, including ground floor commercial spaces, occupies 55,000 square feet, while the Brower Center measures in at 35,000, well below the requisite ratio. 

None of the Brower Center uses qualify under the fine arts/cultural uses bonus. 

Sage said that the project nonetheless has a large housing component and that an auditorium in the Brower Center will be available for some arts and cultural uses. 

“The amendments call for minor changes to the available bonuses applied specifically to this site, and keeps the height at no more than the current bonuses allow,” he said. 

 

Questions and answers 

Noting that most of the Brower Center itself would be leased to non-profit tenants, Commissioner Susan Wengraf posed a question to John Clawson, the complex project manager for Equity Community Builders. 

“The largest non-profit in the city is right across the street. Will there be any provision for not renting to the University of California?” 

Property leased to the university is removed from the tax rolls, a matter of growing concern in the city. 

“There are no restrictions,” Clawson said. 

“I have very grave concerns about the city building office space for the university,” said Wengraf. “They are the largest tenant in the downtown area.” 

“The city is not subsidizing the Brower Center,” said Clawson. “We are paying full market value for the land, approximately $5 million.” 

But the city is subsidizing the Oxford Plaza building, including $2.9 million in federal funds allocated by the Housing Advisory Commission, and the two projects are joined at the hip in the city approval process, a point Wengraf didn’t pursue. 

Commissioner Sara Shumer asked about another funding source now being solicited, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Brownfields Economic Development Incentives (BEDI) grants. 

The Ed Roberts Center at the Ashby BART station has received BEDI moneys for their project. 

Brownfields are usually defined as land polluted by various toxins which require remediation before development can occur. 

“My understanding is that the name is somewhat misleading because the site doesn’t have to be a brownfield,” Sage said. 

“They consider underutilized property as brownfields,” Clawson said, “not brownfields as contaminated.” 

 

Endorsements 

“We recommended the brownfields BEDI grant because HUD defines it broadly,” said Housing Advisory Commission (HAC) Vice-Chair Jesse Arreguin, who gave the project a ringing endorsement. 

HAC endorsed the grant proposal in a divided vote during their regular meeting Wednesday. 

Another self-described enthusiastic supporter was Anna de Leon, of Anna’s Jazz Island, Berkeley’s newest night club which recently opened in the Gaia Building, one building west of the Brower Center site on Allston Way. 

“We should give them whatever changes are needed,” she said. “How could we do otherwise?” 

Planning Manager Mark Rhoades drew chuckles from commissioners and the audience when he noted that de Leon “is the occupant, finally, of a cultural space.” 

Her club is located in the Gaia Building in part of the ground floor cultural space that allowed developer Patrick Kennedy to building the structure higher than would otherwise been allowed under the Downtown Plan. 

Deborah Badhia, executive director of the Downtown Berkeley Organization, said that while her group couldn’t make a formal recommendation on the project, “I’m looking forward to it. It will do a lot of things for a lot of people.” 

The group can’t take a formal stand, she said, because President Raudel Wilson is a member of the Zoning Adjustments Board which must vote on the project. 

When it came time for the vote, the planners gave their unanimous endorsement. 

 

West Campus 

Rhoades dropped a small bombshell late in the meeting when he declared that the city intends to assert jurisdiction over development at the school district’s West Campus site. 

“My reading of the [district’s] plan is that the city will have jurisdiction over the whole thing,” he said. “The Zoning Adjustments Board will address the specific issues.” 

If the school board has its way, jurisdiction would rest with the state architect’s office, which has purview over development of educational buildings and is exempt from municipal zoning codes. 

Rhoades said the city would have final say over everything except for a few interior spaces where teaching activities would occur. 

Attorneys for the city and the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) will hash out the details. 

His comments came as a result of a proposal by members Rob Wrenn and David Stoloff to ask BUSD to radically reduce the 170 parking places included in plans for development of the West Campus site. 

The initial hitch with the notion came when Rhoades said he’d need to ask the city manager’s office if the commission needed city council authorization to send the letter. 

Wrenn noted that the current school district offices at Old City Hall and its annex have only 13 spaces. 

“You couldn’t do anything more environmentally unfriendly” than to provide one space for every employee, he said. “The school district is even more backward that the university when it comes to urging alternative transport. 

“This is a very clear conflict with General Plan policy and it’s clearly appropriate for the Planning Commission to address.” 

But other members said they wanted to know more about the district’s plan before reaching a decision. 

“I’m totally uncomfortable getting into this towards the end of the process and using the august grandeur of the Planning Commission to intimidate the BUSD,” quipped Commissioner Gene Poschman, “I would love to refer this to the Transportation Commission [chaired by Rob Wrenn].” 

The commission meeting ended with no action taken on the proposal. 

The West Campus plan goes to the school board for a public hearing at its June 29 meeting.›


‘Project BUILD’ Keeps Kids Reading During Summer By MATTHEW ARTZ

Friday June 24, 2005

Nearly 1,000 Berkeley kids kicked off the city’s summer program Wednesday, but instead of throwing balls and eating sloppy joes, they all had a book under their arm and celery on their plate. 

With support from UC Berkeley and local businesses, Berkeley has expanded Project BUILD, a two-year-old program designed to infuse standard summer recreation programs for kindergarten through eighth grade students with lessons in healthy eating, recycling, and most important, literacy. 

Studies show that students regress a half grade in reading over the summer, said Trina Ostrander, executive director of the Berkeley Public Education Foundation. “It’s tragic that kids who are already behind actually lose academic skills over the summer.” 

Project BUILD attempts to keep students on track academically by giving them two free books and deploying 80 trained UC Berkeley students to tutor them three hours a day. The remainder of the day is reserved for recreation. 

The program works with eight already established city summer programs and is geared towards low income students in south and west Berkeley, where students have disproportionately lower test scores and higher rates of asthma and diabetes. 

“This is like school, only more fun,” said Victoria Alejo, a fourth grader who selected Felita as her summer reading material. Alexis Conway, a third grader, said that the three hours of reading was her favorite part of the program, although most of her friends preferred swimming. 

Beatriz Leyva-Cutler, the executive director of BAHIA, a community group that has teamed up with Project BUILD, said she has noticed that students who participated in last year’s program read better during the school year. 

“Our kids were a lot more excited about reading,” said Phil Cotton, who directs Berkeley’s Young Adult Project, also affiliated with the program. “The kids were proud to show off their books and show their parents what they read.”  

Cotton said that before Project BUILD, YAP had high school students or community volunteers tutoring students rather than trained UC students. “They solidify the program that much more,” he said. 

Tou Lor, a recent Cal grad who tutored students last year, said the program gives UC tutors a chance to formulate their own lesson plan. “This is a much richer experience than tutoring during the school year,” he said. 

Unlike last year, he added, when the program was hastily put together over two months, the tutors now have more training from UC Berkeley’s School of Education for scholastic work and from Berkeley’s Health Department to teach kids about cooking and exercising. 

The program carries a $320,000 price tag, but doesn’t cost the city any money. UC Berkeley covers the cost of the tutors through $255,000 in federal work-study funding and local businesses have contributed the rest of the money. All students will receive a free lunch devoid of soda and sweets. 

“This is the most exciting project I’ve been involved with in quite some time,” said Mayor Tom Bates, who worked to cobble together the funding and support groups to get the program underway. 

Project BUILD isn’t the only summer program in Berkeley this year, said school district spokesperson Mark Coplan. The PTA will continue to run programs at a few school sites that focus more on recreation. 

 

 

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Gilman Ballfields Hit Fast Track By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Friday June 24, 2005

Two city commissions mulled matters as diverse as artificial turf and burrowing owls Thursday during a joint evening meeting called to discuss the Gilman Street Playing Fields. 

During the 90-minute session, both Planning and Parks and Recreation commissioners heard from an Albany city councilmember, the chair of the Waterfront Commission, representatives of the Sierra Club, Audubon Society and Citizens for Eastshore Parks plus assorted city staffers and others. 

The meeting follows the release of proposed amendments to the Waterfront Specific Plan and zoning codes, along with the project’s environmental impact study and its accompanying proposed mitigated negative declaration. 

The city is pushing the project through the commission process, hoping for a final City Council vote on Sept. 27, according to planner Alan Gatzke. 

While the entire project will include two regulation soccer fields, two softball fields and a full-scale hardball field, only the soccer fields are in line for the first phase of development, said Parks and Recreation Department project manager Roger Miller. 

The $3 million initial phase will build the end-to-end fields on the northeast portion of the site along the south side of Gilman and extending down the Eastshore Freeway frontage road end at the northern edge of the hardball field site. 

The fields are costly in part because they are made of artificial turf atop an 18-inch drainage platform designed to allow play within an hour after a rain. 

The baseball fields, a small field house with restrooms on the north and additional restrooms on the south and, perhaps, night lighting would follow in a second phase after further funds are secured. 

The land, owned by the East Bay Regional Parks District, is currently occupied by the overflow parking lot for Golden Gate Fields on its northern half and unpaved land on the south. 

Eastshore State Park owns the narrow strip along the waterfront, including the Bayshore Trail. 

A joint powers agreement formed by the cities of Berkeley, Emeryville, Albany, El Cerrito and Richmond was created to initiate the project, and will result in the formation of a Joint Powers Authority which will work with Berkeley officials to bring it into being. 

City Director of Parks and Recreation and the Waterfront Mark Seleznow said the cities banded together because “of the enormous deficit of playing fields throughout the East Bay community” and “the parks district doesn’t do this kind of work.” 

 

Environmental concerns 

Vice Mayor Allan Maris of Albany, a veteran of his city’s Waterfront and Parks and Recreation Commissions before his election to the council, noted that the East Shore Park General Plan included playing fields on the Albany Plateau at the base of the Albany Bulb to the north of Golden Gate Fields. 

That notion was later abandoned after objections were raised by environmentalists, including Norman La Force of the Sierra Club and Robert Cheasty of Citizens for East Shore Parks. 

Both were on hand Thursday to endorse the current proposal—with one proviso. 

La Force, who was speaking both for the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, said the best alternative was to create a new habitat for burrowing owls on the Albany Plateau. 

When Planning Commissioner Sara Shumer noted that the Berkeley Meadow at the base of the Berkeley Marina was also used as an owl habitat, La Force said that the land was also reserved as habitat for two raptors that compete directly with the owl, while a habitat on the plateau could be prepared especially for the owls, officially recognized as a threatened species.  

Planner Alan Gatzke said the Planning Commission will be asked to vote on two amendments to the Waterfront Specific Plan which will allow the fields to be built. 

The first provides specific language to allow development of ballfields on the site, while the second would exempt the project from a requirement to prepare a master development plan for the project, a lengthy and potentially expensive process. 

 

Deadlines and meetings 

Planning commissioners will also be asked to give their approval to a zoning ordinance change needed before the city can move ahead. 

As the joint meeting ended, the Planning Commission voted to set a July 13 hearing on the environmental impact statement. 

“Major commissions involved in drafting the plan must all provide comments” on the EIS, Gatzke said. 

While the Transportation Commission offered their comments last week, the Waterfront Commission offered theirs at a meeting held simultaneously with the Planning Commission. Parks and Recreation is scheduled to offers theirs on Monday, with a final deadline for submission on July 6. 

Final comments for the environmental documents will be taken at the Planning Commission July 13 meeting, with the commission scheduled to vote on the plan and zoning amendments on July 27. 

Seleznow said that if all goes as planned, the construction contract on the soccer fields would be signed in spring or early summer of 2006, with the first games to begin early that September.,


RFID Detractors Gather for Protest By MATTHEW ARTZ

Friday June 24, 2005

To the backdrop of songs that harkened back to the Cold War, about 60 Berkeley lefties and library workers, most of them old enough to remember the ‘60s, protested Tuesday against what they see as a 21st century menace. 

Radio frequency identification devices, palm-sized antennas that can be used to track anything from cattle to razors, are coming to the library starting in August.  

But opponents of the technology, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and locally Super Berkeleyans Organizing For Library Defense, oppose the technology. 

They argue that when it comes to library books, the devices could allow authorities or anyone with a card reading machine to track not just the book, but the library patron as well. 

SuperBOLD also fears that the devices—purported to increase self check-out rates at the library to 90 percent—might cost library employees their jobs. 

“We want humans, not machines,” Peace And Justice Commissioner Phoebe Anne Sorgen told the audience. 

Berkeley has already paid for its $650,000 system, approved last year by the library board, and is moving ahead with implementation. The board was scheduled to hold a public forum on the technology Monday, but scheduling conflicts among the panel of experts caused them to postpone the meeting, said Board Member Terry Powell. The forum has been tentatively rescheduled for August 1. 

The battle over RFIDs is continuing on the state and national levels, said Lee Tien, an attorney with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

The EFF and ACLU succeeded in passing a bill through the state Assembly banning RFID in state identity cards, Tien said. However, he added, a companion bill in the senate is facing opposition from the electronics industry. 

Tien said national concern about RFID has increased after the U. S. State Department was forced to withdraw its plan to install the devices on new U.S. passports. The agency is now considering ways to encrypt the devices so they can only be read by authorized individuals. 


City Receives High Marks in Mayor’s Poll By MATTHEW ARTZ

Friday June 24, 2005

The Fire Department is Berkeley’s top budget priority according to an unscientific survey of residents released Tuesday by Mayor Tom Bates. 

Fire protection and emergency services, both provided by the Fire Department, ranked one and two among survey participants. Business assistance, job training, affordable housing and arts programs were rated as the lowest priorities out of a list of 18. 

The top priorities after fire and emergency services were: Police, libraries, parks, child care and after school programs, health programs, senior and disabled programs, street and sidewalk repair, transportation and parking, audits, homeless programs and bicycle programs. 

The survey didn’t appear to influence the mayor’s recommendations for funding community agencies, also released this week. The biggest beneficiaries were the civic arts program, a youth jobs program, and the Berkeley Guides, which serves downtown businesses. 

Survey participants gave the city high marks overall for services. Fifty-nine percent responded that city services were good to excellent, while just 18 percent ranked such services as below average or very poor. 

Respondents were not offered categories to express their opinions on land use, development, zoning or growth. 

Despite the low ranking for business assistance, 69 percent of respondents said economic development was an important issue. 

655 residents took the survey, the majority of whom attended one of the mayor’s recent public meetings. Others took the survey online. 

Also some council districts were disproportionately represented. District 1, Northwest Berkeley, accounted for 23 percent of the respondents, while District 4, Central Berkeley, accounted for 4 percent.  

The mayor’s office acknowledged that the survey was not a validly accurate public opinion poll. 

At Tuesday’s council meeting Mayor Bates said that if revenues were strong he would consider restoring funding to the fire department. To help close an $8.9 million budget deficit, the city will rotate the closure of fire companies starting in July.


Gay Pride Festival This Weekend By CASSIE NORTON

Friday June 24, 2005

This weekend might be a good time to reload your BART pass and avoid driving in San Francisco—the city will be full of revelers for the 35th annual Pride Celebration. 

The celebration is a culmination of the month of pride events that takes place every June. Historically, it is a commemoration of the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the birth of the modern gay rights movement. Locally, the mission of the San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Celebration Committee is “to educate the world, commemorate our heritage, celebrate our culture, and liberate our people,” according to the Pride website. 

The festivities will be held Saturday, June 25, from noon to 6 p.m. at the Civic Center and continue on Sunday from noon to 7 p.m. A $3 donation is requested, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Performers include the San Francisco Orchestra on Saturday and Third Eye Blind, En Vogue, BETTY, and third-place American Idol finalist Kimberley Locke on Sunday. The famous Pride Parade begins at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, starting on Market Street at Beale and traveling west to Eighth Street. 

Grandstand seats for the parade can be purchased in advance for $31 per person or for $35 at the parade, and are for sale at the Pacific Center for Human Growth at 2712 Telegraph Ave. The tickets must be purchased in person and paid for with cash. Drop-in hours are Monday through Friday from noon to 6 p.m. or by appointment; however, desk volunteer Lester Marks strongly suggests calling the center beforehand at 548-8283. 

Each year the Pride Committee elects publicly nominated grand marshals, people who have contributed significantly to the LGBT community. This year there are three celebrity grand marshals: retired pro football player turned singer Esera Tualo; Ilene Chaiken, creator of the hit series The L Word ; and Alec Mapa, an openly gay actor, playwright, journalist, comic and performer who writes a regular column for The Advocate called “Minority Report.” 

The grand marshal recognized for lifetime achievement is Jose Sarria, who as an openly gay man working at the Black Cat bar in San Francisco in the 1940s, lead the customers to the local jail to serenade the arrested patrons of area gay bars. In 1961 he was the first openly gay person in the modern world to run for public office. He lost, but the 5,600 votes he garnered drew attention to the importance of the gay voting populace. Sarria later developed the bylaws and functions of what became the Imperial Court of San Francisco, which has grown to become a national philanthropic organization. He remains very active in the community. 

Local grand marshals include Randy Burns, founder of the Gay American Indians in 1975, and an HIV/AIDS and human rights activist; James Hormel, the philanthropist who funded the gay and lesbian center in the San Francisco Library and the first openly gay ambassador; and the Reverend Dr. G. Penny Nixon, Senior Minister of the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, a progressive Christian church which “encourages gay people to experience the fullness of their spiritual life.” 

The Pride Committee also awards the “Pink Brick” to a person or organization who has hurt the LGBT community in the past year. This year’s recipient is Sen. Diane Feinstein for her comment that gay marriage was “too much, too fast, too soon.” While this is the most recent incident between Feinstein and the gay community, it is not the first. Feinstein has had a rocky relationship with the community, voting against the first domestic partners’ legislation in 1982 and in favor of closing the San Francisco bath houses. However, she also provided funding for HIV/AIDS during the presidency of Ronald Reagan and supported Grand Marshall James Hormel in his bid for an ambassadorial position. 

According to the committee, this is the first time the Pink Brick has been awarded to someone “we can talk with.” 

The final grand marshal award, given to organizations who have helped the LGBT community, went to PAWS (Pets Are Wonderful Support), a non-profit organization that assists people with AIDS/HIV and other disabling illnesses in staying together with their companion animals. They are dedicated to educating the community on the benefits and risks of animal companionship and advocating on behalf of the human-animal bond. 

In order to accommodate the crowds, the BART will be providing longer trains on Sunday, as well as event trains before and after the celebration. Trains will operate on a regular Sunday schedule at 20-minute intervals on the Richmond to Fremont, Pittsburg/Baypoint to Millbrae and Dublin/Pleasanton to Daly City lines. BART personnel will be selling BART tickets at tables in selected stations to help ease the demand at ticket machines. A table will be open at the Dublin/Pleasanton and Fremont stations from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m and at the Civic Center from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. BART officials suggest buying round trip tickets to avoid lines before the trip home. 

For more information on the Pride Celebration, call (415) 864 - 3733 or log on to the Pride website, www.sfpride.org.


Health Officials Urge Changes at Field Station, Campus Bay By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Friday June 24, 2005

Anxious workers at the Richmond Field Station (RFS) gathered in a conference room at the UC Berkeley facility Thursday to hear reports from state and local officials on potential health risks posed by hazardous pollutants at RFS and the Campus Bay site next door. 

Contra Costa Public Health Director Dr. Wendel Brunner and Dr. Richard Kruetzer, chief of the Environmental Health Investigations branch of the state Department of Health Services, said that while current conditions were well within acceptable occupational exposure standards, they would press for more sensitive exposure monitoring equipment at both locations. 

Brunner said the two agencies joined forces to look at the sites at the request of community members and people who work at RFS and in the businesses immediately south of Campus Bay. 

“Probably the most important potential health risk arises because the site has not been completely evaluated,” said Brunner. “The university really needs to develop a health and safety plan that can be [posted] in areas that have not been completely assessed and remediated.” 

Of particular concern was potential exposures to workers involved in digging in still-contaminated areas, he said. 

Monitoring equipment now in use is sensitive to acceptable exposure levels for workers who spend approximately 40 hours weekly at the site, but not to the lower levels that could represent potential threats to infants and others who receive longer exposures because they live near the site, he said. 

Specifically, the two agencies called for lower-than-occupational-level detection of airborne arsenic and mercury, public availability of all known information sampling data, a letter from the university to all employees promising not to retaliate against employees who raise questions about site safety and implementing the precautionary principle for all untested and unremediated areas of the sites. 

Other actions urged include: 

• Notification of local works and residents before the start of any remediation actions. 

• Fencing with warning signs of unremediated areas of East Stege Marsh and the adjoining lagoon. 

• Formulation of a health and safety plan for use during all future marsh restoration efforts in remediated areas, taking into account the possibility of chemicals migrating in from unremediated areas. 

• Training in hazardous materials handling and exposures for UC workers whose jobs may include digging and otherwise handling soils at the site. 

The officials also called for monitoring of supposedly “clean” East Bay mud imported to replace the contaminated muck excavated from Stege Marsh at both sites. 

“There’s a lot of contaminated mud around the Bay, and we don’t want contaminated mud to replace contaminated mud,” said Brunner. 

Nonetheless, said the physicians, children working to replant remediated areas of the marsh don’t face any risks of exposure to known toxins—a concern recently raised by members of Bay Area Residents for Responsible Development. 

While Brunner said the agencies were directing their primary efforts at current and future conditions at the site, many of the employees, including retirees present during the session, said they were more concerned with exposures incurred in the past and with their potential health consequences. 

Brunner acknowledged that no measurements had been collected during some of the previous cleanup efforts, including large-scale operations that led up to the creation of a 350,000-cubic-yard capped waste pile at Campus Bay, and said that monitors that were in place were geared to the higher, occupational exposures. 

Barbara Cook of the state Department of Toxic Substances Control said she was satisfied that monitoring was adequate during cleanup efforts at Campus Bay over the past year. “They were set...to protect the community,” she said, adding, “we have to go back and talk about this.” 

DHS physician Marilyn Underwood said Thursday morning that a subsequent review of DTSC monitoring revealed that arsenic levels were detected at levels very close to what her department wanted, and were considered adequate. 

Responding to employee concerns about the potential synergistic effects of contaminants on the site Brunner acknowledged that little is known about how the interaction of two chemicals might produce a greater adverse effect than expected from their additive impacts—a phenomenon well known in pharmacology. Underwood said that her department considered only additive impacts. 

The physicians likewise couldn’t offer reassuring answers to workers who asked what tests might detect prior exposures. 

Lichterman offered one possible source of help, employee health complaint logs held by a former RFS employee who called her after a Daily Planet story previewing Thursday’s meeting. 

She also presented officials with photographs of an unknown purple fluid oozing up from a site near Field Station Building 484, along with samples of the liquid.  

UC senior editor and UPTE union Occupational Health and Safety Officer Joan Lichterman seconded the call for a non-retaliation letter, reminding UC officials that “you said we would get a letter...to date, nothing has happened.” 

“I imagine it will be coming soon,” said Teresa McLemore of the university’s Employee Relations Department. 

Other UC officials on hand for the afternoon included Environmental Health and Safety specialists Karl Hans and Anna Moore, Scott Shackleton and assistant Dean of the College of Engineering (which has jurisdiction over most of the site). 

Four other DHS officers wer also in attendance. 

The two agencies will continue to work together with the goal of preparing a final report and recommendations. A meeting in November with all the various agencies involved in the two sites is expected to make a major advance on the goal. 

 

CAG Meeting  

The Community Advisory Group appointed to assist the state Department of Toxic Substances Control in formulating final cleanup plans for Campus Bay will meet June 30 to discuss whether to include RFS in their purview. The Daily Planet incorrectly reported that the meet would occur after Thursday’s meeting. 

The meeting, open to the public, will be held from 7 to 9 p.m. in the Bermuda Room of the Richmond Convention Center, 403 Civic Center Plaza near the corner of Nevin and 25th streets.›


Helen Lima, Presente! By MARGY WILKINSON Special to the Planet

Friday June 24, 2005

Helen Corbin Lima died peacefully in her sleep in the early hours of May 5. She had recently celebrated her 88th birthday. On the day she died she had lunch with friends at the North Oakland Senior Center and after a rest helped make a large pot of applesauce.  

Helen and her twin brother Allen were born on March 31, 1917, in China where their father was a missionary. Helen returned to the U.S. permanently in 1928, the year her mother died. Helen graduated from high school in Henry, Illinois and went first to Carleton College and then to the University of Illinois in Urbana. She graduated with a degree in sociology and no hopes of finding a job in the Midwest. In 1938, a self declared atheist and non-conformist, she moved to Eureka, California where her older sister Clara was living. Clara had been part of the community support for the 1935 Eureka lumber strike and that attracted Helen. She worked part-time at a restaurant and cleaned houses before she finally she found a job as the secretary for the fisherman’s union Local 38 in Eureka in 1939. Helen later wrote about this experience, “I learned CIO unionism—militant, democratic and politically progressive.” Helen’s job was to keep the books, track the treasury and take the minutes. She soon, however, became an organizer. That same year Helen joined the Communist Party and in 1940 she married Albert J “Mickie” Lima who was a local leader in the CP.  

Their first child, Margaret was born in 1943 and in 1945 the family moved to San Francisco. Helen went to work in the offices of People’s World newspaper. Their second child, Michael, was born in August 1949 and in May 1951 their third child, Rachel, was born. Six weeks later Mickie and other leaders of the Communist Party were arrested under the Smith Act. For the next several years Helen’s life was consumed by the “Smith Act Defense.” By 1956 the job at the People’s World had become very part time and Helen went to work first in a small restaurant and then in the spring of 1957 in the kitchen at Herrick Hospital in Berkeley. In the summer of 1958 SEIU Local 250 struck at several East Bay hospitals for pay increase and union recognition. After a three-week strike they won union recognition and a nickel increase in pay. Helen, who had been a strike captain, became a rank and file union activist—and for the next 21 years she fought for workers on the job and for democracy and financial transparency in Local 250.  

In 1979 Helen retired from Herrick and devoted her time to political work. She worked for peace, against racism and South African apartheid, in many local political campaigns and raised money for the People’s World newspaper. She also took care of her son Michael who suffered from schizophrenia until he committed suicide in 1982. In 1995 Helen lost her son-in-law Donzell in a tragic incident of street violence. In 1987 Mickie retired from full time work in the Communist Party and Mickie and Helen spent long weeks at the family cabin in Fort Bragg. Mickie died in June 1989 and in early 1991 Helen moved into Strawberry Creek Lodge in Berkeley. Her only income was Social Security, so she applied for Section 8 housing—and a whole new realm of political activity opened up for her. From then until her death Helen was active in the fight for affordable housing and to save Section 8. In May 2000 she was given an affordable housing leadership award for community activism by the Non Profit Housing Association of Northern California. And in November 2004 she received the Hell Raiser of the Year award from Berkeley’s Housing Rights Advocates.  

Helen is survived by daughters Rachel and Margy and son-in-law Tony; grandchildren Jason and wife Rachel, Lila and Matthew; by great grandchildren Sofia and Mickie—and by scores of friends and admirers.  

A public memorial will be held at 2:00 p.m. on June 26, 2005, at Finnish Hall, 1819 Tenth St., Berkeley. Please call Margy Wilkinson at 644-1138 for information. g


Editorial Cartoon BY JUSTIN DEFREITAS

Staff
Friday June 24, 2005

http://www.jfdefreitas.com/index.php?path=/00_Latest%20Work?


Letters to the Editor

Friday June 24, 2005

UC SETTLEMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

My friend Zelda keeps getting in deeper and deeper. Someone needs to throw her a life raft. Let’s talk a little about the UC lawsuit. 

Substance: The only hook Berkeley had (because the university is exempt from local regulation) is a flawed environmental quality report. What the lawsuit could have realistically accomplished, had it been tried, was to force a new report. Nothing more. What the settlement did accomplish was more than that for the cash-starved city. Of course, the city is starved for cash partly because short-sighted folks (including Zelda) voted down some needed tax measures last November. 

Process: The City Council met with its attorneys to discuss settlement in closed session. Just as it always does in lawsuit settlement talks. I should know, it always happened when I sued the city on behalf of someone. If that is anti-democratic, it is surprising that it took Zelda so long to find out about the practice (reported in all local papers for as long as I have lived here—approximately 50 years). 

Taxes: It surprises and disappoints me that good, formerly progressive people like Zelda would vote to deprive the libraries and the city of necessary revenue at a time when the governor is starving the cities and counties in an attempt to avoid or reduce needed taxes. People need to understand that, as George Lakoff reminds us, taxes are the dues we pay for the civilization we enjoy. 

One final note: It hardly needs an entire letter to point out that Marie Bowman’s screed is long on taxes and number of employees but short (actually, absent) on the service we provide here in Berkeley that the cities she uses for comparison do not provide. But then, truth was not her weapon. 

Mal Burnstein 

 

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DOWNING STREET MEMO 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I send the letter below to the Daily Planet because although the San Francisco Chronicle once published about half my letters, it has published none since last October and will not respond to my query about whether it maintains a blacklist, which increasingly appears to be the case.  

More important, however, is the shameful way in which the U.S. media has largely ignored the implications of the Downing Street memo and those that have followed it as published in the British press (but not here), as well as the way that the Conyers hearing was ridiculed by the leading newspapers that bothered to report it. The lack of coverage of these extremely important documents and of that riveting hearing is one of the greatest indictments of U.S. journalism, even as the Republican assassination of Dan Rather, Newsweek, and many others shows that there is no safety for the press in cooperation with the present regime.  

Editors, San Francisco Chronicle: 

Anyone who read the Cox News Service account of the historic June 16 hearing held by Rep. John Conyers on the significance of the Downing Street Memo (and those that have followed and buttressed it) would have virtually no idea of what those of us who watched the hearings on C-Span saw and heard, let alone of who testified at the hearing, why it had to be held in a cramped basement room, or why those memoranda appear to point to impeachable crimes. To its credit, the San Francisco Chronicle printed the text of the memo along with the drab little article, but it did so on page A20 and provided none of the essential context needed by readers to understand its dynamite implications.  

Now that public pressure is forcing the mainstream U.S. media to pay attention to a document published over a month ago in the Times of London, pundits at the leading newspapers and network news are justifying their tardiness by echoing the White House claims that the evidence of deliberate deception by the Bush and Blair administrations is miraculously absurd and stale news at the same time, and that anyone who pays it heed is a paranoid wingnut or, more inconsequentially, an anti-war activist. In its failure to adequately cover this explosive story, the U.S. media shares culpability with the twin administrations which deceived the world into an ever-deepening disaster from which there now appears no escape.  

Gray Brechin  

 

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IMPEACHMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

We’ve recently been reading about the Downing Street Memo covering a meeting that Prime Minister Tony Blair of England had with his top advisors in March 2002. This memo revealed incontrovertibly that President Bush and his administration were already planning to invade Iraq illegally. The memo shows that they were planning to “fix” the weapons-of-mass-destruction reports from the intelligence agencies. We now realize that this misinformation was used to get Congress to authorize an illegal invasion of Iraq so that by March 2003, the United States and Britain could join together to topple Saddam Hussein and bring about the death of 1,700 U.S. citizens and more than 100,000 Iraqi citizens. 

Congressman John Conyers and 35 other members of the congress have just held a hearing to call on President Bush to answer questions raised by the Downing Street Memo. Bush is not likely to do so since this administration has been using cover-up tactics to avoid a frank discussion of the memo. It is time to consider impeachment of President Bush for the crime not only of starting a war illegally, but of creating a horrendous situation in Iraq for which there appears to be no end (is that what President Bush meant when he talked about “endless war?”). 

Impeachment could not proceed without a congressional inquiry into lies Bush might have told congress to get its permission to invade Iraq. Therefore, we call on the Daily Planet to urge the Berkeley City Council to call for such an inquiry based on information brought to light by the Downing Street Memo. 

Jean Pauline  

Oakland 

 

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ELDER ABUSE 

Just what is Ms. Wheeler trying to say in her June 14 commentary? Her title suggests that the library has discarded books on the subject of elder abuse, but she cites no titles and provides no evidence that this is the case. She rightly points out that the library has no books on the subject. I suspect what she’s requesting is that the library acquire some references (for which it sounds like she may have a list). To this end, the library’s website has a “Suggest A Purchase” link on the top right and I bet they’d be pleased to take donations. 

I didn’t even know the public library had an “Adult” collection! 

John Vinopal 

 

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GOD AND VIOLENCE 

I have three friends who have all experienced violence in their families recently. One dead son in a car-jacking, one critical son because of an unprovoked road-rage shooting and a godson who was shot seven times in the abdomen six weeks ago in a robbery. These assaults have all been committed by “kids.” I find it self-defeating for our society that these “kids” at the age of 10 are taught everything there is to know about sex but that it is unlawful for anyone to tell them about God, that God has laws, and that if everyone put God first in their lives there would be no violence such as this. 

Catherine Willis 

 

• 

JEFFERSON-HEMINGS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Reading the several articles regarding the proposed renaming of the Jefferson Elementary School, leads me to believe that all citizens of Berkeley are not so well informed on the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings controversy. I refer your readers to www.angelfire.com/va/TJTruth and www.tjheritage.org. Read the full Scholars Commission Report from a link here and the book review, “The Jefferson-Hemings Myth: An American Travesty.”  

Nothing proves a Jefferson-Hemings relationship but it still fuels the slavery debate.  

Herb Barger 

Jefferson Family Historian 

Assistant to Dr. E.A. Foster on the Jefferson-Hemings DNA Study 

Ft. Washington, Md. 

 

• 

INHUMANE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It’s always a bit worrying when a citizen commissioner interjects themselves into a city staffing issue because of their personal agenda of hostility. Humane Commissioner McFall speaks loudly at public meetings and writes letters to the papers but never reveals her status as a commissioner. This gives the impression she is just a very informed bystander—she is not. She has an ax to grind with Councilmember Dona Spring and with certain other progressive commissioners and she grinds it ceaselessly. In her public statements she crudely berates the councilmember who has fought tirelessly for animals and the animal shelter, long before it was fashionable to do so and certainly long before Ms McFall was given her position on the commission—Dona Spring. 

It is unseemly for a commissioner to speak up for any job cuts in the agency she oversees, but her statements make clear that she has taken a position to endorse one position, which in effect endorses cutting of another. She then finds reasons to justify the cut while making a broad call for no cuts. How shallow and how very transparent. 

There is not another member of the Humane Commission I know of who has taken this position. The rest of us, knowing better, are advocating for more staff, not less. This department has been cut, every year for four years. We cannot afford, in a time of greater public anxiety about dogs, to be cutting back on any staff, whether they be field operations or shelter-based. 

McFall’s ugly attack on Spring for not going to the shelter and her accusation that Dona knows nothing about animal sheltering does not take into account that as a disabled woman in a wheelchair, crossing the railroad tracks makes Dona anxious—with good reason. Neither does it take into account that Ms. Spring has consistently appointed commissioners with know how and experience to advise her on the shelter. 

Jill Posener 

Berkeley Humane Commissioner 

 

• 

BLOTTER, ETC. 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

“Federation Communications Commission”? (Daily Planet, June 21.) Is Star Wars what blew Brenneman’s mind? 

And as to Police Blotter aficionado Foldvary (Letters, June 21), I’d say he misses the main point as to the annoyance in reading the blotter. I can’t believe anyone reads that thing because of what (s)he sees in it as “wit.” With all the tons of writing styles available in crime stories plastered all over the media in our present-day society, would anyone go to a police blotter for entertainment? Foldvary seems typical of quite a few Berkeleyans who hold some concept that the way they think is the way “people,” “most people” or “righteous people” think. 

The Police Blotter is just plain annoying in that it forces one to put extra effort—because of archaic crime slang or whatever—into simply reading a useful feature for getting a rough idea of crime problems in one’s vicinity. 

May the Force wipe the nonsense out of the Daily Planet Police Blotter! And, oh yeah, train whistles: O.K., they’re nostalgic...but only if you live the right distance from their tracks. And then there’s BART, which doesn’t even need a whistle to grate on your nerves while walking the Nimitz Trail two mountain ridges away, every time it turns on a radius of almost the same distance! 

Ray Chamberlin 

 

• 

MEASURE A RAID 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As the chair of Vote Health, I want to alert your readers to a proposed raid on Measure A funds, which Alameda County voters authorized in March 2004 to be spent on providing healthcare services to low-income and uninsured residents. Measure A, a half-cent sales tax increase, specifies that the new funding is to supplement, not replace existing county spending. Yet Dave Kears, head of the county’s Health Care Services Agency, is proposing to balance his department’s budget by using $5.4 million in Measure A funds to pay cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) to several health care providers. These COLAs are essential, given the surging costs of providing healthcare, but they should come out of County funds, not Measure A tax receipts. 

This proposal also violates the Board of Supervisors policy of last December, which stated that the community primary care clinics would have priority for any Measure A funds above the anticipated $20 million per year. That’s where this $5.4 million comes from—more taxes have been collected than anticipated by the board’s original allocation of $20 million from Measure A. 

Another major problem is the failure of the supervisors to appoint the citizen oversight committee required by Measure A. 15 months after the election there is still no independent monitoring of how our tax dollars are being spent. 

We agree that the county is facing fiscal problems, in large part because it is in turn being raided by the state and federal governments. But the county administrator somehow found an additional $20 million to plug holes in the sheriff’s budget—that extra funding should have been more equitably distributed to all county departments being forced to make cuts.  

The Board of Supervisors adopts the county budget this Friday, June 24, starting at 10 a.m. Call President Keith Carson at 272-6695 to protest this abuse of Measure A funds and insist that the COLAs be paid out of the county’s pocket! 

Kay Eisenhower 

Oakland 

 

• 

BUDGET SUGGESTIONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I would like to offer some suggestions regarding the city’s current budget crisis: 

1. Re-negotiate all city employment contacts to eliminate the practice of including automatic annual COLAs and to require each city employee to contribute to his or her own retirement, as other cities do. 

2. Place Public Housing under HUD (Oakland has done this successfully). The city has more than met housing goals set by ABAG; the department costs per unit for management appear excessive; and the department has not been in compliance with HUD rules. 

3. Eliminate Berkeley’s redundant Health Department and use the county Health Department. We already pay for Alameda County services as well as for Berkeley’s. The city could assume an advocate position. 

4. Evaluate the effectiveness of current youth programs before adding any more. 

5. Our sewer fees are four to five times higher than those of other cities, while our sewers continue to deteriorate. Is it perhaps because the city siphons off sewer funds and applies them to other projects? 

6. $60,000 for turtles to enhance a non-functioning fountain? This surely is a joke!? 

The above cuts could give us the police and fire protection the citizens of the city deserve. Anything less is malfeasance on the part of city government. Eight policemen on the street at night is dangerous, as is eliminating a fire truck. The primary duty of government is to ensure public safety, and we should make that a priority. 

Evelyn Giardina 

 

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WATERFRONT  

RECOMMENDATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Regarding the June 21 story, “Transportation Commission Declines to Choose Ferry Site,” by Richard Brenneman: 

For the record, the Waterfront Commission’s recommendation was the same as that reported for the Transportation Commission, i.e., to consider all potential sites for providing ferry transit service to the East Bay: 

“Request that WTA proceed with environmental review and detailed site selection for a terminal location that includes all potential sites in Berkeley and Albany and direct city staff to provide support for the analysis of parking and traffic impacts.” 

Brad Smith 

 

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TEACHER TENURE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In his crusade against California’s teachers, Gov. Schwarzenegger crassly manipulates a misconception: teacher tenure as inured incompetence. In fact, there is no such thing as a permanent K-12 teacher. Tenure, conferred after two years’ satisfactory service, is simply the right not to be dismissed without a fair hearing. To prevent this “sunshine” status from taking effect for three additional years, so that during any of the five years a teacher could be dismissed in backstage mode without review, is no recipe for good teaching—and certainly not for the ésprit de corps that we Californians remember in our best teachers. 

Anne Richardson 

Albany 

 

• 

ANTI-PLANET 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Mayor Bates’ remark at City Council on Tuesday night that he does not read the Daily Planet is frighteningly reminiscent of the isolation of another one of our leaders, George W. Bush. 

If you do not know what your constituents are thinking and what issues concern them, you will not be able to make informed decisions. And that is what we see happening on both the national and local level. 

Yes, it is hard to be a politician in a town that has an independent paper, with good investigative reporters and a very attentive readership who generously contribute their views in letters and op-ed columns. 

But difficult as it is, politicians cannot survive in an hermetically sealed environment, and should actually be thankful for the wonderful form of democracy a local, independently owned paper presents us with. 

Gregory Pedemonte 

 

• 

MEGA MALL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Not Albany residents, only 49 percent of 400 hand-picked residents through a push poll, expressed an opinion that indicated they did not want a “mega mall” built on privately owned asphalt at Golden Gate Fields. 

How the pollsters came up with “mega mall” when no plans have been made about the scope of the project is anybody’s guess unless they think about the backers of the big bucks survey. One is the developer of Fourth Street who doesn’t want the competition, and the other is an internationally active organization whose local representative doesn’t live in Albany, doesn’t even live in Alameda County. 

I say to them, “Get your noses out of my town’s business.” Richard Brenneman missed the big story at Monday night’s council meeting, probably because he was not there. The citizens in the audience did not come to the microphone to discuss the pros and cons of development. They stood to express their outrage at Councilmember Lieber’s statement at the end of the presentation that the issue was dead because his numbers showed that there was no support for development so it would never happen and the people of Albany had nothing to say about it. This was said in a forum designed for open discourse! 

Lieber also said he had nothing to do with the poll, but later said he helped design some of the questions. When questioned on that point he retreated to the previous “no involvement” stance which turned out to be that he had not contributed any money to take the survey. Mr. Lieber has a lot to learn about Albany. He overlooked Measure C, and he overlooked the fact that concerned Albany residents who care about more than a single issue are not about to be pushed around by this front man for outside interests and his potty-mouthed minion. 

Lubov Mazur 

Albany 

 

• 

SCHOLARLY REPORT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Concerning David Wilson’s letter of June 17 on the UC Settlement, either Mr. Wilson and I are looking at different texts, or Mr. Wilson is guilty of shoddy scholarship. I am looking at the text of the settlement agreement on the mayor’s website. Section III.D. reads as follows: “The parties acknowledge that if changes in state law modify the monetary legal obligations of UC the parties shall renegotiate this agreement with the purpose of maintaining the same total amount of allocations, inclusive of any new obligation.” I do not believe this necessarily says that the City of Berkeley is signing away the rights that would be created by a change in state law. It arguably says that the new obligations will be met and the renegotiation will attempt to keep the total allocations the same, if possible. It does not necessarily imply that the stated purpose of the renegotiation will necessarily be met. I think David Wilson is right, however, that the wording is ambiguous, and this creates the danger of an unjust court ruling, but ambiguity is generally sufficient to ensure that the city has not signed away its rights, because the signing away of rights must always be unambiguous and clearly evident in the wording of the contract. As for Mr. Wilson’s second point, it does not seem logical. If the settlement agreement terminates, all of it terminates, including any provision relating to attorney’s fees in a future challenge. 

It is disturbing that Mr. Wilson has not responded to my essential point, which is the very point on which the mayor and the city officials have most clearly deceived the people. The fiscal impact report on the city manager’s website breaks down the $13.5 million into three categories: on-going costs of providing services ($8.1 million), one-time capital costs ($2.7 million), and sewer/stormwater costs ($2.7 million). Ostensibly, the university is liable for the $8.1 million under the San Marcos ruling. It is liable in addition for the second charge of $2.7 million under the subsequent legislation, Government Code Section 54999, et seq. It is only the one-time charges for capital improvements, which are also known as special assessments, that the university is clearly exempt from. This is the key point on which the mayor and his lackeys should be challenged. Of course, they should also be challenged on the secrecy issue, which Antonio Rossman believes is even more serious than any of the very serious substantive issues. The issue of signing away the sovereignty of the city is also an extremely important issue. 

As an immediate concern, we now have the City Council attempting to perpetrate another fraud on the public. Item 15 on the action part of the agenda for the regular meeting of June 21 is a deceptive fraud upon the people. It is entitled “Alternative UC Sewer Payment Method,” and within the text it continues to perpetrate the fraud that it is merely a different method of payment that is at issue. In fact, the purpose of the new legislation is to exempt the university from paying the lawful sewer/stormwater costs. This purpose was made explicit in the settlement agreement. Subsection VI.C. of the settlement agreement reads in relevant part as follows: “City will promptly pass a resolution and take any other legal steps necessary to exempt UC Berkeley from the imposition of the sewer fees adopted by the City Council on April 26, 2005.” What is now planned is most obviously not an “alternative method of payment,” but an exemption from the true charges and a substitution of token charges in their place. This is a deceptive fraud upon the people, just one more in a long list of such fraudulent acts by this city government. 

Peter Mutnick 


Column: UnderCurrents: Downing the Stray Pigeons of the Slavery Discussion By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR

Friday June 24, 2005

“Black Americans and their leaders would be far better served if they would address the real problems in black education instead of the superficial and misleading issue of the name of a school.” So begins the April 19, 2005 Berkeley Daily Planet commentary by Berkeley resident Michael Larrick, writing on his opposition to the petition to change the name of Berkeley’s Jefferson Elementary School. 

The petition was submitted to Jefferson Elementary principal Betty Delaney in the spring of 2003, and called for the name change on the grounds that Thomas Jefferson “held as many as 150 African and African-American men, women and children in bondage, denying them the very rights which he had asserted for all in the Declaration of Independence. .... For some ... a school name which fails to acknowledge or respect the depth and importance of their people’s collective sorrow is personally offensive....” 

The question of whether the name of Jefferson Elementary should be changed has been argued at length in the letters to the editor pages of this paper, and elsewhere, and the issue of whether it would be changed was decided this week by the Berkeley School Board, which denied the petition on a 3-2 vote. 

But Mr. Larrick’s commentary raises a different point, which is whether the issue of Thomas Jefferson as a slaveholder—and by extension, the issues raised by the institution of American slavery in general—should be a topic of such discussion at all, given the many problems being faced by African American children in the public schools. It is Mr. Larrick’s opinion that such a discussion is, at best, a waste of time, and takes away from a concentrated attack on what has been come to be called the “achievement gap”—in which the educational results of black students in general (as measured by standardized test scores and grades, for example) persistently lag behind the educational results of their white counterparts. 

“The name of a school has absolutely nothing to do with academic achievement,” Mr. Larrick argues. “The real reasons for the ‘achievement gap’ are uncomfortable for many to discuss so the portrayal of blacks as perennial victims is used to absolve them from having to accept responsibility for their own actions and bad choices.” He concludes that “the black community needs to look to the future and make some changes in their approach to education and it goes far beyond the name of a school. Time is running out on the ability to play the victim card. Doing something to change incredible school drop out rate and the number of single mothers is what should be a priority or you may as well just change the name of the school to San Quentin Prep.” 

Mr. Larrick has let fly a number of stray pigeons out of this bush, in all directions at once. Let us pick them off quickly, one by one, before they get too far away. 

The first stray pigeon is the inference that African Americans suffer from the “Gerald Ford Syndrome,” taken from the remark by President Lyndon Johnson that because Mr. Ford had played too much football without a helmet, he could not both walk and chew gum at the same time. The apparent contention by Mr. Larrick is that African Americans cannot explore the historical causes of our present problems while simultaneously working to solve those problems, but, like Sam told his son, “You can either plow this field lengthways, or you can plow it wideways, but if you try to do it both at once, you’re gonna end up on the highways.” 

But that first stray pigeon is actually knocked down by Mr. Larrick’s own second, which is his contention that the Jefferson name change petition was brought by something he calls “black Americans and their leaders.” Actually, the name change was not put forth as part of some general black agenda, either local or national, even if such a general black agenda exists (which is doubtful). Instead, the Jefferson name change idea was initiated in part by Jefferson Elementary school teachers—some of them African American, some of them of other races—who pursued the name change issue on their off time—breaks and lunches, evenings and weekends—while continuing at their day job of educating the students at Jefferson. 

But Mr. Larrick has set forth a third stray pigeon—the implication that a prolonged discussion of American slavery is unproductive in and of itself—which has flown far and fast, and we must hurry to catch it. 

The question arises, to what cause can we attribute what Mr. Larrick identifies as the “lag of black performance”? 

In his commentary, Mr. Larrick cites, as one example of that “lag,” the work of Dr. John Ogbu, who “found that the very same problems plagued both Oakland and the affluent black suburb of Cleveland, Shaker Heights. Black students were absent more often, did less homework, watched more television and had less involved parents. They did not value education … [Dr. Ogbu] found that the students own attitudes hindered their academic achievement.” Dr. Obgu’s study, Mr. Larrick continues, “raises some uncomfortable questions about race, opportunity and responsibility.” 

Yes, but what are the answers? 

One can say, as Mr. Jefferson himself once did, that blacks underachieve because we simply don’t have the tools to compete. “Comparing [blacks] by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in his 1782 essay “Notes On Virginia,” “it appears to me that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior… and in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. … They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration…” 

Or one can blame it, as Mr. Larrick now does, not on genetic inferiority but on what he calls the black cultivation of what he calls a “victim mentality,” a sort of code word for saying that African-Americans are too lazy to get up and solve our own problems, but find it easier to simply shuffle along while continuing to blame our plight on a long-ended situation. 

But could the persistent “lag of black performance” have some roots in slavery and could a serious study of slavery—not a mere condemnation—reveal those causes and have a hand in the cure? Beyond that, could a serious study of slavery be profitable in understanding other aspects of American life? Having run out of space, we must leave the answers to those interesting questions to another time. 


Police Blotter By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Friday June 24, 2005

Marina Brawl Busts 

Three women and a man, along with a juvenile, were arrested on charges of battery after a 2 a.m. brawl in a restaurant parking lot near the intersection of University Avenue and Seawall Drive in the Berkeley Marina last Thursday, said Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies. 

 

Tenacious V 

A tenacious 29-year-old would-be robbery victim resisted a group of teenage felons who landed a punch or two while trying to relieve him of his valuables near the corner of Delaware Street and San Pablo Avenue last Thursday afternoon. 

 

Booster Bust 

It turned out to be an extra bad day for the 40-year-old shoplifter who attempted a five-finger discount at the Urban Outfitters store on Bancroft Way last Friday morning. 

The prompt arrival of police and the ensuing records check revealed that the fellow had committed a similar offense within the last two years, automatically raising the seriousness of his offense. He was also nailed for providing a false name and for violation of his probation from the earlier crime. 

 

Gang of Three 

Police arrested three juveniles after the beating and robbery of another juvenile in the 2000 Block of Shattuck Avenue late Friday evening. 

 

Cell, Cash Taken 

A pair of bandits, at least one packing a pistol, took a cell phone and cash belonging to a 23-year-old man as he was walking near the tennis courts in Willard Park shortly before 1 a.m. Saturday. 

The robbers were last seen beating the pavement westbound on Derby Street, said Officer Okies. 

 

Dwelling Shot 

Police are seeking a man who stepped out of an SUV about 2:30 Saturday afternoon and blasted away with a handgun at a building in the 2300 block of Tenth Street. 

No one was injured in the attack. 

A witness described the suspect as a thinly built Hispanic man about 19 years old and 5’8” tall, wearing a red shirt and baggy pants. He was last seen fleeing northbound on California Street in a large silver SUV, possibly a Chevrolet Suburban, said Officer Okies. 

 

Costly Ticket 

A San Pablo Avenue traffic stop early Monday evening headed south for the driver when the citing officer discovered that the 38-year-old woman behind the wheel was in possession of stolen property, automatically earning her a second charge of probation violation. 

 

Costly Tools 

An alert caller warned police at 5 a.m. that a trio of folk lifting recyclables from sidewalk containers along Mendocino Avenue might be up to something more serious. 

Arriving on the scene, they found one of the trio, a 33-year-old man, in possession of both burglary tools and drug paraphernalia. 

 

Scary Threat 

A panicked call from a woman in a parked car summoned officers to the intersection of Lincoln and Chestnut streets, where they found a man with a roofer’s hatchet standing near the open window of her vehicle at 2:45 p.m. Tuesday. 

After officers arrested the suspect, the woman said the man had approached her, striking her closed window with the weapon and demanding she shut off her engine, followed by a threat to smash the window and chop her if she didn’t open the window—which she did just as officers arrived. 

The man was booked on a charge of brandishing a deadly weapon. 

 

Punches Police 

A 27-year-old Berkeley man was arrested on two charges of battery on an officer of the law after he swung on Berkeley cops who had responded to a Wednesday noon call of a man brandishing a butcher’s knife. 

When officers arrived at the residence in the 1800 block of Fairview, the man came out of the dwelling and starting swinging his fists at the officers, inflicting injuries in the process. 

A records check yielded an additional charge of probation violation. 

 

Stabs Son 

Police arrested a 43-year-old Berkeley man after he allegedly stabbed his son in the back about 1:15 p.m. Wednesday in the 2700 block of Sojourner Truth Way. 

The father fled and the victim’s son called police just after he was stabbed in the back. The father was arrested soon thereafter. 

Police booked the father on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and felony child abuse with great bodily injury. 

No further information was available on the state of the victim, said Officer Okies. 

 

Solo Heist 

A lone bandit slugged a 29-year-old man as he was walking along the 3100 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Way about 11:20 p.m. Wednesday, taking off with his cell phone, CD player and bicycle.o


Commentary: Critiquing Visual Arts on Public Display By ALEX NICOLOFF

Friday June 24, 2005

Thanks to Bonnie Hughes for an excellent, historic review of Berkeley’s duplicit culture. It was a rare opinion piece with which I am in total sympathy. Such an uncommonly, insightful perspective as she brings to bear, needs to be supplemented by a critical examination of such visual arts as are on prominent public display.  

Rather than deal with the usual art exhibits presented at the Berkeley Art Museum, on this occasion, I would draw attention to a more unconventional venue, that of the display windows in the downtown, Berkeley-owned parking garage. It is space now devoted to the visual arts for the pleasure of the unsuspecting passersby. Compliments need to be extended to the anonymous individuals that not only conceived the plan but also the installers that have been managing the inviting variety of walk-along exhibits, visible from the Berkeley Repertory Theater across the street.  

There needs to be a greater focus on the civic arts in Berkeley, in particular, public sculpture. I must say it is not an inspiring picture. In a town so heavily preoccupied with practical politics, Berkeley is an artistically “blighted” city with hardly any public art that can be recognized as such, neither “HERE” nor “THERE,” or anywhere else for that matter. Such examples of public art as do exist, are of questionable aesthetic merit.  

There is, firstly of course, that racist abomination in the Berkeley Marina, clearly depicting a virulent hostility against San Francisco (or is it intended for the Far East?). The ceramic sculpture is a direct swipe in the manner of a 12th century Haniwa warrior horseman aiming his arrow high into the sky, hardly a fitting icon to have at the foot of Berkeley. What can its defiant posture be saying and to whom? To add insult to injury, few people may know that it was actually “plopped” into place in the dark of night without anyone’s knowledge.  

Furthermore, when public officials issued a complaint, the sculptor gathered enough petition signatures to legitimatize it through an initiative on the next ballot. To the shocked surprise of many citizens, he succeeded. This is not a personal opinion of mine but a historic fact. There it remains to this day, as a centerpiece at the head of the pier. It is a commanding and aggressive display of arrogant conceit and native-born fascism! What did the voters of this town really have in mind when they approved of it? What did they say in opposing it? I’d say, the name for that sort of offensive behavior is nothing less than cultural rape. (If there is anyone out there interested in signing a petition to have it removed, please let me know and I shall pass it along.)  

In contrast, Dorothy Bryant’s adjoining article on “Mud Flat Sculpture” is a sad commentary on a photographic documentation, long since disappeared. It was a collection of photos recording the “Mud Flat Sculpture” at the waterfront. Here were grassroots, an art expression of a rapidly changing world as seen by both artists and the audience of motorists daily driving by. It could be seen by everyone for free, without a red carpet, come-on.  

The art movement of Dada (in World War I) had once again been revived by unknown students as sculptural “graffiti.” “Found objects” could once again have a new, albeit short, life span. It was a fleeting world of novel and entertaining imagery changing every day. The originality of “Mud Flat Sculpture” however, lay in the fact that students would stroll by and pick up drift wood to build sculptures that would last a few days, before being disassembled by someone to build a new image. It was a free-for-all reminding one of a hippy, happy-land where everything belonged to everyone, all the time. (Many years ago Burma Shave did a similar thing. It lined up several posters containing a message in a poetry format, spaced out for a half mile down the highway. It would at least relieve boredom.)  

One more example of unofficial public art must be mentioned. It was generated in the time of massive student unrest in Berkeley and so, should be recognized as a historic site. Several anonymous individuals, acting independently, constructed a large, welded pipe sculpture and ensconced it in Ohlone Park (Grant and Hearst streets). It marked the occasion of an earlier march in 1969. This particular demonstration began in People’s Park on Telegraph Avenue and ended up in “People’s Park Annex” on Hearst Street. It was an evening of primitive drumming and free dancing around a huge bonfire, built over the incomplete BART tunnel. It was a revival of virtually primitive, Paleolithic sensibilities. (The sculpture has been repaired and repainted several times since its installation.) 

To my knowledge, there are several examples of civic-sponsored public art that need to be given special attention. What can one say in public about the amorphous pile of whatever it is supposed to be that appears in the very heart of downtown Berkeley (on the corner of Shattuck and Addison Street). One wonders what viewpoints were expressed in favor of it by a majority of the appointed members of the Art Commission? What did the minority say about it that is printable? Mention must be made in passing of the large number of sidewalk plaques of poetry to be seen while waiting in line at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. So much for officially sanctioned public visual art that includes the literary arts. Does anyone know of anything else that can be added to this list? 

Three final examples. One must not leave out the model of a World War I, fighter airplane, mounted on a solitary position the tidelands of San Francisco Bay for many years (south of University Avenue). It would bring a smile of delight to children and relieve the boredom of drivers passing by.  

Secondly, though few may see it, there is a very competent, splendidly large, spray-can painting authorized by school officials in the yard of Whittier Arts Magnet School (Virginia and Shattuck). 

To my knowledge, there is only one last, civic-sponsored installation that needs to be mentioned. It is a typographically pathetic example of simple signage in gross size rather than being a sculpture in the more familiar sense. It is located on the border of Berkeley and Oakland, Ashby and MLK Streets, and is named “HERE” and “THERE,” reminiscent of Hollywood’s gigantic, hillside sign. Will its class snobbery needlessly raise the ire of Oaklanders for many years to come?  

 

Alex Nicoloff is a Berkeley artist.›


Commentary: CIL Peer Counseling Provides an Essential Service By RUTHANNE SHPINER

Friday June 24, 2005

I am a person with a disability (spinal cord injury status post—20 years) who has been living in the Berkeley area since 1993.  

During that time I have accessed the services CIL provides on multiple occasions for varying reasons. I am writing now out of serious concern that a key service CIL offers the community may be deleted. The peer counseling program headed by Phil Chavez is rumored to be slated for extinction. This would be a mistake of gargantuan proportions. First and most importantly, the mission of CIL is to have persons with disabilities provide services to like situated members of the community. That philosophy is the crux of the independent living movement which itself was born in Berkeley. Peer counseling delivered to members of the disability community by other disabled members of the community is critical. Peer counseling encompasses a breadth of comprehensive life style issues that by definition can not be absorbed by other services CIL offers, even if those services are provided by persons with disabilities. Issues such as finding and managing attendant care, establishing solid friendships post disability onset, issues of family reaction to one’s disability and sought for independence, sexuality, establishing the requisite skills for battling government agencies for benefits, plus health maintenance such as basic bladder and bowel care and pressure sore prevention can not be absorbed adequately by say the housing or employment position at CIL. There must be an established role for performing peer counseling. 

Secondly, Phil Chavez is an institution unto himself having been an advocate for the disabled and employee of CIL for over thirty years. His reputation precedes him. I have been a member of the peer support group he runs and not only was it immensely valuable, Phil is inextricably intertwined with how the group functions. The group can not be the same in his absence by definition. In short, Phil is not a fungible item that can be easily and readily replaced.  

If CIL is to remain loyal to its mission it is crucial that both Phil Chavez and the peer counseling program he heads remain as is. Budget cuts are tough for every non profit institution to have to confront and address. Board members must address this challenge without deleting the critical function peer counseling serves at CIL. Ed Roberts would turn over in his grave were he to witness this.  

 

Ruthanne Shpiner is a Berkeley resident.


Commentary: Mayor Bates Drops the Ball: Secret Agreement Aids UC, Not Berkeley Residents By ANNE WAGLEY

Friday June 24, 2005

When Tom Bates was running for mayor in 2002, he spoke to many residents concerned about the impact of UC expansion on the city’s quality of life. He assured us that, with the connections he developed in Sacramento during his years in the Assembly, he would be able to deal effectively with UC Berkeley. He could bring pressure to bear on UC and could create a better town-gown relationship under which the city’s concerns would be addressed. 

But Mayor Bates has not lived up to his promises. Nowhere is this made more clear than in the agreement that he negotiated in secret with UC to settle the city’s lawsuit around the recently approved UC Long-Range Development Plan. 

Approved behind closed doors by the City Council, with no public review or input, this agreement fails abysmally to address the potential negative impacts of either present or future UC development. Worse, the agreement improperly attempts to give UC control over planning for the future of the city’s downtown. 

Only councilmembers Olds, Spring and Worthington had the good sense to vote against this one-sided agreement, which benefits UC at the expense of the city’s residents.  

 

More Cars, More Traffic 

Traffic is the single biggest impact of the university on the city. UC is the largest generator of traffic in our city, but the agreement ignores it.  

There is no commitment by UC to reduce the number of automobile trips to campus. While Stanford University committed to taking steps to ensure that their expansion would not be accompanied by any increase in peak period trips, UC refuses to make any similar commitment. 

To achieve a reduction in drive-alone auto trips, the 2001 Southside/Downtown Transportation Demand Management (TDM) Study recommended a series of actions and programs including: 

• An Eco Pass program to provide UC employees with free transit passes. 

• Expanded shuttle service. 

• Improvements to the Residential Permit Parking (RPP) program. 

• Improvements to bus stops and transit service. 

• Traffic signal prioritization for buses. 

• Actions to implement the bicycle plan. 

But instead of taking significant measures to reduce commuting, UC is determined to go ahead with a massive increase in their parking supply. Apparently they wish to encourage a higher percentage of their staff and students to drive to campus.  

And this does not even include the increase in cars proposed by UC for the Berkeley Lab in their LRDP to be released later this year. It is shameful that Tom Bates signed off on this parking increase, since it directly conflicts with the city’s General Plan and is environmentally unsound. 

The 2,060 spaces that UC proposes to build are not needed. The TDM study concluded that, with a modest 3-5 percent reduction in the drive-alone rate of UC and non-UC commuters, no additional parking would be needed through 2010-2011.  

But even without TDM and with no shift toward transit, walking and bicycling, the campus would need only 550 more spaces. The 2,060 spaces that UC proposes are thus more than three times the number the TDM study said would be necessary in the event that no TDM policies were implemented. With better TDM, UC would reduce the need for more parking, and our existing parking resources could be used to meet the needs of Berkeley residents and businesses. 

 

Fiscal Impacts 

UC has a huge negative fiscal impact on the city, but the financial terms of the settlement are weak. $800,000 a year will go to the city for fire and emergency services and for sewer and storm drain projects. The allocation for sewers and storm drains ($200,000) is actually less than the city has been receiving from UC under the prior 1990 agreement ($500,000). And as part of the settlement the city agrees not to impose new or additional sewer fees on UC. This means that the shortfall in the current and future sewer budget will have to be found elsewhere—on property owners’ tax bills.  

A 2004 independent fiscal analysis estimated the annual fiscal impact on the city of providing services both for the existing UC community and for LRDP-projected expansion at $13.5 million a year. 

The agreement also calls for another $400,000 to be spent annually by UC, but UC will decide how to spend it. It is not clear that this money will be spent on anything that will benefit the city or its residents. 

Of this, $200,000 would “fund projects that benefit city neighborhoods.” But the city will not decide how the money is spent; it will be “disbursed at the Chancellor’s discretion.” This is not comforting because UC has rarely shown an interest in addressing neighborhood concerns. 

Another $200,000 is earmarked for TDM, but the vague language merely specifies that it would go to “joint UC/COB” programs, studies, and projects. Again, the city cannot independently decide how the money is spent, and no city staff responsible for transportation management were consulted about this provision. 

UC has a very poor track record when it comes to TDM. It has refused to implement an Eco Pass program for its staff similar to the city’s Eco Pass program or the successful Eco Pass-type programs at Stanford, UCLA, the University of Washington or other universities. Nothing in the agreement requires UC to change its tune. 

 

The Future of Downtown 

To add insult to injury, the secret agreement gratuitously attempts to hand UC control over planning for the future of downtown Berkeley. 

It’s obvious that the agreement was written by the university with little or no city input. The concept of a “Downtown Area Plan” did not appear in the city’s original response to the LRDP (a very good response), and was not suggested by any of the more than 300 Berkeley residents who submitted comments to the university’s plans. How else could one explain language in the agreement that gives the university a veto over both the process and the content of a “Downtown Area Plan” (DAP) that would amend the city’s General Plan? 

No decision about the process of planning for downtown can be made without the approval of UC’s planning director (who lives far from Berkeley and commutes by car). No draft of the proposed DAP can be released for public input without UC’s permission. 

Bates’ agreement privileges UC at the expense of residents, merchants, environmentalists, and other stakeholders. UC would have a veto to eliminate anything that UC administrators don’t like. The opinions of Berkeleyans won’t count unless UC also agrees with them. 

To make matters worse, the agreement does not even commit UC to following the plan once it’s adopted! They can continue to buy land downtown and build things that are inconsistent with the plan if they choose. 

Fortunately for Berkeleyans, the provisions in the agreement that give UC a planning veto will not be enforceable, since they are inconsistent with the Planning Commission’s legally constituted role in the planning process. They are also inconsistent with the city’s General Plan, which mandates maximum citizen participation in area planning.  

However, citizens are now left with only two modes of self-defense: expensive legal battles, or changing the political landscape. In practice, Bates’ attempt to give UC control over downtown planning will require a Planning Commission and a City Council who are willing to ignore their charge to act in the public interest. Only the voters can determine that. 

 

Closing off Other Options 

In the settlement our City Council has explicitly signed away our rights to future increased monetary payments from the University, even if there are changes in state law. This would seem to conflict with the admirable efforts of our Assemblywomen Loni Hancock who proposed AB 2902 last year, and to conflict with our own city attorney who authored the League of California Cities amicus brief in the City of Marina lawsuit currently pending before the California Supreme Court. 

 

Wheeling and Dealing 

Mayor Bates wheeled and dealed in secret, and the result is rotten. Bates talked tough, vowing to “fight tooth and nail” to protect Berkeley from UC, but in the end, he sold Berkeley residents out to UC.  

With this agreement, Mayor Bates has protected special interests instead of the public interest. He clearly signals his contempt for the city’s neighborhoods, whose concerns have been totally ignored. He clearly signals his contempt for the city’s public processes, which this agreement dismisses. And this “environmental” mayor has permitted the city and UC to contribute to the Bay Area’s air quality problems and to global warming, making Berkeley part of the environmental problem instead of part of the solution. This is an insult to Berkeley’s proud environmental values and traditions. 

 

Anne Wagley is an employee of the Berkeley Daily Planet and a member of Berkeleyans for a Livable University Environment. 


Tamalpais Road Fire Hazard By PAUL M. SCHWARTZ

Friday June 24, 2005

I am writing to place the City of Berkeley on notice about a hazardous condition that currently exists on Tamalpais Road in the North Berkeley hills. There is often no access for emergency vehicles, in particular fire trucks. 

This is due to the lack of posted and enforced alternative side street parking on Tamalpais Road. When two vehicles are parked opposite one another, there is not enough room for emergency vehicles to pass and gain access to homes located past the parked cars. This becomes an even more egregious problem when various property owners hire contractors who park large trucks and place dumpsters on the street.  

Recently, last week, there was a dumpster on the block for over 5 days. When a driver would park opposite the dumpster, there was no access for emergency vehicles. I have no idea whether a permit is required for the placing of a dumpster. If it is required it should come with the requirement that no parking signs be placed across the street from the dumpster so that emergency vehicles can pass. Additionally, that requirement should be enforced by the City of Berkeley through any or all three of the following departments, traffic, fire and police. There should be stiff penalties for violations of the terms of any permits issued and violations of posted parking restrictions. Remember, money not only talks, it sings and dances.  

The last few days, a neighbor was having roof work done and the contractor parked 3 large trucks on the street again blocking emergency vehicle access.  

Today, a neighbor was having tree work done and the tree contractor similarly parked large vehicles across from parked cars. There was not even access for a normal sized car let alone emergency vehicles. This condition lasted for several hours. I tried three times to reach the City of Berkeley through their nonemergency number and was placed on hold for lengthy periods of time. No person ever came on the line. I didn't feel comfortable declaring this an emergency as it wasn't yet at that level.  

This is a hazardous condition that needs to be alleviated as quickly as possible to be sure fire vehicles have access to homes and other emergency vehicles have access to those in need.  

I understand the need of neighbors for parking, but it should not come at the expense of denying their neighbors access to emergency services.  

This is a formal request that the City of Berkeley alleviate this situation and create a parking plan for this street that assures the safety of all individuals and protection of property. We homeowners pay extraordinarily high taxes and should be provided at least the most basic of services.  

Councilmembers representing other districts need to check their districts to be sure emergency vehicles have access to their constituents.  

 

Paul M. Schwartz is a Berkeley attorney. 


Public Art Flowers in New Spots on Campus By STEVEN FINACOM Special to the Planet

Friday June 24, 2005

Here? There? While a new streetside civic sculpture in south Berkeley has received considerable attention in recent months, major public art installations have been more quietly blossoming on the UC Berkeley campus.  

Although some of the most dramatic pieces are temporary—products of an artist-in-residence program—they all add considerable visual excitement to a campus where scholarly wisdom and creative energy are extensive in the visual arts, but public sculpture is sparse. 

There are three relatively recent installations worth noting. 

 

Pomodoro Orb 

A partial seismic retrofit of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum a few years ago altered the outdoor sculpture garden. Some sculptures migrated across Bancroft Way to the campus where they have been, on the whole, quite successful additions. 

The latest to arrive at a permanent site—via a long detour for conservation work—is the best, “Rotanle dal Foro Central,” by Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro.  

Long-time Berkeleyans will remember this huge, gold-glimmering bronze orb that stood outside the Durant Avenue doors of the Pacific Film Archive and Art Museum café. It was added to the museum’s collection in 1971. 

(There are similar Pomodoro orbs around the world. Curiously, by coincidence, one is displayed in front of the Berkeley Library at Trinity College, Dublin). 

The more than head-high sculpture is partially bisected into two hemispheres and pierced by channels that, from some angles, make it resemble a gigantic eyeball. Unevenly geometrical encrustations and fissures interrupt the smooth, regular, curve of the outer surfaces. 

The orb is well placed in its new location on a lawn along the pathway that leads up into the campus from the intersection of Oxford and Center Streets. Situated against a shady backdrop of live oaks and redwoods, it is especially interesting this time of year when the low, late evening, sun strikes the polished bronze. 

Along with a handsome nearby neoclassical sign wall that welcomes visitors, the Pomodoro sculpture makes this traditional pedestrian entrance to the campus feel particularly well adorned. The sculpture also informally presages the proposed relocation of the Berkeley Art Museum to the city block on the northwest corner of the intersection of Oxford and Center streets. 

The Pomodoro stands not far from a marker commemorating the Don Pedro Fages expedition—the first European-Americans to pass through the future Berkeley—which visited this area in 1772.  

Just as passersby today pause to view the enigma of this giant and solitary bronze egg, so native Californians, if they were nearby in that year, might have wonderingly regarded Fages and his men as alien, but also compelling, apparitions in the local landscape. 

 

Babel Library IX 

The relatively recent augmentation of campus cultural programs with an artist in residence position has produced two major, although temporary, indoor art installations. 

Spanish-born, Denmark-based, artist J. Ignacio Diaz de Rabago created two sculptures under the auspices of the Consortium for the Arts and the campus Arts Research Center. 

“Babel Library IX” stands—or, rather, hangs—in the four story cylindrical rotunda of the Gardner Stacks, the underground addition to Doe Library near the center of campus. 

The installation consists of dozens of books pierced through with metal cables and accessory holes and strung on diagonals across the four-story atrium space. 

I imagine a sense of weightlessness was intended, but it doesn’t come across to me. The books hang there, some slightly quivering in air currents, like pinioned butterflies.  

The project also seems confined in a straitjacket of site specificity. What sort of art installation to create in a library? Why something that turns books into art, of course! 

There used to be a little more catholicity in the decorative sensibilities of those that designed and ornamented libraries. John Galen Howard, who probably never knowingly mutilated a book, placed a bronze bust of the Goddess of Wisdom over the main entrance to Doe Library three generations ago. 

In contrast, next door at the Gardner Stacks, “Babel Library IX” greets seekers at the portals of knowledge with Shakespeare on a stick.  

I don’t mean that metaphorically. A frail volume entitled W. Shakespeare is one of those impaled on a metal cable. Rarely has the tension between “art” and “literature” seemed so great. 

My appreciation of this artwork was additionally diminished by a little disclaimer posted in the atrium. “The books used in this project were not part of the Library’s collection and were slated for disposal.”  

You can, in fact, see the UC Library imprints on some of the books. And the library website confirms that the books are indeed from the University Library, but calls them “discarded and unsalvageable.”  

“Unsalvagable” seems disingenuous. Many of the books look in decent condition. They may not be useful to the library, but they are not toxic waste. I might well buy “W. Shakespeare” if it were shelved in University Library’s surplus booksale room, “for disposal” rather than perforated with a drill. 

Some might argue that the content of these older books is obsolete and unneeded in the library’s collections, regardless of their physical condition.  

But look at a few of the visible titles. “Federal Censorship,” “Health Care Politics,” “U.S. Foreign Commerce,” “American Child Health,” “Pakistan: A Political Study,” and “What Every Child Needs.”  

Those topics read like tomorrow’s newspaper headlines. But the books themselves? You can’t read them anymore. Of course, they’re now “art”. 

 

Round Room 

Diaz de Rabago’s “Round Room” follows the same approach as Babel Library IX—a family of similar objects suspended in an atrium void—but there is a world of expressive difference between the two installations. 

This piece is wonderful. The artist has engineered, with the most simple materials, a nearly weightless convergence of expressive art and architectural space that makes full, complimentary, use of its setting. Go see it. 

More than a hundred small foam balls are strung in a random pattern on fishing line through the three story lobby of the Hearst Memorial Mining Building, built nearly a century ago to a design by John Galen Howard. 

The balls seem carefully sized to match the globular light fixtures that run in rows around the bottoms of the metal balconies; art and electricity merge. The spheres also play off against the shapes and forms of the suspended light fixtures, fanlight windows in the main façade, and three circular, segmented, skylights.  

To completely appreciate this installation you should go from floor to floor, looking at it from different levels and perspectives. Different times of day, too; it’s just as interesting in early evening shadows as in bright morning light. 

What does this represent? Should we regard the balls as bubbles, molecules, stars? Who cares. The piece is magical, however you choose to regard them. The first time I visited this installation I was reminded of the scenes from the Harry Potter movies, when lighted candles float unsupported in the Hogwarts Castle dining room, or swarms of winged keys flit through a gloomy vault.  

Rabago says in a press release, “most of my work has to do with gravity, and to get free of gravity.” Here, in one of the truly grand buildings of the campus, he succeeded. 

Where to see the art: 

Babel Library IX” is in the Gardner Stacks, accessed through Doe Library. It hangs beyond an access control desk, but visitors are currently permitted to go in and view the installation from the top level of the atrium. For library hours, check www.lib.berkeley.edu. 

“Round Room” is in the main atrium of the Hearst Memorial Mining Building in the northeast corner of the campus. Enter through the main doors on the southern façade. A university press release says this installation may be dismantled in July, so visit soon. 

“Rotante dal Foro Centrale,” stands just east of the intersection of Oxford and Center streets.  

Biographical information and descriptions of artworks by Diaz de Rabago can be found at www.rabagoarte.com. 




Swindle and Gifford Hold Forth at Moe’s on Monday By KEN BULLOCK Special to the Planet

Friday June 24, 2005

“It’s total serendipity—the way my whole life goes.” Michael Swindle sums up the chain of circumstances that have led up to his forthcoming reading from his new book, Slouching Towards Birmingham (Frog Press/North Atlantic, Berkeley), a collection of pieces on “off-beat sports, like alligator wrestling, cockfighting, wild boar hunting—told with great savoir-faire,” as described by his “running buddy,” local (and international) favorite Barry Gifford, who will introduce Swindle and read from his own work “a little something compatible” at 7 p.m. on Monday, June 27, at Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue. 

“There’s sure to be protest signs in front of Moe’s,” kids Gifford. But Swindle’s prose, much of it originally published in the Village Voice and the New York Times, isn’t so much a descriptive compendium of blood sports as a triumph of storytelling.  

The friendship between the two writers was struck when Swindle was called in to interview Gifford for Details magazine when an earlier interviewer’s effort “imploded,” proving unusable. “The editor needed a one week turnaround. I met Barry in New Orleans. Writers are not always so eager to meet other writers ... but we’re about the same age, like the same music, have other tastes in common ... we made a very quick bond. Barry was going to see his Uncle Buck in Tampa; he jumped in my car and we made a trip that’s become an annual event. He’d never been in the Mississippi Delta before. We’ve done a lot of crazy adventures together since, but never had the opportunity before to appear together like this.” 

Born in Birmingham, Swindle spent his childhood in the North Central hill country of Mississippi before his family moved back to Birmingham. “All the Swindles are in Mississippi; I always claim it as my home. My childhood, out in the woods, was so idyllic that, even a half century later, it seems almost imaginary.” His career kicked off when the Village Voice sent him to cover the Marvin Hagler-Sugar Ray Leonard fight in 1985 in Las Vegas. “The Voice had a sports section in those days; I did a lot of fight stories—Atlantic City, Vegas ... I was the weird Southern guy for them for a long time.” In 1994, “when the junta was still in charge in Haiti, I was pictured in the first color photo printed inside the paper with my arm around a one-armed (from a birth defect) voodoo priest, Ti-Bout, “Little Arm”—who died shortly afterwards, but he saw the picture.” After working on Slouching Toward Birmingham, “a young editor called in my first assignment in quite awhile: to cover the shooting of Hunter Thompson’s ashes out of a 50-foot cannon on his farm in Colorado, the last weekend of August.” 

The Moe’s reading with Gifford is a new wrinkle in his career. “In Birmingham a few weeks ago was the first time I read out loud.” But his sometimes tart style of talking, with long raconteurish Southern rhythms to his speech he occasionally—and quite genteely—apologizes for, as if long-winded, promise an evening of real tale-telling. As if an afterthought, he related another joint adventure: “In March 2001, Barry and I were both in Mexico City; he’d been invited to read at a big arts festival at the Palacio. The Zapatistas were putting on their Zapa-Tour march from Chiapas to the capital, and were due to arrive on our last day in the Zocalo.. I’m not leaving the same day this happens! But Barry was booked to go to Cuba. So I moved into his suite on the fifth floor of the Majestic, overlooking the Zocalo. At midnight I was trying to read myself asleep, when I heard drums and went down to see what turned out to be the last part of an Indian New Years ceremony: a circle dance, with a guy carrying a big crockery kind of thing filled with some kind of beverage. A woman stepped out of the circle and handed me a goblet. I drank from it and went to hand it back, but she shook her head no, and motioned for me to make the circle and have another drink. The title of my piece, ‘Observador Por Casualidad’ says it, what I always seem to be—‘The Accidental Observer.’” 

Swindle’s reading gig with his “star pal” is an increasingly rare appearance for Gifford, famed for his novels, nonfiction, poetry and screenplays. “Some love engaging their public with 20-30 city blowouts. After Night People, strange people started coming out. Now I prefer crossover audiences, in cinemas or bars, venues like my British publisher sends me to. Young people today aren’t trying to write the Great American Novel—but maybe the Great American Screenplay. 

I started out as a musician, got into poetry through lyrics, then novels. Screenplays came later. If the history of the novel starts in the Heian period with Murasaki and Sei Shonagon a thousand years ago, or in the West about 400 years back, we may be near the end of it now—and I’m glad to be a part of it.” 

“But I’m glad too to be introducing Michael in person in Berkeley, just like writing the foreword to his book. When we met, we became friends on the spot—and took it on the road. This is just another chapter.” 

 

 


Arts Calendar

Friday June 24, 2005

FRIDAY, JUNE 24 

THEATER 

Antares Ensemble “Hellenic Image” choruses and monologues from Greek tragedies at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club. Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through June 26. Tickets are $10-$35. 525-3254.  

Aurora Theatre “The Thousandth Night” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. 2 and 7 p.m., through July 24, at 2081 Addison St. Tickets are $36. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Repertory Theater, “Honour” at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. and runs through July 3. Tickets are $20-$39. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

California Shakespeare Theater, “Othello” at 8 p.m. at Bruns Amphitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., between Berkeley and Orinda, through July 3. Tickets are $10-$55. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Shotgun Players, “Arabian Night” Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. until July 10. Tickets are $10-$30. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Subterranean Shakespeare “The Taming of the Shrew,” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center in Live Oak Park, through June 24. For reservations call 276-3871. 

Un-Scripted Theater Company “The Short and the Long of It” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., through June 25 at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St., Oakland. Tickets are $7-$10. 415-869-5384. www.un-scripted.com 

FILM 

Jean-Marie Teno: “A Trip to the Country” at 7 p.m and “Clando” and 9 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Michael Chorost describes his journey from deafness to hearing in “Rebuilt: How Becomming Part Computer Made Me More Human” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

Filmmaker Jean- Marie Teno discusses his artistic process at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“The Beggar’s Opera” at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Tickets are $56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Vince Wallace Quintet at 9 p.m. at Cafe Van Kleef, 1621 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 763-7711. www.cafevankleef.com 

Yumi Thomas, mezzo-soprano, Sarita Cannon, soprano, Shunsuke Kurahata, piano, at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Cost is $12-$15. 845-6811. www.giorgigallery.com 

Flamenco with guest artists from Spain, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $18-$20. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Betty Shaw, Melanie O’Reilly & Tir na Mara at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Nasty Breeze, One Block Radius, Boogie Shack at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Lua at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Space Invaders, saxophone quartet, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. www.epicarts.org 

Gearoid ÓhAllmhuráin at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Pat Nevins and Friends in a Benefit for Pirate Radio at 9 p.m. at the Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway, Oakland. Cost is $10. 465-8480. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Macy Blackman Quartet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Mere Ours, singer songwriter, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Chuck Prophet, Jug Free America at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryplough.com 

Los Cerveceros, Deconditioned, Until the Fall, 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. 

40 Watt Hype, hip-hop, latin, funk, at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $8. 548-1159.  

Space Invaders, saxophone quartet, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10.  

Stolen Bibles at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Bobby Watson & Horizon at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $14-$20. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, JUNE 25 

EXHIBITIONS 

“A Girl’s Life” video installations by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Dawn D. Valadez opens at Pro Arts, 550 Second St. Oakland. www.proartsgallery.org 

“Celebrating Life through Art” an exhibition of Shona sulpture from Zimbabwe at Kofa International Art, Gallery, 1661 20th St., Suite 2, Oakland. 451-5632. 

FILM 

Jean-Marie Tendo: The Colonial Misunderstanding” at 7:30 p.m. and “Head in the Clouds” at 9:05 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Rhythm & Muse with Romanian poet Corbina Stirb at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center. Free. 527-9753, 644-6893. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Trinity Chamber Concerts with Lara Bruckmann, soprano, at 8 p.m. at 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864. http:// 

trinitychsmberconcerts.com 

“The Beggar’s Opera” at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Tickets are $56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Guillaume Vincent, piano, at 4 p.m. at Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Donation $15 adults, $6 children. 268-8115. www.sbcacc.org/concert_gv  

Mokai & Friends, folk-blues, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10.  

Modalities & Samvega at 1 p.m. at People’s Park, 2556 Haste St. bakerartstudios@gmail.com  

Pick Pocket Ensemble at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Terry Rodriguez, Dick Conte Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Melanie O’Reilly at 9 p.m. at Cafe Van Kleef, 1621 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 763-7711. www.cafevankleef.com 

Sourdough Slim at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Marina Garza & Orquestra D’Soul with Montuno Groove. Conversation with the artists at 8:30 p.m., performance at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$14. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Jai Uttal and the Pagan Love Orchestra at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Gawdamn, Mr. Byrnes, Our Name is Robert Paulson at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Jerry Kennedy, acoustic R&B, at 7 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Mokai and Friends, acoustic folk-blues, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. www.epicarts.org 

Arlington Houston Quartet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Deborah Crooks at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Mystic, hip hop, soul, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $12. 548-1159.  

Anton Barbeau, Lucifer Meltdown, Joe Rut at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryplough.com 

Mokai, Mia and Jonah, and Jason Miller, eclectic folk, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. www.epicarts.org 

Rock N Roll Adventure Kids, Empty Silos Echo War 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. 

Helsinki Skylight at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Bobby Watson & Horizon at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $14-$20. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SUNDAY, JUNE 26 

CHILDREN  

Family Explorations: Living Traditions and Historic Objects with Native American, Japanese and Latino music and traditions at 1 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Cost is $4-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

New Works by Bruce Skogen, abstract paintings, at Cafe DiDartolo, 3310 Grand Ave., Oakland. 832-9005. 

“Ballybaba” four artists re-imagine the landscapes of Beckett’s “Molloy.” Reception at 1 p.m. at the Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. 620-6772. www.therichmondartcenter.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Gail Entrekin and Linda Watanabe McFerrin at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“The Beggar’s Opera” at 3 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Tickets are $56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Bay Area Negro Spirituals Heritage Day at 2:30 p.m. at West Oakland Senior Center, 1724 Adeline St. 238-7016. www.dogonvillage.com/negrospirituals 

Aaron Blumenfeld “Seven Art Songs” Housewarming Party for Congregation Beth Israel, at 7:30 p.m. at 1630 Bancroft Way. Cost is $15. 

PachaSiku, pan pipes, flutes and drums, at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Fandango V, early California dance and music at 3 p.m. at Peralta Hacienda Historical Park, 2465 34th Ave., Oakland. 532-9142. 

Mark Deutsch, part of the series “Offerings” at 7 p.m. at Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. Suggested donation $10. 213-3122. 

John McCutcheon at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $21.50-$22.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

MRLS wih Murzyn, Rokeach, Lockett and Saunders at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Americana Unplugged with B. Moccola and Paul Crowder at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Bobby Watson & Horizon at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $14-$20. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

MONDAY, JUNE 27 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Peter Baker and Susan Glasser describe Putin’s rise to power in “Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of the Revolution” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Poetry Express Theme night on “Fathers and Suns” for Father’s Day and the Summer Solstice at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

Oliver Mtukudzi & Black Spirits, afro-pop from Zimbabwe at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $8-$12. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

TUESDAY, JUNE 28 

THEATER 

Shotgun Theater Lab “The Pawn” Tues. and Wed. at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through July 6. Tickets are $10. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

“Tell It On Tuesday” with solo performers celebrating the art of storytelling at 7:30 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Cost is $5 at the door. www.juliamorgan.org  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows read from their translations of Rilke at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Chitra Divakaruni describes how radio can empower youth in isolated communities in “Queen of Dreams” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

The Whole Note Poetry Series with Lenore Weiss and Avotcja at 7 p.m. at The Beanery, 2925 College Ave., near Ashby. 549-9093. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Distones at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Randy Craig Trio at 7:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

John Patitucci Trio with Adam Rogers and Clarence Penn at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Jazzschool Tuesdays, a weekly showcase of up-and-coming ensembles from Berkeley Jazz- 

school at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Eric Shifrin, jazz piano, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29 

FILM 

Seventies Underground: “Shoot the Whale” at 3 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

James Frey describes friendship with a fellow addict in “My Friend Leonard” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Dean Sluyter discusses “Cinema Nirvana: Enlightenment Lessons from the Movies” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

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 

Calvin Keys Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

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

Sonic Camouflage at 8 p.m. at Cafe Van Kleef, 1621 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 763-7711. www.cafevankleef.com 

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

Drunken Cat Paws at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Scissors for Lefty, The Visible Man, Plum Crazy at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Spirit Music Jamia featuring Me’shell Ndegeocello at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $20-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, JUNE 30 

EXHIBITIONS 

“A Girl’s Life” video installations by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Dawn D. Valadez. Reception from 6 to 8 p.m. at Pro Arts, 550 Second St. Oakland. www.proartsgallery.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Mandy Aftel discusses “Scents and Sensibilities: Creating Solid Perfumes for Well Being” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Word Beat Reading Series with Ralph Dranow and Dan Marlin at 7 p.m. at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave.. 526-5985. 

Live and Unplugged Open Mic at 7 p.m. at Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar St. 703-9350. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Odori Simcha with Neal Cronin at 6 p.m. at Temescal Cafe, 4920 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Donation $5. 

David Lindley at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $20.50-$21.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Ben Stolerow Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Hal Stein Quartet at 9 p.m. at Cafe Van Kleef, 1621 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 763-7711. www.cafevankleef.com 

No Origin, Research and Development, Svelte at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082 www.starryplough.com 

Peter Barshay and Marcos Silva at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Frogger, Clockwork and Rich Drama at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Spirit Music Jamia featuring Me’shell Ndegeocello at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $20-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com


Celebrating 93 Years of Life, 58 Years of Selling Antiques By PATRICK KEILCH Special to the Planet

Staff
Friday June 24, 2005

At a crossroads of the East Bay, legendary antique dealer Bill Cross has operated the renowned Antique Center on Telegraph Avenue near the Berkeley-Oakland border for nearly 50 years. His business has drawn customers from throughout the region because of the high quality and uniqueness of its antique stock. Bill is also a well-known collector of classic British cars such as Roll Royce, Jaguar, Bentley, and Daimler, and of related memorabilia (vintage signage, toys, pictures, and novelties).  

He has the reputation of being quite the English gentleman and talks like one. However, he was actually born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1912 of English parents. His father and mother came to America so that Bill’s father could be the prop manager at the Hippodrome in the New York City theater scene. When Bill was 4 years old, World War I broke out. His English-born parents decided to return to England to “protect the homeland.” On the ship sailing to England, free-spirited Bill was befriended by the sailors and roamed freely on the ship. Bill’s family arrived safely in England where they remained and raised Bill and other new siblings.  

The senior Cross served as the “property master” at the Palladium and Oxford theaters in London, which Bill says helped develop his own interest in antiques and collectibles. During the 1930s, Bill was trained and educated to design the individual “carriage bodies” for high-end automobiles. With the worldwide depression, the market fell out of this type of business, but this generated his life-long interest in classic cars. Bill later served in World War II as a police officer in London and helped protect people at underground shelters during the Nazi Blitzkrieg bombings.  

After the war, Bill started up the Antique Center business in 1947 in London. In 1956, he and his wife Pamela returned to America and settled with their children Anita and James in Berkeley on University Avenue, where they also relocated the Antique Center. In the next year Bill moved the business to 6519 Telegraph Ave. near the Berkeley-Oakland border where it has remained to this day. Meanwhile, with his experience with classic cars in England, Bill began to collect antique British cars, some of which he has generously used to chauffeur friends and acquaintances to weddings, antique shows, and special events in Northern California.  

While operating the antique business Bill and his wife Pamela raised two children, Anita, who is the mother of Bill’s two grandchildren Heather and Kellie, and James. James has worked at the Antique Center for many years and now manages the business, attracting customers with reasonable bargains.  

One of every year’s most colorful events is Bill’s large June birthday gala at the Antique Center and in his oversized and very British garage, which is a museum of sorts. Family, friends, colleagues, and business associates from throughout Northern California, plus family from England and Australia, join in the birthday celebration accompanied by live music, singing vintage ballads and standards around the piano, telling lots of tales, and much revelry. Amid Bill’s displays of colorful signs, vintage photographs, and memorabilia, the celebrants enjoy a massive birthday cake and champagne toasts in celebration of another grand year. This June, the party celebrated Bill’s 93rd birthday and the Antique Center’s 58th anniversary. 

 

For persons interested in antiques and collectibles, the Antique Center is open almost daily at 6519 Telegraph Ave. at the border of Berkeley and Oakland and can be reached at 654-3717. 

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Berkeley This Week

Friday June 24, 2005

FRIDAY, JUNE 24 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Charles Townes on “Confluence of Science and Religion” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. 526-2925.  

Bill Mandel, KPFA host, together with his son, Bob, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar St. Donation $10, no one turned away. 495-5132. 

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 8 p.m. at the East Bay Chess Club, 1940 Virginia St. Players at all levels are welcome. 845-1041. 

Women in Black Vigil noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. 845-1143. 

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

SATURDAY, JUNE 25 

Kid’s Garden Club for ages 7-12 to explore the world of gardening, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. Cost is $5-$7, registration required. 525-2233. 

Music and Arts at People’s Park from noon to 6 p.m. 707-963-7402. 

How to Create Your Own Garden Paradise at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-2351. 

Building with Alternative Materials: Cob and Strawbale A workshop from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. Cost is $75. 525-7610. www.bldgeductr.org/ 

seminars.html  

Lead-Safe Painting and Remodeling Learn how to detect and remedy lead hazards and conduct lead-safe renovations for your older home. From 9 to 11 a.m. at Alameda County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program Training Facility, 1017 22nd Avenue, Suite 110, Oakland. Free. 567-8280. 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland uptown to the Lake to discover Art Deco landmarks. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of the Paramount Theater at 2025 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

Year of the Estuary: Carquinez Hike Meet at 10 a.m. at the Eckley Pier staging area off Carquinez Scenic Drive near Crockett to learn about the region’s history. 525-2233. 

Animal Origami with Mitsuko Yoneyama, for children 4 years and older, at 3 p.m. at RabbitEars, Arlington Ave., Kensington. 525-6155.  

Tantric Feast and Auction with live music at 6 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Tickets for the feast are $25, for the auction $10. For reservations 888-826-8729. info@tantrayogainternational.org 

Breema Clinic Open House from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. with demonstrations and mini-sessions at 6201 Florio St. at Claremont & College, Rockridge. 428-1234. www.breemahealth.com  

Cheese Tastings and discussion with Debra Dickerson, author of “Great Grilled Cheese” at 1 p.m. at The Pasta Shop, 1786 Fourth St. 528-1786. 

Spirited Woman Workshop from 1 to 4 p.m. at Creative Juices Arts, 432 Bellevue Ave., Oakland. Cost is $85. Reservations required. 888-428-1234.  

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

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

Tribute to Lee and Dorothy Marsh, founders of the BRJCC. For details call 848-0237, ext. 110. 

SUNDAY, JUNE 26 

On the Bluebird Trail Meet at 10 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area for a 3.5 mile walk up and over Wildcat Peak and a portion of the bluebird nestbox trail to help with the nesting survey. Bring water and a snack. For ages ten and up. 525-2233. 

Pat the Bunny For toddlers ages 2-4 to meet a Little Farm Dutch Rabbit, at 1 p.m. at the Tilden Nature Center. 525-2233. 

Bay Area Negro Spirituals Heritage Day at 2:30 p.m. at West Oakland Senior Center, 1724 Adeline St. 238-7016. www.dogonvillage.com/negrospirituals 

Celebrating Helen Rand Parish A memorial celebrating the life and spirit of author and activist Helen Rand Parish will be held from 2 to 4 p.m., at the Berkeley Yatch Club, at 1 Seawall Drive, Berkeley Marina. 653-1250. 

Open House at Studio 12, from 1 to 4 p.m. with information on aerial dance, yoga and Iaido, at 2525 Eighth St. 587-0770. www.movingout.org 

Berkeley City Club free tour from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Tours are sponsored by the Berkeley City Club and the Landmark Heritage Foundation. Donations welcome. The Berkeley City Club is located at 2315 Durant Ave. For group reservations or more information, call 848-7800 or 883-9710. 

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 

“Habitat for Humanity” with Holly Zimmerman and Sydney Williams at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Elizabeth Cook on “Preserving Tibetan Texts” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

East Bay Synagogues Fundraiser and Garden Party at 1 p.m. at 8898 Terrace Drive, El Cerrito. Tickets are $12-$15. Reservations required. 843-3131. www.aquarianminyan.org 

MONDAY, JUNE 27 

City of Berkeley Walking Group walks Mon.-Thurs. from 5 to 5:30 p.m. Meet at 830 University Ave. All new participants receive a free pedometer. 981-5131. 

“The Patriot Act” with ACLU attorney, Jeff Mittman at 7 p.m. at the Paul Robeson Chapter of the ACLU meeting at the Rockridge Library, Manila and College Aves., Oakland. 

Tenant’s Rights Workshop at 6 p.m. at the Long Haul Infoshop 3124 Shattuck Ave. www.barringtoncollective.org 

Conflict Resolution Skills Class at 7 p.m. at Oscar Wilde Co-op, 2410 Warring St. Learn about different approaches to conflict, your conflict style, active listening, effective communication, and the basic philosophies that aid in transforming interpersonal conflict. www.barringtoncollective.org 

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group for people 60 years and over meets Mondays at 10:15 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Join at any time. Cost is $2.50 with refreshments. 524-9122.  

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

TUESDAY, JUNE 28 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. In case of questionable weather, call around 8 a.m. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

Educators Academy: Insects and Crawling Creatures, Tues.-Thurs., from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. For teachers of grades K-5. Fee is $100 for Berkeley residents, $110 for non-residents. Registration required. 636-1684. 

Great Yosemite Day Hikes with Ann Marie Brown at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Juvenile Criminal Records Workshop at 6 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Learn what remedies available for individuals with juvenile records in California. www.barringtoncollective.org 

Berkeley PC Users Group Problem solving and beginners meeting to answer, in simple English, users questions about Windows computers. At 7 p.m. at 1145 Walnut St. corner of Eunice. All welcome, no charge. 527-2177.  

Mandala Workshop using collage and art materials to create a circular form at 7 p.m. at Change Makers, 6536 Telegraph Ave. at 66th. Cost is $25. To register call. 525-9258.  

Family Storytime at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Buddhist Meditation Class at 7 p.m. at The Dzalandhara Buddhist Center. Cost is $7-$10. For directions and details please call 559-8183. 

Brainstormer Weekly Pub Quiz every Tuesday from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. at Pyramid Alehouse Brewery, 901 Gilman St. 528-9880. 

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

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

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29 

Insects for Kids A free class for children ages 5-10, at 9 a.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. www.barringtoncollective.org 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around the restored 1870s business district. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of G.B. Ratto’s at 827 Washington St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

Speculative and Practical Folklore Class at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. We will discuss American folk practices from around the country but specifically Southern/South-Eastern, Pennsylvanian, Appalachian and Ozark folk practices. www.barringtoncollective.org 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Action St. 841-2174.  

Skin Cancer Screening for people with limited or no insurance at Alta Bates, Markstein Campus. Free, but registration required. 869-8833. 

Bayswater Book Club meets to discuss “Crossing the Rubicon” by Michael C. Ruppert at 6:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble Coffee Shop, El Cerrito Plaza. 433-2911. 

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. 

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. 

Stitch ‘n Bitch Bring your knitting, crocheting and other handcrafts from 6 to 9 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198. 

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

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

geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, JUNE 30 

Puppy Skills, four one-hour classes on Thurs. evenings at 7:30 p.m. at Rabbit Ears, 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Cost is $100. To register call 525-6155. 

ONGOING 

Summer Camps for Children offered by the City of Berkeley, including swimming, sports and twilight basketball, from June 20 to August 12, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. 981-5150, 981-5153. 

Free Lunches for Berkeley Children beginning June 20, Mon.-Fri., 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Frances Albrier Center, James Kenney Center, MLK, Jr. Youth Services Center, Strawberry Creek, Washington School and Rosa Parks School. 981-5146. 

Albany Summer Youth Programs including basketball, classes, bike trips and family activities. For information see www.albanyca.org/dept/rec.html 

Bay Area Shakespeare Camp for ages 7 to 13, two week sessions through Aug., at John Hinkle Park. Cost is $395, with scholarships available. 415-422-2222. www.sfshakes.org 

CITY MEETINGS 

Solid Waste Management Commission Mon., June 27, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Tania Levy, 981-6368. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/solidwaste 

City Council meets Tues. June 28, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

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FCC Threatens Berkeley Liberation Radio By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Tuesday June 21, 2005

The next sound a Berkeley Liberation Radio (BLR) broadcaster may hear just might be the dreaded knock on the door from a federal SWAT team. 

A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) notice served on the station Friday charges that 104.1 FM was operating without a license and that the station’s signal was bleeding into other, licensed frequencies. 

The action followed two days after federal agents served a cease and desist order at the station, which broadcasts from a second floor studio at 5427 Telegraph Ave. in Oakland. 

For Screwy Lewie and Soul, the notice stirs up memories of the Dec. 11, 2002, raid when more than a dozen armed U.S. Marshals accompanied by an Oakland police officer raided the station and seized all the equipment and CDs, leaving behind only the station’s inventory of vinyl LP albums. 

“They shoved a gun into the face of a student who was visiting at the time,” said Soul, who hosts the Isabella Show Friday mornings at 7. 

“We were told not to go back on the air again, but we were collectively able to gather up new equipment and everything we needed to go back on the air again on Dec. 27. We’ve continued ever since.” 

Berkeley Liberation Radio is a classic example of microradio, the mostly unlicensed stations that broadcast at less than 100 watts of power—typically with a broadcasting radius of about five miles from the transmitter. 

When the FCC agreed to license microradio five years ago, the decision didn’t automatically legitimize the host of small stations, many distinctly leftist in character, that were broadcasting at the time. 

Instead, under the Bush administration, the lion’s share of licenses have been granted to churches. 

“They won’t license stations that had early actions against them,” said Screwy Lewie, who hosts “The Vinyl Time Machine.” 

A new raid would fit in with two other recent actions: an Oct. 15, 2003, raid on San Francisco Liberation Radio that shut down the station and a similar raid last Sept. 29 that shut down Radio Free Santa Cruz. 

Berkeley attorney Alan Korn, who has represented the San Francisco in challenging the action, said current federal legislation weighs heavily against microradio stations in urban areas. 

Under lobbying pressure from corporate broadcasters, Congress narrowed FCC regulations that defined the frequency distances between existing stations and microradio broadcasters, further limiting the opportunities for microradio in the heavily crowded urban airwaves. 

“The rules require huge gaps [between broadcast frequencies],” Korn said, “much more than necessary.” 

The FCC notice served Friday claims 104.1 is detectable above the allowable limits, and also charges that the station is also encroaching on frequencies used by air traffic controllers and aircraft at Oakland International Airport. 

Korn, who serves on the National Lawyers Guild’s Committee on Democratic Communication, said he is skeptical of the latter claim, “but it’s a good way to make certain that a judge will issue a warrant,” he said. 

While a federal trial-level judge rejected his appeal of the FFC seizure at the San Francisco, the case is now on appeal before the U.S. Courts of Appeals’ Ninth Circuit, traditionally the most liberal in the federal system. 

BLR staffers are quick to note that theirs isn’t a pirate radio station—an illegal broadcaster who usurps a frequency already assigned by the FCC.  

Soul noted that “the FCC is saying they won’t give a license to anyone they say has violated the law. Besides, that’s not our intent.” She doesn’t want the license herself.  

Unlike some of the all-volunteer staff, Screwy Lewie said he’d like to see the station get a license. 

Both broadcasters are long-term veterans of microradio. Soul’s been with BLR and its predecessor since 1998, and Screwy Lewie since 1996. 

After the closure of Radio Free Berkeley in June, 1998, BLR was born the following year outside the studios of KPFA when the station was forced briefly off the air. 

For Screwy Lewie, the station has helped him fulfill a lifelong dream. “I’m doing exactly what I want to do,” he said. 

And like others on the staff, he vows to keep the station running whatever happens with the pending FCC action. 

Asked about what was happening with BLR, an FCC official in Washington, speaking only on background, would allow only that no comment was possible because of the ongoing investigation. 

 

Second Crisis  

The current contretemps with the feds isn’t the station’s only crisis. Other tenants in the building they now use have complained that their transmitter is interfering with electronic equipment, leading to an eviction notice from their landlord. 

Even before the FCC notices, the station had planned a fundraiser for this Friday to help raise cash to find a new home for their operations. 

The $20 a head function will be held at the Oakland Metro near Jack London Square at 201 Broadway in Oakland starting at 7:30. n


Pollster Finds Little Support for Magna’s Proposed Albany Mall By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Tuesday June 21, 2005

Albany residents reject a proposed shopping mall at Golden Gates Fields by a convincing margin, according to a poll City Councilmember Robert Lieber submitted to his colleagues Monday night. 

The survey of 400 registered Albany voters, conducted by the Evans/McDonough Company of Oakland, reports that when initially asked, 60 percent said they thought the project was either a bad idea or a very bad idea. Twenty-seven percent offered favorable opinions. 

If it is built, the maxi-mall, planned for a little-used 45-acre parking lot next to the entrance to the Albany Bulb, would provide 600,000 to 800,000 square feet of retail space in a scenic location—which merchants fear will kill businesses already reeling from a troubled economy. 

Two-thirds of Albany residents said they favored environmental restoration and open space along the waterfront instead of the upscale mall proposed by Magna Entertainment Corporation—the owner of the Golden Gates Fields racetrack—and Caruso Affiliated Holdings, run by Los Angeles developer Rick Caruso. 

The poll also revealed that most Albany residents (57 percent) have never visited the race track, with another 18 percent saying they visited once a year. Only 7 percent said they visit one or more days a week during racing season. 

Brian Parker, a former Albany City Council candidate, said he raised the funds for the survey, with the majority coming from two larger donors who have requested anonymity. 

“The biggest supporters of the mall are white males who are ‘decline to state’ voters, while the biggest opponents are older white Democratic women who shop on Solano Avenue,” he said. 

Parker said construction of the mall “would be the end of Solano Avenue,” the upscale street of shops and restaurants that begins in Albany and ends at Sutter Street in Berkeley. “If the mall goes through, we’ll be having vacancies again,” he added. 

Matt Middlebrook, the former Los Angeles deputy mayor who is working for Caruso to develop support for the project, said he was very disappointed with the poll. 

“I’m disappointed not with the results,” he said, “but with the fact that someone is spending $20,000 on a poll designed to influence decisions on a project that’s not even designed yet. It’s designed not to find out the opinions of Albany voters but to find arguments that will influence their decisions.” 

Any waterfront development in Albany must be submitted to voter approval. 

While Middlebrook charged that the poll presented to the council doesn’t include all the questions asked during the poll, Lieber said “we are releasing 100 percent of the results about the project.” 

The only information not included in the packet concerned voter opinions of individual elected officials, he said. 

“The biggest surprise was that voters were most concerned about traffic,” Lieber said. Nearly three out of four voters polled cited traffic as their greatest concern. 

“They probably remember the days when the track was more popular, but then traffic is a lot worse now and perhaps they just don’t want to see more of it,” Lieber said. 

Middlebrook scoffed at concerns expressed by those polled that the mall would result in concrete dominating the waterfront, the second-ranked concern reported by pollsters. “It’s currently dominated by asphalt,” he said. 

Likewise he dismissed fears that the mall could lead to a doubling of Albany’s population, the third-ranked concern. 

Caruso’s company has deep pockets, recently spending seven figures on successfully influencing a voter referendum on a mall in Glendale.m


School Board Plans Hearing, Vote on Jefferson Name Change By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR

Tuesday June 21, 2005

Two years after a group of Jefferson Elementary School parents and teachers began circulating a petition to change the school’s name because of Thomas Jefferson’s connection to slavery, the general Berkeley public will get its first—and only—opportunity to officially enter the process when the BUSD Board of Education holds a public hearing on the issue prior to Wednesday night’s regular board meeting. 

While public comment on the issue has been widespread throughout the city—including in the letters pages of the Daily Planet—official input has been confined so far to a narrowly defined Jefferson School community.  

The hearing will begin at 6:30 p.m. at the Old City Hall on Martin Luther King Jr. Way in downtown Berkeley. Under Berkeley Unified’s facilities name-change policy, the board makes the final decision on proposed name changes following a vote by members of the current school community at the individual school: students, staff members, and parents and guardians of present students. The vote will be held during the board’s regular meeting, scheduled to begin at 7:45 p.m. 

At the end of last month, current Jefferson School community members voted to change the school’s name to Sequoia. Some people have suggested that the name referred to a 19th century Georgia Cherokee leader and inventor named Sequoya—also known as George Guess—who developed the Cherokee alphabet. However, school officials and literature distributed during the voting process both indicate that the proposed new name was intended to represent the giant California tree. 

Board members were evenly divided on the name change when the issue first came to them at their last meeting, with Board Vice President Terry Doran and Director John Selawsky indicating that they would respect the vote of the school community to change the name, and Directors Shirley Issel and Joaquin Rivera saying they would oppose the name change. Board President Nancy Riddle said she had not yet made up her mind. 

Board members are also divided as to what criteria should be used to uphold or deny the proposed Jefferson Elementary name change. Selawsky said at the last meeting that the board’s only function should be to certify whether the school community properly followed the district’s name-change policy. Rivera countered that the board’s function in the name change is “more than just an automatic process; it’s within the board’s discretion to vote it up or down.” 

The policy itself is silent on that issue, stating only that once a name-change petition has been received, “the board will act on the petition.” 

In her report to the Board, Superintendent Michele Lawrence said the she “can certify to the board that there were no violations of [the name change] policy” during the school’s vote. “The superintendent believes the steps outlined in the present policy have been followed as required...” 

Lawrence called the district’s name-change policy itself “significantly flawed,” and board members on both sides of the Jefferson name change issue have indicated that once the Jefferson change is decided, the board will move forward with changes to that policy. Among the complaints received is that the district’s policy allows K-3 elementary school children to vote on proposed school name changes, while excluding—among others—school alumni, parents of students who have graduated from the school, and residents of the school neighborhood. 

Board President Riddle said that board members had decided not to make changes while the Jefferson name change campaign was ongoing for fear of being accused of trying to sway the school community vote one way or the other. 

Budget matters are also scheduled to take up much of the board’s attention Wednesday night. 

As earlier promised—or warned—the superintendent’s office is recommending reductions in the Berkeley High athletic program. The $25,000 in recommended General Fund cuts—in overtime and stipends for coaches of some freshman teams—are expected to be partially offset by an expected $20,000 grant award from the independent nonprofit Berkeley Athletic Fund. 

Also at Wednesday’s meeting, the Board will release to the public the proposed contract settlement agreements with its five employee unions, and will take its first public look at the proposed district budget for fiscal year 2005-06.


AC Transit Hikes Fares By CASSIE NORTON

Tuesday June 21, 2005

After months of deliberation, AC Transit’s Board of Directors has settled on a fare hike in an attempt to offset a projected $40 million budget deficit. 

It has been three years since the last basic fare hike, and the cost of transfers has not changed since 1990. 

The decision holds youth, senior, and disability passes at their present rates and the cost of transfers will remain at 25 cents, but adult fares will rise from $1.50 to $1.75 and 31-day adult passes from $60 to $70. Transbay passes will go from $3 to $3.50 for adults and from $1.50 to $1.70 for seniors, youths, and persons with disabilities. The price of a transbay 31-day pass will increase from $100 to $116. 

The fare hikes are effective Sept. 6. 

Without fare increases, AC Transit General Manager Rick Fernandez said that the agency would be forced to consider reducing both personnel and operations, after a 17 percent reduction in services last year. 

Directors Joe Wallace (Richmond), Hayashi (Hayward), Chris Peeples (at-large), and Rebecca Kaplan (at-large) voted in favor of the modified proposal. Peeples emphasized that because the AC Transit works on a grid system that has been adversely affected by service cuts, forcing people to make more transfers, the agency had a responsibility to keep transfer prices low. 

Directors Greg Harper and Dolores Jaquez, both representing Oakland, and Director Joe Bischofberger (Newark and Fremont) voted against the measure, saying they were in favor of raising the price of transfers. 

AC Transit passes are available at Long’s Drugs, Andronico’s, Berkeley Bowl, Elephant Pharmacy, and the AC Transit offices in Oakland and San Francisco. 

h


City Employee Retires at 84 After 50 Years of Service By MATTHEW ARTZ

Tuesday June 21, 2005

After two decades of escorting Berkeley school children across some of Berkeley’s busiest intersections, George Harris—one of the city’s oldest crossing guards—turned in his stop sign Friday. 

Harris’ retirement after 50 years as a Berkeley public employee, the last 20 as a crossing guard, was greeted with little fanfare but a lot of love from neighbors who said they appreciated his presence every school day. 

“He’s a very kind gentleman and just a very nice human being,” said Darryl Bartlow, a resident at the corner of Ashby and Fulton where Harris has served as a crossing guard for Le Conte Elementary School for the past 12 years. 

“He’s part of the neighborhood. It seems like he’s been our crossing guard since my son was a munchkin,” added Lisa Bullwinkle, another neighbor. Not only did Harris help Bullwinkle’s family cross Ashby, she said, but as an added kind act he baked them several batches of his signature dish, peach cobbler. 

“This job has been just like going to church for me,” said Harris, a North Oakland resident and the father of nine children. “I enjoyed the students so much I kept coming back every year.” 

Harris didn’t become a crossing guard for the money. Thirty years collecting garbage for the city netted him a pension, but retirement didn’t give him enough opportunity to chat. “George is a schmooze artist,” Bullwinkle said. 

On his last day, the retiring guard struck up conversations with pedestrians and cyclists as they waited for the light to turn green, not about his pending retirement, but about his time in the army. 

Harris grew up in Pittsburgh, Penn., the son of a bricklayer. In 1942 the army sent him to Berkeley. As a member of the 779th Military Police Battalion, he was stationed at Camp Ashby just west of San Pablo Avenue. 

“Back then, all you had to do was stand on Ashby and girls would say ‘Hey soldier boy’ and offer you a ride to San Francisco,” he said. “Those were the good old days.” 

The army sent Harris to Burma for the last year of the war, but he liked California so much, he came back for good in 1946. 

He got a job collecting garbage in Berkeley at a time when the metal bins didn’t have wheels and the garbage men hauled the trash over their shoulder into the truck. 

When he retired after 30 years without taking a sick day, Harris ran into a Berkeley police sergeant, who recommended he apply to be a crossing guard. 

“The sergeant told me never to hold a student’s hand or get to close to any of them because the others might get jealous,” he said. 

Harris has tried to follow the rules, but said he just couldn’t help talking to some students. “Sometimes if I’m walking on Shattuck, someone will call my name and say, ‘Mr. Harris, don’t you remember me, you used to cross me.’” 

As a friendly gesture a few years back, he gave his stop sign to Bullwinkle’s son, Tyler Volz. 

“Mr. Harris is the man,” said Volz, now a Berkeley High student. “He’d always put a smile on your face every time you see him.” 

During his 20 years on the job, Harris saw plenty of car accidents, but never let a pedestrian get hit. He said there were a few instances where he kept students from accidents, and recalled one time when a student yelled at him to dodge an oncoming car Harris didn’t see coming. 

“The boy basically saved my life,” he said. 

Even at age 84, with arthritis in his legs, Harris has mixed feelings about retirement. He said he might have stuck around a little longer if budget problems weren’t forcing the city to reduce the number of crossing guards next year. With his seniority, Harris knows his job would be safe, but he didn’t want to displace a crossing guard who needed the income. 

“I don’t want to take milk off anybody’s table,” he said. 

A devout Christian and member of Berkeley’s Progressive Baptist Church, Harris says he’ll spend most of his free time studying the Bible. But he promised neighbors Friday that he would make a few visits back to the intersection he patrolled for a dozen years. 

“I’m going to miss all these nice people,” he said. “Getting the wave from all the people walking and bicycling past. It made me feel good.” 


Council Considers Secrecy Ban, Budget, Drayage By MATTHEW ARTZ

Tuesday June 21, 2005

A proposal at Tuesday’s Berkeley City Council meeting could constrain Berkeley’s recent practice of settling city land use lawsuits behind closed doors. 

Mayor Tom Bates and Councilmember Kriss Worthington have proposed approving in principle the concept of requiring all future confidentiality agreements to include a provision for public review and comment on any tentative land use, master plan, or long range plan agreement before final council action. They want the city manager to return with appropriate implementation language. 

The proposal comes amid harsh criticism from neighborhood leaders over a deal to settle a city lawsuit against UC Berkeley regarding the campus’ Long Range Development Plan. A confidentiality agreement between the city and UC to apply to the negotiations was interpreted by the city attorney’s office as precluding the council from disclosing the proposed settlement for public comment until after both sides approved the deal. 

“I was shocked that we were not able to take the agreement to the public,” Bates said. “I want to clarify that it will never happen again.” 

If it passes, the proposal would make Berkeley one of the first cities in California to codify the right of residents to comment on certain types of settlements, said Peter Scheer of the California First Amendment Coalition, an open government advocate. But the ordinance, he added, “would simply codify a standard political practice in most local governments.” 

Santa Cruz City Attorney John Barisone said that city’s council decides on a case-by-case basis whether or not a lawsuit is far-reaching enough to allow for public review of a proposed settlement. 

“Obviously when dealing with the university it will be of general public interest [to disclose a settlement],” he said. 

Requiring proposed settlements to be released for public comment can make negotiations more difficult, Barisone said. “When you’re dealing with a business or corporate entity they are not always willing to go through a public tongue lashing.” 

State law allows cities to settle lawsuits without public input. 

Councilmember Betty Olds questioned the wisdom of disclosing every land use lawsuit to public scrutiny and said that in light of the UC settlement, the proposal seemed too late. 

“We’re locking the barn door after the horse was stolen,” she said. 

Under the settlement, the city withdrew its lawsuit contesting the university’s Long Range Development Plan and the university doubled its payments for city services and agreed to work with the city on new zoning rules for the downtown.  

In more fallout from the UC settlement, the council is scheduled to vote on allowing UC Berkeley to pay reduced sewer fees. In April, the council passed sewer fees requiring UC Berkeley—a state institution exempt from local fees and taxes—to pay a higher rate, approximately $2.1 million for next year.  

But the city slipped in a clause allowing it to cut a separate deal with UC pending the resolution of settlement talks. The settlement agreement calls for UC to pay Berkeley $200,000 a year for sewer services—roughly $300,00 less than it paid this year. The city is supplementing its sewer budget with money from property taxes. City Manager Phil Kamlarz has said that, despite reduced payments from UC, Berkeley would not have to further increase sewer fees for residents this year, which are already scheduled to go up by 3 percent. 

 

Budget 

With one week to go before the city must pass a balanced budget, the council will hold a public hearing and debate a proposal from Mayor Bates on how to spend unallocated funds. 

The city has ordered departments to cut their budgets 10 percent to help close an $8.9 million deficit in the city’s general fund. However the city has received an unexpected windfall from higher than expected revenues from a tax on property transfers. The council has set aside most of the money for capital projects like street repair and a new police dispatch system, but there is still roughly $700,000 for the council to allocate. 

Mayor Bates’ proposal calls for spending $267,974 up front and holding off on allocating the rest of the funds until December, when the city has a better sense of whether the tax revenues will remain high. 

Bates calls for spending $80,000 to restore the Berkeley Guides for six months, $40,000 for Berkeley Youth Alternatives’ employment program, $12,500 to extend for six months the contract of Pedal Express to deliver interoffice mail by bicycle, and $24,163 to maintain the city’s civic arts coordinator as a full time position through December.  

If property tax revenues remain strong, the mayor proposes to then spend $40,000 on a crime analyst, $38,802 to help low income children obtain hearing aids, $50,000 to pay for a gate to close off a new bicycle path at night, $44,000 for civic arts grants and $19,643 to pay for safety escorts at the Ashby BART station. 

Competing plans have been issued by the Human Welfare and Community Action Commission, which has called for restoring over $1.1 million to community non-profits that provide services to the poor. In addition, Councilmember Worthington has proposed restoring $600,000 in community non-profits funding. 

 

Other Items 

• The council will again consider whether to require a public hearing before the Zoning Adjustment Board to issue permits to demolish 24 apartments in the Drayage, an illegal live-work warehouse in West Berkeley. 

• Mayor Bates and Linda Maio have proposed that the council urge county lawmakers to select a registrar of voters who favors instant runoff voting. The outgoing registrar, Bradley Clark, has been seen by IRV supporters as an opponent of the system Berkeley voters approved last year. 

• The council will be asked to amend city election laws to allow credit and debit cards for campaign expenditures. 


Meetings Target Concerns at Toxic Richmond Sites By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Tuesday June 21, 2005

Concerns over a pair of contaminated sites in Richmond will be addressed at two meetings this week and another on June 30. All are being convened by state agencies. 

On Wednesday, the state Department of Health Services (DHS) will address worker concerns about health problems at UC Berkeley’s Richmond Field Station (RFS). The meeting will be held from 3 to 5 p.m. in Building 454 of the station, which is located just south of Marina Bay. 

A second session scheduled from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Thursday in the offices of Kray Cabling, 1344 South 49th S t. in Richmond, will address health concerns of owners and employees of businesses near the Campus Bay site, just south of RFS. 

The June 30 meeting will be the first for the Community Advisory Group (CAG) appointed to help the state Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) develop cleanup plans for the controversial Campus Bay site. 

The main item on the CAG’s agenda will be the decision whether or not to extend its oversight to the RFS. 

The CAG meeting will be held from 7 to 9 p.m. in the Bermuda Room of the Richmond Convention Center, 403 Civic Center Plaza near the corner of Nevin and 25th streets. 

CAGs are an integral part of the state Department of Toxic Substances Control cleanup efforts at sites contaminated by toxic and other conta minants, and the new Richmond CAG was formed as the result of a petition circulated by Richmond activist Ethel Dotson. 

The 25-member panel was picked by a selection committee that included Dotson, Bay Area Residents for Responsible Development member She rry Padgett, Michelle Milan of the staff of Assemblymember Loni Hancock and Jay Leonhardy, assistant to Richmond Mayor Irma Anderson. 

Included on the CAG are representatives of three government agencies, including Contra Costa County Public Health Direct or Wendel Brunner, Richmond City Councilmember Gayle McLaughlin and Richmond Redevelopment Agency chief Steven Duran. 

McLaughlin and Brunner have expressed strong reservations about plans to develop 1,331 residential units atop the buried toxins at Campus Bay while Duran has been a strong proponent of the project. 

UC Berkeley officials resisted a resolution by McLaughlin that called on the Richmond City Council to urge the transfer of cleanup efforts at the field station from the Regional Water Quality Control Board to DTSC. 

The water board has no toxicologists on its staff while the DTSC boasts a strong collection of toxic experts. 

Meanwhile UC Berkeley unions are pressing the school’s administrators for more information about toxics at the field sta tion, as well as for reports of illnesses suffered by workers at the site.


Transportation Commission Declines to Choose Ferry Site By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Tuesday June 21, 2005

Berkeley’s Transportation Commissioners refused Thursday to endorse the Waterfront Commission’s June 8 recommendation to choose the dock at the Doubletree Hotel as the future terminal for ferry service. 

Instead, the Transportation Commission voted to urge the San Francisco Bay Water Transit Authority (WTA) to consider all potential area sites in their plans for providing ferry transit services to the East Bay. 

That decision would include consideration of sites at the waterfront near the foot of Gilman Street in Berkeley and Buchanan Streets in Albany, both strongly disfavored by environmentalists and Paul Kamen, chair of the Waterfront Commission. 

“This is the first time I’ve ever found myself in agreement with Norman La Force,” said Kamen. La Force is the Bay Area attorney for the Sierra Club, which often finds itself at odds with waterfront development advocates. 

Also opposed to the Gilman and Albany sites is Citizens for Eastshore Parks. That organization played an instrumental role in creating the Eastshore State Park, which is scheduled to acquire the Albany Bulb, the small landfill that begins at the end of Buchanan Street.  

Albany City Councilmember Robert Lieber noted Monday that both the Gilman and Buchanan street sites would require extensive dredging before they could be used by ferries, while the Berkeley Marina site would not. 

The Doubletree pier is already used by Hornblower cruise ships and would require little or no modification to serve as a terminal. The other sites would require extensive and expensive construction. 

Kamen said extensive parking already present at the Marina would mean no additional parking would be required at that site, another potential cost savings. 

WTA Executive Officer Steven Castleberry told the commission that the environmental review of sites in the Berkeley area would include all three locations, but said a recommendation from the Berkeley City Council would carry weight in the final selection. 

Berkeley and Albany are vying for the first new WTA terminal in the East Bay. Complicating the selection of an Albany site is that city’s recent decision to consider expanded dock operations for Toyota Motors import operations at the preferred site in Marina Bay. 

“We do not plan to do both Berkeley/Albany and Richmond,” Castleberry told the commission. “Measure 2 funds currently allow for only one.” That measure, passed by Bay Area voters last year, increased bridge tolls to fund public transportation projects. 

Commission Chair Rob Wrenn said he wouldn’t support the Waterfront Commission recommendation without a similar site review by his panel. 

Castleberry said he was “a little worried” of going ahead without a recommendation, noting that any review would cover all the sites, “but if there’s a preferred site, the review usually throws a little more money behind it.”u


Brower Center on ZAB, Planning Agendas By RICHARD BRENNEMAN

Tuesday June 21, 2005

Plans for the new David Brower Center and Oxford Plaza affordable housing complex will be presented at both the City of Berkeley Planning Commission and the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) this week. 

The project consists of two buildings—one housing environmental organizations and the other housing low-income tenants. 

Planning commissioners Wednesday will consider proposed amendments to the city’s Downtown Plan that would allow the buildings to add two additional floors above the three-story limit now imposed along Oxford/Fulton Street facing the UC Berkeley Campus. 

Planning commissioners are also being asked to provide comments on the project’s proposed mitigated negative declaration, an environmental document that spells out remedies for adverse impacts likely to arise from the project. 

The commission is also scheduled to act on zoning amendments that would ease permitting thresholds for home-based teaching and an update to the housing element of the General Plan. 

The commission meeting begins at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

Preceding the meeting at 6:30 p.m. will be a joint workshop of the Planning and Parks and Recreation Commissions on the Gilman Street ball fields and proposed amendments to the Specific Plan Zoning District and the Waterfront Plan required before the project can be developed. 

The Brower Center appears on Thursday night’s ZAB agenda only as an informational item to give the board a preview of the project they’ll be voting on later. 

Items appearing on ZAB action agenda include a final vote on a controversial three-story “popup” condominium project at 2901 Otis St., an addition to a home at 2235 Derby St., and a proposal for a cellular phone antenna at 611 Hearst Ave. 

ZAB members will also get a preview of revised plans for a 29-unit five-story condominium project at 2701 Shattuck Ave. and are being asked to advise planning staff about a duplex and cottage project planned for 1532 Martin Luther King. Jr. Way. 

The ZAB meeting begins at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers, 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way.


Correction

Tuesday June 21, 2005

A June 3 story, “Health Officer Charges Department With Misuse of Public Funds,” reported the following: “Berkeley has a track record of misappropriating public health money. In 2000, the city had to backfill the public health reserve fund $2.4 million after the state determined that since 1993 Berkeley had illegally used the money to pay for other city expenses.” In fact, there was never an allegation from the state Department of Health and Human Services of either misappropriation or illegal use of funds. The state agency asked the city to redeposit state funds from its General Fund to a special health fund for accounting purposes.


Editorial Cartoon By JUSTIN DEFREITAS

Tuesday June 21, 2005

http://www.jfdefreitas.com/index.php?path=/00_Latest%20Work?


Letters to the Editor

Tuesday June 21, 2005

DRAYAGE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have read in the Berkeley Daily Planet that the 24 residential rental units at the Drayage are not residential rental units because they weren’t “legally established.” It is unfortunate that 24 residential dwelling units, occupied by real people for over two decades, are to be afforded no legitimate legal status by the city’s planning-building-zoning-housing departments. Since when has it been city policy to destroy affordable live/work artist housing, not to mention devastate a community that has contributed so much to Berkeley over the years?  

Tom Meyer 

 

• 

RAILROAD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Just a quick note, Conductors on the railroad don’t blow the horn, engineers do. A conductor is basically along for the ride unless there is a need to pick up or drop off railcars in route to their destination. Good article about train whistles, just can’t understand why people build next to or near train tracks. Much like when people complain about speeding cars in their neighborhood and ask police to shoot radar, statistically the individuals who get caught speeding are the same ones that called to complain in the first place. But with the railroad and whistle complaints it is usually the same people who complain that end up illegally going around crossing gates when a train comes, and get hit, then in court they testify that the engineer didn’t blow the whistle enough for them to realize that a train was coming, resulting in millions paid out every year to so-called victims of crossing accidents. Don’t get me wrong, I may work for the railroad but I do not necessarily defend them, but in this day and age an ever-increasing number of civil and criminal suits in these crossing accidents are filed. The train crew are the ones that are being sued. When the high-priced railroad lawyers beat the so-called “victims” in court they look to the crew of the train to fill their pockets. Personally I think if you bought a house next to the airport, railroad tracks, fire station, etc., that you must have had a terrible realtor who led you there in the first place, or you did not research the area well before spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a home without really knowing where it is that you were about to live. I challenge you to do the following: Do a Google news search everyday and see what the two main headlines are concerning railroads. Here is what you will find. The number one railroad-related news in the media is railroad crossing accidents, the number two is residents complaining about loud whistles and proposed “quiet zones.” All I can say is, take responsibility for what you do; if you move in next to the tracks don’t complain about the noise; and if you go around crossing gates and get hit, don’t blame the railroad, or its employees (that is, should you live). 

Dick Ehrhardt 

 

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TRAIN WHISTLES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I didn’t respond at first to Linda Maio’s proposal to silence the West Berkeley trains because I couldn’t stop laughing. Apparently she is serious about spending scarce public funds to destroy one of the most beloved sounds in the world. 

This town does nothing about enforcing the laws against gas-powered leaf-blowers, which would cost us nothing and even make money off the considerable fines. If noise pollution is an honest concern, start there. But don’t interfere with the West Berkeley train songs without a hearing, so that all points of view can be heard. While some may be bothered, most, including me, would miss them terribly. 

Carol Denney 

 

• 

KPFA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

If Alan Wofsy wants to publicly rant against both the old and new Left (Letters, June 14) that’s his choice. But let him be aware that strong emotions alone do not a persuasive argument make. They create instead a form of village gossip based on a wall of sound.  

Wofsy tries to discredit the woman who filed sexual harassment charges against Bernstein by stating that she “devotes her time...to propaganda on behalf of a notorious cop killer.” This is no more than a smear. Based on it, are we then to conclude that her harassment charges are invalid?  

True, Mumia Abu Jamal was convicted of killing a policeman but he’s still innocent, based on facts Wofsy tunes out: the four eyewitnesses who cleared Mumia, the forensic evidence that discredits the prosecution’s case, the repudiated confessions, and the bullets that don’t match the bullet holes.  

Wofsy has thus become part of that groupmind where facts are of no consequence compared to passionately held, unproven opinions.  

Wofsy’s last slingshot is that KPFA is undermining America, apparently by airing views he disagrees with. The O’Reilly virus strikes again.  

Lastly, what Wofsy has demonstrated is that he’s one angry dude. He may want to Google the proper target for his rancor.  

Maris Arnold  

 

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CITY BUDGET 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The City of Berkeley is doing it again! Year after year, the safety and welfare of the citizens of Berkeley have repeatedly been disregarded by a majority of members of the City Council as well as the city manager during the budget period by threatening to cut the heart of vital basic services, in this case, fire safety and emergency services. Is this a deliberate attempt by the City Council and the city manager to force its citizens to adhere to increased taxes? 

If this is the city’s way of dealing with the budget deficit, then why is the source of the structural deficit being ignored? Over 60 percent of the deficit is due to rising costs of employee salaries and benefits. Health insurance costs are rising by 18.5 percent a year. The council chose to ignore the recommendation of the now defunct Citizens’ Budget Review Commission (the first commission to be axed) to transfer the 8.4 percent share of retirement costs to its employees. Employee costs are projected to rise at a much faster rate than city income (general fund is projected to increase at only 2-4 percent per year) and unless the city deals with this issue, essential city services will be threatened year after year. 

I question the manner in which the city gives it priorities to public services. While public safety is being threatened, the following projects are being given priority: 

• $120,000 for equipment for Train Horn. 

• $80,000 for Berkeley guides. 

• $50,000 for bike path fence. 

• $61,148 for start-up money for real-time parking signs. 

• $30,000 for solar bond funding match. 

• $300,000 technology investment for customer service improvement. 

I can go on and on about different programs which the city can no longer afford but insists on having by passing the burden to the citizens of Berkeley. With only half of its property owners paying property taxes, why is the city bent on further burdening its taxpayers instead of looking at ways of cutting unnecessary programs, streamlining its operations and increasing city income? 

Cecilia I. Gaerlan 

Co-Captain 

Shasta-Sterling Neighborhood Group 

 

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SIMILARITIES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In the debate over Oakland’s sideshows, has anyone recognized the similarities between the sideshow phenomena and Critical Mass? Both events involve marginalized people using whatever means are at hand to retake some public space, have fun, meet new people and enjoy the good weather. It may seem a stretch to compare African-American youth with no space in the entire city of Oakland to poor bicyclists squeezed out and hated by motorists, but the similarities are there. 

Sideshows and Critical Mass are both leaderless but self-organizing, spontaneous but predictable, fun, alt-community events with political overtones that threaten to keep youthful rebellion alive. Both phenomena are confusing and frightening to the uninitiated and both make demands for breathing room in the public arena. 

The other similarity is the way the media, the police and city are reacting to sideshows; very much like the way the San Francisco mayor and police behaved when confronted with Critical Mass. First, they ignored us, then they tried to control us, then for a while they facilitated the ride, then they tried to fight us by cracking heads, impounding bikes and making mass arrests, then they got over themselves and went back to helping the ride pass through unmolested, like any other civic nuisance that mucks up public streets on any given day. And though it still goes on every month in a town near you, unless you’ve been stuck in it, you haven’t heard much about Critical Mass in years, because the shock value has waned and the media has moved on to the latest menace du jour like sideshows and terrorist preschoolers. 

Perhaps we should think outside the mayor’s box. 

Hank Chapot 

 

• 

ROSE GROCERY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I write to note a couple of omissions in your story regarding the condominiums which have risen behind the old Rose Grocery. 

First, I recall a decade ago when affordable housing developers proposed renovating the site to provide housing to low-income people living with HIV. Living several blocks from the grocery, I served at that time on a Neighborhood Advisory Board along with some of the good people who have helped realize this new iteration. It is worth pausing to contrast the unbridled enthusiasm for “luxurious townhouses”—for which the Landmarks Preservation Commission “received 37 letters from neighbors in support and none in opposition”—with the often bitter neighborhood opposition to affordable housing units for people in need. 

Second, I was surprised to learn this weekend that former Zoning Adjustments Board member and current City Councilmember Laurie Capitelli—“who helped expedite what could have been a very lengthy process”—is listed at the property as one of the sellers’ real estate agents. If the Daily Planet story is accurate, it is dispiriting to see a public official poised to benefit directly from a local development project in which he had a direct hand in promoting. 

Although no one can lament the rehabilitation of the neglected property, these omissions from your story offer a cautionary tale about the future of our city. In a culture of increasing wealth disparity, self-interest—whether by our neighbors or our elected officials—will continue to drive decisions that over time risk diminishing and impoverishing us all. 

Jeff Selbin 

 

• 

WATER SOURCES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Bruce Joffe seems singularly uninformed about his own water supply. If, as stated in his letter, he lives in Piedmont, his “sweetest, cleanest drinking water of anyplace on the planet” is supplied by the East Bay Municipal Utility District from the Pardee Reservoir on the Mokelumne River and not from Hetch Hetchy at all. And the same is true of Berkeley, Oakland, and Richmond. It seems that Mr. Joffe is simply looking for an excuse for his ad hominem attack on “Environmental Defense people.” 

Gene Rochlin 

 

• 

ANIMAL SHELTER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As far as I know, there is only one person in Berkeley who regards making any further cuts to the Berkeley Animal Shelter budget as in any way acceptable, and that’s the city manager, who demanded a 10 percent cut in spite of the fact that the shelter has been losing a staff member per year for several years. (If the ratio of police officers to Berkeley residents were similar to the ratio of Animal Shelter employees to companion animals, Berkeley would have about three police officers.) Presented with the city manager’s demand, Shelter Director Katherine O’Connor told him that she would have to cut either one kennel attendant, one animal control officer, or the volunteer coordinator position, and that, forced to make a choice, she would choose to cut the animal control officer position, because that would be the choice least damaging to the welfare of the animals housed at the shelter. This is because there is one basic reason for the difference between the Oakland Animal Shelter’s 54 percent kill rate for shelter animals and the Berkeley Shelter’s 10 percent kill rate: volunteers! There are at present more than 1,000 volunteers, more than 300 of whom are active volunteers. More than 35 new volunteers are recruited and trained by the volunteer coordinator every other week. The average weekly time put in by volunteers, June through November 2004, amounted to 230 hours per week. In December 2004 that number jumped to 418 hours per week. 

The volunteer coordinator works 40-50 hours per week turning this huge volunteer workforce into a productive reality. She supervises and supports dog walkers and cat socializers who keep animals adoptable and make them more so because animals are given human contact and positive reinforcement. (Imagine the impact of someone—or no one—visiting you while you serve a prison sentence.) She assesses animals that come into the shelter and prepares them for exposure to potential adopters, organizes and mobilizes offsite adoption events that attract hundreds of members of the public every weekend and result in adoptions that would never happen if the animals weren’t visible in this way, counsels potential adopters in every adoption, so that the choice is appropriate and permanent, creates shelter events and makes them happen, in order to supplement the shelter budget, coordinates website postings (an essential tool for adoptions today,) manages the Youth Education program, and performs various other duties. 

When I asked Director O’Connor what would happen if the loss of one animal control officer position resulted in a one day per week closure of the shelter, she said that while it would definitely be a bad situation, it would have nowhere near the deleterious effect on the welfare of shelter animals as the loss of the volunteer coordinator position, and it would occur on a weekday if it happened, and it would never result in animals being deprived of basic care. A different opinion was expressed in a recommendation put forward by Councilmember Dona Spring at the June 14 City Council meeting, that “it will be less detrimental to cut the volunteer coordinator position rather than an animal control officer position.” Ms. Spring, who never goes near the Animal Shelter and has no training or experience that suits her to express an opinion so much at variance with the shelter director’s opinion, had received so many angry e-mails from volunteers by June 14 that she had already backed off and amended her original position by that evening’s council meeting. I expect to join other volunteers at the June 21 council meeting to voice our disagreement with Dona Spring, and our opinion that a “volunteer volunteer coordinator” is an unrealizable fantasy. But I hope to be joined by large numbers of readers of the Daily Planet—perhaps that more than two-thirds of Berkeley who voted for Measure I and 7.2 million dollars for a new animal shelter in November 2002—who may still persuade the City Council to vote against any further cuts tot he shelter at all! 

Chadidjah McFallU


Column: The Public Eye: What’s the Matter with Berkeley? By ZELDA BRONSTEIN

Tuesday June 21, 2005

Still reeling from the news of the City Council majority’s secret sell-out to the university, I opened the June 20 Nation and read that Berkeley is part of an “urban archipelago” of “progressive cities in a conservative sea.” According to John Nichols’ cover story, progressive agendas, blocked at the federal and state levels, are being advanced in municipal venues around the country. 

The locales Nichols has in mind are “major metropolitan centers, aging industrial cities and college towns.” For example, Lawrence, Kansas, (population 88,000). On April 5, when 70 percent of the statewide electorate voted to make same-sex marriage illegal in Kansas, “progressives swept every open post in Lawrence,” including the mayor’s office. 

New mayor Dennis Highberger has gotten Lawrence to officially condemn the Patriot Act. But, Nichols hastens to add, Highberger spends most of his time on “mundane municipal issues like funding library services,…buying new land for park space.” With the support of “Progressive Lawrence—a local group that two years ago wrested power from more conservative, pro-development forces,” Highberger and other officials “have focused on implementing ’smart growth’ strategies to prevent sprawl, working with local employees to improve delivery of services and promoting tolerance in a state where that can be controversial.” 

Closer to home, in Irvine, former mayor, now councilmember, Larry Agran “and his progressive allies have developed pioneering programs in childcare, affordable housing, recycling and open-space preservation, most notably undoing plans by developers to turn a former Marine Corps base into an international airport.” Stretching from the mountains to the Pacific, the ex-base will become the largest metropolitan park (7,400 acres) in the nation. 

Other cities have passed living-wage laws and instituted publicly financed elections. One hundred thirty-four mayors have agreed to pursue at the local level the Kyoto Protocol’s goal of reducing greenhouse emissions. And two nationwide organizations have sprung up to support progressives at the local level—Cities for Progress, which will seek to influence national policy through the joint efforts of communities and local officials, and the New Cities conference of mayors. 

Berkeley gets only a nod in Nichols’ story. The first New Cities meeting, in February, he writes, “drew mayors from Milwaukee, Salt Lake City, Berkeley and nine other cities.” That’s it. 

But what else would you expect? Progressive Lawrence and Irvine are newsworthy; progressive Berkeley rates a yawn. Ever since the Free Speech Movement coalesced in Sproul Plaza 40 years ago, this town has symbolized cutting edge liberalism to the world at large. 

The question is, does Berkeley still deserve its reputation as a liberal bastion? 

The answer may not be obvious. Last November Berkeley gave John Kerry the highest percentage of votes (90 percent) of any city with a majority of white residents, and the third highest (coming behind Detroit at 94 percent and Gary at 92 percent) of any city, period. 

At the same time, Berkeley voters turned down four city tax measures. The San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial writers saw the defeat of municipal taxes here and elsewhere in the Bay Area as “conservative strains” in our deep blue bailiwick. 

As far as Berkeley is concerned, that’s a superficial reading. I’m somebody whom the Daily Planet once characterized, fairly or not, as “a member of Berkeley’s progressive establishment.” Last fall I voted with the majority against city taxes. I wasn’t voting against “guvmint” or against new taxes per se (I voted for the school tax, again with the majority). I was voting against the particular government that’s currently installed in City Hall. I wanted to send a message to Mayor Bates and City Manager Kamlarz: I don’t like the way you’re running this town. I know many other Berkeleyans who call themselves progressives who did the same thing for the same reason. 

Even before the Bates-led debacle of the UC settlement, it had become clear that the electoral gesture of no-confidence didn’t get across. Since last November, actions undertaken by the mayor and City Council in concert with city staff and/or city commissioners—the mind-boggling reconfiguration of Marin Avenue; the approval of Jeremy’s admittedly illegal expansion on College Avenue; the approval of the nine-story Seagate project on Center, which violated the city’s General Plan, Downtown Core zoning ordinance and affordable housing laws; the insidious attacks on the West Berkeley Plan; the pathetic community budget process—all indicated that the leadership at City Hall had actually become more high-handed than ever. 

Now, the council majority’s capitulation to the university leaves no doubt about what Tom Bates and his allies stand for: closed government, secret deals, deregulated development, pandering to power and spin spin spin. 

The worst thing about the settlement with UC is that it cuts citizens out of the planning process and effectively gives the Regents veto power over downtown Berkeley’s future (See Section II of the settlement at www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

mayor/PR/UCAgreement.pdf). The school’s charter from the state already exempts it from municipal land use laws. It was unconscionable for the mayor and council to surrender the city’s control over non-UC development in downtown as well. It may also be illegal. 

Today, Berkeley is a city of progressives governed by men and women who have scant respect for a principle that progressives, i.e., democrats with a small d, hold dear: people should have a meaningful say in the decisions that affect their lives. How ironic—and painful—that at a time when progressive politics are gaining momentum in cities around the country, Berkeley has moved in the opposite direction. 

In November 2006 Tom Bates will be up for re-election. So will two of the five councilmembers who okayed the UC deal, Linda Maio and Gordon Wozniak. Between then and now, the paramount task is to see to it that next time we elect a mayor and councilmembers who will govern in accordance with Berkeley’s proudly democratic history and character.


Column: Love Us Because We’re Fabulous: 50 Ways to Support LGBT By SUSAN PARKER

Tuesday June 21, 2005

Prolific local writer Meredith Maran has added another tome to her long list of writing accomplishments, this time in the form of anthology: 50 Ways To Support Lesbian & Gay Equality (Inner Ocean Publishing, 165 pages, $14.95). Subtitled “The Complete Guide to Supporting Family, Friends-or Yourself,” its short and snappy personal essays are accompanied by tip sheets listing commonsense advice and a myriad of LGBT resources.  

Co-edited by Angela Watrous, 50 Ways To Support Lesbian & Gay Equality showcases fifty authors, including many local residents such as filmmaker Johnny Symons, Colorlines editor Daisy Hernandez , and writer/counselor Renate Stendhal. Also voicing opinions are renowned activists, among them Judy Shepard (mother of slain gay college student Matthew Shepard and Executive Director of the Matthew Shepard Foundation), Margaret Cho (comedian), Candace Gingrich (sister of Newt, and Youth Outreach Manager for the Human Rights Campaign), Jerry Greenfield (cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade), Rebecca Walker (author of Black, White and Jewish), Kelli O’Donnell (wife of Rosie, and founder of R Family Vacations) and William F. Schulz (Executive Director of Amnesty International).  

In Montclair last week, I caught several of the authors and Maran in discussion at the intimate and wonderfully energetic independent bookstore, A Great Good Place for Books. Starting with a flamboyant lip sync performance by Diva Dan, the agenda included brief talks by attorney Emily Doskow, who specializes in same-sex couple adoption, Joel Ginsberg, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association, and Leland Traiman, founder of Rainbow Flag Health Services, the only gay sperm bank in the world, located right here in Alameda County. Like the anthology, these writer-activists offered a kaleidoscope of information including how to deal with the straight world, and where to get help with LBGT concerns. But what made their talks most relevant were their personal stories, which, as in 50 Ways To Support Lesbian & Gay Equality, puts a human face on the difficult issues faced by the LBGT community. Traiman recounted his husband’s mother’s inability to accept the children they are raising; Diva Dan explained what it’s like to grow up a boy wanting to wear a dress in Tennessee; Maran told of the eight years she and her sons were estranged from her father. These stories and the dozens of others in this collection are poignant, concise and refreshingly unsentimental. 

For example, the “Value Families Like Mine” essay by “queerspawn,” (birth through donor insemination to two proud and open moms), Nathaniel Obler, spokesperson for Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere (COLAGE), encourages readers to take a look at this “ever-growing community that is adding a new, younger, and--if I do say so myself--cuter face to the gay community.” 

Thea Hillman discusses intersex issues in an essay entitled “Put the ‘I’ in Pride,” Victoria Neilson—in “Demand Immigration Equality”—explains why immigration laws need to be changed, C. Dixon Osburn sheds light on don’t ask, don’t tell military policies in “Ask, Tell.” “Advocate for Our Elders,” by Scott J. Hamilton, explores the growing senior LBGT population, and “Keep the Faith,” by Reverend Dr. Troy D. Perry, champions spiritual pursuits through the Metropolitan Community Churches.  

I plan to keep 50 Ways to Support Lesbian & Gay Equality within easy reach on my bookshelf. I’ll review some of the films recommended by Diane Anderson-Minshall in Watch Movies about LGBT Life, research classes to take and books to read as suggested by Arlene Stein in “Study Something Queer,” and educate my teenage friends and relatives on the proper use of the word gay as explained by Debra Chasnoff in “Talk to Children about LGBT People: It’s Elementary.” And I’ll heed the sage advice of Diva Dan in “Walk a Mile in My Heels” not to “hate us because we’re beautiful. Love us because we’re fabulous.” 

Meredith Maran and several of the authors from 50 Ways to Support Lesbian & Gay Equality will appear at the San Francisco Main Library July 7. For more information go to www.meredithmaran.com. 


Commentary: Why Do City Staff Plug Coporate Development? By GALE GARCIA

Tuesday June 21, 2005

I recently attended a meeting of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), on the topic of mixed-use infill development in Berkeley, hosted by Berkeley Planning Director Dan Marks and Planning Manager Mark Rhoades—a truly enlightening experience.  

Early in the presentation, Mr. Marks casually stated that Berkeley’s building boom is “a disaster for small landlords” (due to the vacancies), yet he spent the rest of the hour cheerleading for massive development. I’m baffled. Small landlords are actual living people, a group which pays a disproportionate share of taxes and fees, and therefore contributes disproportionately to Berkeley’s revenue.  

Nonetheless, our Planning and Development Department continues to “incentivize” huge projects by national corporations, such as the subsidiary of real estate investment giant, Marcus and Millichap, currently seeking to demolish the Brennan’s and Celia’s buildings, and SNK Captec Arpeggio LLC, which has purchased the project formerly known as “Seagate.” Yet, incredibly, Marks claimed that Berkeley is being developed by “home-grown folks” who know the local market.  

Hmm, I don’t think so. At a meeting about the Brennan’s demolition project, the corporation’s representative said that two-bedroom apartments in the planned building would rent for up to $2,600 per month. However, one can now rent a three-bedroom cottage—with a dining room and yard—for much less than that, inspiring little confidence that this company has a clue about our rental market. 

Why would a planning director encourage national corporations to perform needless construction, which he admits is disastrous for local small property owners? For the tax revenue? But each of the big projects is owned by a limited liability corporation (LLC), so the buildings can be sold, under some circumstances, without generating a property transfer tax and without triggering a higher assessed value (see “Building LLCs Present Tax Collection Problems”, Daily Planet, May 6).  

Furthermore, “limited liability” means that if the project gets into debt, or fails, none of the corporate owners risks anything more than his initial investment. Rents have indeed dropped—vacancies have dramatically increased—and some of the new buildings are proving to be rather costly to maintain. Do these projects have a viable future? Does it make sense to add more of the same to an already glutted market? 

Unfortunately, Marks is not the only department head who appears to be working for love of construction rather than for the people of Berkeley. The partners of Seagate Properties, Inc. never seemed very interested in their nine-story zoning violation proposed for downtown. The rumor was that they wanted to secure the approvals and “flip” the property. At the Zoning Adjustments Board hearing of Oct. 14, 2004, no one from the company even bothered to show up! No problem—the project had Housing Director Steve Barton to speak on its behalf.  

Barton extolled the virtues of the luxury units in the plan, and the level of seismic reinforcement that might be performed. Curiously, he also brought up the financial risk involved in such projects, saying, “…and if they lose their shirts, the city will have gained even if the developers lost.” I wrote to him Jan. 10 of this year, inquiring how he thought the city might gain from failed developments, but I’ve yet to receive a reply. 

So, our well-paid department directors are encouraging a disaster for real home-grown folks (small landlords), while empowering corporations to demolish our local businesses (Brennan’s, Celia’s, and many others) for needless massive construction. Why are the concerned citizens of Berkeley allowing this to continue? 

 

Gale Garcia is Berkeley resident.?


Commentary: SuperBOLD: Library Should Cut Losses By JANE WELFORD

Tuesday June 21, 2005

Matthew Artz makes it appear as though “a truce has been achieved in the war between labor and management” (“Library Budget Spares Jobs, Sunday Hours,” Daily Planet, June 10). As a member of Super Berkeleyans Organizing for Library Defense (SuperBOLD), I can report that the fight has only just begun.  

We have two major battles: One is our demand for the cancellation of the radio frequency identification (RFID) contract and removal of the RFID tags; the other is achieving a fully staffed library with union benefits for all. SuperBOLD believe in unions, decent wages, decent benefits, health care for workers, especially in the Bay Area where it is notoriously difficult to make ends meet. 

Mr. Artz jumped to the conclusion that SuperBOLD has joined forces with other organizations. Because speakers come from other organizations to support our position about the Library Tax, does not mean that we have joined forces with them.  

We are asking that the City Council support a Library Tax increase only on condition that the RFID is stopped dead in its tracks and the tags removed. We are opposed to the tax being used to pay for updating this new technology every few years, to pay for a new batch of radio frequency chips for the new books, videos, CDs, DVDs, and magazines as they come in, and to pay for endless tweaking and repairs that RFID will require. For example, I’ve noticed that tags are being put on magazines. Will the tags be thrown out with the discarded magazines?  

We witness the lack of concern for the workers at our libraries (too much work for too few workers; morale is at an all-time low), the lack of concern for resources—especially books (some 20,000 books were tossed in dumpsters just to save the 50 cents for each RFID chip), and the rush to put this new technology in before we were even aware of what was happening. Now the Board of Library Trustees has postponed the June 20 community forum on RFID.  

I recommend that the Library Tax increase be spent on books and materials for the citizens of Berkeley and on the humans who interact with us, teach our children how to use the library, and put the books away. 

I am amazed that Mr. Artz could actually write the following: “...after months of union leaders bashing Berkeley Library Director Jackie Griffin.” The Board of Library Trustees (BOLT) had to be pushed by community and workers at the BOLT meetings to listen to what union stewards and leaders were trying to say. Director Griffin doesn’t appear to pay attention to speakers from the library board meeting audience, whether they be union, library users, or library workers.  

Corporate welfare tactics of co-opting taxpayers to fund public testing of undeveloped technology while reducing the staffing of our tax-funded libraries are not acceptable to SuperBOLD nor to the residents of Berkeley. Almost 1,000 people have signed our petition requesting that RFID be removed from our libraries. The director has taken out a loan of $500,000 via the City of Berkeley to pay for the RFID system. The existing system was working perfectly well. There were no repetitive stress injuries at all last year, yet this was one of the major arguments for buying this system. When the loan was taken, it was clear that the library would be in the red about $650,000 for the technology alone. The budget cuts were going to have to come from somewhere after they committed to the expense. We will be paying $55,000 just in interest on this loan. Future expenses will be exponentially greater; this is the rule of new technologies; they don’t actually make our goods and services cheaper—but they do line the pockets of the technology-mongers.  

The wisest immediate action is to cut our losses and get rid of the technology and trappings of RFID before we end up in a real mess, with our libraries understaffed, not enough money to buy new books, and the technology not working. Any Library Tax increase should be used to preserve our great libraries, not to reduce labor costs! If RFID is not stopped and the Library Tax increase is passed, the money will be spent to pay for batches of RFID chips and to update and repair this untested technology rather than to hire enough library workers to make the job bearable for them and useful for us and our children and for great library materials.  

Come to our rally on Tuesday, June 21 at 6 p.m. at Old City Hall and then stay to speak at the budget hearing!  

 

Jane Welford is a member of Super Berkeleyans Organizing for Library Defense.


Commentary: Why My Name Is Burton By WINSTON BURTON

Tuesday June 21, 2005

I was recently at a meeting in the City of Berkeley where a conversation started regarding the Berkeley City Council’s 8-1 decision to review the background of vendors to see if they had any connection to slavery in the United States. Some people thought this was ridiculous… “You see, slavery was so long ago.” Some said, “The council should spend its time on more important issues.” I thought about, “Why my name is Burton.” 

During the Civil War my great grandfather Luke was a slave on the Upsher Plantation near the Eastern Shore in Virginia. He had brothers named Gorge, John, Bill and several sisters whose names I never knew. They all shared the last name Upsher, after the master of the plantation to whom none were actually related. Well, during the Civil War Luke ran away, and when the war was over he returned to the Eastern Shore and reunited with his brother and their families. They lived in towns named Exmore, Ha’Valley and Nasawadax. They became farmers, merchants, fishermen and even school teachers. Yet there was one big difference between Luke and his siblings. When Luke returned after the Civil War his brothers were still called Upsher, but his last name was now Burton. My grandfather, Luke’s son, told me and my brother this story when I was about 8 years old. We asked my grandfather and grandmother where did he get the name Burton. They said it was probably from someone he had befriended or someone who had helped him.  

For years we thought about great grandpa Luke fighting in the Civil War, saving lives and claiming his own name. During the 1960s, when many African Americans were rejecting their “slave master” names and picking their own last names (like X) my brothers and I were proud that Luke had already picked a name for us, and fought in the war to legitimize his birthright.  

Around 1925, my grandfather, Berkely Burton (his real name) traveled north from Virginia looking for work. He always said if he hadn’t fell asleep, and fallen off of that pickup truck in Philly, we would all have been New Yorkers. He settled in Philadelphia and eventually sent for his wife, two sons and a daughter who were still in Virginia. His youngest son, Clifton, was my father.  

In 1989 at my 40th birthday party in Philly I was delighted that my great aunt, several other aunts and various cousins could attend. Some of them still had the last name of Upsher and came from the same small towns in Virginia. We sat around and talked about old times and the subject came up: why my name is Burton. My brother and I told our version how our great grandpa Luke fought in the Civil War and claimed his own name and identity. My great aunt Prescila, who was 96 at the time, kind of smiled and said in a soft voice, “The way I heard it was that after Luke ran away, he was soon recaptured and spent the remainder of the war as a slave on the Burton plantation.”  

Somehow, sitting in that meeting in Berkeley, it all didn’t seem so long ago. And to the Burtons and the Upshers, it’s still an issue. 

 

Winston “Upsher” Burton is a Berkeley resident. 

n


Commentary: City Budget: Wasted Windfalls, Overlooked Opportunities By MARIE BOWMAN

Tuesday June 21, 2005

In November 2004 the residents of Berkeley sent the City Council a loud message:  

• The city’s budget can be balanced without increasing taxes and fees.  

• Essential services should not be targeted for budget cuts.  

• City staff and non-profits (55 percent of Berkeley’s landowners) must pitch in to balance the budget.  

What does the proposed budget have in store for us?  

• Multiple fee increases beyond the cost of living.  

• Reduced services in police, fire and public works. 

• More sidestepping of budgetary structural issues in favor of pet projects.  

Why should we be saddled with “more of the same” poor fiscal management when there are plenty of opportunities to do things right? 

 

City Revenues More Than Adequate 

Berkeleyans have the highest tax/fee burden in the state, with a median income of only $44,485.  

The city is experiencing windfall revenues. In the first nine months of fiscal year 2005, transfer tax revenues went up $10.5 million, 38 percent more than last year. The city can expect a minimum of $15 million in increased revenue from vehicle license fee and transfer tax sources alone. Property tax revenues are up 7.7 percent versus last year. 

Sewer fees are ridiculously high. Annual sewer fees for an average single-family home in Alameda are $162, Albany $245, El Cerrito $111, Hayward $79, Oakland $176, and San Leandro $104. The average house in Berkeley pays $400 -- over four times as much as Hayward! Berkeley’s sewer fees increased by 5 percent last year and are proposed for further increases of 3 percent annually through the end of the decade. Refuse fees were increased 5 percent last year, and are proposed to be increased by 8 percent this year and 20 percent the year after that. All of the above municipalities except Berkeley, can maintain and replace their sewer systems. 

 

Missed Opportunities 

Berkeley has the highest number of city workers in proportion to our population: It takes 66 residents to support one employee. Berkeley’s staffing ratio is 50 percent higher than Alameda and Oakland, the next most staff-heavy municipalities. Salary and benefit costs make up more than three-fourths of the city’s budget. It makes sense to look for savings in this area. None of the following suggestions from residents have been adopted:  

• Reinstate the one-day-off a month for non-essential staff.  

• Have staff contribute toward their retirement programs.  

• Have staff contribute toward their rapidly rising health care costs--18.5 percent annually. 

• Reduce excessive salary increases.  

• Reorganize and restructure city departments for greater efficiencies and cost savings (Berkeley is overstaffed compared to anywhere else).  

• Eliminate the YMCA benefit.  

Many nonprofits in Berkeley receive a free ride. Residents proposed “payments in lieu of taxes” or PILOT fees, for the major players, but so far the city has sold out the residents. Recent negotiations with the university have resulted in a locked-in subsidy from Berkeley residents to UC, because UC’s payments don’t come close to covering the cost of city services provided. This is a $177 million giveaway! The average Berkeley household will subsidize the university by $750 per year. Once the university’s Long-Range Development Plan takes effect, UC will remove 30 city blocks from the tax rolls to create 2.5 million square feet—the size of the Empire State Building!—of space that requires city services but pays no taxes. Within 10 years each Berkeley household will be subsidizing the university at an average of $1,000 per year! 

The second-largest landlord in Berkeley is the University Students Cooperative Association. They have net revenues of approximately $1 million annually, and cost the city approximately $200,000 annually in calls for city services. PILOT Fees should be negotiated with the USCA. 

 

Misplaced Priorities 

Cuts are being made in exactly the wrong places. Partly this is done from cynical motives. If the city targets essential services for cuts (instead of pet programs), it thinks residents will be willing to pay higher taxes, because residents will want to protect essential services. Some examples: The proposed budget reduces the police force by seven full-time employees (FTE). Berkeley has the fourth-highest crime rate in the state when it comes to rape, robbery, burglary, and personal assaults—higher than Oakland, San Jose, Los Angeles or San Francisco.  

The proposed budget reneges on the city’s pledge to restore a fire truck shift, even though the Fire Department found $300,000 in internal savings just for this purpose. City leaders agreed that the truck would be reinstated June 1 for the start of the fire season, but it didn’t happen.  

Park maintenance/landscape staff were reduced by six FTE last year and three FTE this year.  

The city clerk’s office will have a reduction of one FTE, which will reduce the support provided for public access to actions on the City Council agenda. The proposed budget eliminates all support for festivals and fairs, which improve revenue and economic development, not to mention our quality of life. Is Scrooge running the City Council? 

Things are looking up for the library with increases of more than twice the Bay Area cost of living index. They remain closed on Sunday, so why doesn’t the additional support translate into additional services?  

 

More Roads Not Taken 

The city continues to sell off real property for a pittance, rather than lease unused land. There is no discernible strategy to increase sales and business tax revenues by becoming a business friendly city, including revitalizing the business districts on Telegraph, Shattuck and University. Customers need to find parking spaces to increase the commercial base. 

Good fiscal policy includes eliminating the $160 million in unfunded liability and increasing the city’s reserve from 6 percent to 13 percent (average reserve rate in Alameda County). 

Balancing the budget via fee increases shows not just managerial laziness, but outright disrespect for the will of the electorate given November’s results. Residents are stretched financially, while the city is receiving windfalls. The City Council needs to develop a sustainable budget, with sound fiscal policies and priorities, that meet resident expectations and is fair to all. 

 

Marie Bowman is a member of Berkeleyans Against Soaring Taxes (BASTA). 


Sumptuous ‘Pearl Fishers’ is a Bargain for Opera Novices By KEN BULLOCK Special to the Planet

Tuesday June 21, 2005

Going up the steps from Van Ness into the lobby of San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House for the opening of Georges Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, past the big floral displays and into the cavernous auditorium, looking up beyond the boxes, the grand tier (beautifully garlanded with white flowers and foliage) and the balcony, I thought of a comment by Bizet’s older contemporary, poet Charles Baudelaire: “The real hero in any theater is the chandelier”—an immense sunburst of glass and light. 

The ornateness of the Opera House, which opened with Tosca in 1932, and opera’s “snobbish” reputation as “high culture” can put off many who would enjoy what originally was an entertainment for the middle and lower classes. A great deal of the pleasure of opera comes from the mix of different elements. The orchestral music, singing, dance, scenery, costumes and lighting are usually more to the point than the plots, which can be a bit hard to take. But with a quick glance at the discreetly placed supertitle screen, where the breezy translations cut to the chase, it’s easy to follow the professions of eternal love, the angry throes of jealousy, the outcries of passion as they come along. 

And the Opera House is a show in itself. The variety of the crowd is always a surprise. On opening night tuxedos and gowns glide—or shuffle—past more casual dress, or unusual costumery bannering the occasion. Fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, whose neo-fauvist production design for The Pearl Fishers has caused a stir, stood out on the first night, even in this wild melange of style, in a splendid blue gown with her hair the set’s signature color of magenta (which some society columns glossed as “pink”). Swirling around at intermission, this audience would disabuse any notion of the stuffiness of opera. 

Some of the more fantastic get-ups are on the standees, who know the cheapest and most casual way to attend, at $10 cash per ticket, sold after 10 a.m. on the day of the performance. Standees flock to the balcony, where the view of the stage is at a steep angle, but the sound is believed to be the best in the house, or to the better sightlines in the dress circle or the orchestra. Some have been known to slip into empty seats after the first intermission.  

If the performance isn’t sold out, students ($15 cash), seniors and members of the military ($30, cards okay) can buy rush tickets after 11 on performance days. (Call the day before to find out if rush tickets will be available.) 

As the lights go down for Pearl Fishers, a gorgeous curtain, depicting Sri Lankan pearl divers on their platforms, goes up, revealing through the hazy gauze of a scrim live pearl fishers on their platforms above the waves in the background. Darkness falls; the figure of Zurga (British baritone William Dazeley in his San Francisco debut) steps forward impressively, brooding in a shaft of light. But darkness is dispelled by a tropical glow. Great palms and lush jungle foliage in bright colors, a little cartoonish as if clipped from a huge storybook, loom up at the wings. A crowd in sumptuous saris and turbans flows out singing, and a ballet of villagers begins. This is the kind of spectacle that makes grand opera particularly worth seeing in the big houses, which can put on such pageantry, keep a professional orchestra and chorus, and bring in the great voices. 

And the voices are wonderful in the famous duet, “Au Fond du Temple Saint,” when Zurga (who’s just been chosen headman of the pearl fishers) and his estranged childhood friend Nadir (tenor Charles Castronovo alumnus of San Francisco Opera’s Merola program) put aside differences and swear eternal friendship. Their bonds had been threatened by their mutual attraction to the beautiful Leila, seen at a temple in the city of Kandy. But, as fate would have it, a veiled virgin priestess carried in on a litter in great pomp now turns out to be none other than Leila (French coloratura soprano Norah Ansellem).  

That’s just the first act. From here on in, the plot tangles up with love, passion, jealousy, and betrayal, and also generosity and self-sacrifice. The ins and outs are marked with wonderfully lyrical singing, duets and solo arias, chorus as well as principals. There are splendid effects of sweet, floating sound when either chorus or Castronovo (a lyric tenor who can make the heart leap) sing from backstage, outside the temple where Leila retreats after singing prayers for the safety of the pearl divers on a cliff above the ocean, and receives a forbidden visit from Nadir.  

Dazeley’s presence is a study in operatic acting, an art by itself. His duets with both Castronovo and Ansellem are stirring, and his soul-searching, jealousy-tinged solo after intermission is a high point. Ansellem shows great technique and excitement. Though warm, the ovation given her at curtain call on opening night wasn’t enough of an acknowledgment. 

Bizet is more famous for Carmen, his last opera. Bizet’s supporters pumped up the score of Carmen to Grand Opera status to bring him recognition after his death at 37, giving the former “comic opera” overtones of a tour-de-force. Many opera lovers prefer the earlier Pearl Fishers (composed when Bizet was 24). In any case, it’s a worthy precursor to the more famous music and story of its illustrious gypsy successor. 

 

The Pearl Fishers runs through July 9 at the San Francisco Opera, 301 Van Ness Ave. at Grove St., San Francisco. For ticktets and showtimes, go to www.sfopera.com or call (415) 864-3330.›


Arts Calendar

Tuesday June 21, 2005

TUESDAY, JUNE 21 

THEATER 

Shotgun Theater Lab “The Pawn” Tues. and Wed. at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through July 6. Tickets are $10. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

FILM 

Jean-Marie Teno “Africa, I will Fleece You” with the filmmaker in person at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Bob Laird, Director of Undergraduate Admissions at UCB, discusses his new book “The Case for Affirmative Action in University Admissions” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Gail Griffith describes “Will’s Choice: A Suicidal Teen, a Desperate Mother, and a Chronicle of Recovery” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Ronnie Gilbert at 1 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190. 

Garden of Memory Solstice Concert with thirty diverse composers and musicians from 5 to 9 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $5-$10. 415-563-6355, ext. 3. 

San Francisco Scottish Fiddlers, traditional and contemporary Celtic music, at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Garnet Rogers at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50- $18.50. 548-1761.  

Brian Kane, jazz guitar, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Jason Martineau, David Sayens Duo at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

Jessica Williams Trio at 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$20. 238-9200.  

Jazzschool Tuesdays at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 22 

EXHIBITIONS 

“From Isolation to Connection” works by artists with psychiatric disabilities at the Berkeley Art Center. Workshop with the curator and artists at 2 p.m. 644-6893. 

“Getting There” works by artists with disabilities and members of East Bay Women Artists. Reception at 6 p.m. at NIAD Art Center, 551 23rd St., Richmond. 620-0290. www.niad.org 

FILM 

Seventies Underground: “Space is the Place” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

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 for the Spirit” harpsichord concert at noon at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway. 444-3555.  

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

The Fourtet Jazz Group at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473.  

Calvin Keys Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Elijah Henry, Karen Geyser at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

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

Sonic Camouflage at 8 p.m. at Cafe Van Kleef, 1621 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 763-7711. 

Kurt Ribak Trio, CD release Party, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Jez Lowe & James Keelaghan at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Jessica Williams Trio at 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$20. 238-9200.  

THURSDAY, JUNE 23 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The People and the Book” A curator’s tour with Elayne Grossbard of paintings and rare books from the Magnes collection at 6:30 p.m. at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. Cost is $4-$6. 549-6950.  

FILM 

International Latino Film Festival “Step Forward” at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $8. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Jean-Maire Teno: “Chief!” with the filmmaker in person at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Nathaniel Rich will show video clips and talk about his new book “San Francisco Noir: The City in Film Noir from 1940 to the Present” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

John Dicker describes “The United States of Wal-Mart” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Word Beat Reading Series with Marianne Robinson, Randy Fingland and Sholeh Wolpe at 7 p.m. at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. 526-5985. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“The Beggar’s Opera” at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Tickets are $56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Carol Denney at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

The People’s Jazz Quintet with Donald “Duck” Bailey, drums, at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. 

The Twots, Riot A-Go-Go, The Sweet Nothings at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082.  

Tin Cup Serenade at 9 p.m. at Cafe Van Kleef, 1621 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 763-7711. www.cafevankleef.com  

Katherine Peck, Crystal Eastman with Fil & Dave, alterna-folk, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. www.epicarts.org 

Harvey Wainapel and Carlos Olivera at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Charles Lloyd with Geri Allen, Eric Harland, and Larry Grenadier at 8 and 10 p.m. through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $12-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Self-Not-Self at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

FRIDAY, JUNE 24 

THEATER 

Antares Ensemble “Hellenic Image” choruses and monologues from Greek tragedies at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club. Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through June 26. Tickets are $10-$35. 525-3254.  

Aurora Theatre “The Thousandth Night” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. 2 and 7 p.m., through July 24, at 2081 Addison St. Tickets are $36. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Repertory Theater, “Honour” at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. and runs through July 3. Tickets are $20-$39. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

California Shakespeare Theater, “Othello” at 8 p.m. at Bruns Amphitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., between Berkeley and Orinda, through July 3. Tickets are $10-$55. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Shotgun Players, “Arabian Night” Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. until July 10. Tickets are $10-$30. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Subterranean Shakespeare “The Taming of the Shrew,” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center in Live Oak Park, through June 24. For reservations call 276-3871. 

Un-Scripted Theater Company “The Short and the Long of It” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., through June 25 at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St., Oakland. Tickets are $7-$10. 415-869-5384. www.un-scripted.com 

FILM 

Jean-Marie Teno: “A Trip to the Country” at 7 p.m and “Clando” and 9 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Michael Chorost describes his journey from deafness to hearing in “Rebuilt: How Becomming Part Computer Made Me More Human” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

Filmmaker Jean- Marie Teno discusses his artistic process at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“The Beggar’s Opera” at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Tickets are $56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Vince Wallace Quintet at 9 p.m. at Cafe Van Kleef, 1621 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 763-7711. www.cafevankleef.com 

Yumi Thomas, mezzo-soprano, Sarita Cannon, soprano, Shunsuke Kurahata, piano, at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Cost is $12-$15. 845-6811. www.giorgigallery.com 

Flamenco with guest artists from Spain, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $18-$20. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Betty Shaw, Melanie O’Reilly & Tir na Mara at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Nasty Breeze, One Block Radius, Boogie Shack at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Lua at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Gearoid ÓhAllmhuráin at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Pat Nevins and Friends in a Benefit for Pirate Radio at 9 p.m. at the Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway, Oakland. Cost is $10. 465-8480. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Macy Blackman Quartet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Mere Ours, singer songwriter, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Chuck Prophet, Jug Free America at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryplough.com 

Los Cerveceros, Deconditioned, Until the Fall, 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. 

40 Watt Hype, hip-hop, latin, funk, at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $8. 548-1159.  

Space Invaders, saxophone quartet, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10.  

Stolen Bibles at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

SATURDAY, JUNE 25 

EXHIBITIONS 

“A Girl’s Life” video installations by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Dawn D. Valadez opens at Pro Arts, 550 Second St. Oakland. www.proartsgallery.org 

“Celebrating Life through Art” an exhibition of Shona sulpture from Zimbabwe at Kofa International Art, Gallery, 1661 20th St., Suite 2, Oakland. 451-5632. 

FILM 

Jean-Marie Tendo: The Colonial Misunderstanding” at 7:30 p.m. and “Head in the Clouds” at 9:05 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Rhythm & Muse with Romaian poet Corbina Stirb at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center. Free. 527-9753, 644-6893. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Trinity Chamber Concerts with Lara Bruckmann, soprano, at 8 p.m. at 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864. http:// 

trinitychsmberconcerts.com 

“The Beggar’s Opera” at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Tickets are $56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Guillaume Vincent, piano, at 4 p.m. at Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Donation $15 adults, $6 children. 268-8115. www.sbcacc.org/concert_gv  

Mokai & Friends, folk-blues, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10.  

Modalities & Samvega at 1 p.m. at People’s Park, 2556 Haste St. bakerartstudios@gmail.com  

Pick Pocket Ensemble at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Terry Rodriguez, Dick Conte Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Melanie O’Reilly at 9 p.m. at Cafe Van Kleef, 1621 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 763-7711. www.cafevankleef.com 

Sourdough Slim at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Marina Garza & Orquestra D’Soul with Montuno Groove. Conversation with the artists at 8:30 p.m., performance at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$14. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Jai Uttal and the Pagan Love Orchestra at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Gawdamn, Mr. Byrnes, Our Name is Robert Paulson at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Jerry Kennedy, acoustic R&B, at 7 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Arlington Houston Quartet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Deborah Crooks at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Mystic, hip hop, soul, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $12. 548-1159.  

Anton Barbeau, Lucifer Meltdown, Joe Rut at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryplough.com 

Mokai, Mia and Jonah, and Jason Miller, eclectic folk, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. www.epicarts.org 

Rock N Roll Adventure Kids, Empty Silos Echo War 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. 

Helsinki Skylight at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

SUNDAY, JUNE 26 

CHILDREN  

Family Explorations: Living Traditions and Historic Objects with Native American, Japanese and Latino music and traditions at 1 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Cost is $4-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

New Works by Bruce Skogen, abstract paintings, at Cafe DiDartolo, 3310 Grand Ave., Oakland. 832-9005. 

“Ballybaba” four artists re-imagine the landscapes of Beckett’s “Molloy.” Reception at 1 p.m. at the Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. 620-6772. www.therichmondartcenter.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Gail Entrekin and Linda Watanabe McFerrin at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“The Beggar’s Opera” at 3 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Tickets are $56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Aaron Blumenfeld “Seven Art Songs” Housewarming Paty for Congregation Beth Israel, at 7:30 p.m. at 1630 Bancroft Way. Cost is $15. 

PachaSiku, pan pipes, flutes and drums, at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Fandango V, early California dance and music at 3 p.m. at Peralta Hacienda Historical Park, 2465 34th Ave., Oakland. 532-9142. 

Mark Deutsch, part of the series “Offerings” at 7 p.m. at Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. Suggested donation $10. 213-3122. 

John McCutcheon at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $21.50-$22.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

MRLS wih Murzyn, Rokeach, Lockett and Saunders at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Americana Unplugged with B. Moccola and Paul Crowder at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

MONDAY, JUNE 27 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Peter Baker and Susan Glasser describe Putin’s rise to power in “Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of the Revolution” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Poetry Express Theme night on “Fathers and Suns” for Father’s day and the Summer Solstice at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

Oliver Mtukudzi & Black Spirits, afro-pop from Zimbabwe at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $8-$12. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com?


Ash Trees Both Strong, Beautiful By RON SULLIVAN Special to the Planet

Tuesday June 21, 2005

Some ash trees are among the last to leaf out in Berkeley every spring—along with certain sycamores—and I’ve caught myself giving up on a few of the oldest specimens every year, supposing them dead at last. So many of our senior trees have been so grotesquely pruned for powerline clearance that I’ve become a bit of a pessimist about them.  

I can’t entirely blame utility crews. Part of the problem is that either trees that get too tall have been planted under utility wires, or utility wires have been strung over trees that get too tall. In most neighborhoods, I suppose the wires are of longer standing than the street trees.  

Another problem is bad pruning, and I think that is a result of bad pruning schedules—too many years between cuts. To compensate, tree workers cut heavily, and we end up with disproportionately spindly scaffold branches, sometimes with silly tufts of leafy twigs on the ends, sometimes with lots of watersprouts that make the whole thing too heavy to hold itself up. 

I didn’t intend to write another malpruning screed, but there is a connection, honest.  

Ash trees are lovely. They have handsome bark—pale gray in most of the ash species we see on city streets—and graceful, feathery compound leaves in encouraging shades of pale and bright green. They take a “vase-shaped” form, roughly a point-down triangle atop a straight trunk, that gives a street a sort of stately Gothic-arch bower as they get large enough for their branches to meet over it.  

Part of that vase shape, though, involves what tree folks call “narrow crotch angles.” Limbs join trunks at acute upward angles, making a “V” rather than a “U.” It looks pretty but increases the chance of a bark inclusion between the limb and trunk, or branch and limb. 

Look at the nearest tree. See that rumple of bark like a rough turtleneck where a limb emerges? If it’s rolled outward and kind of rough, like a keloid scar, that’s a good thing. As the limb grows thicker, the bark at the junction is being forced outward, where it’s harmless. If it’s rolled inward to make a neat little crease like the inside of your bent elbow, there might be trouble brewing. 

Bark that’s rolled inward can effectively dam the live flow of the tree, so what looks like a thickening branch is actually being cut off from nutrients at that upper edge, while the bark is growing into the wood. It replaces live tissue with dead “skin,” and leaves less wood to hold the limb up. That’s the kind of branch that’s most likely to rip off the trunk under stress from wind, weight (from outside forces or just from sudden fast water intake, which adds a surprising amount), or just gravity and time.  

What I find interesting is that ash trees don’t do as much of this self-pruning, in my experience, as sweetgums and acacias do. Maybe it’s just that the strong white wood they make is capable of holding itself up. Ash is what your classic Louisville Slugger baseball bat is made of, after all, and tool handles and other things that need to withstand hard knocks.  

You want strength? Yggdrasil, the World Tree of Norse mythology, is widely supposed to have been an ash. (And the first human man was made of ash; the first human woman, alder.)  

Mostly what you see planted around here are velvet ash, especially the ‘Modesto’ cultivar (Fraxinus velutina ‘Modesto’) and shamel ash (Fraxinus uhdei). Just to add to our instant California tour of names, “fresno” is the Spanish word for the shamel ash. That one is evergreen if it’s growing far enough to the south; it’s native to semitropical Mexico.  

There’s a potentially serious threat to our ash trees – it’s already devastating urban and rural ash groves in the Midwest. The emerald ash borer, a beetle imported accidentally in freight from Asia, has killed more than six million ash trees in Michigan, and is spreading in spite of quarantines. When you think about chestnut blight and Dutch elm disease and how they’ve changed our landscape, it’s a lot more scary than the prospect of the occasional falling limb. 


Berkeley This Week

Tuesday June 21, 2005

TUESDAY, JUNE 21 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

Summer Solstice Words and Music Bring your guitars, drums and poetry from 11 a.m. to noon at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Protest RFID Rally at 6 p.m. on the steps of Old City Hall, 2134 M.L.King, Jr. Way, to call for removal of Radio Frequency chips from Berkeley Public Library books, CDs, etc. 843-2152. 

“Cuba: 45 Years of Struggle against U.S. Imperialism” at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. Donation $3-$10 benefits the ongoing work of the Committee to Free the Cuban Five. To reserve free childcare call 415-821-6545.  

“The Case for Affirmative Action in University Admissions” with Bob Laird, Director of Undergraduate Admissions at UCB, at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books, 1491 Shattuck Ave. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

“History of the Tele Times” a screening and discussion of the underground magazine with BN Duncan, Claire Burch and Ace Backwards at 7 p.m. at Book Zoo, 2556 Telegraph Ave. 883-1332. 

East Bay Bicycle Coalition meets at 7:30 p.m. at the Rockridge Library, 5366 College Ave., Rockridge. 433-RIDE. www.ebbc.org 

Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation at 10 a.m. at 6230 Claremont Ave., Oakland. Advance sign-up needed 594-5165. 

Poetry as a Spiritual Practice with Roy Doughty at 7 p.m. at Unity of Berkeley, 2075 Eunice St. Free. 271-8318. 

“Pacing Yourself for Optimum Functioning” at noon in the Mafly Auditorium, Alta Bates, Herrick Campus, 2001 Dwight Way. Sponsored by Arthritis Foundation/Fibromyalgia. 644-3273. 

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

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 22 

Return of the Over-the-Hills Gang Hikers 55 years and older who are interested in nature study, history, fitness, and fun are invited to join us on a series of monthly excursions exploring our Regional Parks. Meets at 10 a.m. To register call 525-2233.  

Insects for Kids A free class for children ages 5-10, at 9 a.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. www.barringtoncollective.org 

Walking Tour of Historic Oakland Churches and Temples Meet at 10 a.m. at the front of the First Prebyterian Church at 2619 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www. 

oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

“Wildly Successful Plants of Northern California,” a slide show with Pam Peirce at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. 548-2220. 

Gilman Street Playing Fields Special Workshop with the Planning and Parks & Recreation Commissions at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7480. 

Jefferson Elementary School Proposed Name Change Public Hearing at 6:30 p.m. at at Old City Hall Council Chambers, 2134 MLK Jr. Way. www.berkeley.k12.ca.us 

Berkeley Unified School District Public Hearing on the 2005-6 Budget at 7:30 p.m. at Old City Hall Council Chambers, 2134 MLK Jr. Way. www.berkeley.k12.ca.us 

“The War is Not Over!” An evening of political performance with David Harris, Merle Kessler, Ian Shoales and Joshua Brody at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz, 1317 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.infotainmentposse.com 

Dine Out and Silent Auction for African AIDS Orphans at Unicorn, 2533 Telegraph Ave. Co-sponsored by Priority Africa Network, ACT UP East Bay and others. For reservations call 841-4339. 

“Zar-Reet!” a documentary of two Moroccan woman, by Albany resident Khadijah Chadly, at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 16. 

“Lethal Medicine” a documentary on the myths of animal experimentation, at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Free, but $5 donations accepted. 925-487-4419. 

“Planning Ahead: Sparing Your Heirs with a Living Trust” at 1:30 p.m. at North Berkeley Senior Center. Sponsored by Berkeley Gray Panthers. 548-9696. 

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. 548-9840. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Action St. 841-2174.  

THURSDAY, JUNE 23 

Wellstone Democratic Club at 6:45 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Social hour at 6 p.m. Don Hazen from Alternet.com will speak about a national progressive strategy. 

Beginning and Intermediate Computer Workshop for all ages, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave. Free, but registration required. call after 6 p.m. 540-0751. 

Local Legends Series with Judy Grahn on women’s spirituality and lesbian feminism at 7 p.m. at Belladonna, 2436 Sacramento St. 883-0600. 

Easy Does It Disability Assistance Board of Directors’ Meeting at 6:30 p.m. at 1744A University Ave. Open to the public. 845-5513. www.easyland.org 

Steps to Buying Your Own Home at 7 p.m. at Shaw Properties, 400 45th St., Oakland. Includes the process of pre-approval for financing, including income requirements and credit issues, and finding a realtor. www.barringtoncollective.org 

American Red Cross Mobile Blood Drive, 1 to 7 p.m. at St. Mary Magdalen, 2005 Berryman St. To make an appointment call 1-800-448-3543. www.BeADonor.com 

FRIDAY, JUNE 24 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Charles Townes on “Confluence of Science and Religion” 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 or 665-9020. 

Bill Mandel, KPFA host, together with his son, Bob, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar St. Donation $10, no one turned away. 495-5132. 

“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 8 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. People of all traditions are welcome to join us. Sponsored by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. 655-6169. www.bpf.org 

SATURDAY, JUNE 25 

Kid’s Garden Club for ages 7-12 to explore the world of gardening, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. Cost is $5-$7, registration required. 525-2233. 

Children’s Zoo Grand Opening at the Oakland Zoo, with interactive experiences, and exhibits of lemurs, giant fruit bats, otters, reptiles and more. 632-9525. www.oaklandzoo.org 

Music and Arts at People’s Park from noon to 6 p.m. 707-963-7402. 

How to Create Your Own Garden Paradise at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-2351. 

Building with Alternative Materials: Cob and Strawbale A workshop from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. Cost is $75. 525-7610. www.bldgeductr.org/ 

seminars.html  

Lead-Safe Painting and Remodeling Learn how to detect and remedy lead hazards and conduct lead-safe renovations for your older home. From 9 to 11 a.m. at Alameda County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program Training Facility, 1017 22nd Avenue, Suite 110, Oakland. Free. 567-8280. 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland uptown to the Lake to discover Art Deco landmarks. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of the Paramount Theater at 2025 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

Tantric Feast and Auction with live music at 6 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Tickets for the feast are $25, for the auction $10. For reservations 888-826-8729. info@tantrayogainternational.org 

Breema Clinic Open House from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. with demonstrations and mini-sessions at 6201 Florio St. at Claremont & College, Rockridge. 428-1234. www.breemahealth.com  

Year of the Estuary: Carquinez Hike Meet at 10 a.m. at the Eckley Pier staging area off Carquinez Scenic Drive near Crockett to learn about the region’s history. 525-2233. 

Animal Origami with Mitsuko Yoneyama, for children 4 years and older, at 3 p.m. at RabbitEars, Arlington Ave., Kensington. 525-6155.  

Cheese Tastings and discussion with Debra Dickerson, author of “Great Grilled Cheese” at 1 p.m. at The Pasta Shop, 1786 Fourth St. 528-1786. 

Spirited Woman Workshop from 1 to 4 p.m. at Creative Juices Arts, 432 Bellevue Ave., Oakland. Cost is $85. Reservations required. 888-428-1234.  

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

Junior Rangers of Tilden meets Sat. mornings at Tilden Nature Center. For more information call 525-2233. 

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

Tribute to Lee and Dorothy Marsh, founders of the BRJCC. For details call 848-0237, ext. 110. 

SUNDAY, JUNE 26 

On the Bluebird Trail Meet at 10 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area for a 3.5 mile walk up and over Wildcat Peak and a portion of the bluebird nestbox trail to help with the nesting survey. Bring water and a snack. For ages ten and up. 525-2233. 

Pat the Bunny For toddlers ages 2-4 to meet a Little Farm Dutch Rabbit, at 1 p.m. at the Tilden Nature Center. 525-2233. 

Celebrating Helen Rand Parish A memorial celebrating the life and spirit of author and activist Helen Rand Parish will be held from 2 to 4 p.m., at the Berkeley Yatch Club, at 1 Seawall Drive, Berkeley Marina. 653-1250. 

Open House at Studio 12, from 1 to 4 p.m. with information on aerial dance, yoga and Iaido, at 2525 Eighth St. 587-0770. www.movingout.org 

Berkeley City Club free tour from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Tours are sponsored by the Berkeley City Club and the Landmark Heritage Foundation. Donations welcome. The Berkeley City Club is located at 2315 Durant Ave. For group reservations or more information, call 848-7800 or 883-9710. 

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 

“Habitat for Humanity” with Holly Zimmerman and Sydney Williams at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Elizabeth Cook on “Preserving Tibetan Texts” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

East Bay Synagogues Fundraiser and Garden Party at 1 p.m. at 8898 Terrace Drive, El Cerrito. Tickets are $12-$15. Reservations required. 843-3131. www.aquarianminyan.org 

MONDAY, JUNE 27 

City of Berkeley Walking Group walks Mon.-Thurs. from 5 to 5:30 p.m. Meet at 830 University Ave. All new participants receive a free pedometer. 981-5131. 

“The Patriot Act” with ACLU attorney, Jeff Mittman at 7 p.m. at the Paul Robeson Chapter of the ACLU meeting at the Rockridge Library, Manila and College Aves., Oakland. 

Tenant’s Rights Workshop at 6 p.m. at the Long Haul Infoshop 3124 Shattuck Ave. www.barringtoncollective.org 

Conflict Resolution Skills Class at 7 p.m. at Oscar Wilde Co-op, 2410 Warring St. Learn about different approaches to conflict, your conflict style, active listening, effective communication, and the basic philosophies that aid in transforming interpersonal conflict. www.barringtoncollective.org 

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group for people 60 years and over meets Mondays at 10:15 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Join at any time. Cost is $2.50 with refreshments. 524-9122. CANCELLED MAY 30 

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

TUESDAY, JUNE 28 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. In case of questionable weather, call around 8 a.m. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

Educators Academy: Insects and crwaling Creatures, Tues.-Thurs., from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. For teachers of grades K-5. Fee is $100 for Berkeley residents, $110 for non-residents. Registration required. 636-1684. 

Great Yosemite Day Hikes with An Marie Brown at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Juvenile Criminal Records Workshop at 6 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Learn what remedies available for individuals with juvenile records in California. www.barringtoncollective.org 

Berkeley PC Users Group Problem solving and beginners meeting to answer, in simple English, users questions about Windows computers. At 7 p.m. at 1145 Walnut St. corner of Eunice. All welcome, no charge. 527-2177.  

Mandala Workshop using collage and art materials to create a circular form at 7 p.m. at Change Makers, 6536 Telegraph Ave. at 66th. Cost is $25. To register call. 525-9258.  

Family Storytime at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Buddhist Meditation Class at 7 p.m. at The Dzalandhara Buddhist Center. Cost is $7-$10. For directions and details please call 559-8183. 

Brainstormer Weekly Pub Quiz every Tuesday from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. at Pyramid Alehouse Brewery, 901 Gilman St. 528-9880. 

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

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

ONGOING 

Summer Camps for Children offered by the City of Berkeley, including swimming, sports and twilight basketball, from June 20 to August 12, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. 981-5150, 981-5153. 

Free Lunches for Berkeley Children beginning June 20, Mon.-Fri., 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Frances Albrier Center, James Kenney Center, MLK, Jr. Youth Services Center, Strawberry Creek, Washington School and Rosa Parks School. 981-5146. 

Albany Summer Youth Programs including basketball, classes, bike trips and family activities. For information see www.albanyca.org/dept/rec.html 

Bay Area Shakespeare Camp for ages 7 to 13, two week sessions through Aug., at John Hinkle Park. Cost is $395, with scholarships available. 415-422-2222. www.sfshakes.org 

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tues., June 21, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Citizens Budget Review Commission meets Wed., June 22, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7041. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/budget 

Civic Arts Commission meets Wed., June 22, 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., June 22 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., June 22, 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., June 22, 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. June 22, 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., June 23, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci.ber 

keley.ca.us/commissions/zoning


Opinion

Editorials

Editorial: What Constitutes the Public Forum? By BECKY O'MALLEY

Friday June 24, 2005

Last Sunday Sylvia Paull organized one of her often-stimulating Cybersalon programs at the Hillside Club. She e-mails invitations to a long list of people, offers a buffet supper, and invites panelists to spark a general discussion among her guests. I was asked to be part of a panel called “Got News? Citizen Journalism.” The other guests were Dan Gillmor, who gave up his tech column at the San Jose Mercury News to start his own interactive-journalism venture, www.Bayosphere.com and Peter Merholz, who founded the Beast Blog, a group blog described by Sylvia as covering “everything of note in the East Bay.” Her invitation alluded to the idea that technology was now making grassroots journalism possible. “With organic publications like these, who needs the artificially flavored New York Times?” she said. 

The bottom line I extracted from a long and interesting discussion is that it’s not the technology as much as the content that counts. The significant contribution that has been made by technology in the last 20 years is that the cost of dissemination of information has gone down, and the amount of information has gone up. What’s not so clear is whether the quality of information has improved.  

In my part of the panel I spoke about my strong belief that, all else being equal, print on paper is still the best way to get the news out, and also the best way to discuss the news.  

Free papers speak to everyone, even those who aren’t technologically savvy enough or well-off enough to own a computer. We reach the Berkeley intelligentsia, but also the Berkeley (and East Bay) bus riders (some readers are in both groups).  

By and large, Internet communication, including websites, blogs and e-mail chains, is narrowcasting. It preaches to the already converted, which is not a bad thing, but different from a newspaper of general circulation. Ideally, the opinion columns of newspapers allow a frank and free exchange of views among people who disagree. 

This is a good place for a digression explaining the kind of content you see in the Berkeley Daily Planet, for those who might be confused. First, the news itself is on the front page, and several of the inside pages. It’s written by professional reporters, who are charged with making sure that their stories offer not just both sides but many voices when there’s a controversy. Our regular columnists, Jesse Allen-Taylor (who is also a regular reporter), Susan Parker and P.M. Price, are charged with parsing the local world from their own personal points of view. Our “Public Eye” columnists, Bob Burnett and Zelda Bronstein, are in a category seldom found in the commercial press these days. They’re active, engaged citizens who also happen to be good writers, who have been asked to comment regularly on the political process from an insider’s vantage point. Letters (under 500 words) and commentaries (over 600 words) are strictly the opinions of the authors, not of the Planet. But some of our most intriguing news appears first on the opinion pages. 

My “editorial” is non-traditional, more of a column than the kind of Olympian pronunciamento found in most papers today. In general, when I say “I” in this space, it’s personal; when I say “we” there’s a good chance that the publisher and the other editors agree with me. 

Recently both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have announced that they’re experimenting with allowing more voices to be represented in the opinion section and even on the sacred editorial pages. That would be a welcome return to policies of earlier days in American journalism, more like what’s found in the livelier European papers like The Guardian. 

But newspapers only work as sponsors of the public forum if they’re open to all points of view. In today’s paper we are fortunate to have some good examples of what our goal is. First, we have an old friend drawing a bead on one of our Public Eye columnists. Readers can judge for themselves who comes out better in the crossfire, and they can add their own comments for next time. Now, this kind of exchange also takes place on the Internet. What is different about our correspondents, and I’m not really sure why, is that they take the time to write carefully and clearly, unlike many online correspondents.  

Next, we reprint a letter from a famously pungent published author which the Chronicle has not seen fit to print. These days big corporate papers limit letters to sound-byte length, and choose the less inflammatory writers much of the time. Some people, like this letter writer, even suspect them of screening out the ones which deviate from the paper’s own politics. Here at the Planet, we print almost everything we get from local readers, except letters which are unintelligible or which attack private individuals. 

Does a lively public forum influence public process? Perhaps eventually. Support for the Iraq invasion is finally down in national polls, as is state-wide support for Schwarzenegger’s lame-brained initiatives. Even the Albany mega-mall proposal, despite hiring well-wired political consultants, is going down in a local poll.  

Of course the influence of the media on politicians depends on partly on whether politicians are consumers of information or not. Bush and Schwarzenegger seem to be well-insulated from the public voice.  

And so are some local pols. A sharp-eared reader forwarded to us this transcription from Tuesday’s public hearing on the Berkeley budget:  

“Speaker No. 41 in the public hearing on the budget said: ‘What got me here today is that I picked up a copy of the Daily Planet and read a letter laying out the argument in favor of not cutting the animal control officer in the Animal Shelter.’ She didn’t dwell on the Planet. She just said that in passing. She asked other people ‘with signs’ if the writer of the letter was present, and she was—in fact, she was the next speaker. 

“After she’d finished, and before the next person could speak, [Mayor Tom] Bates said: ‘I don’t read that paper.’ [laughter] ‘I’m sorry. You’ll have to get in a real newspaper if you want me to read it.’ [laughter from the dais, much booing and hissing from the audience].” 

A real newspaper wouldn’t be, for example, the Daily Californian, now would it? Unless, perhaps, Bates did manage to read that one before he tossed a thousand copies in the trash during his last campaign. But don’t count on it. He’s not much of a reader, it seems. And proud of it, too. 


BHS Student Artist Wins Congressional Art Award By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR

Tuesday June 21, 2005

The office of Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) announced this week that Berkeley High School student Naomi Drexler is the ninth congressional district winner of the annual Congressional Art Competition, the third time a BHS student has won the award in recent years. 

Drexler’s entry was selected over 25 other artworks submitted by high school students throughout the East Bay district. 

Drexler’s winning work, “Eyes of Sorrow,” a portrait of a young East Indian woman, will hang in the U.S. Capitol building during the “An Artistic Discovery” competition’s year-long exhibit. 

“We are very proud to have Naomi’s work represent our district in the capitol,” Lee said in a released statement. “This is a great opportunity to highlight the ways that art education can enrich the lives of our young people.” 

Berkeley Unified School District Public Information Officer Mark Coplan said, “We’re really excited to see another Berkeley High School student win this award.”  

He said that the number of Berkeley High winners over the past few years “is in part attributable to the talent of these young artists, and in part attributable to the existing fine arts program at Berkeley High School that is not available in many other local high schools. And with a new fine arts small school opening up next year, we believe that there will be even more opportunities for upcoming young artists in our area.” 

The Arts and Humanities Academy (AHA) is scheduled to begin operation at Berkeley High in the fall. 

J