The City of Albany is removing homeless encampments on the Albany Landfill as part of a process that will bring the 31-acre site closer to becoming part of the Eastshore State Park. 

The city, which owns the landfill, has brought in a four-yard front loa der, backhoe and three 30-yard containers to remove 12 homeless encampments. 

The encampments, some of which are abandoned, contain a variety of materials including shopping carts, large sheets of plywood and general refuse. There is also an assortment of personal possessions such as clothing, books and camping equipment. 

City officials said the project will be completed by Thursday at an estimated cost of $15,000. 

“The Albany Waterfront Committee was concerned with the number of homeless encampments th at have sprung up,” said Ann Chaney, the city’s community development director. “We thought the best approach would be to remove the debris and the campsites and make it a better park for everyone.” 

In 1999, the City of Albany removed approximately 45 people who were living on the landfill, some who had camped on the craggy, windblown landfill for eight years. But some of the displaced squatters began to move back onto the sporadically monitored property and currently it is estimated that 10 people live there year around. 

Workers are cutting 10-foot roadways across the landfill to access some of the more hidden campsites. The process has caused concern among frequent landfill visitors that mature trees and wildlife habitat will be destroyed in the process. Berkeley attorney Osha Neumann has written a letter to the Albany City Council requesting that the front loader and backhoe be removed and that the debris be carried out by hand.  

But Public Works Supervisor John Medlock said the large amount of the debris and other materials require the use of heavy machinery. He added that very little vegetation is being destroyed. 

“Plus there is a lot of broken glass and needles,” he said. “We are trying to handle the debris as little as possible.”  

Chaney said there are no immediate plans to remove any of the paintings, murals and sculptures that are concentrated on the northwest corner of the landfill.  

City workers will also seal off seven wells that monitored toxic substances that were leaching into the ba y. The landfill is a former construction debris dump that closed in the early 1980s. In 1984 the Regional Water Quality Control Board issued a closure order when ammonia and high concentrations of metals were found leaching into the bay.  

Once the order was put in place, the city of Albany was unable to transfer the property or develop it until the toxic problem was solved. The cost to clean the environmental problems was so high, city officials decided to let the environmental problem naturally attenua te. 

By default, the legal limbo gave rise to an organic public park. A community of homeless took root pet owners loved the freedom to let dogs run free and paintings and sculptures flourished. One landfill resident built a small castle complete with lancet windows and spiral staircase.  

However, last May the RWQCB issued a finding that the landfill is no longer leaching ammonia or other toxic materials into the bay and lifted the closure order. Once the monitoring wells are capped, the City of Albany will be free to transfer the management of the property to the East Bay Regional Park District, and ultimately to the state as an addition to the Eastshore State Park although it is uncertain when this will take place. 

“There is currently no agreement wi th the EBRPD as to when we will turn over the land or if it will ultimately become part of the Eastshore State Park,” Chaney said. “We are just beginning to talk about it.” 

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A decision last week by the Albany City Council to hold St. Mary’s College High School to a 10-year-old conditional use permit square-footage limit has left school representatives and at least one city councilmember trading charges of reneging on an agreement, as well as another councilmember’s charges that city staff encouraged St. Mary’s to break their deal with the city. 

St. Mary’s is a private, 630-student, 9-12 grade Lasallian school located in the Peralta Park Neighborhood on the southeast corner of Albany where it borders on Berkeley, three blocks from Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. 

Last Tuesday, the council voted 3-0, with one abstention, to reverse an Albany City Planning And Zoning Commission recommendation that would have allowed St. Mary’s to keep a band pavilion, a snack shop, and 652 square feet of classroom space on its campus. The vote upheld an appeal by members of the Peralta Park Neighborhood Association. 

Among other things in its appeal, the Peralta Park neighbors argued that the Planning and Zoning Commission decision ignored the reason why square footage conditions were put on St. Mary’s in the first place and failed to include any California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) analysis of cumulative impacts. 

Albany City Councilmember Robert Lieber, who sided with neighbors in opposing the school’s expansion, accused St. Mary’s officials of negotiating in bad faith. 

“I wanted to send a message both to the school and to anyone else that when you make an agreement with the City of Albany, we will enforce it,” he said. 

But in a letter posted on the school’s website this week, St. Mary’s President Brother Edmond Larouche called upon councilmembers to reverse their decision.  

“It is ... surprising to see members of the council so readily attach themselves to the notion that the school had breached a trust or contract with its neighbors and had had less than honorable intentions in pursuing the city’s direction,” he said. “There has been no breach of trust on the part of the school.” 

Larouche added, “Just as some school neighbors feel that city processes have failed them, so, too, does Saint Mary’s after Tuesday night’s council reversal of the ... Planning and Zoning decision.” 

Larouche called the council decision “political and solely intended to be punitive.” 

At issue is whether the school should be held to the 1994 conditional use permit (CUP) without going through the process of developing and presenting a new school Master Plan. Among other things, the 1994 CUP limited the school to 90,675 square feet. 

Five years later, St. Mary’s applied for and received a second CUP from the City of Albany in which the city allowed St. Mary’s to build the 9,100-square-foot, two-story, seven-classroom Frates Memorial Hall in exchange for demolishing 2,380 square feet of existing buildings (the band room and the snack shop) and taking another 652 feet of building space out of classroom use. 

That total 3,032 square feet was supposed to be taken out of use within one year of the occupancy date of Frates Hall, which received its certificate of occupancy at the beginning of January, 2002. 

But two weeks before the one-year time limit was to run out, St. Mary’s applied for an amendment to keep the 3,032 square feet in use, effectively increasing the school’s total square footage to 93,707. It was that application which the Planning and Zoning Commission upheld last April after what Albany Planning Manager Dave Dowsell said was a battle that lasted more than two and a half years between neighbors and school officials. 

Councilmember Robert Lieber charged that St. Mary’s strategy “all along” was to keep both the Frates Hall square footage and the band pavilion/snack shop square footage, and says that at least some city representatives actively encouraged the school in that strategy. 

“When I had the school representative on the stand Tuesday night,” Lieber said, “he said that the school was told by city Planning Commissioners [during the 1999 CUP decision] to pay no attention to the requirement to demolish the buildings. In effect, the school was told to ‘shine them on. You can get out of this later on.’” 

Lieber’s charges that city staff did more than merely receive St. Mary’s amendment request are backed up, in part, by documents released both by the school and by the Planning and Zoning Commission. 

In his website-posted letter, St. Mary’s president Larouche said St. Mary’s sought reconsideration of the square footage limitation “at the city’s suggestion.” 

And in his recommendation to council on the St. Mary’s amendment, Planning Manager Dowswell wrote, “When the square footage limitation was discussed in 1999, some of the planning and zoning commissioners encouraged the school to return to the Commission to request an increase in the allowable building square footage.” 

In supporting the commission’s recommendation to uphold St. Mary’s request, Dowswell wrote councilmembers that “in reviewing the records of [the original 1994 CUP], staff was unable to find a specific reason or reasons for limiting the total building square-footage allotted to the school to 90,675 square feet. ... Staff believes the square footage limit was imposed as a means to further regulate, probably from a visual standpoint, the school’s impact on the neighborhood. Ultimately, the Planning and Zoning Commission felt that allowing the 3,032 square feet of building area to remain ... would not have a negative visual (environmental) impact on the neighborhood since the two buildings already exist.” 

According to Dowswell, the building space in question is currently being used by St. Mary’s. 

“They probably could do without the snack shop,” Dowswell said in a telephone interview. “But the band pavilion is in constant use. This is where the school band actually practices. It’s a stand-alone building, which makes it a great location from a noise factor.” 

In its decision Tuesday night, the Council agreed to let St. Mary’s keep the extra buildings temporarily, so long as they are taken out of use. St. Mary’s is presently preparing to begin a new Master Plan process with the city, and the three councilmembers who upheld the Peralta Park Neighborhood Association Appeal said they would wait until that document ultimately comes before council before deciding the fate of the buildings. 

Lieber abstained on the vote, calling it a bad decision. 

“I would have voted to demolish the buildings immediately,” he said, “but that vote wasn’t available.”´

Tuesday’s City Council meeting looks to be the latest battleground for pro- and anti-development forces as the council holds a public hearing on changes to a law that governs the future of Berkeley’s historic buildings. 

Before the council is draft ordinance language from the Planning Commission that opponents charge would weaken sections of Berkeley’s Landmark Preservation Ordinance. Meanwhile the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which enforces the ordinance, recently voted to rescind its approval of a previous draft of revisions, and has called on the city to bring in an outside consultant to guide the revision process. 

The council typically doesn’t vote on agenda items at the same meeting in which it holds a public hearing on them. With the summer recess two weeks away, a vote on LPO revisions might not come until September, though the council could vote on Tuesday if it wants to speed things up. 

The controversy has garnered a lot of attention, in part because developers portray the ordinance as a tool for derailing projects and preservationists see it as valuable protection for structures they say are esthetically and historically significant. 

Since it was adopted in 1974, Berkeley has designated 265 landmarks, four historic districts and 27 structures of merit. 

The ordinance is credited with stopping the wholesale demolition of older buildings during the 1960s and early 1970s. However opponents of the Landmarks Preservation Commission have charged that commissioners have exploited it to slow down development rather than to save worthy buildings. On several occasions, the City Council has reversed the commission’s designations of buildings in order to allow them to be demolished for development sites.  

Revisions to the ordinance have been in the works for five years. The council originally asked the Landmarks Commission to revise it to avoid conflicting with the state’s Permit Streamlining Act, which requires that building permits be acted on within a specific time frame. 

To ensure that the ordinance wasn’t used to obstruct proposed developments, the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved a Planning Department proposal to front-load the designation process so developers would know from the beginning whether their property might qualify as a historic resource and fall under the commission’s purview. The proposal changed timelines for the commission and the public to respond to development projects and required that most applications to demolish or alter older buildings over fifty years old, including private homes, be placed on the commission’s agenda for early evaluation of the property’s historic status. 

But some members of the Planning Commission said that they didn’t think the proposal went far enough to aid developers. Rather than accepting the LPC-approved revisions, the Planning Commission spent nearly a year formulating its own proposals to change the ordinance. The draft forwarded to the Council by the Planning Commission would further limit the window for the public to initiate landmarking proceedings. 

It would also take away the Landmarks Commission’s control over “minor alterations” to the exterior of designated structures of merit—which have different criteria than landmarks do—and give it to city Planning Department staff instead. Under both drafts, the Landmarks Preservation Commission would get new power to deny demolitions of both landmarks and structures of merit, which would eliminate conflict with the Permit Streamlining Act, but opponents say that Planning Commission revisions would weaken protection for structures of merit under the California Environmental Quality Act. 

For councilmembers allied with preservationists, the Planning Commission proposal goes too far to serve developers and excludes citizen participation. 

“It’s a slap in the face to anyone who cares about landmarks,” said Councilmember Kriss Worthington, who along with Councilmember Dona Spring has been a staunch defender of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. 

Other councilmembers said they were undecided on the issue, but expressed an openness to the Planning Commission’s proposal. 

“I don’t think a structure of merit should be treated the same as a landmark,” said Councilmember Laurie Capitelli. 

Noting concerns that the Landmarks Preservation Commission had previously used its power to obstruct proposed developments, Capitelli also said that “Whether a building is landmarked or not should not be based on the type of building proposed to replace it.” 

Councilmember Spring said she is against the LPC’s proposal to enlist aid from an outside expert. 

“The problem with an outside consultant is that it will be under the thumb of the city attorney and planning staff,” said Spring, who contends city staff favors the Planning Commission’s version. 

Also Tuesday, City Manager Phil Kamlarz will explain the recent closure of Berkeley hills Fire Station 7 last Wednesday. As of July 1, the city had been rotating the closure of up to two fire companies as a cost saving measure, but councilmembers were under the impression that closures would be rare and the station in the fire-prone hills would be exempt.  

In response to concern from the council, City Manager Phil Kamlarz has ordered that Station 7, home to a single engine company, remain open and that no more than one fire company be shut down daily until the council takes up the issue next week. The council will consider spending roughly $250,000 to limit closures to one fire company a day through December, when 12 new hires are expected to diminish the need for closures. 

The council will also hold a public hearing Tuesday to establish late fees for landlords as part of the city’s Rental Housing Safety Program. 

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A marriage between two national media chains has apparently deprived the San Francisco Bay Guardian of one of its top advertisers. 

Bill Graham Presents, the Bay Area’s largest concert venue operator and a subsidiary of media conglomerate Clear Channel Entertainment, informed the Guardian three weeks ago that a sponsorship agreement with competitor New Times means it will no longer be placing ads in the independent weekly, said Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond. 

“This is a case of the big chain trying to stick it to the little guy,” he said. “It’s so frustrating because they won’t play fair.” 

The deal with New Times, the Phoenix, Ariz.-based publisher of 11 alternative weekly papers, including the Guardian’s chief competitors, SF Weekly and the East Bay Express, calls for New Times to pay Clear Channel a six-figure sum as part of a three-year deal to rename San Francisco’s Warfield Theater “The SF Weekly Warfield.” 

The deal also requires BGP to boost advertising in New Times papers. Redmond said the deal leaves little or no money to advertise in the Bay Guardian or other local papers. BGP had previously advertised in both the Guardian and New Times papers, as well as the San Jose Metro and the San Francisco Chronicle. 

SF Weekly’s Publisher Chris Keating called Redmond’s claim “just more Guardian rhetoric.” 

“We would never require [exclusive advertising rights],” he said. “BGP can put ads wherever they want.” 

Bill Graham Presents President Lee Smith said the company decided to cancel advertising with the Bay Guardian only after the paper wrote an article bashing the deal. “I don’t think I’m inclined to advertise in a publication that reports things so unfairly towards us,” he said.  

Smith added that while the contract does call on the company to spend more money advertising in New Times papers, Clear Channel expected to continue running ads in the Chronicle and San Jose Metro. BGP ads continued to run in the Bay Guardian this week under a contract that is set to expire shortly, Redmond said. 

New Times has signed several naming rights deals with concert venue operators around the country, none of which led to competing papers losing advertising, said Kurtis Barton, publisher of the Phoenix New Times.  

“The more people who come to our sponsored venues the better it is for us,” he said. “Every time they put our name in the Bay Guardian, that’s marketing.” 

Redmond said BGP had been one of the Bay Guardian’s top 10 advertisers, but declined to disclose how much money the paper stood to lose without them. 

“It’s a big chunk of change, but we’ll survive,” he said. “We’ve been dealing with this kind of anti-competitive behavior for years.”  

The Guardian has a pending lawsuit against New Times charging that SF Weekly has purposely sold ads below cost to win advertisers away from the Guardian and drive it out of business. Redmond said the case could go to trial next summer. 

The two alternative weeklies have also attacked each other in their editorial pages. The Weekly mocks the more left-leaning Guardian for its politics, while the Bay Guardian insists that SF Weekly is a cutthroat chain publication with no connection to the Bay Area. 

In 2003, the Bay Guardian reported on a deal between New Times and Village Voice Media to end competition in Los Angeles and Cleveland. New Times closed its Los Angeles paper, giving Village Voice Media a monopoly in free weeklies there, while VVM closed its Cleveland paper, giving New Times a monopoly in that market. 

The Justice Department filed an anti-trust suit against the two companies and obtained a settlement forcing them to sell the assets of the closed papers to outside groups interested in reopening the papers. 

Clear Channel is the biggest player on the local entertainment scene. It owns seven Bay Area radio stations and books concerts at the Warfield, Filmore, Shoreline Amphitheater, Chronicle Pavilion and Mountain Winery. 

Berkeley’s two major concert venues, the Greek Theater and the Community Theater, recently switched booking agents from Clear Channel to the Berkeley-based Another Planet Entertainment, owned by former BGP executives. 

Clear Channel, based in San Antonio, Tex., maintains close ties to Republican politicians, and has been criticized by free speech advocates for prior actions. Following the Sept. 11., 2001 terrorist attacks, the company briefly banned dozens of songs from its airwaves including “Peace Train,” by Cat Stevens, now known as Yusef Islam.  

Last year, Berkeley-based Project Billboard sued a Clear Channel subsidiary that controls much of Manhattan’s top billboard space when the company balked at the group’s design: An American flag-patterned bomb with the caption, “Democracy Is Best Taught By Example, Not War.” The group ultimately replaced the bomb with a dove and agreed to move the message from the top of the Mariott Marquis, which opposed the political banner being placed above its Times Square Hotel. 

On July 28 the curtain is scheduled to rise once again at the Elmwood Theater, operator Greg King said Monday. 

The three-screen centerpiece of College Avenue’s Elmwood Shopping District has been closed for nearly a year. A nearby broken sewer line flooded the theater last October. 

The theater is owned by the Elmwood Theater Foundation, formed by local merchants and residents, and is the beneficiary of the Elmwood business improvement district. 

Repair work was scheduled to be complete by Thanksgiving, but a series of delays stalled the project, said King. 

King said the interior work on the theater is complete and all that remains is some exterior seismic upgrade work. The theater foundation, under pressure from the city, decided to retrofit the building while making repairs from the sewer damage. 

The building had been retrofitted in 1994, but the theater never received a final city inspection, and in 2000 the city tightened requirements for masonry structures like the theater. Berkeley loaned the foundation $90,000 for the seismic work. 

The sewer damage caused more damage than initially realized, King said. Floors were stripped to the dirt and reinforced walls from the 1994 seismic work were torn down. Sewer repairs weren’t completed until January, he said, in part because of a fee dispute between the contractor and the insurance company. 

The seismic work also ran into delays, King said. Among the difficulties, he said, were a lack of construction coordination and bureaucratic hurdles as the theater attempted to get a city permit for a new level floor designed for patrons in wheelchairs. 

The exterior seismic work won’t be complete by July 28, but King said the theater should be in good enough shape to welcome back customers. 

He expected most of the theater’s former employees, many of whom have been collecting unemployment insurance, to return. Also the theater will now control its concession stand, which he said would offer more upscale selections. 

John Moriarty, a member of the Elmwood Theater Foundation, said he expected patrons to be impressed by its new interior. 

“There will be new seats, new floors, new carpets,” he said. “When it opens it will be wonderful.” 

UC Berkeley has temporarily gnawed off yet another hunk of city turf, moving the Bancroft Library collection to a downtown building while the campus library is retrofitted. 

The deal, however, will make no difference to the city tax burden since the space is destined for another non-property-tax-paying institution, the non-profit Judah L. Magnes Museum. The museum plans to move into the new building after the Bancroft Library collection returns to campus.  

The Magnes features collections of Judaica, especially items involving the settlement of Jews in the American West. It will relocate its treasures from its current home at 2911 Russell St. to the building they purchased at 2121 Allston Way across from the Gaia Building. 

The new lease to the Bancroft Library puts off the museum move for at least two years while allowing the larger and even more valuable collection to find a temporary home. The Bancroft Library and its archives needs a new home while that institution’s usual home in the Doe Library Annex on campus undergoes a $64 million retrofit. 

Magnes spokesperson Robin Wander said the lease will give the museum time to plan and raise more funds for its eventual move to the Allston Way structure. 

According to the Bancroft’s website the library will reopen at its temporary new home in October. The relocation involves more than a half-million books, many rare and irreplaceable, nearly three million photographs and five million manuscripts, including those of Mark Twain. 

The rebuilding of the UC library facility is expected to take two years. 

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The Berkeley Planning Commission will take up three major projects when it meets Wednesday night, leading off with the joint UC-city Downtown Area Plan (DAP) process. 

City Planning and Development Director Dan Marks and UC Berkeley Assistant Vice Chancellor Tom Lollini will give a presentation on the process, worked out as part of the settlement of the city’s suit against UC Berkeley over the university’s 2020 Long Range Development Plan (LRDP). 

Slated as an informational presentation, the talk will focus on the planning process and timeline, followed by a question and answer session. The meeting begins at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

As resolved in the controversial settlement, the city and university will jointly work to formulate a plan for the downtown area adjoining the UC campus, an area where the university is already the single largest landowner. 

The second major item on the agenda for the meeting is a session for gathering scoping comments for the draft environmental impact report on the proposed West Berkeley Bowl. 

The proposal by Berkeley Bowl owner Glen Yasuda calls for a new store with a warehouse on a 2.3 acre site at 920 Heinz Avenue, which currently houses vacant buildings and an asphalt business. 

The proposal has drawn fire from some West Berkeley artisans and business owners who have decried the advancement of commercial uses in the city’s dwindling supply of land zoned for light industrial and manufacturing uses. 

Mayor Bates is strongly pushing for a greater commercial presence along Ashby and University avenues and Gilman Street in West Berkeley to boost city sales tax revenues, setting the stage for a major land use battle in a city known for such conflicts. 

The third major item on Wednesday’s agenda is a public hearing on Waterfront Specific Plan and Zoning Ordinances revisions needed to build a complex of soccer and baseball fields on the southernmost parking lot at Golden Gate Fields, immediately south of the western end of Gilman Street. 

If all goes as planned, construction on the project’s first phase could begin next spring or early summer, with completion due by September. 

If the Planning Commission gives a final nod to the amendments at its July 27 meeting, the City Council could give final approval on Sept. 26. 

Slated for construction on the southernmost parking lot at Golden Gate Fields, the fields are being built as a joint effort by the cities of Berkeley, Albany, Emeryville, and Richmond, working in cooperation the East Bay Regional Parks District (EBRPD), which owns the land. 

Under the memorandum of understanding formed for the project, Berkeley is the lead agency for the project and will manage the fields under EBRPD supervision, said Parks and Recreation Chair Yolanda Huang.  

Once approved, construction will begin on two specially designed artificial turf soccer fields, which can also be used for football and field hockey. That project will consume the entire $3 million currently available, with two softball fields and a regulation hardball field to follow as funds become available. 

Another major project on Wednesday’s agenda is a public hearing to adopt a tentative tract map on a 30-unit condominium project planned for 2025 Channing Way. 

The final hearing set for Wednesday will focus on proposed Zoning Ordinance amendments to clarify definitions of front-, side- and backyards, which have become an issue in part because of projects recently approved that seem questionable under the current ordinance. 

The new amendments would establish clear and enforceable rules developers must follow. Yard-related parking issues played a major role in debates over the so-called “flying cottage” at 3045 Shattuck Ave.?

Berkeley’s Zoning Adjustments Board is confronting yet another dispute over construction plans on La Vereda Trail. 

Last year’s battle focused on proposed alterations to a cottage designed by noted architect William Wurster at 1650 La Vereda Trail, which pitted WIRED magazine founder Tom Rossetto in an acrimonious affray with neighbors who protested the scale of proposed alterations. 

Opponents successfully lobbied to landmark the building and Rossetto’s architect came up with plans that satisfied both the Landmarks Preservation Commission and ZAB. 

The newest battle concerns a 977-square-foot two-car garage and accessory building at 1734 La Vereda to augment the home at 1732 La Vereda. 

While ZAB approved the project, the owners of three nearby properties have appealed, and the board will hear from them and architect John Holey when they meet at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers at Old City Hall, 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

A proposal to demolish a single family home at 1532 Martin Luther King Jr. Way has been placed on the consent calendar, despite protests from some neighbors at the proposal’s last airing.  

Plans call for replacement of the home by a two-story duplex and a cottage in the rear. The main issue ZAB members didn’t like was the visibility of front yard parking from the street.  

The last major item on the agenda is a proposal to reduced by 1,855 square feet plans already approved for an Affordable Housing Associates project at 1001 Ashby Ave.

A joint school lunch and school-garden-to-school-table project of the Berkeley Unified School District and Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation has received the attention of national legislators and the country’s national museum. 

During a Smithsonian Folklife Festival held in the two-week period between June 23 and July 4, the Smithsonian Institution recreated Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School’s Edible Schoolyard on an 80-by-20-foot plot on the National Mall in Washington D.C. 

Legislators, including Senators Hillary Clinton of New York, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Barbara Boxer of California stopped by to munch on wood-fired pizza and listen to a pitch for support for the Berkeley-inspired School Lunch Initiative. 

The exhibit also featured interactive work with students, demonstrating ways to grow and harvest healthy food in the way the Edible Schoolyard regularly operates in Berkeley. 

“A nutritious daily lunch, integrated into classroom lesson plans for grades K-12, will be provided for all public school students in the district, from kindergarten through high school,” according to the Chez Panisse Foundation website. “Our intention is to change the lives of every public school child in Berkeley, and to provide a model for the reinvention of public school lunch nationwide.” 

Waters is working now on both national and state legislation to advance that initiative in other school districts. The Washington D.C. exhibit garnered long stories in both the New York Times and the Washington Post. 

Edible Schoolyard’s Program Coordinator Chelsea Chatman, who made the trip to Washington and “basically worked in the kitchen most of the time preparing food,” called the event “the right opportunity,” even though she believes it will take some time for Congressional legislative action to result. 

“It’s going to take a while for these ideas to percolate,” she said. “But even during the time we were there, we could see good things beginning to happen in the D.C. schools around lunch programs.” 

She said that the initial invitation to Waters came two years ago, with the focus on the Edible Schoolyard. 

“The Berkeley School Lunch Initiative wasn’t as formal then as it is now,” Waters said. “We knew that we were going to the mall with the garden. But the initiative added a new piece.” 

Chatman said she was impressed by the re-creation of the Edible Schoolyard on the National Mall, which Smithsonian Institution staff members had to do on top of the existing grass because federal law does not permit digging into the mall ground. 

Students from three Washington area elementary schools assisted in the planting, with help given by Maine Four Seasons Farms owner Elliot Coleman, whom Chatman called “one of the east coast’s foremost experts on organic gardening.” 

While the Berkeley participants brought some Bay Area seeds (“mostly beans”) with them to pass out to students, Chatman said that the exhibit received donations of plants, food, and garden materials from D.C. area groups.  

Berkeley participants in the exhibit included Waters, Chatman, Edible Schoolyard Manager Kelsey Siegel, LeConte Elementary Garden Educator Ben Goff, Chez Panisse Director of Special Projects Marcia Guerrero and her assistant Jesse Benthien, and BUSD lunch consultant Ann Cooper. 

Travel, food, and lodging for most of the Berkeley contingent was paid for by the Smithsonian Institution, with some funding provided by the Chez Panisse Foundation for the lobbying efforts with legislators. No funds came from the Berkeley Unified School District.›

Berkeley has hired Claudette Ford as acting director of public works to replace Rene Cardinaux, who is retiring Aug. 5 after eight years with the city. 

Ford worked as the public works agency director in Oakland for five years and before that served as the director of public works in New Haven, Conn. For the past year, she has worked as a private consultant. 

In Oakland, Ford supervised 750 employees with an operating budget of $98 million and a $35 million capital program. 

“Ms. Ford’s past experience in a neighboring city has amply prepared her for the role of acting public works director for Berkeley,” said Phil Kamlarz in a statement. David Hodgkins, the acting human resources director, said Ford would get a trial run as acting director. If both she and the city are satisfied, Kamlarz could then ask the City Council to make her the permanent department head. 

Public works, which includes the Office of Transportation, is the city’s largest department with an annual budget of about $75 million. 

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The London attacks are the symptoms of an internal war among two Islamic trends, and may be a sign of growing desperation by one group.  

Clearly the London explosions indicate that al Qaeda is still capable of carrying out well-planned attacks in the heart of London, one of the most secured European capitals. The operation surpassed in magnitude any attack carried out by the IRA in Britain for past five decades. The bombings were designed to punish the most loyal ally of the United States for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But why now?  

The answer goes beyond the G8 summit, which coincided with the explosions, and lies instead within an ongoing conflict between two Islamic trends. The first trend, largely represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, which was established by Hassan al-Banna in 1928 in Egypt, calls for peaceful political participation to bring about a society based on Islamic principles. The other one, largely represented by al Qaeda, supports any means necessary, including violence, to achieve similar goals.  

The “cold war” between these two groups, as some Arab commentators call it, started in 1970s in Egypt, when the Muslim Brotherhood rejected other former Brotherhood members—mainly young students who were severely tortured by the Egyptian government—upon their release from prison. By calling for the use of violence against the government, these students had become too radical for the Brotherhood.  

The Brotherhood also rejected the teachings of Said Qutub, a former Brotherhood member whose prison writings provide the ideological foundation for most radical Islamic movements.  

Kamal Habib, an Islamic scholar who appears on Al Jazeera’s Web site, writes that the young students formed the nucleus of the Egyptian radical Salafi and Takafiri trends, the ideological foundation of al Qaeda. Radical Salafism is an extremist interpretation of how Islam was practiced in the time of the Prophet. Takfirism claims the right to declare others infidels, including Muslims, thus sanctioning their punishment or murder.  

Habib explains that the war between the Muslim Brotherhood and these two trends was played out in Egypt in Al Azahar, Alexandria and Cairo universities. The failure of the Muslim Brotherhood to achieve tangible results in fighting corruption and changing the Egyptian government helped these radical groups win many students to their side.  

The radical Salafi trend criticized the Muslim Brotherhood for, in their view, compromising the principles of jihad and accepting subjugation to infidel regimes closely associated with the U.S.  

Radical students, including al Qaeda top lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri, once a leader in the Egyptian Jihad organization, declared Egyptian President Anwar Al Sadat an infidel, and assassinated him in October 1981. Several hundreds of these radicals were imprisoned and eventually sent to Afghanistan to fight the former Soviet Union. The Egyptian government hoped that they would die there.  

In Afghanistan, not only did al-Zawahiri deviate from Muslim Brotherhood head Abdullah Azzam, the charismatic leader who was able to recruit young Arab men to fight against the U.S.S.R., but he also convinced the successful financier Osama Bin Laden to leave Azzam and join him in what would become the most lethal radical Islamic organization, Al Qaeda.  

The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks achieved great success for the two men in gaining legitimacy, which was evident in the amount of attention that Bin Laden’s and Al-Zawahiri’s speeches were receiving in the Muslim world. Things had changed, however, by the time al-Zawahiri gave his latest speech on May 18 of this year.  

The thrust of al-Zawahiri’s speech, aired on Al Jazeera, was to criticize the recent and groundbreaking peaceful demonstrations in Egypt that were largely organized by the Muslim Brotherhood. “Driving the invading Crusader troops and Jews from Islamic countries cannot be achieved through demonstrations and chanting slogans in the street,” al-Zawahiri said. “We can achieve reform and drive the invaders out only through fighting in the cause of God.”  

But this did not cause the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to reverse its April decision to join the Egyptian social movement “Kefayah” (”change”), which is led by the Christian Egyptian George Ishak and includes communists, leftists, secularists and nationalists.  

Al-Zawahiri also criticized the new position taken by Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood organization that, since the election of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, has agreed to a “cooling off” period, refrained from suicide operations and participated in municipal elections. “I salute my brothers, the lions of Islam, who are garrisoned on the holy frontiers of Islam in the environs of Jerusalem,” al-Zawahiri said. “I beseech them, invoking the name of the Almighty God, not to renounce their jihad; not to lay down their arms ... and not to allow themselves to be dragged into the game of secular elections under a secular constitution.”  

But senior Hamas official Mahmud al-Zahar recently told Al Jazeera television, “resistance does not have to be armed,” which is the opposite of Hamas’ past policy line: “What was taken by force can only be taken back by force.” Even before Hamas’ new stance, their attacks against Israeli civilians were rationalized as a defensive jihad, and not based on a Takafiri stance.  

This in turn follows many reports in Arab media about an “American-Islamic dialogue” between Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, and retired U.S. government officials.  

The London bombings, in this view, look like an attempt by Al Qaeda to regain momentum and respect in the Muslim world at a time when many Islamic figures are renouncing violence and turning toward politics. Most recently, on July 8, Abu Muhamad al-Maqdsi, the spiritual leader of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, criticized the targeting of Shiite mosques and citizens in Iraq. The U.S. is pressuring Egypt to end its ban on the Muslim Brotherhood and to stop detaining Brotherhood leaders. This is a Bush administration attempt to correct the historical mistake in which U.S. support for secular Egyptian regimes in their oppression of Brotherhood leaders only radicalized these leaders and empowered their ideology. 

Jalal Ghazi monitors and translates Arab media for New California Media (a project of PNS) and Link TV. ?

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

A NEW PERSPECTIVE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

When the most recent traffic circles were installed near downtown, I expected to like them. And I did for the first week, in which I happened to only bicycle. But then I walked. 

Where straight traffic through never bothered me much, now all the cars veer into the crosswalk. At night especially the car headlights sweep the sidewalk. All my protective pedestrian reflexes (e.g. “there is a car coming straight at me”) are activated. And, despite the stop signs at each circle, car drivers rarely stop. 

I find walking on the sidewalk much less pleasant now that circles have been installed. 

Bryce Nesbitt 

• 

HAZARDS OF TRAFFIC CIRCLES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

“Calming circles.” Duh! If you want to calm down, turn on soft music in your car. I cannot see any use for them except to complicate local people’s lives. I worry about the thousands of dollars it must have cost the city to erect, plant, water and maintain these structures. In times of budget crisis, the money could have been spent on needed expenditures such as fire trucks, which, by the way, could travel a lot easier through the city without the circles. Every second of delay to firemen increases damages caused by fires. The circles are another obstruction combined with barriers and speedbumps to make emergency services more hazardous and difficult. 

Andree Leenaers Smith 

• 

SCHOOL CONSTRUCTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Walking by the mess that is Willard School yesterday, I saw two of the newly installed sprinklers, broken, just gushing waster. I saw the asphalt driveway ripped up when the old driveway was perfectly fine. As best as I can remember, the old driveway didn’t even have a crack. A couple of years ago the school district took out the old chain link fence, and installed a brand new one closer to the sidewalk. A year ago, they removed that new chain link fence and for a year, the schoolyard was open, which was quite lovely. I discovered to my delight a very nice labyrinth, which I have enjoyed walking. Now the school district is doing more construction, whose purpose is not at all clear. 

A few weeks ago, a letter writer lamented the waste on fencing at King School. Perhaps these build, tear down, rebuild with inferior quality materials and tear down again cycles is not merely poor planning, but someone feather bedding a private account? I am certainly curious as to what the school district is doing and why. How much does this all cost? I wonder if it isn’t appropriate for an investigation. 

Sara Rutman 

• 

NO ROLE MODEL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

If anyone or any institution should be a role model for youth, it should be our schools and our school systems. As I watch this continued construction of new facilities in Berkeley, I am struck by all the grass that is being planted just for show, and how very little recycled materials or green building technology is being included. Solar panels anywhere? Students are taught the four Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle and rot. Our schools by and large have school gardens that compost. Yet, the very behavior of our school system demonstrates the hypocrisy of what it is teaching our children. 

Grass is a mono-culture, and expensive to maintain. It is mowed with petroleum powered equipment at a time when everyone is decrying our dependence on foreign oil. Grass requires an enormous amount of water. In the Native Plants Tour this past April, thousands crowded our beautiful Berkeley gardens, as Berkeley is a regional leader in incorporating native plants into our backyards. Yet, our school system continues to act as an ostrich in the sand. We live in a Mediterranean climate. There is no justification to spend public funds on planting, maintaining and watering grass. (That huge swath of water wasting lawn in front of King and the new grass at Willard). John Selawsky, I thought you claimed to be environmentally conscious. What happened? 

Now that the continued construction at Willard is killing the lawn planted last Fall, maybe instead of replanting it with water wasteful grass, BUSD can do better and replant with drought tolerant, native plants in order to practice what it teaches. And take the money it now spends on water and mowing and put into programs for students. 

Lewina Ruggles 

• 

EXTRAVAGANCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The current community discussions of Berkeley Unified School District construction spending waste are examples of what happens when a big bureaucracy is given money without adequate safeguards and accountability measures. The school district will spend every nickel of our money, without refund, regardless of need and definitely without considering efficiency and effectiveness, as long as we taxpayers let them. 

Having followed the school construction program, I have seen how endless monies are poorly used. The new school at Rosa Parks cost $12 million. So, Malcolm X school wanted $12 million for itself. Cragmont Elementary School got wood parquet floors in its cafeteria. So the high school had to get hardwood paneling in its cafeteria. 

The extravagances are wild. Malcolm X school built an outdoor concrete amphitheater, so Cragmont School had to build one, then King, and Willard had to build one. But no one ever asked, is spending money like this a good idea? Malcolm X’s amphitheater is seldom used, and last year became a fishbowl twice due to flooding. King’s concrete amphitheater essentially cuts off the beautiful Edible Garden from the rest of the school. A concrete barrier. And the amphitheater is oriented so that you sit in it with your face in the sun. Everyone in Berkeley should visit King during school hours, and see that this large, expensive and ugly structure is little used. Why was it built at all? 

I support funding schools. I don’t support waste and fiscal mismanagement. It is time for a complete independent audit of our school local parcel taxes and bonds, to honestly, and truthfully let us taxpayers know. What kind of job is are schools doing? Is our money well used? Are students benefiting? 

Raymond Chandler 

• 

STATIST QUO 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Ah, everyone’s favorite state apologist, Mal Burnstein, rides forth again to present another self-serving non-argument as to why his bureaucratic class has further claim to our resources ! 

Excuse me, Mal, but taxes are not like club dues. No club collects members or funds at the point of a gun. Far from being a mark of civilization as the myopic Professor Lakoff would have it, taxes are a remnant of ancient societies where the ruling class would forcibly extract its tribute from the hides of its subjects. 

Anyone is under any illusions that all the services currently monopolized by government could not be provided privately in a free market needs to read For A New Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard. Rothbard goes into detail as to how everything from roads to schools to the police could be furnished more efficiently and without infringing our freedom in a society of laissez-faire capitalism. 

It’s a beautiful antidote to the Berkeley Statist Quo. Which also happens to be the intellectually braindead staus quo around here. 

Lin Biao 

• 

MARRIAGE EQUALITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Letter writer S. Smith (July 8) is a classic example of someone picking a fight instead of working to achieve a goal. S/he accurately points out the unfairness of many legal privileges available to married people, an issue I imagine the vast majority of supporters of gay marriage will acknowledge, and then goes on the attack, seemingly accusing everyone in a committed relationship of opposing fairer policies. 

I, for one, am in complete agreement with the assertion that a successful life partnership (ours passed 30 years in June) is reward enough in itself, though I would not call it the “happenstance of our sex lives.” If the objective is to recruit supporters for reform of government and business bias, count me in, though family-friendly policies making it easier for partners to care for one another probably pay for themselves by reducing the need for social services. But Smith’s letter was an attack on marriage itself, calculated to undermine any coalition between couples and single people for tax and benefit reform—a coalition that obviously will be needed if it’s true that singles are a minority. 

Legal benefits are often mentioned by gay marriage proponents, because they are a concrete example of material unfairness based on gender, but many gay and lesbian couples just want their relationships acknowledged and sanctioned in the community. Spitting in the eye of these folks does zero to win their support—or mine. 

Daryl Sieck 

• 

DOG PARK PROBLEMS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Sometimes a good idea turns out to be a bad idea.  

The Ohlone dog park was one of the first in our country. A place for dogs to run around without leashes. Good idea. The bad part is that it was set up in a residential area. More and more dog owners are drawn to the park, even from outside of Berkeley. I was told that there are 30,000 dogs in Berkeley alone. A small percentage of dogs bark more than exercise. Some dogs are brought at 6 a.m. and some dogs are brought as late as 10:30 p.m. Neighbors who work at home, neighbors who work nights, children are robbed of the right of a reasonably peaceful environment. 

There have been more than three years of monthly meetings to work out some solution. Dog owners have refused to observe reasonable hours. The Parks Department and City Council have had representatives at these meetings, and have recognized problems. Dog trainers have testified that any dog can be taught not to bark, and offered to teach classes. Meetings, meetings, meetings—for more than three years. Anything change? No! 

Dogs and dog owners are mobile. We neighbors are not. The noise at times exceeds allowable standards. I suggest that Ohlone dog park be moved to a non-residential area. Maybe City Hall would be a good place. 

Harry Gans 

• 

OZZIE’S 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Yes, it’s a shame that Ozzie’s Fountain has to close after so many years and so many memories. As a native of Berkeley, I have many of those same memories as a student at Willard back in the ‘60s, getting a cherry phosphate from Ozzie. It’s odd, however to see the likes of Marty Schiffenbauer merely calling it “sad” that no one with the money has stepped forward to keep it going. He should have plenty of money himself to keep his beloved hangout going. After all, he almost single-handedly brought rent control to Berkeley so he could keep his money out of the evil landlord’s pockets. Over 25 years of savings should be just about enough. I say he should put his money where is mouth is. 

Tim Cannon 

• 

PEACE LANTERN CEREMONY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

One of the many occasions in Berkeley when Norine Smith will be missed is this year’s Peace Lantern Ceremony, Aug. 6 at the north end of Aquatic Park. Norine applied her legendary enthusiasm to the success of this event, which involves three of her great loves: the quest for peace and justice; Japanese culture; and the parkland adjoining Berkeley’s Bay waterfront, which she worked so hard to protect as a Waterfront Commissioner. 

Norine (along with various friends she recruited) helped create the annual ceremony, in which participants (including many children) decorate shades for candle-lit lanterns floated on the lagoon at dusk, after performances of Japanese music and messages from the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Until this year, her work on this event was behind-the-scenes: hosting planning meetings at her house, organizing work sessions to make lantern shades, directing volunteers assembling and lighting the lanterns at the event. This year, she was to serve as one of the event’s emcees. 

The ceremony affirms our aspirations for a peaceful future and our abhorrence of atomic (and all) warfare, but it is rooted in an ancient Japanese tradition for honoring the departed. Many people decorate their lantern shades with remembrances of loved ones; the lanterns are floated as “boats” to guide their souls to the Beyond. While Norine has made that journey too early, there is no doubt she packed more passion, activism, and love into her 67 years than most of us could fit into 100. 

Fittingly, the planning group is dedicating the 2005 Peace Lantern Ceremony to Norine. To honor Norine, all who have gone before us, and especially, our community’s many efforts toward a just and peaceful future, please contact the planning committee at www.progressiveportal.org/lanterns or 595-4626 and help make this all-volunteer, low-budget event a success. Wherever she’s watching from now, I know Norine will be pleased. 

Steve Freedkin 

• 

BETH EL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am a property owner who has lived at 1237 Oxford Street since 1965, right next door to the monstrous complex that Temple Beth El is currently constructing in what used to be a very nice neighborhood. The activities that will take place in this huge complex are threatening to have a very negative impact on the lives of those of us who live here unless Beth El will live up to the legally binding agreements it has made with LOCCNA, the neighborhood association. 

I am deeply concerned about the unethical behavior of Beth El which negotiated an agreement and now seeks to ignore it. I understand that the City is preparing to issue a Certificate of Occupancy for this project even though Beth El has failed to live up to the legally binding signed agreement, the language of which was incorporated into the Conditional Use Permit to be issued for the project. 

If the City fails to require that Temple Beth El live up to its agreement on the detailed parking plan and the requirements for bank- stabilization and landscaping for Codornices Creek that it signed, then the City will be derelict in its duty and responsibilities to the citizens of Berkeley in this neighborhood. 

The mayor and city government should look into this matter and require full compliance with the conditions specified before allowing the buildings to be occupied. 

Ruth L. Jennings  

Nevada City 

• 

LAWSUIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Just to keep the people abreast of what is happening in the CEQA lawsuit over LRDP, my motion for inquiry into the existence of extrinsic fraud in the obtaining of the voluntary dismissal is still pending before the court and will be heard on July 20, 2005, at 9:00 A.M.  

However, the in-house counsel, Hope Schmeltzer for the university and Zach Cowan for the city, wrote a highly improper letter to the court, requesting of the court that it should return my motion to me “as improvidently filed.” Then, they asked that the court should “vacate the filing nunc pro tunc.” Any attorney reading this should recognize that these legal terms were improperly used and that the request of the parties was essentially hysterical gibberish, or legobabble.  

A ruling or judgment is sometimes said to be made improvidently, if the court lacked some critical piece of information that it later obtained, but there is no record I could find of a motion being “improvidently” filed. That is because a judge does not prejudge a motion and so there is nothing that she could un-judge and re-judge, just based upon the filing. Similarly, a nunc pro tunc order is solely for correcting an error in the record, not for undoing what was actually done.  

A filing can be “unified” at least in some jurisdictions, if the filing is deficient in some respect, but that is not even what the parties claimed. They went on to make extensive legal arguments in their letter addressed to the clerk of the court. This was a bizarre breach of legal ethics by the office of one who just received an award for her writings on legal ethics. I suspect that the members of the State Bar who voted to give that award to Manuela Albuquerque don’t know her like we do. They need to hear our perspective.  

The scariest part of all, however, was the last paragraph. The parties said: “Please notify us as soon as possible after vacating the filing so that the court will not be burdened with a response to a motion that is beyond the court’s jurisdiction.” Not only they are making a legal argument about jurisdiction in a letter addressed to the clerk of the court, but they are certain that the court will do their bidding, will do just as they say, based upon this serious breach of civil procedure. This is arrogance of the highest order. This is complete and utter contempt for law and the rule of law. This is unfettered disdain for due process. 

By the way, I was easily able to show the court, in a letter of my own written solely to counter their letter, that the arguments of the parties were lame and incorrect, as of course they always have been. My motion is correct. Assuming we get a fair hearing, we will win. All power to the people! 

Peter J. Mutnick 

• 

ANTI-BLOTTER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Just another pitch against “cutesy” police logs. I have taught high school students for ten years, and many of them cuss quite often (or use other words I find offensive). When I object, they say “It’s OK, ‘we’ all know what we mean.” I tell them that I find it offensive, and a good rule is to avoid offending people. While it seems these days we cannot open our mouths without offending at lease one person, there have been enough letters to the Planet opposed to Richard Brenneman’s style to argue that many people are being offended by his style. We should not have to, as one writer wrote “zing up the telling of what otherwise become repetitious and boring.” A “police blotter” is not there for our entertainment, but to tell us of unfortunate events that happened in our town. 

Lee Amosslee 

• 

A FEW THOUGHTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I love Berkeley and read the Daily Planet regularly. I am grateful for the open, honest, and sincere reporting and learn much from the letters to the editor.  

I am saddened at the seeming intentional lack of communication between the mayor and the city council on matters of UC Berkeley’s development plans for this wonderful city and am reminded of a quote from Gary Snyder’s poem titled, The Arts Council Meets in Eureka. The poem ends, sadly:  

No one who lives here  

has the power  

to run this town.  

On a lighter note: I suggest in place of the controversial humorous police blotter, that there be a separate column devoted to overheard conversations about town. For example, in one afternoon I heard some beautiful exchanges which make me so glad to be here:  

In line at the bank, a woman explains to the bank teller: “I’m into numerology. So, it matters very much to me how much I deposit and on what date. So let me just take a moment to think it through.”  

In the same afternoon: A Retail Clerk on her cell phone with her daughter: “You want to take what! Won’t that be heavy and too much luggage! ....Hangs up and exclaims...”Can you believe it! My daughter is bringing her espresso machine to Maui. Kona coffee isn’t good enough. She says she can’t live without lattes for two weeks!”  

Karen Clark 

El Cerrito 

• 

PLAME LEAK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Journalist jailed but the big story is that a high level snitch exists in the Bush administration who leaked the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame to syndicated columnist Robert Novak. This is treason. Valerie Plame’s name was leaked a few days after husband, former ambassador, Joseph Wilson criticized President Bush’s reasons for invading Iraq. Who is the dirty rat and why does the Bush administration continue to impede the investigation? 

Ron Lowe 

• 

MEDIA HAVE IT WRONG 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As usual, our corrupt complicit corporate media has the recent story about the jailing of the New York Times reporter Judith Miller upside-down, inside-out, backwards or in a word, wrong. Judith Miller is a war criminal. Judith Miller is an accessory before the fact to mass murder and war crimes in Iraq. Judith Miller belongs in jail, along with Rove, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Cheney and Bush and the rest of their vicious gang. In 2002 and 2003, her constant parroting of the Bush regime’s lies about the existence of Iraqi WMDs, which were printed in the New York Times as the gospel truth, were a major part of propaganda blitz used to bully and stampede the American people and the Congress into supporting the stupid invasion of Iraq. Judith Miller is now protecting some traitorous criminals in the Bush White House who illegally outed the undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame some two years ago; she is not “protecting her sources.” 

Valerie Plame, the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was outed by someone in the Bush White House as retaliation against him for his earlier having revealed the Bush lie about Iraq having purchased some yellow cake uranium ore from Niger, a country in Africa. The Cheney lie was that Saddam had “reconstituted his nuclear program” and thus needed the uranium ore to make nuclear weapons. Ambassador Wilson revealed that the documents that supposedly showed the Iraqi purchase of yellow cake were merely crude forgeries. Ambassador Wilson then blew the whistle on these Bush lies by going public with this information. This was a big step in cracking the facade of all of the Bush lies about Iraq.  

The Bush White House then orchestrated the outing of an undercover CIA agent, who incidentally was researching possible WMD threats, in what was an 

extremely reckless act. This criminal action was meant to intimidate other potential whistle-blowers who might want to reveal other Bush regime crimes.  

I guess that all the editorial pontificators prattling on about the supposed “freedom of the press” in America are not referring to the freedom of the corporate media to lie, smear, attack, distort, omit facts and act as cheerleaders in support of the illegitimate Bush regime, its thefts of presidential elections in 2000 and 2004, its vast corporate corruption, its absurd unbelievable incompetence in managing to not quite be able seal off airliner cockpits in time to stop the nine-eleven terror attacks, its overthrow of the democracy in Haiti by the kidnapping of President Aristide to Africa and his replacement by death squad leaders and its illegal 

criminal war on the Iraqi people.  

The only “free press” newspapers left in 21st century corporate America are a few courageous progressive alternative weekly papers. Otherwise, we are forced to go to the Internet each day to find anything resembling the truth. In this regard, some useful alternative media websites include: News from occupied Iraq at www.uruknet.info, the LeftCoaster at www.theleftcoaster.com, Nero Fiddled at /nerofiddled.blogspot.com, Common Dreams at www.commondreams.org, Truth Out at www.truthout.org, Tom Paine at www.tompaine.com, Buzz Flash at www.buzzflash.com, Bella Ciao at //bellaciao.org and the Daily Kos at www.dailykos.com. 

James K. Sayre 

Oakland 

It will be three years until the next Democratic convention, but Washington insiders not only expect Hillary Clinton to run for president, they believe that she will easily garner the nomination. According to veteran prognosticator Charlie Cook, Hillary is far ahead of the other contenders, both in terms of money raised and support among the party faithful. First, she has to win re-election to her New York Senate seat; if she wins that race handily in 2006, then her historic presidential nomination seems assured. Anticipating Hillary, conservatives have already launched a no-holds-barred assault on the former first lady. 

Few question Sen. Clinton’s intelligence or determination. The standard objection to her candidacy is that she is “a polarizing figure”—that for every voter who is a fan, there is another who detests her. Many feel that the polarizing label sells Hillary short. Charlie Cook observed that Hillary’s constituents have found her to be hardworking and pragmatic. Recent New York polls showed the Senator with favorability ratings in the 60-70 percent range, and holding a thirty-point lead over her likely opponents. 

Outside New York, many voters continue to have reservations about the former first lady. While some of their hesitation may be due to sexist bias, the most likely source is her enigmatic relationship with Bill Clinton.  

Even in Europe, the former first lady is a controversial figure. In May, at a dinner party in Great Britain, several conservative Brits volunteered that they did not like Hillary Clinton. Although they knew almost nothing about her, they had negative feelings based upon the fact that Ms. Clinton stayed married to Bill after the Monica Lewinsky scandal. They believed Hillary did this in order to further her political career and described her as an “opportunist.” Many American voters share these sentiments. 

Roughly one-third of the electorate dislikes Sen. Clinton and probably won’t vote for her under any circumstance. Assuming that another third will vote for whomever the Democrats nominate, that leaves a final third that Hillary has to win over. Republican leaders are already worried about the possibility that the former First Lady might shake her “difficult woman” moniker and broaden her base of support. Predictably, they have launched their favorite weapon, the negative hit piece based upon interviews with questionable sources. 

In June, Edward Klein’s book The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She’ll Go to Become President was published. In 272 pages, long on innuendo and woefully short on journalism, Klein levels two charges at the senator: she may be a lesbian (Gadzooks!) and she is ambitious (Sacre Bleu!). While universally panned, Klein’s book has crept near the top of the best-seller list. No doubt it is only the first of a series of attacks on Ms. Clinton, part of a carefully orchestrated Republican strategy to keep alive the iconic image of Hillary as a person of poor moral character because she had the temerity to “stand by her man” and now seeks her own starring role. 

Hillary Clinton has wisely decided not to respond to Klein’s book. Instead her campaign is methodically gathering support, gaining momentum for the races in 2006 and 2008. In the course of this effort, the junior Senator from New York is carefully establishing her positions on issues ranging from abortion to zydeco. 

Is Ms. Clinton a liberal or a centrist? Does she have original ideas or is she content to cannibalize those of others? Will her campaign be poll-driven or will she have the chutzpah to take an independent stand on strategic issues? In due course we will learn the answers to the many questions that rank-and-file Democrats have about their probable nominee. 

In the meantime, it would tell us a lot about the “real” Hillary if she would help her party by providing some of the leadership it desperately needs. At this moment in time, the Democratic Party is struggling to find its identity. A recent Democracy Corps poll found that while voters had lost confidence in President Bush, Democrats had fallen even further out of favor—only 38 percent of the electorate had positive feelings about them versus 43 percent for the Republicans. Veteran Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg attributed this decline to the public perception that Democrats have “no core set of convictions or point of view.” Most voters are clear that the Dems oppose the policies of the Bush administration but unsure of what they offer to replace them with. At the moment, Democrats are best characterized as the Party whose unifying slogan is, “Just say no.” 

Based upon her status as the party’s probable nominee, and with her own Senate reelection seemingly assured, it is not asking too much for Hillary to help the party get its act together for 2006. Whether she does this, or instead, plays it’s safe and lets others carry the load until 2008, will tell us a lot about Ms. Clinton. Is she is a real leader, a rock the party can rebuild around, or yet another self-centered celebrity candidate? 

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer and activist. He can be reached at bobburnett@comcast.net. 

›

For years there has been a small leak in the ceiling between the upstairs bathroom and the downstairs dining room at our house. As leaks tend to do, it has grown progressively worse with time. The first major seepage was discovered after a charming young Russian guest decided to hand wash clothes in the bathroom sink. She forgot to turn off the hot water spigot before leaving the house. A crack in the downstairs ceiling plaster developed and water dripped onto the dining room table. Fortunately, no one was sitting there at the time, and after some investigation and discussion it was decided that as long as no one left the water running, or as long as there were no Russians in the house, we didn’t really have a major plumbing problem, we just had a big hole in the ceiling.  

But then sporadic leaks sprung whenever anyone took a bath. We fixed this situation by banning upstairs bathing. One was allowed to take a brief shower, but no one was permitted to soak in the tub. This policy worked okay because, even though there are four adults living in our house, no one has the leisure time required to loll in the tub. 

Last week the situation changed with two significant events. First, our friend Jernae, a teenager, moved in for the summer, and second, my 3-year-old nephew, Bryce, came to visit at the same time my housemate’s 7-year-old niece, Clyiesha, dropped by for an extended stay.  

I took Bryce and Clyiesha to a small park located just south of the Claremont Avenue DMV. It’s one of a few tiny green oases where Temescal Creek runs above ground for several yards. Bryce and Clyiesha took off their shoes, and immediately began wading. Before I knew it, they had whipped off their pants and shirts and were fully engaged in water sports and hydrotherapy research. When we got home, Andrea, Clyiesha’s aunt, made them take a bubble bath. I momentarily forgot about the leakage problem, but not for long. 

Immediately after Bryce and Clyiesha got out of the tub, Jernae took a bubble bath by herself. When she was done I took a shower and that’s when the trouble began. Too much water had backed up behind the wall due to seepage from the ancient pipes. It was raining in our dining room.  

So I did what I always do when we suffer from plumbing failure: I called my neighbor, Teddy Franklin, and asked for his help. He came over and diagnosed the problem. We needed to replace the hot and cold spigot stems and the shower diverter.  

The next day Teddy and I went to Orchard Supply to look for parts. There were hundreds of bathtub stems to choose from but none that fit the exact measurements of our upstairs tub. We went across the street to Ashby Hardware and Building Supply, and when that didn’t work we went to Ehret Company Plumbing and Heating on Gilman Street. A nice man named Joe spent an hour looking for the proper replacements. He found a shower stem, but not the correct hot and cold water apparatus. We drove to Rubenstein Supply on 28th and San Pablo in search of the missing pieces. An enormous gentleman with a lot of tattoos told us that we needed to go to Meyer Plumbing Supply located near Jack London Square. “And if they don’t have it?” I asked Teddy as we sped toward the docks. Teddy shook his head. “Then we’re talkin’ cuttin’ a hole in the wall, pullin’ all the pipes, and replacin’ everything,” said Teddy. “It’s gonna get ugly.” 

But at Meyer’s we found exactly what we needed. Three hours after leaving home, Teddy and I returned. He repaired the bathtub leak in less than thirty minutes. Finding the proper hardware took six times as long as the actual fix. I always knew that I didn’t want to be a plumber, but I thought it was because of the nature of the work. Now I know it’s because of the parts, and not the resulting product.  

.

Quickly Extinguished 

Firefighters blame that old favorite, a problematic extension cord, for a Saturday blaze that did $15,000 in damage to one room and its contents in a garden courtyard apartment at 2233 Blake St. 

The 911 call reached firefighters at 5:59 p.m., and when they arrived moments later, they found flames shooting out of a window, said Deputy Fire Chief David Orth. 

The flames were quickly extinguished, with the damaged confined to a single room, Orth said.µ

Tall, Thin, Deadly 

A thin man about 6’5” tall who professed to be packing a deadly weapon convinced a woman to surrender her cash about 2:15 a.m. Thursday near the corner of Blake and Ellsworth streets, said Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies. 

Bottle Hurler 

Police are seeking the 20-something woman who hurled a bottle at a 59-year-old woman outside St. Helena Liquors at 2198 San Pablo Ave. shortly after noon Thursday. 

Officer Okies said the bottle didn’t cause serious damage to the intended victim but did manage to inflict some property damage. 

Drive-By Shooting 

A man was sitting in his car on Francisco Street near the corner of Curtis Street just before 9 p.m. Thursday when a dark gray PT Cruiser pulled alongside, a dark tinted window rolled down and a handful of pistol appeared, followed by a volley of shots. 

The would-be victim sustained only superficial injuries in the potentially deadly attack, said Okies.  

Laptop Robbery 

A pair of strongly built felons approached a man in the 1900 Block of University Avenue at 2:45 a.m. Friday, when one of them delivered a kick just before the pair made off with their victim’s laptop computer. 

The two men were associated with a red vehicle with out-of-state plates which was last seen headed southbound on Shattuck Avenue, said Officer Okies. 

Gang of Four 

Four bandits braced a 33-year-old man in the 2300 block of Durant Avenue about 12:48 a.m. Sunday and strong-armed him into forking over his wallet and cash. 

Escalatio 

A verbal altercation between two men outside the 76 Station at 901 Ashby Ave. just before 1:30 p.m. Saturday clicked up a notch when one of the two headed to his car and returned with a baseball, which he brandished at the other before setting it down. 

After the argument escalated yet again, the would-be bat-wielder picked up an air hose and swung it, striking his co-disputant squarely in the head. 

At that point, the bat-threatened and hose-hit fellow and his opponent launched into a round of fisticuffs, resulting in the flight of bat boy. 

Officer Okies said the two fellows were known to each other before the fracas. An investigation into the brouhaha is now underway. 

Youthful Villains 

Police are seeking two youths between the ages of 12 and 14 who robbed a 70-something woman outside the Berkeley Bowl shortly after 6 p.m. Sunday. 

The two grabbed at her purse, which she unsuccessfully fought to keep before the young bandits fled the scene on their bicycles. 

By continuing the fight after she tried to keep the purse, the youngsters elevated their crime from a simple purse snatch to a more serious strong-arm robbery, said Officer Okies. 

Woman Snatches Purse 

A woman in her 30s approached a 20-year-old woman near the corner of Regent and Parker streets shortly before 11 p.m. Sunday, knocked her to the ground and then made off with her purse. 

Your story “Board Vetoes Jefferson School Name Change” (July 8) was misleading. I was never “torn” about the name change. I objected to labeling opponents of the name change as racist, and opposed arguments that the nasty nature of the campaign somehow justified ignoring the result of the vote. I said what the School Board taught about the value of democracy was more important than any school name. I reminded the School Board how disgusted we were when the Supreme Court interfered with the 2000 election. I implored boardmembers to prove that in Berkeley one’s vote still counted, and concluded that admiration for Jefferson required respecting the democratic process he so loved by honoring the vote to re-name the school. 

Unfortunately this incident represents another episode in the accelerating trend toward undemocratic governance. In 2001 I warned that Berkeley was becoming “…an administrative state, where policy is decided by bureaucratic fait, and where the voice of the people will not be heard.” ( “Dead Trees Resemble Communications Tower Fiasco,” March 28, 2001.) 

Since then the problem has gotten worse. First Linda Maio’s aide Brad Smith issued a memo calling for removal of commissioners who favored the Height Initiative. Then, immediately following the mayor’s apology for trashing newspapers that endorsed his opponent, the City Council ignored pleas by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Peace and Justice Commission by creating a secretive “Agenda Committee” which, in the absence of TV and radio coverage, makes backroom deals and prevents controversial items from appearing on City Council agendas. 

The March 2002 election saw voters adopt initiatives further eroding democracy. Measure H lowered to 40 percent the number of votes a candidate needs to avoid a run-off election, and Measure J made it more difficult to run for local office. Ironically, Maudelle Shirek failed to qualify for re-election after, either by confusion or conspiracy, she failed to comply with the more complicated procedures she sanctioned by supporting Measure J. 

By 2004 the gratitude toward more amiable City Council meetings was fading. Some people began to see Mayor Bates as the mythical evil genie who grants wishes at the cost of dire unanticipated consequences—the wicked magician whose parlor tricks made squabbling vanish by pulling back room deals out of his hat while making democratic debate disappear. That fiscal waste and disgust at the selling out of citizen interest to developers led an unlikely coalition of Berkeley voters to defeat every tax increase City Council placed on the ballot. To drive the point home the same voters adopted tax increases for Berkeley schools, state mental health and children’s hospitals. Berkeley voters were not opposing to taxes per se, but the City Council itself. 

Unfortunately, the council is ignoring the message. The sneaky deal with UC to abandon authority over downtown development means that unless the courts intervene the mayor, city staff and UC developers can make backroom development deals which can not be altered by commissions or by the City Council. Councilmembers have violated the city charter by relinquishing land use authority and guaranteed a charade of sympathetic speeches about how UC’s sovereign immunity means we can do nothing to stop the very development this deal allows! 

These sleazy arrangements to undermine democratic participation will further alienate citizens from city government making the rejection of future tax measures more likely. If voting “no” continues to fall upon deaf ears, Charter Reform will eventually be enacted. My fear is that at the rate that the City Council is giving public land away to developers there will be little left to save by that time. 

Elliot Cohen is a member of the Peace and Justice Commission.  

While some of our better lawmakers are working hard to improve our schools, keep fire stations open, fix our roads, and bring jobs to our beloved city of Berkeley, a chosen few are once again wasting their time, and our dollars, writing resolutions on na tional and international issues. 

In the most recent example, Councilmember Kriss Worthington wrote a resolution supporting a federal Department of Peace. On the surface a Department of Peace sounds like a lovely idea. What the heck, while we’re at it, le t’s call it the Department of Peace, Puppies, and Chocolate—those are good things that we can all get behind, right? 

Before I delve into the flawed logic for a Department of Peace, let’s first examine my reasons for voting against the resolution as a com missioner on Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission. The commission reviewed the legislation first in order to save our elected officials from wasting their time and our money. 

Our city government has jurisdiction and power only on a local level. We hav e a responsibility to provide the citizens of Berkeley with good schools, police and fire protection, functioning roads and so on. Nowhere in our job descriptions does it say that the Mayor or the city council is supposed to have a position on issues like Middle East politics, war, free trade, or the United Nations. Regardless of my personal opinions, the fact that Kriss Worthington hates President Bush or the Iraq war or all wars is of little concern to me and even less concern to the rest of the country. Why? He is a local politician with zero federal power. His job is to improve the small town of Berkeley. When our city council wastes its time and our dollars debating and voting on one ineffectual resolution after another just to make themselves feel g ood, I get incensed and so should the rest of Berkeley’s citizens.  

The city’s volunteer Peace and Justice Commission, appointed by the City Council and the School Board, reviewed the Department of Peace legislation and listened to public testimony and d ebate during two consecutive meetings. The resolution was not able to garner enough votes to pass a supporting resolution onto the council. Those in favor needed eight votes. They got six. Three people abstained, and I proudly voted against it. Five membe rs were absent. 

The three commissioners who abstained were not uninformed as Elliot Cohen, a fellow commissioner, erroneously told the City Council. These abstainers were squarely against the legislation but were frightened out of their shoes to publicly vote against something and risk being characterized by the progressives as—hold on to your hats—anti-peace!  

Unhappy with their loss at the commission, Cohen and others went crying to Worthington for relief, sidestepping the process and making the commission system virtually obsolete. Maybe we don’t need a Peace and Justice Commission after all. 

What’s wrong with a Department of Peace? First, I suggest reading what Dennis Kucinich, the author of the legislation, is calling for. I’m fairly certain most of the councilmembers who voted for the resolution didn’t bother to read it. But let’s assume they did. When you see them, thank them for spending your tax dollars to read about issues they have no jurisdiction over.  

The proposed Department of Peace cal ls for the creation of dozens and dozens of largely redundant programs dealing with spousal abuse, gangs, labor laws, drug abuse, ethnic intolerance and on and on – and oh yes, it also calls for the department to stop our government from getting into wars that progressives don’t approve of. The fact that there are federal, state, city, and non governmental organizations already working to solve these problems is lost on them. The fact that we already have a Department of State working for peace all over t he world is lost on them. The fact that we have a delegation to the United Nations, once again, is lost on them. 

Another key principal of Kucinich’s legislation is the establishment of a cabinet level Secretary of Peace. Let’s say the progressives got th eir Department of Peace. How would they feel about Donald Rumsfeld being appointed by the President to run the Department? It could happen. What would they do then, write a new resolution calling for the abolishment of the Department of Peace? 

To date, o nly a few members of the House have signed on as co-sponsors. In fact, the legislation has been languishing in the House for over two years. At Tuesday’s city council meeting, the local backers of this legislation waved around a letter from Sen. Feinstein misrepresenting her position entirely. She does not support this legislation. Her boiler plate response letter only said that she’d “examine” it.  

Councilmembers Worthington, Anderson, Maio, Moore, Spring, and Mayor Bates can feel good that their progre ssive credentials are intact. But let’s be honest. Was one new teacher hired? Will all our fire stations be open twenty-four hours a day this summer? Were any new jobs created? Has the life of one single person in this city been improved? This is their jo b.  

Councilmembers Capitelli, Olds, and Wozniak all abstained from the voting to support the Department of Peace. They need to be thanked and congratulated for doing the right thing.  

My vote against the resolution on the Peace and Justice commission wa s not a vote against peace. It was a message to the City Council: Do your job. We need to remind them of it every day, or they need to be voted out of office. 

Jonathan Wornick is a member of the Peace and Justice Commission. 

à

The new fiscal year is a good time to look back on the last two and a half years and reflect on where we are in Berkeley and on what we have accomplished together. 

I took office at a time when the city was facing the worst budget crisis in our history with rising costs, flat revenues, and major reductions in state and federal funding. In just the past two and a half years, we cut $20 million out of our budget, eliminated over 10 percent of our workforce and reduced support to many of our community-serving programs.  

In spite of this immense challenge, we found new ways to innovate. We turned many of those challenges into opportunities to reclaim Berkeley’s leadership on environmental, housing and youth policy.  

Without question, Berkeley has regained its position as a world environmental leader. In fact, Berkeley was recently named the third most sustainable city in the country. I am proud of that ranking—as well as the fact that we are using our environmental policies to save money and build our economic base. 

The City Council adopted the Kyoto Protocol, required all city buildings to be built to a high green (LEED-silver) standards, enacted the precautionary principals to ensure the healthiest public policy options are chosen, and is joining the Chicago Climate Exchange to reduce green house gas emissions.  

There are more than 200 “green businesses” and 75 green buildings in Berkeley, making this a national center for sustainable business. The city has fostered this growth by creating the Mayor’s Sustainable Business Working Group and developing an action plan to build on our green businesses success. The city recently adopted a plan to achieve “zero waste” by the year 2020—helping the environment and giving a boost to the businesses that have sprung up to make use of the recycled and reused materials. 

Berkeley is also at the forefront of the clean energy revolution. We recently formed an innovative privately financed $100 million clean energy fund partnership with the City of Oakland. The city has helped provide thousands of small businesses and private homes with free-energy efficiency retrofits. We have taken the lead in moving towards public power through a community choice aggregation joint partnership with several Bay Area cities. These programs are making Berkeley a more competitive place for sustainable businesses to locate. 

The City of Berkeley also brought City CarShare to local government, replacing 15 of its fleet cars with four hybrids that are available to the public through City CarShare on evenings and weekends. The innovative program will save the City $400,000 in the first year, reduce emissions, and reduce the need for parking spaces. Earlier this year, it was named one of the 12 most innovative city programs in the country by Harvard University.  

We are also working to expand open space and sports fields. Berkeley is leading a Joint Powers Authority with five neighboring cities, in cooperation with the East Bay Regional Parks District and State Parks Department, to oversee a $6 million dollar 17-acre sports field complex to give young people and adults a place to play ball. 

On the housing front, Berkeley used its housing trust fund to build more affordable and workforce housing than at any time in our history. Two affordable housing developments are under construction and three additional projects are in the pipeline—adding nearly 300 new units for low-income seniors, disabled, and working families to our housing stock. We are ensuring that people who work in Berkeley will still be able to live here. 

Perhaps most importantly, we have marshaled our resources to protect our young people. We have saved programs for Berkeley’s youth from debilitating cutbacks, allocating $600,000 annually from its the general fund to subsidize childcare for low-income families and $7 million for youth programs. This commitment to young people earned Berkeley statewide recognition from the California Wellness Foundation as the number one Teen Healthy City in California. 

This summer, we expanded an innovative partnership called Project BUILD (Berkeley United in Literacy Development) to bring summer literacy, nutrition and physical activity to hundreds of preschool and school age children in South and West Berkeley—where the greatest health and academic disparities exist. Now in its second year, the partnership includes the UC Cal Corps Public Service Center, the city’s recreation centers, libraries senior and public health programs, UC Berkeley schools of Education and Public Health, and BUSD and is funded by local businesses.  

This year approximately 40 employees volunteered with Berkeley’s “at risk” youth as a result of the City Council-adopted initiative called Berkeley Champions for Kids —a multi-pronged program that encourages Berkeley adults to mentor and volunteer with Berkeley’s young people. Included in Berkeley Champions for Kids are also opportunities for city employees to donate to local youth-serving programs through a voluntary payroll deduction program. 

I’m very proud of our city’s progressive record while swimming up stream against federal and state cut backs and a weak economy. We still have a lot to do, but Berkeley is once again setting the pace.  

Tom Bates is the mayor of Berkeley. 

Last week the City of Albany installed three enormous green dumpsters on the upper road leading to the Albany Bulb and began an operation the purpose of which we’re being told is to clean out campsites of the homeless, some of which have been reoccupied in recent months. 

Unfortunately the clean up is being done in a way that is producing massive and completely unnecessary environmental damage. Unless the methods used are changed, irreparable harm will be done to the fragile ecosystem of the landfill. 

Instead of using the least intrusive means to accomplish its objective the city has chosen to bring in bulldozers and heavy equipment. The road down the center of the Bulb has been widened, although it was already wide enough to allow the passage of police vehicles and pick ups. In two places large circles have been scrapped bare around methane vents. But the worst damage has been caused by the use of heavy equipment to clear paths to campsites. California native plants including full grown coyote bush have been flattened. In one case mature palm trees and acacias have been uprooted. Broken tree limbs and dirt have been bulldozed down a hillside, destroying what was one of the prettiest groves of trees on the entire landfill. 

There is no reason why the environment needs to be collateral damage of the campaign to remove the homeless from the landfill. Everything that the homeless brought into the landfill was carried in by hand, or wheeled in on shopping carts and bicycles. If they brought stuff in by hand, it can be taken out by hand. 

The use of heavy equipment makes no sense if Albany is simply conducting a cleanup operation. A possible explanation for its use is that Albany’s goal goes beyond cleanup to reshaping the landscape of the landfill so that it no longer provides camouflage for possible homeless sites. If that is the case, the operation is shortsighted and futile. It will destroy habitat for wildlife, reduce biodiversity, replace a complex mix of mature plants with fast growing invasive vegetation, and leave ugly scars which will not heal for decades. The folly of destroying a village in order to save it is self evident. The folly of destroying everything that is attractive about the landfill in order to prevent homeless people from camping there should be equally obvious. Regular patrolling and the issuance of warnings would be more effective and have fewer side effects. 

Albany may be ambivalent about the landfill. The debate about its future has been lively and impassioned. It may soon become part of the East Shore State Park. But whatever its future, the current operation needs to be stopped and reassessed immediately. 

Destruction is easy. But trees take years to grow and ecosystems can not be willed into being overnight. 

Osha Neumann is a local artist and attorney.›

From its origins about 400 years ago, opera has been conceived as a synaesthetic experience. The voices, the lyrics, the orchestration, stylized acting, costumes, sets and lighting are meant to add up to a total effect on all the senses of the audience. This is what has given credence to the frequent claims that opera is the greatest of arts—because it combines them all in an aesthetic apotheosis. 

Festival Opera’s production of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball), playing this Tuesday, Friday and Sunday at Walnut Creek’s Dean Lesher Center, brings the truth of these claims home in a way that more extravagant productions in the great opera houses often don’t. 

The popular caricature of opera as overwrought and cloying unfortunately applies to many of these lavish shows; the audience is left to sort out what elements really worked. Festival Opera’s Un Ballo, however, is a triumph of perfect coordination between cast, orchestra, musical and stage direction and design that results in a stunning overall effect, something that could never be achieved in its particular way by any other means, by any of the other arts. 

Un Ballo is based on an historic incident, the assassination of Sweden’s king, Gustavus III, by Count Ankerstrüm at a masked ball at court during the late 18th century. The opera, with libretto by Antonio Somma, was based on a work by French playwright Eugene Scribe (responsible for the type of “well-wrought” play that’s the model for subsequent commercial theater and screenplays). The setting was changed (note the characters’ Italian names) as regicide was still a sensitive issue. 

In the pit before the stage, dominated by an enormous gilt picture frame, conductor Michael Morgan strikes up the orchestra in the overture, graceful, but with elegiac overtones. He emphasizes the great spectrum of moods that quickly alternate, even crowding in and contradicting one another. The tempo rises and the music is briefly tempestuous, then the lights go up to reveal a tableau of the court within the golden frame, courtly figures striking a pose beneath marble arches and heraldic banners—perfect image of a 19th century academic imitation of an Old Master painting. Each act begins and ends this way. 

This is Romantic opera at its peak. The story is sublime, but also a melodrama from a scandal sheet. King Riccardo is a noble, reckless soul, with a secret, forbidden love whom he looks forward to seeing at the masked ball. Heroic tenor Mark Duffin is a splendid Riccardo, gaining strength as he goes, especially in the second act’s graveyard (and gallows-side) duet with wonderful soprano Hope Briggs as Amelia, his inamorata. Baritone Scott Bearden as faithful nobleman Renato tries to warn the careless, lovelorn Riccardo of a plot on his life, but Riccardo shrugs it off. The unknowing Renato is Amelia’s husband. Here are all the threads of the plot that will twist into tragedy.  

In subsequent scenes, among the fantastic ruins (like the chiaroscuro of a baroque oil painting), gypsy sorceress Ulrica (dramatically powerful mezzo Patrice Houston) reads the palm of the disguised Riccardo and tells him a friend will kill him. Then Riccardo confronts Amelia by the gallows as she gathers a dread herb to help her forget their love. And in a drawing room, Renato condemns Amelia before an enormous portrait of the king (the room in strange foreshortened perspective). Finally, at the masked ball, the plot teases out every bit of emotion and musical color and rhythm possible. 

The cast is uniformly fine, with exceptional support from soprano Aimee Puentes as impish pageboy Oscar (who at one point leaps into the arms of startled Renato), and basses Matthew Trevino and Carlos Aguilar as the somberly dressed conspirators. The chorus, whether as the court or the superstitious subjects attending the gypsy’s prophecies, is very good, presided over by chorus master John Kendall Bailey. 

Set designer Peter Crompton has excelled in his extraordinary conception, abetted by excellent work by lighting designer Matthew Antaky, costumer Vincent, and stage director David Cox, who moved the cast within and outside the proscenium of Crompton’s great gilt frame with a skillful grace that accented the lyric and dramatic features of the libretto. Frederic O. Boulay was director of production. 

The collaboration among all involved—remarkable in that all principals besides Houston, as well as designers Antaky and Vincent, are debuting with Festival—makes Un Ballo in Maschera an event equal to any recently in the several performing arts. 

“Why go to San Francisco?” reads the Lesher Center’s advertisement, “Festival Opera’s here!”—good reason for the rest of us to make it to Walnut Creek. 

Festival Opera presents Un Ballo in Maschera at 8 p.m. July12 and 15 and at 2 p.m. July 17 at the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek. $35-$100. Sung in Italian with English supertitles. For more information, see www.festivalopera.com or order tickets at (925) 943-SHOW.›

TUESDAY, JULY 12 

CHILDREN 

Colibri An interactive journey through Latin America with traditional instruments and song, at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

FILM 

Eyeing Nature “The Great Art of Knowing” and “Skagafjordur”at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Sam Davis on “Designing for the Homeless: Architecture that Works” at 6 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. Free, but please RSVP 643-8465. 

Bakari Kitwana explains “Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiffers, Wannabes and the New Reality of Race in America” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

The Whole Note Poetry Series with Nicole Henares and Anise at 7 p.m. at The Beanery, 2925 College Ave. 549-9093. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Swamp Coolers at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054.  

The Karan Casey Band, Irish progressive traditionalists, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50- $18.50. 548-1761.  

Singers’ Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

Mark Goldenberg at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

YMP and the Jazz Masters Benefit at 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $18-$22. 238-9200.  

Barbara Linn at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

WEDNESDAY, JULY 13 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Vanishing Species and More” recent mixed-media paintings by Rita Sklar. Reception for the artist at 4 p.m. at the Joseph P. Bort MetroCenter, 101 Eighth St., Oakland. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays. 464-7773. 

ACCI Gallery, “2005 New Member Show” Reception for the artists at 6 p.m. at 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

“Transformations” A new Life for Recycled and Found Objects by Toby Tover-Krein. Reception at 4 p.m. at LunchStop Café, Bort Metro Center, 101 8th St. Oakland. Sponsored by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. 

FILM 

For Your Eyes Only “ Saboteur” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Arab Women Film Festival “Hollywood Harems” and “Benaat Chicago” at 7:30 p.m. at La Pena Cultural Center. Donation $5. 849-2568. www.lapena.org  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Faith Adiele talks about her journey to become Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun in “Meeting Faith” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.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 

Café Poetry hosted by Kira Allen at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña. Donation $2. 849-2568.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

Bernard Anderson & The Old School Band at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. West Coast Swing dance lesson with Nick & Shanna at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

Sat Tan Trio, heavy dub, jazz, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Fiamma Fumana, Italian folk fusion, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50- $18.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

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

The Fourtet Jazz Group at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Pete Escovedo & His Orchestra at 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $20-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, JULY 14 

EXHIBITIONS 

California Watercolor Association “Summer Small Paintings Show. Artists reception at 6 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. 848-1228. www.giorgigallery.com 

“Fire & Light” The Crucible’s Fire Arts Festival at 6:30 p.m. at 1260 7th St., Oakland. Tickets are $75. 444-0919. www.thecrucible.org 

FILM 

Pre-Code Hollywood “Female” at 7:30 p.m. and “Heat Lightening” at 8:50 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Bay Area Writing Project’s Young Writers will read at 7 p.m. at Moe’s Bookstore, 2476 Telegraph Ave.  

“On the Wall: The Art of Collecting Photography” A panel discussion sponsored by Pacific Center for the Photographic Arts at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Free, donations accepted.  

Helen Oyeyemi introduces her novel of a child torn between the worlds of her British father and Nigerian mother in “The Icarus Girl” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

“The Photographc Legacy of Claude Cahun” with Sandra Phillips, SFMOMA, at 6:30 p.m. at Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. Cost is $4-$6. 549-6950. 

Word Beat Reading Series with Cherise Wyneken & Tim Nuveen at 7 p.m. at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. 526-5985. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Summer Noon Concert with The Hipnotics at the Downtown Berkeley BART Plaza. Sponsored by the Downtown Berkeley Association. 

From Bastille to Bush, labor musicians, including Anne Feeney, at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$20. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Jug Free America at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Jason Davis & Jazz Pirates at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

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

The Welcome Matt, Demons Defeated at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082 www.starryplough.com 

Debbie Poryes/Glenn Richman Duo at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

FRIDAY, JULY 15 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley, “A Murder is Announced” by Agatha Christie at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck at Berryman. Runs Fri. and Sat. through Aug. 13. Tickets are $10. 649-5999. www.aeofberkeley.org 

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 

“The Domestic Crusaders” the story of a Muslim family in the aftermath of 9/11, at 8 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 8 p.m. at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. Tickets are $20-$35. www.domesticcrusaders.com 

Central Works, “The Grand Inquisitor” by Dostoevsky. Thurs - Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at The Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through July 31. Tickets are $9-$25 sliding scale. 558-1381. www.centralworks.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theatre “Anything Goes” Cole Porter’s musical, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through Aug. 13 at 951 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito. 524-9132. www.ccct.org 

“Livin’ Fat” a comedy about an African American family struggling over a financial blessing, Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 8 p.m., Sun. at 4 p.m., through July 30, at Sweets Ballroom, 1933 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $12.50-$35. 233-9222. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Lightning From Above” The Crucible’s Fire Arts Festival at 8 p.m. at 1260 7th St., Oakland. Tickets are $25. 444-0919. www.thecrucible.org 

ACCI Gallery, “2005 New Member Show” opens at 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

Eddie Two Moons, Apache Jeweler Reception at 7 p.m. at Gathering Tribes Gallery, 1573 Solano Ave. Exhibit open Sat. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sun. 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. 528-9038. www.gatheringtribes.com 

FILM 

For Your Eyes Only “Spies” at 7:30 p.m. at Pacific Film Archive. With Jon Mirsalis on piano. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Lisa Houston, mezzo-soprano, with Daniel Lockert, piano and Leland Morine, baritone in a benefit concert for Options Recovery Services, at 8 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Suggested donation $30. 666-9900. www.optionsrecovery.org 

Santero, debut album release party at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Stomp the Stumps Benefit for the Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters with Gary Gates Band, Funky Nixons and Day Late Fools’ Band at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10-$20. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Ellen Hoffman, Eric Swinderman at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Jill Knight with Deborah Levoy at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Vince Lateano/Satoru Oda Quartet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

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

Brenda Weiler, folk/rock singer-songwriter, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. All ages. Cost is $5-$10. www.epicarts.org 

The Next Generation, Emerging Artists Concert Series at 8 p.m. at the Jazz- 

school. Cost is $10. 845-5373.  

Lae with Ranch Hound Brown at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$8. 548-1159.  

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

Battletorn, Gunsfire Mayhem, P.D.A. at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

Pete Escovedo & His Orchestra at 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $20-$24. 238-9200.  

SATURDAY, JULY 16 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Magma From Within” The Crucible’s Fire Arts Festival at 8 p.m. at 1260 7th St., Oakland. Tickets are $25. 444-0919. www.thecrucible.org 

THEATER 

Woman’s Will, “Richard III” Sat. and Sun. at 1 p.m. in John Hinkle Park. Free. 420-0813. www.woman’s will.org 

FILM 

Pre-Code Hollywood “Bombshell” at 7 p.m. and “Red Headed Woman” at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

Oakland Outdoor Cinema “West Side Story” with an introduction by Rita Moreno, at 8 p.m. on Washington St. between 9th and 10th Sts. Limited seating, bring chairs and blankets. 238-4734. www.filmoakland.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Grace Grafton & James Downs at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Opera “Meistersinger” at 7:30 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Theater. Tickets are $10-$40. 925-798-1300. www.berkeleyopera.org 

Rebbesoul, world fusion with Hebrew roots, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Hideo Date, Robin Gregory at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

Kurt Ribak Trio at 2 p.m. at Down Home Music, 10341 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 525-2129. 

Odori Simcha with Neal Cronin at 7 p.m. at Temescal Cafe, 4920 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Donation $5. 

Mariospeedwagon & Lemon Juju at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Hip Bones, jazz grooves, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

John Keawe at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Loose Wig Quartet at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com  

Flamenco, music and dance, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$20. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Frank Fotusky and Steve Mann at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. www.epicarts.org 

Phil Kellogg, psychadelic blues, at 7 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Campo Bravo, Judith and Holornes, The RIse & Fall of Amy Rude at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Randy Porter Trio at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Thought Riot, Love Equals Death, Daggermouth at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, JULY 17 

CHILDREN 

Explore Geometric Shapes and Sculpture from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. Cost is $8 adults, $5 seniors and students with i.d. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

Berkeley Art Center National Juried Exhibition and Awards Reception at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

“Thirty Something” Anniversary celebration and exhibition honoring Berkeley’s Kala Art Institute and Archana Horsting and Yuzo Nakano at 5:30 p.m. at Greens Restaurant, Fort Mason, SF. Tickets are $150. 549-2977. www.kala.org 

“On University Land in the Berkeley Hills” nature photographs by Sharon Beals. Reception at 4 p.m. at The Faculty Club, UC Campus. Hosted by the Claremont Canyon Conservancy. 

THEATER 

Sun & Moon Ensemble “Krishan and Radha” with performers and musicians from India at 4 p.m. at Julia Morgan Theater. Tickets are $10 for adults, $5 for children. 925-798-1300. www.juliamorgan.org 

FILM 

Harold Lloyd “Safety Last” at 3 p.m. and Pre-Code Hollywood “I’m No Angel” at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Free Speech Movement Poetry Festival, featuring Jack Hirschman, Paul Sawyer and others, from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar St. 528-5403. 

Poetry Flash with Dale Jensen & Judy Wells at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852.  

Sculptor Bruce Beasley, Artist’s Gallery Talk at 2 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Midsummer Mozart “Paris” Symphony at 7 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $28-$48. 415-627-9145.  

The Berkeley Saxophone Quartet at 4 p.m. at the San Francisco Community Music Center, 544 Capp St., S.F. Tickets available at the door at $10 for adults, $5 for children and seniors. 415-647-6015. berkeleysaxophonequartet.com 

Jack Gates Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

Ace of Spades Acoustic Series with Paula Fraxzier, Patty Spiglanin and JJ Schultz at 1 p.m. at MamaBuzz Cafe, 2318 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Free. All ages. 289-2272. 

Americana Unplugged: Redwing Bluegrass Band at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 655-5715. 

Danzaq, Peruvian dance, at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15. 849-2568.  

The Strings Quartet Project at 4:30 at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. 

Roy Bookbinder at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Flamenco Open Stage at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Mental, Justice at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

MONDAY, JULY 18 

THEATER 

Naked Masks “Amnesiac” at 8 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Free. 883-9872. www.nakedmasks.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“John Serl: Recent Acquisitions” opens at The Ames Gallery, 2661 Cedar St. and runs through Sept. 17. Gallery hours are 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Mon.-Fri. 845-4949. www.amesgallery.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Express with Jeanne Lupton, Janell Moon, Donna Lane & Trena Machado at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

John Ellis Quartet at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$14. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

?

You think of fossil-hunting as something that takes place in faraway barren places: the Flaming Cliffs of the Gobi Desert, the windy wastes of Patagonia, the Dakota badlands. But not downtown Berkeley. That was the source of Specimen 78858 in the UC Museum of Palaeontology’s collection, though, a fossil I finally got to meet at last year’s Cal Day. It’s a massive thighbone, the femur of an extinct ground sloth that inhabited these parts in the Pleistocene Era, tens of thousands of years ago, and it turned up when the Berkeley BART station was being excavated. 

The species, depending on which sloth scholar you ask, is either Glossotherium harlani or Paramylodon harlani. Charles Darwin dug a Glossotherium, along with other former South Americans, out of the Bahia Blanca fossil beds in Argentina when the Beagle anchored there in 1832. The name, meaning “tongue-animal” (and I’ll get to that later), was coined by the anatomist Richard Owen, who later broke bitterly with Darwin after The Origin of Species was published. Harlani honors another nineteenth-century naturalist, Richard Harlan, who described the species from a jawbone found at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky. (Yes, a real place—a friend visited it during a business trip to Cincinnati. It’s a salt lick where sloths, mammoths, and other prehistoric megafauna left their skeletons.) Harlan’s more notorious younger brother Josiah, a rogue Quaker turned adventurer in feudal Afghanistan, appears to have been the real-life inspiration for Kipling’s “The Man Who Would be King.” 

But back to Harlan’s ground sloth: These ungainly creatures evolved in South America when it was an island, with a fauna of sabertoothed marsupials, giant flightless predatory birds, and odd hoofed mammals. Ground sloths show up in the fossil record long before the modern tree sloths, the only survivors of a diverse lineage: three-toed sloths like the one Dr. Maturin brought aboard HMS Surprise and Captain Aubrey won over with cake soaked in grog, and two-toed sloths. Some palaeontologists believe the two-toed and three-toed sloths evolved from distantly related ground-sloth ancestors, acquiring their tree-hanging lifestyles and specialized anatomies through convergence. Another South American sloth, the sea sloth Thalassocnus, became adapted to an aquatic life.  

When the Isthmus of Panama joined the Americas three million years ago, the sloths moved north as North American species—big cats, elephants, the ancestral llamas—headed south. Harlan’s ground sloth was one of several species inhabiting Pleistocene Southern California; after the extinct western horse and ancient bison, it’s the third most common plant-eating mammal in the La Brea Tar Pits. At 11 feet in length and 3,500 pounds, it was only a midsized sloth; its relative Eremotherium was elephantine. Apart from the Bay Area, Harlan’s sloth ranged at least as far north as Carson City, Nev., where there’s a fossil sloth trackway with 19-inch-long impressions in the yard of the state prison. 

Sloth tracks look oddly humanoid, but the creatures actually walked on the outsides of their hind feet; the foot was rotated so the sole faced inward. The gait of a sloth was at best a waddle. There were other anatomical pecularities. Ground sloths had a second set of ribs, linking the standard costal ribs to the breastbone. Some of their tail vertebrae were fused to the pelvis, forming a heavy-duty brace to support the beasts when they sat upright. And some species, including Harlan’s, had pebble-like nodules embedded in the skin of the back, armoring the sloth against sabertooths, dire wolves, and other predators. 

The sloths also had wicked-looking sickle-shaped foreclaws, used by G. harlani primarily for digging roots, by other species for snagging leafy branches. They would also have been formidable in defense. A flange on the cheekbone anchored massive jaw muscles for serious chewing power. Owen thought the sloth he christened used its tongue giraffe-fashion to gather food, hence Glossotherium. The flat grinding teeth of Harlan’s sloth suggest it was primarily a grazer.  

Those foreclaws misled Thomas Jefferson, our only palaeontologist president, into misclassifying an eastern species, Megalonyx jeffersoni, as some kind of giant feline. After the error had been corrected, Jefferson cherished the hope that some of the creatures might still survive in the unexplored West; he asked Lewis and Clark to keep an eye out for them. 

No such luck, though; the sloths were long gone. If you subscribe to Paul Martin’s controversial Pleistocene Overkill hypothesis, the big, slow, and probably none-too-bright beasts would have been easy targets for Palaeoindian hunters. Alternatively, they may have succumbed to changes in climate after the retreat of the glaciers. In any case, the youngest G. harlani remains from Rancho La Brea are 13,890 years old; some persisted for another four thousand years in Florida. 

For those who are inclined to believe such things, there are persistent rumors of something big and slothlike in the Amazon jungle. It’s reputed to leave oddly shaped tracks and a foul smell. So far, as with Bigfoot and other cryptofauna, tangible evidence is lacking.  

TUESDAY, JULY 12 

Rally for Youth Vote Join Berkeley teenagers in support of a measure that would allow 17 year olds to vote in school board elections in Berkeley. At 1 p.m. in front of the Berkeley BART station. 883-9091. 

“Ideas that Sustain an Unjust Economy” A conversation with Terry O’Keefe at 6 p.m. at Café de la Paz, Shattuck at Cedar. Sponsored by the Sustainable Business Alliance. terry@sustainablebiz.org 

Road Cycling for Women Covering rules of the road, bike choice, clothing and accessories, at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Free. 527-4140. 

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. 524-9992. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org  

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

Kundalin Yoga six-week class, Tues. at 4:15 p.m. at Studio 12, 2525 Eighth St. Cost is $42. 841-4339. 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Don Worth will lead a current events discussion at 11 a.m. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, JULY 13 

Save the U.S. Supreme Court Rally at 5:30 p.m. at 14th and Broadway, Oakland to protect our rights and civil liberties. Sponsored by the National Organization for Women, Oakland/East Bay. www.oebnow.org 

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 

The Wonderful World of Worms We’ll learn how worms “see,” where they live, what they eat. For ages 8 to 12 at 10 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. We’ll be digging in the dirt so dress to get dirty. Cost is $5-$7. Registration required. 525-2233. 

Climbing Mt. Shasta Tips for first-time climbers with Eric White, climbing ranger with the U.S. Forest Service at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Free. 527-4140. 

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. 

Arab Women Film Festival “Hollywood Harems” and “Benaat Chicago” at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Donation $5. 849-2568.  

“Raymundo: The Revolutionary Film-Makers’ Struggle” A documentary on the life and work of Raymundo Gleyzer, at 7 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. 

Track Maintenance, a benefit party for Watchword Press with readings and music at 7:30 p.m. at Café Van Kleef, 1624 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5.  

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

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. 

“Searching Within” A free 9-week course, Wed. at 7 p.m. at 2510 Channing Way. Call to reserve a place. 652-1583. bayarea@gnosticweb.com 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. Peace Walk at 7 p.m.  

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. 

THURSDAY, JULY 14 

Where the Wild Things Live A nature program for 8-12 year olds to discover who lives where and why. At 11 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Fee is $5-$7. Registration required. 525-2233.  

“Rescuing Asian Black Bears in China” A lecture with Jill Robinson at 7 p.m. at the Oakland Zoo, 9777 Golf Links Rd, Oakland. Cost is $8-$10. 632-9525. www.oaklandzoo.org 

Parenting Class: Yoga with Baby for new and expecting parents at 10 a.m. at Bananas, 5232 Claremont Ave. Registration required. 658-7353.  

“The Lost Boys of Sudan” A documentary following two Sudanese refugees on their journey from Africa to America, at 7 p.m. at the James Irvine Foundation Conference Center, 353 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, Oakland. Reception at 6:30 p.m. Free. Sponsored by the Piedmont Diversity Film Committee. 835-9227. www.diversityworks.org 

Nonprofits and Grantwriting Workshop from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave. freeskoolyes@yahoo.com 

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 

World of Plants Tours Thurs.-Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botan 

ical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. Cost is $1-$5. 643-2755. http:// 

botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

“Eating for Health: A Family Plan” with Ed Bauman, Ph.D., Director of Bauman College at 5:30 p.m. at Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy, 1744 Solano Ave. 527-8929. 

FRIDAY, JULY 15 

“Eyewitness in Iraq” with Sheila Provencher, an American who has spent the last year and a hlaf in Iraq doing humanitarian work, at 1:30 p.m., Fireside Room, Starr King School for the Ministry, GTU. 928-4901. 

Celebration in Opera and Song for Options Recovery Services with Lisa Houston, mezzo-soprano, Daniel Lockert, piano and Leland Morine, baritone at 8 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Suggested donation $30. 666-9900. www.optionsrecovery.org 

Contientious Projector Film Series will show “Beyond Treason” at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Unitraian Universalist Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. 528-5403. 

Harry Potter Midnight Costume Party to celebrate the release of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” at 12:01 a.m. (Sat.) at Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary and Garden Arts, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Harry Potter Book Release Party at 8 p.m. at Barnes & Noble, Bay Street, Emeryville. Crafts, trivia contest. Come dressed as your favorite character. Book will not be released until 12:01 a.m on the 16th. 655-4002. 

Thinking of Becoming a Doula? at 2 p.m. at Change Makers, 6536 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Free. 728-8513. 

Salsa Dancing at “The Beat” Dance Studio at 8:30 p.m. Lessons with Joseph Gallardo. 2560 9th St. at Parker. 472-2393 www.wildsalsanights.com 

Berkeley Chess Club 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. 548-6310. 

SATURDAY, JULY 16 

Harvesting for the Hungry Do you have fruit trees? Village Harvest and Spiral Gardens are teaming together to harvest backyard fruit trees for the hungry. If you live in the Berkeley area, have a large amount of fruit and are unable to harvest it yourself, call 888-FRUIT-411, joni@villageharvest.org www.villageharvest.org 

Fix Our Ferals Fundraiser at 4 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church, One Lawson Road, Kensington. Silent auction, food and wine. Cost is $35. www.fixourferals.org 

Edible and Medicinal Plant Walk with Terri Compost at 1 p.m. in People’s Park. Meet at the west end. 658-9178. 

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 

SASSAFRAS Shotgun’s Annual Splendalicious Silent Auction Family Renion and Soiree with performances and hors d’oeuvres at 7 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. Cost is sliding scale $20-$100. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Berkeley Cybersalon “At the Electronic Frontier” with Esther Dyson and Brad Templeton at 6 p.m. at The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St.  

Remodeling Workshop covering design options, working with professionals, permits and zoning, budgeting and scheduling and more. From 9 a.m. to noon at Truitt and White Conference Center, 1817 Second St. Free with advance registration. 558-8030. www.macbuild.com 

Planting for Shade Learn how to plant a woodland garden or a shady tropical garden, at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-2351. 

Biodiesel Car Show sponsored by Berkeley Biodiesel from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Crissy Field, Mason St. in the Presidio, SF. 594-4000, ext. 777. www.berkeleybiodiesel.org 

Connecting Through Dance for the Visually Impaired A celebration and fundraiser with silent auction, dance demonstrations, and open floor for dancing and free dessert bar. From 7 to 11 p.m. at Lake Merritt Dance Center, 200 Grand Ave. at Harrison, Oakland. Tickets are $20-$25. 501-4713. www.connectingthroughdance.org 

Oakland Outdoor Cinema “West Side Story” with an introduction by Rita Moreno, at 8 p.m. on Washington St. between 9th and 10th Sts. Limited seating, bring chairs and blankets. 238-4734. www.filmoakland.com 

Free Sailboat Rides between 1 and 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club in the Berkeley Marina. Bring warm waterproof clothes. www.cal-sailing.org 

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 

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

Walking Tour of Oakland City Center Meet at 10 a.m. in front Oakland City Hall at Frank Ogawa Plaza. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tour of the F. M. “Borax” Smith Estate. Cost is $5-$10. For details call 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org 

Loose Leash Walking for Your Dog at noon at RabbitEars, 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Cost is $35. Registration required. 525-6155. 

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. 

SUNDAY, JULY 17 

Bay to Barkers Berkeley’s biggest dog walk and festival from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Cesar Chavez Park in the Berkeley Marina. Registration is $25-$30. Proceeds benefit the Berkeley East-Bay Humane Society. www.berkeleyhumane.org 

Rock N Roll at Wildcat Creek for ages six and up to explore a river-bed, gather stones, and learn how the land was shaped. Meet at 10:30 a.m. at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Summer Pond Plunge With dip-nets and magnifiers we’ll discover the denizens of the deep. For ages four and up. Meet at 2 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Bike Tour of Oakland A leisurely-paced tour covering the history of Oakland. Meet at 10 a.m. at the 10th St. entrance of the Oakland Museum of California. Registration required, 238-3514. 

Oakland Street Peace Festival from noon to 5 p.m. at Lakeside Park at Lake Merritt. Music, performances and speakers. For details see www.sourceoflight.com/streetpeace.html 

Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tour of Montclair Village. Cost is $5-$10. For details call 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org 

Free Speech Movement Poetry Festival, featuring Jack Hirschman, Paul Sawyer and others, from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Berkeley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. 528-5403. 

Community Arts Awareness Workshops and Networking Bazaar, from 3 to 9 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Afternoon workshops are free, donations of $20 and up for the evening program. Sponsored by the Truss Project. 689-6771. www.trussproject.org 

Hands-On Bicycle Clinic from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Free. 527-4140. 

Free Sailboat Rides between 1 and 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club in the Berkeley Marina. Bring warm waterproof clothes. www.cal-sailing.org 

Children’s Film Series “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” at 11 a.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Cost is $5. www.juliamorgan.org 

Socal Action Forum “Stand Against Domestic Violence” a video, at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

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 

“Science and Religion: Issues For the 21st Century” with Dr. Robert Russell at 11:30 a.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. 

MONDAY, JULY 18 

“Uncluttering Your Life” with Jill Lebeau and Stephanie Barbic at 7 p.m. at the El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave. 526-7512. www.ccclib.org  

Spanish Book Club, led by Ricardo Antonio Navarette meets at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books, Telegraph Ave. For title of book to be discussed see www.codysbooks.com 

Sisters of Song A week-long workshop for emerging poets, led by Yosefa Raz. Open to girls between the ages of 13-19. Mon. - Fri. from 9 to 11:30 a.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center. 848-0237, ext. 130. karenc@brjcc.org 

Stress Less with Hypnosis A free seminar at 6:30 p.m. in Oakland. Registration required. 465-2524. 

TUESDAY, JULY 19 

Peach Tasting plus other stone fruits, from 2 to 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Derby St. at MLK,Jr. Way. Cooking demonstration at 11:30 a.m. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

“Creating a Non-Violent Peaceforce” with Mel Duncan at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Friends Church, 1600 Sacramento St. Sonation $5 and up. 533-4732. 

Healthy Eating Habits and Hypnosis A free seminar at 6:30 p.m. in Oakland. Registration required. 465-2524. 

Berkeley Salon Discussion Group meets to discuss “Craig’s List: Has it Changed Your LIfe?” from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Please bring snacks and soft drinks to share. No peanuts please. 601-6690.  

Magic Show with Norman Ng at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

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. 524-9992. 

Parenting Class: Living with Ones and Twos, with Meg Zeiback, nurse practitioner at 7 p.m. at Bananas, 5232 Claremont Ave. Registration required. 658-7353.  

Fast-Packing An evening with GoLite founder Demetri Coupounas at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Free. 527-4140. 

“A Fat Nation in a Thin World” video and discussion at 1 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190. 

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. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

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

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. At 11 a.m. Laurabeth Nelson will talk about the Asian Art Museum’s exhibit “Tibet Rooftop of the World.” 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., July 12, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Homeless Commission meets Wed., July 13, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jane Micallef, 981-5426. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/homeless 

Planning Commission meets Wed., July 13, 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., July 13 at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-4950. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/policereview 

Library Board of Trustees meets Wed. July 13, at 7 p.m. at South Berkeley Senior Center, Jackie Y. Griffin, 981-6195. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/library 

Commission on Early Childhood Education meets Thurs., July 14, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Angel- 

lique De Cloud, 981-5428. www.ci.berkeley. ca.us/commissions/earlychildhoodeducation  

Community Health Commission meets Thurs., July 14, at 6:45 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Kristin Tehrani, 981-5356. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/health 

West Berkeley Project Area Commission meets Thurs., July 14, at 7 p.m., at the West Berke 

ley Senior Center. Iris Starr, 981-7520. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/westberkeley  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., July 14, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/commissions/zoning  ?

The Shattuck Hotel, once one of the toniest hotels in Northern California, is headed for a new era of grandeur, thanks to the partnership of owner Roy Nee with Starwood Hotels—considered by many the world’s leading hotelier. 

Anyone who meets Nee, a long-time Marin County resident who moved to Berkeley seven years ago, quickly discovers that he’s downtown Berkeley’s biggest booster, willing to wage an eight-figure gamble on the city’s future. 

Starwood, whose brands include the St. Regis (including the namesake hotel in New York), ITT Sheraton, The Luxury Collection, W, and Four Points, will operate the hotel under the Westin label. 

The Westin Berkeley, as the refurbished hotel will be known, will offer 199 upscale rooms, convention and meeting facilities, a spa, rooftop gardens and terraces, a wedding suite with a private courtyard and a presidential suite with its own terrace and a restaurant. 

The biggest change in the building’s exterior will be a two-story addition to the currently undistinguished Hink’s Annex building on the west end of the structure on Allston Way. 

The building will be resurfaced, and its four-story skyline will resemble the main hotel building. Ground floor spaces will continue to be used by the U.S. Post Office and YMCA, Nee said. 

A remarkable family 

Restoring the building is going to be a long, expensive process, but Nee said he feels up to the task, thanks to assistance he’ll have from an extended family that seems to epitomize the concept of over-achieving. 

Nee moved to Berkeley because his spouse, Blanche, was a principal scientist at Chiron. Frustrated with her job, she decided to go for an M.B.A., enrolling in a joint program offered by Columbia University and the Haas School at UC Berkeley. 

After graduating late last year at the top of her class and quitting her post at Chiron in March, she’s now fully immersed in the project. 

“They say husband-and-wife teams are difficult, but it’s working out great,” said the 55-year-old Nee. “She’s my business partner, along with my nephew and my son, Darin.” 

The younger Nee graduated with a physics degrees from Stanford and had been accepted into the Yale physics program to work on quantum computing, an emerging technology based on one of the most baffling of natural phenomena. 

“He turned them down and went to Turkey on an archaeological dig, and from there, he went to Egypt,” his father said. “Now he’s decided he wants to be a doctor.” 

His nephew, Kyle Harris, is the private chef to Barry Levinson, one of Hollywood’s leading lights. “He’s cooked for all the big stars,” Nee said. 

Another nephew is also involved, a Harvard graduate who is the son of Nee’s older brother, Victor, who is a department chair at Cornell. 

“If there’s such a thing as a family enterprise, this is it,” said Nee, smiling. “What I have on my side is brain power but no hotel experience—but we’re up to the game.” 

Nee’s academic background is more modest. He started college at UCLA, then moved to UC Santa Cruz a year after it opened, but his radical political activities kept him occupied in the Bay Area, so he finished his mathematics degree at San Francisco State. 

After college, he began work as a carpenter. “I worked at all the shipyards, and made journeyman,” he said. Then it was on to contracting. 

His best-known property is the Tea Garden Spa in Mill Valley, a popular facility that employs Zen principles in its offering, hence the name of the corporate entity—Zen Spa. 

With a staff of 50, the Tea Garden will offer its expertise in running the smaller spa Nee plans to install in the basement floor beneath the hotel. 

Berkeley Film Festival plans 

Nee’s MIll Valley holdings also includes the offices of the popular Mill Valley Film Festival—an event that Nee loves. 

As the new owner of a hotel building that includes a major theater, he’s already put out feelers to both the Mill Valley festival organizers and Landmarks Theaters, which in addition to the Shattuck Cinemas operates the Act 1 and 2 and California theaters in downtown Berkeley. 

Nee said the Mill Valley festival organizers are excited about the prospect of teaming up with Berkeley. 

Landmark, which operates 208 screens in 57 cities, makes a logical partner, said Nee. 

Part of 2929 Entertainment, a firm owned by Internet entrepreneur Todd Wagner and billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, Landmarks is a leading showcase for independent film and is switching all its theaters to digital projection. 

“Mark Cuban is a logical partner, and we’ll be asking him if he’d give up one or two of his screens for a few days,” Nee said. 

A Berkeley film festival makes sense, he said, since the city was home to Pauline Kael, perhaps the greatest film critic of the 20th Century. Her husband once ran an art house of Telegraph Avenue, and after their divorce opened the Fine Arts Cinema at the site now occupied by Patrick Kennedy’s Fine Arts Building at the southeast corner of Haste and Shattuck. 

Challenges ahead 

Nee knows that making his biggest-ever investment in downtown Berkeley is a challenge, but he’s convinced that the new hotel will represent a major force toward revitalizing the city’s core. 

With ownership consolidated for the first time in two decades, Nee said now’s the time to move. 

“Mayor (Tom) Bates is right about championing the downtown image,” he said. “You need to have partnerships to work together to changes people’s opinions. 

“We want to foster people’s best efforts to help bring about the change, and taking an historically significant block and bringing a great hotel to the city is a good start.” 

Nee believes the hotel will help attract the kind of retail the downtown needs to make it commercially viable. 

“Right now, it’s not the right mix.” he said. “We have wonderful things like Berkeley Rep, and the Shattuck Cinemas is the Landmark’s largest grossing theater in the Bay area. Now we need to bring in the right kind of retail.” 

Once Nee formulated his vision for the property, it proved sufficiently contagious to attract several major hoteliers. He settled Starwood because of the group’s long-term management expertise. 

“They’re in it for decades,” he said. 

Unusual allies 

In a city where developers often charge that preservationists and the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) are their biggest enemies, Nee can’t offer enough praise to both. 

Leslie Emmington, both an LPC member and an employee of the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, can’t stop praising Nee either. 

To her, Nee is restoring one of the city’s most significant landmarks to it’s original intent—a four star hotel that will reflect well on the city. 

Nee is bringing his project to the LPC Monday for a first look after working closely with a three-member subcommitte on which Emmington serves, said the commissioner. Emmington added, “It’s a wonderful project.” 

Because the building is a city landmark, the exterior designs must pass muster with the commission, which is charged with making sure that the refurbishing of the existing building is carried out properly, and that the expanded annex building has details that differentiate it subtly from the original construction. 

UC Hotel competition 

Neither Nee nor Westin were frightened off by the ongoing negotiations between UC Berkeley and hotelier Carpenter & Co. to build a combination high-rise hotel and conference center just a block to the northeast at the corner of Shattuck and Center Street. 

“I looked at UC’s study and I commissioned one of my own from a hotel company, and I’m convinced that there’s room for both hotels. UC attracts plenty of meetings and conferences, and we’ll be able to keep them in the city,” Nee said. 

UC has twice extended their talks with Carpenter, while Nee has been able to find a premiere operator less than a year after buying the property, so he’ll have a significant head start. 

Original vision  

The Shattuck was built by former gold prospector Francis Kittredge Shattuck in the wake of the great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, when residents of that city, terrified by the disastrous fires that followed the quake, began packing up and moving to Berkeley. 

“The building was built of reinforced concrete and was fireproof, something they stressed in their advertisements,” Nee said.  

The hotel opened on Dec. 15, 1910 and proved so successful that an annex filling out the rest of the block along Shattuck, making it the longest structure in Northern California at the time. 

Berkeley was in the midst of its biggest boom at the time, and the university was starting its meteoric rise. 

Shattuck sold out to William Whitecotton in 1918, and the new owner ran it as the Whitecotton Hotel. It reverted back the Shattuck name in 1942 and has retained it through several changes of ownership and management. 

The property was split up after a bankruptcy in the early 1980s when it was seized by the government and auctioned off. 

“Now it’s a lot like when the hotel was first built,” Nee said. “Berkeley is going through a renaissance and the community is becoming friendlier to businesses, who stayed away for three decades starting in the 1960s when the city gained a radical reputation. I like to think that we’re restoring the hotel to its original vision.”

In what the University of California is calling “the most severe and comprehensive disciplinary action that UC Berkeley has taken against a fraternity in several years,” the fraternity accused in last spring’s pellet gun hazing attack on a Berkeley street will be disbanded and forced to reorganize. 

But criminal charges have yet to be filed against suspects for allegedly shooting an unidentified 19-year-old Pi Kappa Phi pledge last April with an air pellet gun and forcing him to consume alcohol and marijuana. 

The Gamma chapter of Pi Kappa Phi fraternity, which had been in continuous operation on the Berkeley campus since its founding in 1909, must suspend all operations for one year, and will have all current members placed on inactive alumni status. 

When it is allowed to reopen in the fall of 2006, the fraternity is expected to operate under what the university calls “a host of conditions, restrictions, and close oversight by the campus administration and the fraternity’s national headquarters.” The national fraternity will decide if any current chapter members will be allowed to join the reorganized chapter. 

The punishment, which is just short of a complete disbanding of the 58-member chapter, was decided in an agreement reached between UC Berkeley officials and the Pi Kappa Phi Fraternity headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

The fraternity must also pay a $4,000 fine, perform 750 hours of community service, and produce a seminar on the dangers of hazing. Fraternity and sorority hazing is banned by UC Berkeley campus. 

Pi Kappa Phi Chief Executive Officer Mark E. Timmes said in a statement that “our investigation indicated a culture of alcohol, drugs, hazing and lack of respect for others which is unacceptable.” 

UC Berkeley Dean of Students Karen Kenney added that “the offenses in this case were especially shocking and disturbing. Strong disciplinary action was called for and is appropriate.” 

A UC Berkeley press release said that the fraternity punishment “also addresses a March 4 incident in which the chapter held an unauthorized party involving various alcohol use violations, including the serving of alcohol to minors.” 

Berkeley Police Public Information Officer Joe Okies said that the April 8 pellet gun incident is “still under investigation” and declined to give a figure as to how many suspects are being investigated. 

Bay City News (BCN) reported this week that 15 fraternity members took place in the hazing, with three members shooting him multiple times with what they described as two BB guns. UC Berkeley describes the weapons as pellet guns. BCN said the 15 fraternity member figure came from Okies, but Okies said by telephone that he has never given out an exact number of those allegedly involved in the incident. 

This is not the first time that a Pi Kappa Phi chapter has been cited for hazing. 

In 2001, three Chico State Pi Kappa Phi members pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor in the alcohol overdose death of Adrian Heideman, and eight fraternity members agreed to pay Heideman’s family $500,000. 

A year later, the chapter reached a confidential, undisclosed settlement with the Heideman’s family over a lawsuit in which the Heidemans charged that he had died in a hazing incident. The Chico State chapter later disbanded.›

Seeking to restore stability to Alameda County’s much criticized public hospital system, hospital trustees are negotiating with Dr. Samuel Ross of Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Tex., to become the system’s next CEO. 

Although a deal to hire Ross, Parkland’s senior vice president and chief medical officer, hasn’t been sealed, the two sides are in exclusive negotiations, said Alameda County Medical Center Board President Dr. Ted Rose. 

The medical center includes Oakland’s Highland Hospital, which serves most of Berkeley’s trauma and emergency cases. Also in the public hospital network, required to treat the uninsured, are San Leandro’s Fairmont Hospital, John George Psychiatric Pavilion and three outpatient clinics 

Last year, with the medical center facing a $50 million deficit and having fired its ninth chief executive in 11 years, county lawmakers turned over management to Nashville, Tenn.-based consultant Cambio Health Solutions. 

With Cambio’s management contract set to expire on Aug. 7, the absence of a new leadership team was one of several criticisms lodged at the board of trustees in a Alameda County Grand Jury report released in May. 

The grand jury also charged that the board, despite receiving $70 million from a county sales tax increase, appeared unable to balance its budget, make tough decisions on layoffs and service reductions, curtail the power of unions and reduce borrowing from the county. 

“The grand jury report was bogus, a real hatchet job,” said Brad Cleveland of SEIU, Local 616. 

Kay Eisenhower, the chair of pro-labor Vote Health, challenged the timing of the report, released nearly two months before the annual grand jury report. She said insiders believed the early release was timed to complicate the search for a new CEO and keep Cambio in charge of the hospital. 

Eisenhower also said the grand jury foreman was a former associate of County Sheriff Charles Plummer, who, she said, first recommended the county bring in Cambio. 

“It’s suspicious when last year a doctor was murdered, there was a $50 million deficit and the hospital was threatened with decertification, but the grand jury report came out as scheduled, but this year, there is a balanced budget, no threat of decertification, but the grand jury feels the need to issue its report in May,” she said. 

Cleveland said that Plummer had written the grand jury a series of letters critical of the medical center and that some of the letters “looked suspiciously similar” to the grand jury report. 

A case in point, he said, was the grand jury’s findings that on any day 25 percent of employees are on paid leave. He said that figure came from Cambio reports, relayed from Plummer to the grand jury, that combined vacation and sick days with medical leave. 

“It was interesting that misinformation provided by Cambio was picked up by the sheriff and ended up in the grand jury report,” he said. 

The trustees, preparing a formal response due to the grand jury Monday, also challenged the report. 

“A lot of their information was outdated,” said Board President Dr. Ted Rose. “We knew in March we were heading towards a balanced budget.” 

Last week, with the help of $70 million from the sales tax hike approved by voters in 2004, the board passed a budget with a projected net income of $253,028 without laying off workers or reducing services.  

Public hospitals in the state have been hard hit by lower fees paid by Medicare and Medi-Cal and an increase in low-income residents without insurance. Rose said between 40 and 50 percent of the medical center’s patients were uninsured. 

He added that the board wanted to steady the hospital’s finances through running a more efficient operation rather than cutting staff. 

“The question is, how do you reduce staff without reducing services,” he said.  

Rose also defended agreements with unions signed last year that gave workers 3 and 5 percent raises as necessary to retain skilled employees. 

County Supervisor Keith Carson said he was “cautiously optimistic” about the medical center’s future, but cautioned that it had to make further service and billing reforms so it wouldn’t be so dependent on the sales tax increase.  

“Given the depth of the challenges, they need to make structural changes,” he said. “I haven’t seen that yet.” 

As far as the medical center’s preferred new leader, Ross could not be reached for comment on his possible appointment to the helm of the county hospital system. A native Texan, he has been a mainstay for the past 12 years at Parkland, best known as the facility President John F. Kennedy was rushed to after being fatally shot. 

Ross has degrees in medicine and medical management from the University of Texas. When he was promoted to his current position in 2003, Parkland CEO Dr. Ron Anderson said of Ross: “His interest in community outreach, indigent health care and public health has led to increased patient volume and revenues and more than $3 million in grant programs for community clinics.”  

State regulators are threatening to strip E-Z Stop Deli, the liquor outlet nearest to Berkeley High, of its alcohol license after police cited it for selling beer to minors for the third time since last March. 

“Three strikes is not very common. We take it very seriously,” said State Alcohol Beverage Control District Administrator Andrew Gomez.  

Rather than stripping the shop of its alcohol license, Gomez is negotiating with E-Z Stop, at 2233 Shattuck Ave., about transferring the business to a new owner at the site, he said. If negotiations break down, an administrative hearing would be scheduled that could result in the shop losing its liquor license.  

State law calls for shops to lose their alcohol licenses after three verified violations within three years. Gomez said he was negotiating with E-Z Stop over transferring the license, “as an option to settle the case as soon as possible.” 

Losing its liquor license would be a severe blow to E-Z Stop, said its owner Ali Erakat. 

“It’s a very big part of the business,” he said. 

Erakat said he couldn’t comment further on the investigation, but added that he had fired the two clerks caught selling alcohol to the decoys. E-Z Stop is continuing to sell alcohol while negotiations proceed. 

ABC is also seeking to revoke the license of Berkeley Market, at 2369 Telegraph Ave., Gomez said. The convenience store has also been cited three times for selling to minors. A hearing for Berkeley Market has been set for August, Gomez said. 

Just last year, E-Z Stop was praised as a model of self policing by neighborhood leaders who successfully fought to keep a newly arriving Longs Drugs from selling beer and wine. 

School Board Director John Selawsky, a leader in the fight against Longs, continued to defend the convenience store. He said E-Z Stop had met previous district demands that it not sell alcohol during the school lunch period or between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. when students are leaving the high school. 

“I think they have been very accommodating with us. I don’t see them as a liability,” Selawsky said. “My concern with Longs was that it was not a family owned business and would not have the proper controls.” 

E-Z Stop has failed every test authorities presented over the past 15 months. On March 19, 2004, a clerk sold beer to a 17-year-old decoy who did not present identification, Gomez said. On March 2, 2005, the same clerk sold beer to a 19-year-old who offered a driver’s license identifying him as a minor. On Sept. 27, 2004 a different clerk sold beer to an 18-year-old decoy without asking for identification. 

The Berkeley Police Department executed the stings through a $50,000 state grant. The decoys, Gomez said, typically come from local colleges or students involved in anti-alcohol groups. 

Recent police operations have apparently resulted in liquor stores cleaning up their act. During the sting this March, E-Z Stop was the only store out of six that sold to minors, Gomez said. 

A police sweep on March 19, 2004 found six of the 15 targeted stores willing to sell to minors, Gomez said. The usual violation rate on decoy operations is about 10 percent, he said. 

Visitors to Edwina Perez’s West Berkeley apartment are greeted by a sign that reads, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”  

The sign is still appropriate for Perez, a self-made preacher and pastor of Berkeley’s New Birth Church, but thanks to what she sees as divine intervention, her house has returned to the service of her family. 

On a recent Sunday, Perez, after nearly 14 years of preaching in a living room that would struggle to fit two sofas, christened her church’s new home: a 10-foot-by-22-foot nook on San Pablo Avenue. Her friends filled all 24 chairs they could squeeze into the building, fanning themselves, during the two-hour service.  

“The training wheels are coming off,” she said. “To move from your house to your own building is every pastor’s dream.” 

A former security guard at Bayer Pharmaceutical, Perez has overcome illness and long odds to lead a church of her own. Born in Cuba, she was raised in San Francisco as a Catholic, and when she moved to Berkeley with her two sons in 1979, she started attending mass at St. Joseph the Worker Church. 

Then in 1991, at a time when an arthritic condition in her legs required her to use a wheelchair, Perez sensed that God was calling her to preach the Bible. 

Since women can’t become priests, she talked about starting her own church with then St. Joseph Pastor Father Bill O’Donnell. 

“I told him I felt this calling in my life and he blessed me to go try it,” she said. “Once I made the decision, there was this overwhelming peace that came over me.” 

Perez was ordained in 1991 by an uncle, a Protestant Bishop in her native Cuba, and returned to Berkeley to lead her first independent service to a congregation of two people. Noticeably absent that first Sunday were Perez’s two sons, who chose to remain Catholic. 

Homespun ministries are not uncommon across the country or in the East Bay, and Perez counts among her heroes local women who also started small churches. Ernestine Rheems, the founder of Center of Hope Church, started preaching in a flatbed truck, Perez said, and Cynthia James, a Bishop in the Church of God in Christ, started preaching on the bus on her way to work. 

Perez’s ministry has always placed a focus on helping her immediate community near Ninth Street and Bancroft Way. When she first moved into her apartment in 1983, she said, she was disappointed to see the drug activity that induced her to leave her previous homes was just as prevalent in her new neighborhood. 

She started her community outreach by heading up her neighborhood watch, but Perez, an expert at doing a lot of work in very little physical space, soon expanded from fighting crime to providing services. She held Saturday tutoring sessions in her building’s front parking lot, where Cal students helped local kids with their school work.  

The parking lot has also hosted a twice-annual hot dog day, where police and community members, including known drug dealers, were welcomed to eat hot dogs cooked by Perez. 

“I remember going to her apartment and being impressed that she really seemed to be going out of her way to help people,” said former Mayor Shirley Dean, who helped Perez hand out turkeys to families in need during the holidays. 

As her church grew, Perez took in several families she said were shunned from their congregations because they had a family member on death row. She has led several prayer sessions from the hallway of San Quentin and has prayed at the bedside of sick people she didn’t know.  

One of those who came to services on Sunday was Nancy Jonathans, who met Perez four years ago in a hospital room where Jonathans’ husband was in a coma after suffering a stroke. Perez dropped by the hospital room at the request of a friend to pray for him. 

“She would visit just to make sure my husband had company,” Jonathans said.  

Two year’s later, in 2003, Perez was diagnosed with breast cancer. Despite a regular Sunday congregation of 35 people, she was too traumatized and disbanded the church. 

“I had to worry about me,” she said. “Being a minister is lonely. We don’t have a safe place to talk about our problems.” 

Perez joined an Oakland church, and after her second ten-week radiation treatment that ended last April, her cancer went into remission. 

Given a clean bill of health, she didn’t plan on resuming her ministry until just January, when she received a call from Vera Baggett, an 87-year-old missionary getting ready to preach in Europe. 

“She told me the Lord said you need to get off your chair and get back to work,” Perez said. Shortly thereafter, another friend, Henrietta Harper, offered her help in rebuilding her church. 

“I just believed it was time for her to start up again,” Harper said. 

Soon Perez was back to preaching in her living room. And, although the number of regular parishioners had shrunk to around 25 every Sunday, rents in West Berkeley had dropped as well—low enough that the church could afford a home of its own just two blocks from Perez’s apartment. 

“I don’t just want this to be a building for prayer but a place where people can get their needs met as much as we can,” she said. Already she plans to revive the Saturday tutoring program and to begin a coffee sale to raise money for breast cancer research. 

“I’m so grateful for everything that has happened,” she said. “We’re in an area that I feel we are going to be so productive.” 

›

The latest incarnation of Ozzie’s, the beloved soda fountain at the southwest corner of the College Avenue and Russell Street intersection in the Elmwood, has expired. 

Operator Mike Hogan served his last sandwiches on June 29, and scooped his last ice cream as he cleaned out the following day. 

Victoria Carter, who holds the lease on the former Elmwood Pharmacy, is searching for a new tenant to the run the institution that has been at the center of neighborhood life for decades. 

But for regulars like writer Marty Schiffenbauer, Hogan’s departure “is really sad.” 

For years a regular on Saturdays from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Schiffenbauer has made Ozzie’s a hangout even during periods in the past when the counter was closed and between operators. 

“It’s a great neighborhood institution,” he said, “and anyone who takes over will become an immediately celebrity.” 

He said, “You really need someone very special, because there’s no real money in it.” 

Times have been hard for both Ozzie’s and Carter. Faced with the minimal profit margins forced by HMOs and insurance companies that have left the prescription drug business in the hands of large merchants who can make their profits off other merchandise, Carter was forced to abandon her prescription business early last year. 

Since then, she has been restructuring her business to offer non-prescription medicines and gift shop items. 

Carter recently signed a new five-year lease with increased rents, and she, in turn, offered Hogan a lease with a modest increase that he realized he couldn’t pay and have any chance of making a profit, something he’d not been able to do since he reopened the shuttered fountain business. 

Hogan insisted that expanded hours offered the one hope for the soda fountain, allowing him to sell to the breakfast and lunch crowds, while Carter insisted that the main reason he couldn’t make a go of it was a lack of practical business sense. 

John Moriarty, proprietor of 14 Karats, a jewelry shop a few doors south of Ozzie’s on College, noted that expanded hours weren’t enough. Hogan made his hot food offerings on a Teflon coated electric griddle, but without a professional grill and hood—an investment of as much as $250,000—Hogan couldn’t serve enough to be profitable. 

The final days took an edgy turn, with Hogan offering customers a sheet offering his version of the reasons he was closing, followed by Carter’s demand that he stopped handing out the sheet, followed by her issuance of a written account of her own. 

Proposed mediation fell through, the lease expired, and Ozzie’s closed. 

There has been an Elmwood Pharmacy in the building since 1921, and a small soda fountain for most of those years. But it was Charles Osborne, who took over the soda fountain in 1950, who made the place a landmark institution. 

A World War II fighter pilot and ace, Osborne drifted leftward after arriving in Berkeley, and the fountain became a favorite hangout of Berkeley leftists. 

A 1982 announcement of radically increased rents mobilized the regulars into a campaign for commercial rent control that became the nation’s first when voters approved it that year. 

The institution lasted seven years before a court decision struck it down. Faced with higher rents, Osborne called it quits. By then he’d been serving the grandkids of some of his first customers. 

Carter’s father, Charles, consolidated his former College and Ashby pharmacy with the Elmwood in 1960, closing his old store in the process. After 26 years, he handed the business over to his daughter four years after Osborne’s departure. 

Others had tried before Hogan, and the regulars recruited Hogan after the business had been shuttered after the previous operator left. 

With the fountain once again closed, Carter is looking for a new operator and is asking other Elmwood merchants to help. 

If she has her way, Ozzie’s will be reincarnated yet again. 

For Hogan, closing was hard. “A lot of people came out,” he said. “They were very supportive and a lot of them were upset.” 

Hogan’s next step will be a move to Sacramento, followed by a period of recuperation before he heads on to his next venture. 

“I’m always optimistic,” Schiffenbauer said. “I’m not giving up totally, but I’m not very happy.”›

July 4 Calm, But Several Other Fires Keep City Firefighters Busy  

A blaze ignited by a discarded holiday party barbecue proved costly Friday for a Berkeley firm once chaired by the late PowerBar co-creator Brian Maxwell. 

Before it was quelled, the blaze had inflicted more than $2.1 million in damage, destroying the structure and all its contents, said Deputy Fire Chief David P. Orth. 

But if there had to be a fire, the timing couldn’t have been much better, said Tom Oliver, a former colleague at PowerBar under the Maxwell regime and president of Coolsystems, Inc. 

“We were planning to move in August, and this just speeds things up,” he said Thursday morning. 

The flames began after the grill, with coals still smoldering inside, was tossed into a trash bin next to the Coolsystems, Inc., warehouse at 929 Camellia St., said Deputy Fire Chief David P. Orth. 

The coals ignited the contents of the dumpster, and the flames quickly spread to the building. 

The call came in to the emergency switchboard at 7:01 p.m. and before the blaze was controlled at 8 p.m., 35 firefighters, including two chiefs, as well as 12 engines and trucks, were engaged in the battle. 

Units from other cities were placed on availability to cover any other fires that might have sprung up while all the city’s crews and trucks were battling the West Berkeley blaze, Orth said. 

No one was injured in the blaze. 

It was the second multi-million-dollar blaze in West Berkeley in eight days. The first, on June 28, did $2 million in damage to the Berkeley Repertory Theater’s scene shop at Fifth and Gilman streets, just two blocks from the scene of Friday’s fire. 

Theater officials announced Wednesday that the troupe’s production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town will open as scheduled on Sept. 9, even though they’re still hunting for new quarters to make the sets. 

After selling PowerBar in March, 2000, for $375 million, Maxwell remained active in the Berkeley business community after he acquired Coolsystems, a company started by NASA space suit designer Bill Elkins, who wanted to apply extraterrestrial design to terrestrial problems. 

Coolsystems GR Accelerated Recovery technology uses high tech cooling units similar to those used by astronauts for treatment of sports injuries—both human and equine—and to ease symptoms of multiple sclerosis. 

“It’s a particularly appropriate name at the moment, since we’re making an accelerated recovery after the fire,” Oliver said. 

The cooling units, which also speed healing by periodically increasing pressure on injured joints, have been adopted by more than 68 professional teams (including the Eagles, Nets and Giants), 118 universities, and 320 individual pro athletes (including Warren Sapp and Corey Maggette) have purchased systems, said corporate, said Dax Kelm, a Jackson Hole, Wyoming, publicist retained by Coolsystems. 

The U.S, Olympic Training Centers, Navy SEALs and the San Francisco Ballet are Game Ready users, and athletes can get Game Ready treatments at physical therapy clinics across the country, he noted.  

Major investors include retired professional football players, including former San Francisco 49ers Steve Young and Jerry Rice, former Seattle Seahawks quarterback Warren Moon, former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman, Buffalo Bills and Washington Redskins defensive end Bruce Smith and former Buffalo Bills quarterback and 1996 GOP Vice Presidential candidate Jack Kemp. 

Oliver said the fire—which did most of its damage in just ten minutes—won’t affect business operations. The Camellia warehouse contained only a few items of inventory. 

The lion’s share of equipment is still at the manufacturing plant,” Kelm said. 

The corporate spokesperson also said that while the company’s computers were destroyed by the fire, all the data was safely backed up in off-site units, so ordering and other business functions are continuing and the phone system is up and running. 

One reason for the minimal impact was that Coolsystem’s lease was running out and the firm was preparing to move. 

Oliver had been completing negotiations on a vacant plant at the northeast corner of Fulton Street and Dwight Way, where a reporter caught up with him Thursday morning. 

“We’ve been doing very well,” Oliver said. “We had record sales in June of both our GR and GRE models”—the “E” stands for equine. “That set us up for a record second quarter.” 

Fortunately, insurance will cover the losses, and Oliver and his team will be moving into their new home as soon as all the necessary signatures are one the lease. 

“It’s just a matter of days,” he said. 

Tilden Park fire 

Berkeley firefighters were called in at 7:06 p.m. Saturday to help East Bay Regional Parks District crews battle a brush fire that scorched a half-acre of brush and eucalyptus near the Tilden Park merry-go-round. 

The blaze was quickly controlled, and parks district investigators are working to determine the cause, said Berkeley Deputy Fire Chief David P. Orth. 

Burning pit 

Berkeley avoided the usual spate of July 4 fireworks blazes, but that didn’t stop someone from igniting a pole vault pit at UC Berkeley’s Edwards Field. 

The fire, which started about 11 p.m., did an estimated $35,000 in damage. 

Second hills blaze 

A belated burst of celebration in the wee hours of Tuesday morning did lead to a fire that consumed nearly four acres of grassland near the Lawrence Hall of Science. 

The fire, reported at 3:33 a.m., resulted in a second alarm before the fire was fully controlled at 4:07 a.m., said Orth. Had the fire happened a month later when vegetation will be drier, the fire could’ve posed a major threat to homes, he said. 

Burned out bottle rockets were found at the scene. 

Stuart Street fire 

Just four minutes after firefighters extinguished the hills blaze, they were dispatched to 1633 Stuart St., where they arrived to find a tenant trapped in his second-floor unit by a blaze on his porch. 

Firefighters were able to extract him through a window, but not before the fellow had burned his hand on an unexpectedly hot front doorknob. 

Damage was estimated at $5,000, Orth said. 

Third fire in two hours 

The morning’s third fire was reported at 5:16 a.m., sparked by a floor furnace in a residence at 2419 Bonar St. The fire was quickly quenched and cause little damage. 

Fence fire 

Berkeley firefighters rushed to 2222 Durant Ave. at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday where they arrived to find a fence on fire that was scorching the outside of an apartment building and sending smoke inside, disrupting the tenants. 

The fire was extinguished without incident, leaving the fence in serious repair and the building needing a touchup.

An apparent miscommunication has Fire Chief Debra Pryor in hot water with Berkeley hills residents. 

As part of its cost-saving plan to rotate fire company closures, the department Wednesday temporarily closed Fire Station 7, the main hills fire station at 2910 Shasta Road.  

Just last week, Pryor had told the council that engine companies serving the Berkeley hills would be immune from closures until the close of fire season in December. 

When neighbors realized Wednesday morning that the fire station was empty, they immediately lodged complaints and ultimately forced the city to reactivate the station’s lone engine company at 5 p.m. The station was closed for a total of nine hours during which time there were no major fires reported in the hills. 

To save $1.2 million in fire department overtime, the city starting July 1 began rotating closures of up to two fire companies when the department was not at full staff. For stations with just one fire company like Station 7, the company closure effectively shuts down the station. 

Under department directives, the closures are to be spread throughout the city, with special provisions made for the fire-prone hills when weather conditions presented severe fire risks. 

But that’s not what Pryor told the council, according to Councilmember Betty Olds, who represents a section of the hills covered by Station 7. 

“She didn’t say it would only be during critical fire times,” Olds said. “She said for the entire fire season. We won’t accept anything less.” 

In response to the confusion, Deputy Chief David Orth said Station 7 will not be closed Friday as scheduled, and that the department will review its schedule for future closures. 

Besides Station 7, Station 3 at 2010 Russell St. and Station 4 at 1900 Marin Ave. and The Alameda also serve hills residents. 

To save money, Berkeley reduced minimum firefighter staffing from 34 to 26. Rather than pay overtime to maintain 34 on-duty firefighters, the city chose to close two three-firefighter companies before shelling out for overtime. 

The reduction was not expected to result in frequent company closures, but the combination of summer vacation time, two recent workers compensation claims and retirements have left the department shorthanded, Orth said.  

During the first six days of July, the city has closed two companies for three days and a single company for two days. The only day the city had full fire service was July 4 as a precaution for Independence Day fireworks. 

Orth expected closures to decrease dramatically by the beginning of next year when vacation time is minimal and the department expects to hire 12 new firefighters. 

Although Berkeley has seen a big increase in major fires over the past month, Orth said call for service volume for 2005 was slightly below average. 

Berkeley police revealed Tuesday that they’d arrested 56-year-old Berkeley resident Paul Mitchell four days earlier in connection with the 1997 rape of a 39-year-old Berkeley resident. 

Mitchell was tied to the crime through a match in the state DNA database, said Berkeley police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies. 

Police said Mitchell broke into the apartment in the 1900 block of El Dorado Avenue in the pre-dawn hours of May 18, 1997 and pinned the victim to her bed with a pistol. The woman was sexually assaulted multiple times and raped during the attack, Okies said. 

The state Department of Justice notified police on May 25 that they’d matched Mitchell’s DNA to the crime, and a six-week investigation followed, in which further evidence was developed tying Mitchell culminating to the assault. 

Sex Crimes Sgt. Alyson Hart praised the Justice Department’s database for its instrumental role in breaking the cold case. 

“The use of new technology combined with effective investigative tools has helped to identify Mitchell as the suspect in this brutal attack and hold him accountable for his crime,” she said. 

Prosecutor John Adams of the Alameda County district attorney’s office worked closely with the Sex Crimes Unit in developing the charges filed. 

Mitchell faces counts of rape and burglary as well as multiple counts of sexual assault, Okies said. 

According to a 2004 Daily Planet story about his eviction from a Berkeley duplex, Mitchell has a bachelor’s degree in English from Cornell University and a Master’s in Education Psychology from Santa Clara University. 

He lived on a disability pension stemming from a leg injury and had served at least one sentence in the Santa Rita Jail by the time the story was written. 

He was living in a van at the time the story was written following his eviction and the potential loss of his 70 percent housing subsidy from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. 

As a result of the story, Mitchell was able to obtain a housing voucher and a apartment in Berkeley, which he then rejected in favor of a residence in Oakland. 

He was living in Berkeley again at the time of his arrest.›

Long-time Berkeley resident Herta Bregoff died peacefully in her home on June 26. She was born Herta Maas in 1922 in Karlsruhe, Baden Province, Germany. 

Her family had lived there for several generations and had a comfortable living situation. Although they were Jewish, they were not religious and considered themselves thoroughly German. Therefore when Hitler came to power, Herta’s parents, Rolf and Dora, did not see themselves in danger and continued to live in Karlsruhe. Herta’s older siblings, Eva, Henry and Trudel, did not share this view, and since they were all young adults, made their way to the United States. 

So Herta was left alone with her parents and then when she was 16, was expelled from school due to her Jewish heritage. This was a very difficult time for her, since her future was uncertain, and her parents were powerless to help the situation. Rolf and Dora did not want Herta to worry, so they did not discuss the political upheaval in Germany with her. It wasn’t until 1971, when Herta was reading her father’s papers, that she learned that Rolf had worked diligently during this time to arrange for them to leave Germany, but was unsuccessful.  

When Herta was 18, the Nazis came to her house and gave the family 20 minutes to collect their belongings; they were forced to board a train out of Karlsruhe. Unlike most German Jews, the Jews of Baden were not shipped to Poland, but instead to southern France. They spent the winter there in a camp called Gurs, living in barracks, having to bathe at an outside spigot, and unsure of their destiny. It rained a lot that winter so the camp was usually a sea of mud. Herta’s father died of dysentery in Gurs and was buried there.  

Meanwhile, Dora’s older children, who were already in the United States, were working hard to have Dora and Herta join them. After many months, sponsors were found, forms were completed, and fees paid to officials. 

Dora and Herta, along with others with American sponsors, were allowed to leave Gurs and took a train to Marseilles. There they stayed in hotels while they tried to get visas. They then took a train to Lisbon, Portugal, and boarded the ship Nyassa to New York City. Many Karlsruhe families had already settled in Berkeley, so Herta and her mother went directly there, where they were reunited with Eva, Henry and Trudel. 

Although Herta had not been able to graduate from high school, UC Berkeley allowed her to attend there. She graduated from UC with a B.S. in Chemistry. At UC she met Bill Bregoff, who had just finished his Army service in the Philippines. They were married in 1948. Herta went on to get a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis, while Bill earned his dental degree there. They returned to California and settled in the South Bay. Bill started a dental practice in Hayward, and they soon bought a house in Castro Valley. Herta had her first daughter, Naomi, in 1954. In 1958, Miriam was born. In 1965, Herta earned her teaching degree from Cal State Hayward and soon started teaching elementary school.  

Herta and Bill decided to move back to Berkeley in 1969, where they bought a house in the Elmwood District. Dora lived five blocks away, and they visited her often until her death in 1971. The same year, Bill and Herta separated, but they would remain friends throughout her life. Herta decided to change careers, and started nursing school at the age of 50. She worked as a registered nurse at Fairmont hospital for 17 years. 

Due to the painful memories of Germany, for 30 years Herta did not return, although her siblings made several trips back. Herta made a very brief trip with Bill and her children in 1971. In 1976, a childhood friend came to Berkeley, and convinced Herta to visit her in Switzerland, which she did in 1979. In 1986, her former elementary school classmates from Karlsruhe had a 50th class reunion, and they paid for her trip there. Herta had a wonderful time and made several more trips to Germany and other parts of Europe. She corresponded with many of her former classmates for the rest of her life. 

Herta had two grandchildren, Forrest and Esther, from her daughter Miriam in Alaska. She saw them yearly, either in Berkeley or in Alaska. They looked forward to packages from her, which always included chocolate. On one trip to Alaska, she taught herself to cross-country ski, as she hadn’t had the chance to learn while growing up in Germany.  

Herta’s experience in Nazi Germany caused her to always feel that nothing in life was certain, and to try to help others less fortunate than herself. She was very generous to her family and friends, volunteered at St. Vincent de Paul, and gave to many charities. She spent very little money on herself, and rarely asked others for help. As her health began to fail, her friends called her often and tried to help her as much as she would allow. Although petite in size, she had incredible inner strength, and will be missed by all who knew her.›

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

TERRORISTS, ANARCHISTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

You know, I actually predicted you would choose the “terrorist” word for a headline if you ran my admittedly pointed opinion piece. So I wasn’t surprised. The actual title of the piece I submitted was “Landmarks Meeting of June 27th”—just a bit less vivid. 

Your choice of that word was both inaccurate and needlessly inflammatory. I chose the word “anarchist” carefully, because of my belief that the LPC had taken profoundly anti-democratic positions, and never considered that “terrorist” was an accurate description. Suicide tactics are indeed employed by some terrorists—but also by others, including Buddhist monks. I did not describe an ideology, only a choice of tactics, as you well know. 

I know controversy sells papers—even free ones—but deliberate distortion is not your duty as an editor. 

I therefore hereby request that you publish a clear clarification that the choice and use of the word “terrorist” was yours as an editor, not mine as a writer. Publication of this letter unedited would be an acceptable alternative. 

Alan Tobey 

• 

LANDMARKS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Regarding Alan Tobey’s July 1 commentary: Was the LPC’s decision anarchy or a courageous protest against rather transparent power plays in support of a pro-development agenda over the past four years? Whereby it is now learned that a few minor changes to the ordinance would have made it compatible with the Permit Streamlining Act (PSA)? Instead of tweaking the ordinance, the PSA became the excuse and created the opportunity to gut the ordinance.  

The current composition of the LPC is different from that which approved the revisions a year ago. Also different at the meeting was the absence of the city’s staff attorney Zack Cowen. Staff was quiet, and the commissioners convened, deliberated, and heard each others’ well-reasoned opinions.  

The LPC’s decision also comes in response to the Planning Commission’s bold attempt to demote the LPC, remove some of its powers, placing those powers in the hands of a commission with no expertise in architectural or historical landmarks, i.e. the Zoning Adjustments Board.  

The LPC’s action is welcome especially in light of the city’s bold notice to the public that the ordinance revisions are exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Historic resources are a protected resource under CEQA, and proposed changes to the ordinance will reduce those protections. The Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association’s (BAHA) attorney argues for environmental review.  

The city’s management and many of the elected council members have a pro-development agenda that is becoming increasingly obvious. Development is one thing, but at the expense of neighborhoods is another. Preservation is a neighborhood issue and not just an aesthetic issue. When a building is demolished, it is usually to put up something larger and more population dense. 

Finally, I wonder if Mr. Tobey’s condemnation of the LPC is a bad case of sour grapes since his recommendation (submitted for that meeting) was not endorsed, and barely considered, by the commission.  

All these examples add up to illustrate the importance of leaving politics out of the ordinance revision process. Toward that end, the city should adopt the LPC’s recommendation and hire an outside expert.  

Janice Thomas  

Director, BAHA 

• 

SLAVERY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

J. Douglas Allen-Taylor wants schools to present more on the impact of African slavery in this country. Good idea. Malcolm X lectured on the topic, and Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale were encouraged during their formative months for their Black Panther Party by the responses to the presentations they gave in Oakland on slavery, and other aspects of black history. But the history lessons in the 1960s were tied with strong analysis of the daily impact of racism upon the black public of that tumultuous decade. The problem was defined as slavery AND the pigs. 

In 2005, an analysis of slavery needs to be tied to the policies since the 1960s that have held back and even regressed African America. Today’s school children need to know that a whole lot more than slavery is the cause for today’s disproportionately high representation of black people among those pushing shopping carts and holding out the tin cup.  

Ted Vincent 

• 

SCHOOL NAME SIDESHOW 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Many thanks to J.Douglas Allen-Taylor for further flapping on our favorite school name sideshow. I’m shocked, simply shocked, to read Mr. Taylor’s enthusiastic endorsement of recent “honest and serious discussion about American slavery, its ramifications, and its implications,” alongside his spoilsport conclusion that this discussion would continue only if Berkeley begets an elementary school formerly known as Jefferson. 

I must caution Mr. Taylor against his disastrously deterministic view on the place of historical slavery in such current issues as how to educate black youth, how (or whether) to close the achievement gap and/or lift the education of all students. The invocation of an antiquated, mechanistic view of the Big Bang is simplistic and misplaced: We will not now find our way by approaching slavery as a singularity with a predictable trajectory to our current condition. To do so is to deny the diversity of experience, views and ambitions that Taylor finds on display in the occasional honest, serious, and difficult conversation among ordinary people. To do so is to hand over a pluralistic and exploratory educational endeavor to dogmatic zealots. Yet again. 

J. Tharp 

• 

TERM LIMITS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have to disagree with Zelda Bronstein (“Commission Reform,” July 5) and support a strictly enforced eight-year term limit for commissioners.  

Gene Poschman is only part of the problem. On ZAB alone, there are two members who have been entrenched for what seem like decades, and they both consistently work against the environment.  

It definitely is undemocratic for these people to have so much influence on decisions about Berkeley development just because they have unlimited free time to devote to city government.  

Let’s open up the commissions to reflect the diversity of opinion in Berkeley and are not dominated by a few entrenched people. 

Charles Siegel 

• 

TRAFFIC CIRCLES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

“People seem to be confused about traffic circles,” claims Colleen McGrath’s July 5 letter. Really? The only confused parties seem to be a couple of planners in the city’s Transportation Office who keep deploying these unwanted devices, and a handful of neighborhood traffic NIMBYs who encourage them. 

The rest of us have figured out traffic circles just fine: They’re an inconvenience and a hazard to nearly everyone. They delay emergency vehicles, distract and baffle drivers, and force cars out into crosswalks and bike lanes. 

Their proliferation will probably cause the very accidents they are supposed to prevent, and harm the pedestrians (like me) and cyclists in whose name they were installed. 

Marcia T. Lau 

• 

BERKELEY HONDA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Berkeley Honda on Shattuck Avenue has joined America’s race to the bottom. Its striking workers are requesting customers not to patronize the establishment until their labor dispute is settled. The workers fear that this Berkeley institution is being turned into an automotive Wal-Mart. The Berkeley dealership has refused to honor the union contract. Instead, 15 employees were fired, including some who are close to retirement. Younger, far less experienced workers have replaced them. Also their pension plan and health insurance have been downgraded. 

Please don’t patronize Berkeley Honda and urge your friends and neighbors not to do so as well. If the community cooperates, these striking workers can have their jobs restored with dignity. 

Harry Brill 

El Cerrito 

• 

GRAND JURY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a long-time Daily Planet reader, I was very disappointed to see your out-of-date and unexamined front-page article on the bogus Grand Jury report attacking the Alameda County Medical 2 and other local media commented on it by quoting hospital and union responses, as well as noting that its two-month early issue was unusual. The Planet also failed to notice that that same week last May a proposal was floated to appoint Sheriff Charlie Plummer to the hospital Board of Trustees. A speedy campaign by SEIU, Vote Health and other community activists halted this action, also reported in other local media. 

Context is all: It was Plummer who first recommended the Tennessee consulting firm Cambio to take over management of ACMC some 18 months ago, over the fierce opposition of labor and community activists. Since their hiring, the sheriff has regularly attended hospital Board of Trustees meetings, often accompanied by uniformed subordinates in what many hospital workers took as an attempt at intimidation. After these meetings the sheriff would then send poison-pen letters to the Board of Supervisors and to the Grand Jury trashing the trustees and the unions. On the day of the clinic walkout last summer—which the Planet did cover—Plummer hoisted a Cambio budget document in a public meeting and claimed that it revealed that 25 percent of the hospital workforce wasn’t working on any given day, supposedly off on workers comp or long-term disability. This was false, but Cambio officials failed to correct their sponsor. 

The foreman of the grand jury is a former high-ranking employee of Sheriff Plummer. If you look at Plummer’s poisonous notes to the Supes and the grand jury, you will note almost identical themes found in the grand jury report. You can get the letters, as we did, from the county.  

One has to ask, from whom did the grand jury get its bad information? Cambio officials called the notion that 25 percent of their staff are out on workers comp “an urban myth” when asked to explain the figure by County Supervisor Gail Steele at a public meeting on May 18. Cambio verified that the figure includes normal vacation, holidays, sick leave, and other paid absences, with only 44 employees actually out on workers comp. Why would a grand jury investigation not check directly with the agency personnel department it was examining? 

The grand jury report, led by Plummer’s friend, praises Cambio, his protégés from Tennessee, for its horrendous management (surprise!) and claims that ACMC is facing a fiscal crisis, although they just passed a balanced budget without any need for layoffs, as Plummer demands. They foolishly blame the unions for nurse staffing ratios, apparently unaware that those are set by the state (remember our governor being chased around the state by nurses when he tried to change the ratios?). 

There are many other “mistakes” in this tainted report, but I don’t have room in your column. Readers should check out the Oakland Tribune for continued updates. 

Kay Eisenhower 

Chair, Vote Health 

Oakland 

• 

DOWNTOWN PARKING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I find it difficult to sympathize with the Downtown Berkeley Association when they complain about insufficient downtown parking. 

We already have enough parking downtown. 

A few years ago, the city and UC jointly funded the Traffic Demand Management (TDM) study. It concluded that there would be plenty of parking spaces if people knew where spaces are available and if so many of the spaces were not filled by business owners and employees who park there all day. 

Downtown parking should be reserved for short-term use: shoppers and visitors. 

The TDM study said that with improved signage, and a “modest” shift of all-day parkers to using public transit, there is ample downtown parking right now. 

Perhaps the DBA would like to act as a distribution center for bus passes, for the use of business owners and their employees. 

Steve Geller 

• 

MORE ON PARKING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Quoting a study conducted by UC Berkeley Staff and students in fall of 2002, “parking shortages are caused in large part by overtime parking, facilitated by broken parking meters and by meter feeding by employees; the effective supply of on-street parking could be increased by better enforcement. Enforcement, in turn, would divert some street parkers to garages and others to less expensive walk, bike and transit modes.” (Deakin, Elizabeth, et. al., Dec. 2002) 

Studies conducted by and for the City of Berkeley show hundreds of parking spaces empty and available in the downtown parking garages, varying during times of day and days of the week, between 1997, 2000 and March 2005, numbering between 100 and 300 empty spaces in the Center Street structure alone. Several other lots add many more available spaces. 

The lack of downtown parking is a myth. Customers of downtown merchants complain they can’t find a parking space. They would like to park close to or in front of the business they are frequenting. But many of the spaces close to the businesses are either: 1) taken by employees or owners of the businesses themselves (observed by study); or 2) taken by meter-feeding patrons who violate the time-limit (about 30 percent of vehicles in the study!). Many metered spaces have had broken meters, up to an average of 32 percent.  

The City of Berkeley’s Transportation Office is in the process of piloting new parking (meter) stations, which seem promising in the solution of meter-feeding and overstaying of time limits. Enforcement will be a more realistic activity with properly functioning parking meters. Once street parking is under better control, with better meters and enforcement, on-street parking violators will be nudged to better utilize the parking garages and/or transit, bicycling and walking modes. It has been estimated that this could open up 50 percent of on-street parking spaces currently occupied on an average day. 

Better parking meters are one of the solutions on the way. The Transportation Office is proposing real-time signage to help drivers find parking and better utilize existing parking spaces; and staff has been working with major employers to support employee use of transportation alternatives.  

Parking spaces are extremely expensive to build: Estimates get higher with each new lot that is built. Surface spaces can cost about $25,000 each, while parking garage spaces can cost upwards of $50,000 per space, or more. 

If one were to think about this situation logically it makes sense both economically and environmentally to allow solution measures time to have an observable outcome, before spending millions of the public’s money to encourage more vehicles to drive and park downtown. 

Marcy Greenhut 

• 

GATED WILLARD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am very dismayed to see that BUSD is now adopting the “gated community” look for Willard Middle School. As this interminable construction continues —what was supposed to last two months and continues unfinished now for 14 months—BUSD is now installing a custom wrought-iron fence and gate, buttressed with over a dozen brick pillars. At the same time as this out of control spending goes on (they should be forced to publish the bill for all their starts and stops), BUSD continues to rattle its tin cup, crying poor. Teachers and students are being moved out of classrooms as administrators are forced to use classrooms as offices since, apparently, there’s no money for portables. Our kids in the cooking program are using 40-year-old stoves, many of which don’t have working ovens and are missing knobs. Two years ago, a major local store generously donated five brand new appliances to the Willard Cooking Program, and to date, not one has been installed. Superintendent Lawrence waxed eloquently at the Berkeley Public Education Foundation Luncheon about the importance of food and nutrition for students, yet there’s no staff or money to install free quality appliances. But there seems to be no end of funds available for their “gated look.”  

You build healthy schools from the foundation up, not from the curb in. There’s something very wrong with BUSD’s priorities and spending. I can’t wait to see what BUSD is charging on my next property tax bill. 

Dan Peven 

• 

FANCY FENCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Heh, I hear that the school district wants to turn Willard Middle School into a gated community—brick pillars, custom wrought-iron fence. The school’s not doing great on test scores, ranks only a 5 (mediocre) on state wide school rankings, but heh, let’s build a fancy expensive fence and gate instead. Now that’s education! 

Marc Fulton 

• 

BART SECURITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

We are all grateful there is no BART strike just now. 

But BART announced above-ground restrooms will be closed, because of raised security after bombings in London. The underground restrooms have been closed for years. There is no indication any of the London bombs were placed in restrooms.  

I spoke with a BART spokesperson and asked how many bombs have been placed in BART restrooms. He said that in his employment at BART since 1971, there have been none, to his knowledge. 

I work with disabled people, who often need access to public restrooms. They also use public transportation more often.  

As an aside, I asked about the coin-operated lockers that were in BART stations until the first Gulf War, when we were told they would be removed because of potential terrorist threat. And we were told, they would be replaced after the war. I am still looking for them. The BART spokesperson said he does not recall ever seeing lockers in BART stations.  

Kevin McFarren 

Oakland 

• 

ANTI-DEMOCRATIC 

Mal Burnstein is at it again, defending the indefensible (Letters, June 24). You might remember Mr. Burnstein as Tom Bates’ lawyer in the infamous Daily Cal trashing case. Now, according to Burnstein, Zelda Bronstein is being naïve and ill-informed when she dares criticize the secrecy with which the City Council deliberated and then approved the settlement with UC. That’s the way the city always deals with lawsuit settlement talks, says Burnstein. “If that is anti-democratic,” he writes, “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.)” 

If Burnstein is right, then his good friend and sometime client Tom Bates was as naïve and ill-informed as Bronstein when he promised BLUE (Berkeleyans for a Livable University Environment) that members of the public would have an opportunity to comment on the terms of the settlement before the council made a final decision. 

If Burnstein is right, why did City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque even bother to sign a confidentiality agreement with UC (also in secret) pledging that the details of the settlement would not be made public until after the deal had been signed and sealed? 

Whether Burnstein is wrong or right, what the mayor, the City Council and the city attorney conspired to do was indisputably anti-democratic. 

Richard Spaid 

• 

MARRIAGE EQUALITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Molly McKay and Equality California, her gay-marriage organization, aren’t interested in real equality; they just want to gang up with the heterosexual marrieds in sticking it to the unmarried minority.  

These gay-marriage advocates are like some light-skinned Blacks in the Jim Crow South who weren’t opposed to discrimination, per se, they just wanted to be classified as white so they didn’t have to suffer it themselves. I guess Equality California likes its equality Animal Farm style, where everybody is equal, but married people are more equal than others. 

Why should married people of any gender combination be awarded any privileges, rights, benefits or other advantages that favor them over unmarried people? Ms. McKay’s desire for gay marriage is scarcely more principled than those who want to reserve marriage exclusively for straights. Both of these selfish groups want to set themselves on a pedestal above the unmarried and then claim special treatment because of their self-exalted status. Ms. McKay should be calling for the inequities of marriage to be eliminated, not merely extended to favor her special-interest group. 

It’s really something to watch gay and straight couples squabble over benefits that they are both perfectly happy to deny to singles. You’d think that with marriage being such a purportedly fabulous thing that they’d be thrilled just to be married. But apparently that’s not enough for these greedy people. 

The heterosexual married majority and the gay wanna-be-marrieds also see fit to vote themselves special privileges and public moneys for being so special. And all of this is at the expense of the unmarried, who are denied economically valuable privileges and who pay taxes that subsidize substantial marriage perks while receiving none themselves. 

If Ms. McKay and Equality California were truly equality-minded they would call for the elimination of all the invidious distinctions that governments and corporations make between people based on the happenstance of their sex lives.  

I won’t hold my breath. 

S. Smiths

The Draft Ron Dellums Movement that is currently sprouting wings and flying all over town has generated the most excitement in an Oakland mayoral race since, well, let’s see...since Jerry Brown announced his plans to run some eight years ago. 

For those who don’t read the news so much, a group of progressives and black political leaders recently began a campaign to convince Mr. Dellums—the former congressmember—to run in the 2006 election to succeed Mr. Brown. From all indications, Mr. Dellums is giving it serious consideration. 

From a distance, the 1998 Brown candidacy and the potential 2006 Dellums candidacy have some superficial similarities, particularly the idea that a nationally known political figure would be expected to bring star-power attention to an unappreciated Oakland. Remember when Jerry Brown was going to put Oakland on the map? Has that been long enough that we can now call it a back-in-the-day thing? 

Anyways, the similarities between what Mr. Brown has done and what Mr. Dellums might do pretty much end right there. 

One is in the area of race, but it’s more complicated than the obvious fact that Mr. Brown is white and Mr. Dellums is black. 

No one is expecting that Mr. Dellums—one of the few (if not the only) black politicians in the nation’s history to win repeated re-election from a political district that was not majority black—would suddenly reverse course in the latter stages of his life and start building a black political power bloc at the expense of all other groups. 

And Mr. Brown is not accused of being an anti-black racist, if by that term we mean someone who either hates black people, or thinks they are not his equal. (Mr. Brown probably thinks that few people are his equal, but that makes him arrogant and elitist, not racist, which is another thing altogether.) 

When he first ran for mayor in 1998, Mr. Brown did ride the wave of underlying feeling in some areas of Oakland that there had been enough of black rule—the Wall Street Journal reported in an August 1999 article that “in his campaign for mayor, Mr. Brown…promised to dismantle the African-American-dominated political machine that presided over much of the city’s decline since the 1970s.” And while Mr. Brown’s attacks on the black sideshow youth have not been overtly anti-black, they have often strayed very close to the edge in their appeal to anti-black stereotypes. 

Still, Mr. Brown retained some of the black presence within Oakland government that was there under Mayor Elihu Harris. Mr. Brown retained the African-American Robert Bobb (for a while) as city manager, replacing him with another African-American, Deborah Edgerly, when he and Bobb could no longer get along. Mr. Brown also replaced one black police chief (Joseph Samuels) with another (the since-departed Richard Word) in one of his first actions as mayor. 

Some of Mr. Brown’s black appointments or attempts at appointments have been—to say it charitably—somewhat peculiar (Harry Edwards as Park and Rec chief and the time the mayor wanted either Angela Davis or Maya Angelou to come on as head librarian—while both of them had read books and written books and even taught from books, neither of them, it appeared, had actually worked in a library. Still, it cannot be said that the mayor swept Oakland’s decks clean of black faces. 

But that has not kept black political activists in Oakland from worrying. 

In the years when this city had an African-American mayor and a majority African-American school board and the local assembly district was regularly sending an African-American member to Sacramento, Oakland was one of the centers of black political power, both in California and in the nation. Given the change in the city’s demographics, it is doubtful that any ethnic group will so dominate Oakland’s elective offices in the near future. (A look at the present racial composition of the Oakland City Council is a better indication of the type of racial-ethnic balance we will probably continue to see: three whites, two African-Americans, two Asian-Americans, one Latino.) 

But the Draft Dellums group says that their major concern is for further down the road, and if there will be enough young and upcoming black political talent to fill the available slots. While Latinos and Asian-Americans are beginning to build strong political organizations in Oakland—and white folks, as always, are holding steady—some black insiders are concerned that the pool of gifted young black politicians is drying up. 

Working for a state legislator or a congressmember is the farm system of politics, where potential young politicians gain name recognition and learn the political ropes. Former Assemblymember Dion Aroner built up her political resume by working for Tom Bates while he was in the assembly, and members of State Senator Don Perata’s team are salted in government positions throughout Oakland and Alameda County. During the time when he was in national office, Dellums did the same, and made certain that at least some of those protegés were black. At least two of them—Congressmember Barbara Lee and County Supervisor Keith Carson—continue to play important roles in Bay Area politics. 

Dellums did not confine his mentorship to up-and-coming blacks, of course, but he certainly included a lot of up-and-coming blacks, probably more so than any other local politician. Members of the Draft Dellums group are hoping that if he returns to local politics, Dellums will revive that training ground for young black politicians, which has virtually dried up since Ms. Lee succeeded him. 

Another area where the Draft Dellums folks think a Mayor Dellums administration would be significantly different from a Mayor Brown administration is in the area of regional cooperation. 

Few of the problems of a modern California city can be solved within the city itself; they need a regional effort (that’s an issue we’ll have to explore in detail in a future column). Because of its size and its geography, Oakland should be the natural political, social, and economic leader of a regional coalition spanning the coastal East Bay, an important section that stretches from Richmond to the north, through Berkeley, Emeryville, and San Leandro down to Hayward to the south, with Piedmont to the east and Alameda to the west. But under Mr. Brown, no such coastal East Bay coalition ever materialized. 

The major reason is that in a coalition, every party must get enough recognition to satisfy its own constituency. No one party can dominate, or the coalition falls apart. But Mr. Brown, who clearly only saw his time in Oakland as a stepping stone back into state or national politics, needed to get full credit for every major Oakland initiative in order to build (or rebuild) his political resumé. He wasn’t too crazy about sharing any of the credit with other Oaklanders, much less the mayors and city councilmembers of other cities. 

There is hope that Mr. Dellums—who, after all, cemented his legacy long ago—would have both the stature and the ability to smooth over the political egos and head up a coalition effort to attack some of the common problems in the region, from economic development to education to transportation to health care, and beyond. 

Will Ron run? I’ve got no inside track on the decision. But I do know that just the thought of a Dellums candidacy has gotten a lot of people excited in what they hope will be a new turn in Oakland politics. And that may end up having an effect on the 2006 mayoral race, whatever Mr. Dellums eventually decides to do. More on that in another column. 

GTGC 

It was a vehicle theft, but it doesn’t fit as a GTA—grand theft auto. Instead, it would have to be called a GTGC, for grand theft golf cart. 

Berkeley police discovered it when they made a pedestrian stop just before 2 a.m. last Friday near the intersection of Prince and Ellis streets when they spotted an electric golf cart belonging to UC Berkeley. 

The drivers, a pair of minors, were booked on suspicion of grand theft, said Berkeley police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies. 

Shoplift Becomes Robbery 

When employees of Eastern Supplies at 2900 Shattuck Ave. stopped a 50-year-old man they’d spotted boosting paint brushes during the lunch hour last Friday, the shoplifter turned his misdemeanor into a felony when he fought with his captures. 

He compounded his crime when he gave a false name to police officers when they arrived, a crime in itself. 

One of the employees sustained minor injuries during the scuffle, which were treated at the scene by firefighter paramedics. 

Women’s Rat Pack 

Rat pack attacks—robberies staged by a band of assailants—typically involve young males, but it was a distaff crew of anywhere from four to eight young women who robbed three other women near the corner of Parker Street and College Avenue shortly before 2 a.m. Saturday. 

When last seen, some of the assailants were high-tailing it away in a red sports car, said Officer Okies. 

Domestic Knife Attack 

A family disturbance turned into assault with a deadly weapon and spousal abuse when a woman pulled a knife in her apartment just before 4 a.m. Saturday. 

Police arrived moments later and booked the 49-year-old woman on the two felony charges. Her partner, who had received a minor knife wound in the scuffle, declined medical help, said Officer Okies. 

Belated Report 

Police got a call at 7:40 a.m. Sunday from a nurse at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, telling of a 20-year-old South Berkeley man who had come in with a knife wound. 

Arriving at the hospital, the young man said he was attacked by a pair of men near the corner of San Pablo Avenue and Jones Street the previous midnight. 

Backpack Theft 

A 25-year-old man called Berkeley police shortly before midnight Sunday after a group of men strong-armed his backpack and its contents near the corner of Sutter and Hopkins streets. 

Solo Deuce of Fourth 

July 4 turned out to be a pretty dull day, and police think that’s just fine, said Officer Okies. Only one drunk driver—a deuce in police parlance—was taken to the hoosegow, and he was popped near the corner of Ashby and Claremont avenues when the day was just two hours old. 

About That Security 

Police were called to Econo Gas at 950 University Ave. at 10 a.m. on the Fourth to investigate a grand theft. 

Turns out it was the station’s security cameras that were swiped. 

Knife For Wallet 

A man with a knife relieved a 35-year-old pedestrian of his wallet near the corner of Adeline and Stuart streets just before 1 a.m. Tuesday. 

GTAntiques 

A woman who had lived on Wildcat Road called police Tuesday to report the theft of four antiques worth $24,000. 

The woman told officers that she had paid a Berkeley man to ship the valuables just before she moved several months ago, but they never arrived at their intended destinations. 

Police are investigating the incident, said Officer Okies. 

Gun Gang 

Four men, including at least two who were packing pistols, robbed a 19-year-old man of his wallet and cell phone about 6 p.m. Tuesday near the corner of Ashby Avenue and Otis Street, said officer Okies. 

Real GTA, Finally 

Police arrested a 48-year-old man in the 1600 block of 63rd Street after they stopped him driving a set of hot wheels.

In my June 28 commentary entitled “Historical Preservation: It Takes A Community,” I wrote that proposed changes to the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance (LPO), due to come before the City Council on July 12, would (among other problems) remove state prot ections that encourage developers to work with the community. The state protections to which I referred are those provided by the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).  

CEQA was passed in 1970, when “environmentalism” was the people’s enterprise—local as well as global, urban as well as rural, cultural as well as natural. CEQA arose from the same impulse that a few years later created our Neighborhood Preservation Ordinance and the LPO. In those days, that was called “progressive.” But how things have changed! Berkeley claims to be a “green” and “progressive” city, but any city determined to avoid environmental protection and public participation is neither.  

Our planning department apparently views CEQA as a stupid law designed to create a divis ive debate, and to throw roadblocks in a developer’s path, after a project design is in its final phases. Thus CEQA is to be avoided at all costs. The result is anger and bitterness on all sides—and bad projects. But this is only because our planning depa rtment does not use CEQA as intended.  

Properly implemented, CEQA is a smart law designed to create early public input into development projects in order to minimize adverse environmental impacts. In so doing, community input and energy is channeled into constructive collaboration on what becomes a much better project.  

CEQA says, “the Lead Agency shall encourage the project proponent to incorporate environmental considerations into project conceptualization, design, and planning at the earliest feasibl e time” (CEQA §15004b3). “Early preparation is necessary for the legal validity of the process and for the usefulness of the documents. Early preparation enables agencies to make revisions in projects . . . before the agency has become so committed to a p articular approach that it can make changes only with difficulty” (CEQA Guidelines).  

What does “early” mean? For public projects, CEQA says that environmental review should start before a site is even purchased! In addition, CEQA states clearly that env ironmental review shall occur “concurrently” with the development application process, not afterward. 

In other words, environmental input from the community should not primarily respond to a project design; it should and must inform the project—and the e arlier, the better. Yet in Berkeley, the project applicant and staff essentially “create” a project together and “finish” it well before the community has even heard about it. Then both applicant and staff hunker down to protect their substantial investme nt from outraged neighbors. Such is the result of violating the intent, spirit, and often even the letter of CEQA. 

Developers’ private property rights do not override protection of the cultural and historical commons. If it comes to this contest, the community should win. But with the right approach, we can make such either-or decisions rare. 

Used properly, CEQA provides one of life’s few real opportunities to “have our cake and eat it too.” This is because one of CEQA’s most brilliant provisions is to require, in environmental impact reports (EIR), consideration of “alternatives” that accomplish the goals of the project while minimizing damage to the environment and surrounding community.  

This is simply a way of forcing people to think creatively. It is nowhere more beneficial than in the case of historical resources, where usually the community and developer are able to ultimately reconcile the old with the new. And it is almost always true that the resulting development is more imaginative, more at tractive, more contextual, more to-scale, and certainly better for the community than it otherwise would have been. And frequently it also turns out to be better for the developer. It’s a win-win all around, and has worked many times in Berkeley. 

Smart d evelopers voluntarily pursue alternatives that respect the community, its values, and its resources, but for those who don’t, CEQA provides two “sticks” that force the developer in the right direction. One is the aforementioned EIR requirement to look for alternatives. The other is the cost of doing an EIR, the mere threat of which often drives the developer to cooperation. In either case, however, lacking municipal policy incentives, the only incentive for the developer to work with the community in Berk eley is CEQA. 

This is where the LPO comes in. Many of the proposed revisions to the LPO are an attempt to neutralize historical resources as a factor mandating environmental review under CEQA. How the proposed LPO revisions do this is too technical for t his commentary, so let’s look at the why, which is even more important to the typical Berkeleyan. 

An acknowledged goal of our planning department is to seek exemption from CEQA review whenever possible. Staff is helped in that goal by state laws promotin g infill development through more and more “categorical exemptions” to CEQA; such exemptions permit projects to be built without consideration of environmental impacts. But, because of the importance and irreplaceability of historical resources, a project’s impact on them trumps all CEQA exemptions. If a historical resource is threatened, there must be environmental review.  

If staff can find a way to legally neutralize historical resources under CEQA, not only can they much more easily demolish the pesk y old buildings that stand in the way of development, they can legally avoid any environmental review for some new infill projects—no matter how large, ugly, dense, or damaging. In addition, and perhaps worse, they must approve projects much faster—within 60 days instead of the longer period required if environmental review is mandated.  

Can we create good developments, especially large ones, within 60 days, especially in the absence of any incentive for the developer to interact with the neighborhood? N o. It takes time for neighbors to intelligently address development issues, and effectively communicate their concerns to decision makers. Such a short fuse, especially for a naïve neighborhood taken by surprise, effectively prevents public input or objec tion, not just on historical issues but on any issue (traffic, parking, aesthetics, etc.). This is exactly what developers and city staff want.  

It has become apparent to me that the attitude that “neighbors” are an obstacle, whose participation is to be avoided (along with CEQA, which mandates it), is the very heart of Berkeley’s planning problems. The LPO has nothing to do with it.  

Nonetheless, the rewriting of the LPO is now offered up as a “solution” to conflict resulting from lack of early and gen uine community engagement in development projects. Why? Nothing in the LPO prevents any well-meaning applicant from—on his own—talking to the community and researching potential project impacts, including historical ones, at any time, with the goal of res olving, not belittling, community concerns. This could occur long before major investment in development plans. And staff could facilitate this with their considerable power and resources. 

But instead, the “solutions” to be considered by the council on J uly 12 are directed not at developers who refuse to work with the community, and not at revamping entrenched planning policies and attitudes that, despite lip service to the contrary, discourage such cooperation. No, all the major changes being considered are aimed squarely at weakening the public’s ability to preserve Berkeley’s heritage, and at circumventing the community’s CEQA protections.  

This is no less than an assault on Berkeley’s interesting and lovely historical character, and all the citizens who cherish it. Why would those whom we have elected with our votes, and whose salaries we pay with our tax money, to protect us and our city, even consider damaging our urban environment in this way? 

Sharon Hudson is an advocate for improving urban quality of life.n

Suicide bombers? Anarchists? That’s not my impression. It’s hard to believe that Alan Tobey (Commentary, July 1) and I both attended the same Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) meeting on the evening of June 27. 

I understand that Mr. Tobey has committed much personal time and energy to the issue at hand and that his disappointment is deeply felt. I share the same frustration. 

The special LPC meeting of June 27 was held to examine our existing Landmarks Preservation Ordinance (LPO) and two proposed sets of revisions— independently crafted by the Landmarks Preservation and Planning Commissions—and to formulate recommendations to City Council. The original charge of the LPC was to revise the LPO to conform to the timing constraints of the Permit Streamlining Act. 

The LPC unanimously raised specific concerns regarding each proposal and chose not to endorse either proposal at this time, without first resolving these concerns, best done with the aid of an impartial third-party, preservation and regulatory expert. Sometimes it is appropriate for responsible individuals to “pull the brake” and “slow the train.” This is one of those times.  

Mr. Tobey likened the LPC to “suicide bombers, blowing up their own proposal in order to prevent the normal cooperative workings of a democratic government.” Throughout the Planning Commission proceedings of the past year, new information has raised serious concerns about the increased workload the LPC proposal—and analogous sections of the Planning Commission proposal—would create for the commission and city staff and the burden it would place on many homeowners attempting to alter their homes. It is one issue that certainly deserves in-depth discussion. 

Mr. Tobey also states that the Commission “asked the Council to throw out five years of effort and start over.” Although individual commissioners may advocate that the LPC “start from scratch,” the full LPC did NOT state that in its final motion and recommendation to the City Council. 

As a Certified Local Government (CLG), the city is required to consult with the state Office of Historic Preservation (OHP) on any proposed ordinance revisions. The OHP has not yet provided final written comments and recommendations arising from its review of the proposed revisions. It is improper for the Council to move to adopt LPO revisions without the OHP review. 

No commissioner threatened lawsuit as Mr. Tobey states. The commission chose to alert the City Council that the LPC and the Planning Commission have received correspondence that suggests that the city may be exposing itself to threat of lawsuit if the city proceeds with substantive revisions to the LPO—which appear to weaken existing provisions—without first conducting the appropriate level of environmental review. The council can turn to the city attorney’s office to assess the degree of risk.  

My hope is that we can resolve our concerns without anger, and without the inflammatory language present in Mr. Tobey’s editorial. 

The LPC’s motion can be found as a late item in the City Council’s package for the July 12 meeting. It is also posted on BAHA’s website. 

Jill Korte is chair of Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Commmission. 

›

The Mexican comic strip character “el negrito” Memín Pinguín has been put on a series of postage stamps. The character is bug eyed, fat lipped, has enormous ears and looks like a black rubber mask compared with the white people in the cartoon, who are drawn with the realistic precision of the old “Prince Valiant” strip. Compared to the whites in the strip, Penguin is Bugs Buggy in the movie Roger Rabbit. 

The White Chicks of the Wayans brothers were 10 times more realistic than little black Memín. Lil’ Memín has a loving rubber-faced handkerchief-head mother. Lil’ Memín can’t speak good Spanish, his white friends tell him. Considering the above, one wonders why the Memín Pinguín postage stamps have drawn little criticism from within Mexico. And most of what there is merely complains that it is insensitive to give “the cute kid” the international exposure of a stamp, considering how “oversensitive” people are on race in some other countries. Bold defenders of the Pinguín stamps are numerous in Mexico. One declared the U.S. critics of the cartoon are agents of the imperialists who are trying to dominate the world culturally as well as militarily. Another commentator said that we up north should mind our own business, adding that “Mexico never had separate water faucets for white people.”  

Defense of the cartoon is long on Menín Pinguín’s honor and good nature and short on answers to the issue of racial stereotyping. Anti-black racism is rarely discussed in Mexico, out of a belief that the nation solved that problem long ago. Mexico abolished caste law at independence in 1821 and eight years later abolished slavery. Mexico has had presidents with African heritage and one with pure Indigenous roots. Mexico’s slavery revolt leader, Gaspar Yanga, has a city and county named in his honor. What does Nat Turner have? Yanga also has a children’s coloring book. Curiously, the cover is adorned with “Topsie” look-a-likes, bug eyed, messy haired, squirly and big-handed lil’ blacks. The author, a left-wing historian, was surprised when told that the “Topsie” depictions would be considered racist in the United States. 

Perhaps if there were more people in Mexico with African appearance there would be less of the stereotyping, but the African population that two centuries ago was counted 10 percent of the nation is now mostly mixed into “the mestizo nation,” as is the case with the majority of the Indigenous. Despite the assimilation, there are still Indigenous beggar women with their emaciated children on the sidewalks of cities all over Mexico. 

A major cause of Mexico’s blind spot on race is that the same independence decade that saw caste and slavery washed away in a mass movement previewing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also previewed Ward Connelly. Action to deal with race met action to outlaw race. First came the 1821 independence war peace plan of Iguala which declared “All inhabitants... without distinction to their being Europeans, Africans or Indians are citizens...with the option to seek all employment according to their merits and virtues.” Law 279 of independent Mexico’s first congress codified this clause. But there was a twist. Instead of “Europeans, Africans or Indians” the equality was extended to all from “whichever of the four corners of the world one may come.” This congress was out to abolish mention of race. Law 313 prohibited references to race in any Mexican government document, or in the records of the parish church.  

Law 303 prohibited any elected official from “speaking disparagingly of anyone’s origins,” which at first glance was an anti-n word law which Dr. King might have supported, but in interpretation meant it was not proper to mention anyone’s origins, either positively or negatively. The congress came close to passing a law to make it illegal to utter the word “Indio” in congressional debates. 

Over the past two centuries the class focus has led Mexico to more years of serious class revolution than almost any other nation. Faceless masses under a sea of sombreros march for leaders and lieutenants who, with a few exceptions, have mention of their race relegated to obscure tomes. But the muralists during the 1910 revolution discovered that they could focus upon history and put color and race in their works. Diego Rivera, for instance, took racial information from his and Frida Kahlo’s exquisite personal library of obscure tomes to publicize African and Indigenous heroes. Today, people privately identify with Rivera’s assortment of heroes of color, who evoke memories of Grandmother’s long Indian braids, or Grandfather’s dark brown skin. It could also be said that a similar quiet personal identification is made with the actor Cantinflas, who clearly has non-white roots, and with very little imagination, an African root. Cantinflas often played the quick-witted, uneducated, poor guy who gets into the society ball. Memín Penguin was a cartoon version of Cantinflas, outwitting the stronger, better educated of the world. 

However, Pinguín’s physical appearance, shoddy clothing and awkward speech are hard to excuse, and these factors are probably a reason that the number of newspapers carrying the 50-year-old comic strip has declined steadily from the early 1960s, as the issues of race raised in the civil rights and black power movements of the U.S. seeped into Mexico. Today, the strip has less than a twentieth of the circulation at its peak. Among the recent defenders of Memín are those who concede having not read the strip in years, and attribute their fondness for the “little black” to their long ago youthful identification with a boisterous and imperfect youngster.?

One of the living treasures of Berkeley is the Kala Art Institute. Now that this facility is over 30 years old, an exhibition of about 80 works by 71 artists can be seen at the Artists Gallery of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at Fort Mason acros s the bay. The exhibition stresses works on paper, created in a very wide range of processes, from woodcut and etching to digital photography, and includes sculpture, books and video works. It presents an overview of some of Kala’s multifarious activities. 

In 1974 two adventurous young artists, Archana Horsting and Yuzo Nakano, met at a famous international workshop and forum of ideas in Paris. They decided that it was the right time to start a community workshop, which would be based on the production of graphics. First located in a garage in San Francisco, they came to Berkeley where they opened the institute in the former Heinz ketchup factory in 1979. 

Kala became a place where artists meet and work and exchange ideas. In addition to prints, artists at Kala have made work in all imaginable new and old media. Selected artists from this country and abroad are awarded fellowship residencies. The international flavor is important. Kala has also organized exhibitions in Italy, Switzerland and even, in 200 3, in Uzbekistan. Catalogues are produced. Kala has also been in the forefront of sponsoring performance art in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its 8,500-square-foot studio in Berkeley includes an art library, an extensive print archive and a consignment sale s department. Most importantly, it never closes for the artists who come there to learn, experiment and take risks toward new ventures. 

The exhibition at Fort Mason gives visitors an idea of the creative energy which exemplifies Kala. This show will be followed by a large retrospective of work from over 30 years of Kala’s work, which will be accompanied by a book, now under consideration by Berkeley’s favorite publisher, Malcolm Margolin of Heyday Books, a house which is also 30-something years old. 

On Wednesday, July 13, Archana Horsting will give a gallery talk and present a brief history of Kala, at Building A at Fort Mason, where the exhibition will continue until July 29. An anniversary dinner reception and silent auction will be held at 5:30 p.m. July 17 at Green’s Restaurant, Fort Mason, Building A, San Francisco. Tickets are $150; call 549-2977 to reserve tickets.

The Domestic Crusaders, a new play by Bay Area-native Wajahat Ali about the reactions of three generations of a Pakistani-American family in the wake of 9/11, will be staged for three performances only, July 15 and 16, at the Thrust Stage of Berkeley Repertory Theater. 

Presented by Oakland’s Before Columbus Foundation, and produced by celebrated author and Before Columbus co-founder Ishmael Reed, The Domestic Crusaders is directed by Carla Blank and features a cast of South Asian actors from the Bay Area. 

The play originated when Ali was a UC Berkeley student in a writing class that Reed was teaching in 2001. 

“After Sept. 11, he disappeared for awhile,” Reed recalls. “There was hazing of Middle Easterners on campus, a bad atmosphere.” 

The Domestic Crusaders started out as a 20-page short story assignment in the class. 

“I asked him to turn the story into a play,” Reed said. “He has a magnificent ear for dialogue. He’s right up there with the best, in terms of family drama. ... A major new voice.” 

Ali said of his play, “I wanted to make something extraordinary out of the ordinary. Not an ethnocentric play that would exclude everyone else, but something in which those who see it would recognize aspects of their own family in a culture they’d never seen anything about before. The familiar in the unfamiliar. And hear what everybody’s got on the tip of their tongue, but doesn’t want to say.”  

Reed touts Ali’s play as “something all could relate to—Irish-American, African-American—but it’s not comfort food theater.” 

All the characters in the play have different sympathies, and different ways of analyzing the situation, he said. 

“The younger immigrant generation, like in all immigrant families, resists the language, the old culture, the food,” Reed said. “They’re on the way to becoming a classic American family. And they have a few secrets, like any family in any ethnic group. ... It’s finally optimistic and sprinkled with humor. There were waves and waves of laughter at the staged readings we had in Newark. There’s satire about the software industry and the media—and the family’s own prejudices, getting indignant over being mistaken for Afghanis! It’s kitchen drama, and brilliant, taking people back to their roots, where they’re coming from.”  

Wajahat Ali wrily recalls Reed referring to the “Muslim-bashing” of post-9/11 as “one man’s getting pummelled in the ring, and the referee’s not stopping the fight.” 

Going on about the “bunch of hustlers” who have made this “a very prolific industry,” Ali mentions Pat Robertson, who on his website “is adamant in his belief that Muslims worship some sort of moon god.” Ali decries the “cookie cutter allegories” of a “Hollywood unable to portray the spiritual lives of Americans” and “the media’s horrible job of conveying world religions, much less different cultures in America.” 

But talking about immigrant families, Ali notes: “Second-generation South Asians don’t know much about their families’ culture. They have to prod the older people, who often don’t want to talk. They’ve seen too many horrible things. The kids, then, are often embarrassed, don’t want to speak—then later ask their second-generation parents, ‘Why didn’t you teach us?’”  

Director Carla Blank recalls the actor who plays the father, Shahab Riazi, “who’s a little bit young for the part, saying ‘This is like a cautionary tale for me,’ warning him of what he might become. At the staged readings, his mother was telling people, ‘My son isn’t really like that!’” 

The cast includes two non-Muslim South Asian actresses, Nidhi Singh and Vidhu Singh, as well as Sadiyah Shaikh, and Saquib Mausoof as the grandfather. 

“The cast was very generous in educating me about their culture,” Blank said. “Together, we figured out the most honest way to present this material at the staged readings last year. At the Mehran Restaurant Theatre in Newark, we had somewhere between 300 to 400 people—and turned half that many away. The South Asian community really got the word out—and seemed amazed at how well Wajahat captured the different generations onstage.” 

Mehran Restaurant is providing Pakistani delicacies as part of the admission price for the show at the Thrust Stage. 

Other readings of the play were staged at last year’s Arts and Soul Festival in Oakland, and in the auditorium of the Main Branch of the Oakland Public Library. The Before Columbus Foundation is presenting this showcase of The Domestic Crusaders as part of its mission to promote contemporary multicultural literature. 

Ali, now a law student at UC Davis, is writing a “sequel/prequel” that will place The Domestic Crusaders in a trilogy, taking the family that debates 9/11 from the Partition of Pakistan and India in 1947 to the present. His background, both from Pakistan and in America, gives him direction, he said. 

“In old Middle Eastern culture, a storyteller was more valued than a swordsman,” Ali said. “He gave their history to the people of the tribes. Translate that onto stage with a couple of other people, it’s a play, but still storytelling. I know exactly where I want to go, but I don’t rush it; I let the characters speak for themselves. They’re not just mouthpieces to move the plot along.” 

The Domestic Crusaders plays at 8 p.m. Friday, July 15 and at 2 and 8 p.m. July 16. Berkeley Repertory Theater, 2025 Addison St. $20-$35. For more information call 647-2900 or see www.domesticcrusaders.com.

FRIDAY, JULY 8 

THEATER 

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 

Central Works, “The Grand Inquisitor” by Dostoevsky. Thurs - Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at The Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through July 31. Tickets are $9-$25 sliding scale. 558-1381. www.centralworks.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theatre “Anything Goes” Cole Porter’s musical, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through Aug. 13 at 951 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito. 524-9132. www.ccct.org 

“Livin’ Fat” a comedy about an African American family struggling over a financial blessing, Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 8 p.m., Sun. at 4 p.m., through July 30, at Sweets Ballroom, 1933 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $12.50-$35. 233-9222. 

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 

Woodminster Summer Musicals “Oaklahoma” at 8 p.m. at Woodminster Amphitheater in Joaquin Miller Park, 3300 Joaquin Miller Rd., Oakland. Through July 17. Tickets are $20-$33. 531-9597. www.woodminster.com 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Insomnia” Ten artists collaborate on one painting, from midnight to sunrise. Reception at 7:30 p.m. at Boontling Gallery, 4224 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. boontlinggallery@hotmail.com 

FILM 

For Your Eyes Only “Black Sunday” at 7:30 p.m. at Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Laurie R. King introduces her new novel, “Locked Rooms” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Jason Martineau, Tina Marzell & Ellen Hoffman Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Jazz, 4000 Meters High, with pianist Johnny Gonzales from Bolivia, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$13. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Lavay Smith and her Red Hot Skillet Lickers at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson with Nick & Shanna at 8 p.m. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Thomas Banks & Cultural Gumbo, N Focus at 5:30 p.m. at Baltic Square, behind 121 Park Place, Point Richmond. 223-3882. 

Beth Waters with Adrianne at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

In Harmony’s Way, a capella CD release, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Viva K, The Cushion Theory, Tiny Power, Gosling at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Los Nadies in a fundraiser for Just Cause Oakland at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Donation $5-$20. All ages event. 

Kathleen Grace Quartet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

DJ & Brook, jazz trio, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Bobby Jamieson Quintet at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373.  

Cecil P-Nut Daniels at 7 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $12-$15. 548-1159.  

Mingus Amungus at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Parallax, No Turning Back, Internal Affairs at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Robben Ford Band at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $22-$26. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, JULY 9 

THEATER 

San Francisco Mime Troupe “Doing Good” at 2 p.m. at Cedar Rose Park, 1300 Rose St. 415-285-1717. www.sfmt.org 

Woman’s Will, “Richard III” Sat. and Sun. at 1 p.m. in John Hinkle Park. Free. 420-0813. www.woman’s will.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

Huichol Indian Art Show with yarn paintings, beadwork and jewelry from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sun. from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Gathering Tribes Gallery, 1573 Solano Ave. 528-9038. www.gatheringtribes.com 

FILM 

Pre-Code Hollywood “Freaks” at 7 p.m. and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” at 8:25 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Chant for Peace with Snatam Kaur, Thomas Barquee & GuruGanesha at 7 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Cost is $20-$25. 1-888-735-4800. 

Hideo Date, Bobi Cespedes & Social Club Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

Carribean Allstars at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Eileen Hazel, songwriter showcase, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. www.epicarts.org 

Jon Roniger, singer-songwriter, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Geoff Muldaur, Larry Hanks, American home-grown music, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Kugleplex, Klezmer music at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Facing New York, Before Braille at 8:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0886.  

Extensions Jazz Quartet with guest Khalil Shaeed at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Rhiannon with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña. Conversation with the artists and Susan Muscarella at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $12-$14. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Smith Dobson Family Quartet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Rev. Rabia, urban blueswoman, at 7 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Real Sippin’ Whiskeys, The Bittersweets, Firecracker at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082.  

Jinx Jones Trio, alt jazz rock,at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Voetsek, Widespread Bloodshead, Brody’s Militia at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, JULY 10 

CHILDREN 

San Francisco Circus Theater, “Elevations 63” at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. at Julia Morgan Theater. Tickets are $5 children, $10 adult. 925-798-1300. www.juliamorgan.org 

THEATER 

San Francisco Mime Troupe “Doing Good” at 2 p.m. at Cedar Rose Park, 1300 Rose St. 415-285-1717. www.sfmt.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

California Watercolor Association “Summer Small Paintings Show” opens at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. 848-1228. www.giorgigallery.com 

Matrix 217: Haim Steinbach “Work in Progress: Objects for People/Snapshots” opens at Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave. Artists talk at 4 p.m. 642-0808.  

FILM 

Eyeing Nature “Darwin’s Nightmare” at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Blind at the Museum” Gallery Talk with John Dugdale and Beth Dungan at 3 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Chilufiya Safaa introduces her new book “A Foreign Affair” at 3 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. Co-sponsored by the International Women’s Writing Guild. 559-9500. 

Poetry Flash with J.P. Greene & George Davis at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Palabuniyan Kulintang Ensemble, traditional music and dance from the southern Philippines at 2 p.m. at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, Bancroft at College Ave. Cost is $1-$4. 643-7648. 

Americana Unplugged: Pete Madsen, blues, at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Misturada with Michael Golds at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

Adrian West, one-man string quartet, at 10 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Teka, Hungarian music at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Hitomi Oba Trio at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

“Take Me Home” a benefit to support the filming of this documentary about children caught in the foster care system at 5 and 7 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $20 adults, $12 youth. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

P-Nut & The Apocolypse at 7 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$7. 548-1159.  

Go it Alone, Blue Monday, Right On at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

MONDAY, JULY 11 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Transformations” A New Life for Recycled and Found Objects by Toby Tover-Krein opens at LunchStop Café, Bort Metro Center, 101 8th St. Oakland. Sponsored by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Actors Reading Writers: “Unwise Decisions” Stories by O. Henry, Lynne McFall and Saki at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Free. 845-8542, ext. 376. 

Aurora Stories, tales from the Arabian Nights at 7:30 p.m. at Aurora Theater, 2081 Addison St., Donation $20. 843-4822. 

Amy Butler Greenfield traces the history of cochineal dye in “A Perfect Red” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Track Maintenance, a benefit party for Watchword Press, with readings and music at 7:30 p.m. at Café Van Kleef, 1624 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5.  

Poetry Express with Marvin Hiemstra at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

East Bay Blues Benefit for East Bay Cancer Support at 7:30 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $20. 238-9200.  

TUESDAY, JULY 12 

CHILDREN 

Colibri An interactive journey through Latin America with traditional instruments and song, at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

FILM 

Eyeing Nature “The Great Art of Knowing” and “Skagafjordur”at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Sam Davis on “Designing for the Homeless: Architecture that Works” at 6 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. Free, but please RSVP 643-8465. 

Bakari Kitwana explains “Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiffers, Wannabes and the New Reality of Race in America” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

The Whole Note Poetry Series with Nicole Henares and Anise at 7 p.m. at The Beanery, 2925 College Ave. 549-9093. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Swamp Coolers at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054.  

The Karan Casey Band, Irish progressive traditionalists, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50- $18.50. 548-1761.  

Singers’ Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

Mark Goldenberg at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

YMP and the Jazz Masters Benefit at 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $18-$22. 238-9200.  

Barbara Linn at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

WEDNESDAY, JULY 13 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Vanishing Species and More” recent mixed-media paintings by Rita Sklar. Reception for the artist at 4 p.m. at the Joseph P. Bort MetroCenter, 101 Eighth St., Oakland. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays. 464-7773. 

ACCI Gallery, “2005 New Member Show” Reception for the artists at 6 p.m. at 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

“Transformations” A new Life for Recycled and Found Objects by Toby Tover-Krein. Reception at 4 p.m. at LunchStop Café, Bort Metro Center, 101 8th St. Oakland. Sponsored by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. 

FILM 

For Your Eyes Only “ Saboteur” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Arab Women Film Festival “Hollywood Harems” and “Benaat Chicago” at 7:30 p.m. at La Pena Cultural Center. Donation $5. 849-2568. www.lapena.org  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Faith Adiele talks about her journey to become Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun in “Meeting Faith” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.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 

Café Poetry hosted by Kira Allen at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña. Donation $2. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

Bernard Anderson & The Old School Band at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. West Coast Swing dance lesson with Nick & Shanna at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

Sat Tan Trio, heavy dub, jazz, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Fiamma Fumana, Italian folk fusion, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50- $18.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

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

The Fourtet Jazz Group at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Pete Escovedo & His Orchestra at 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $20-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, JULY 14 

EXHIBITIONS 

California Watercolor Association “Summer Small Paintings Show. Artists reception at 6 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. 848-1228. www.giorgigallery.com 

“Fire & Light” The Crucible’s Fire Arts Festival at 6:30 p.m. at 1260 7th St., Oakland. Tickets are $75. 444-0919. www.thecrucible.org 

FILM 

Pre-Code Hollywood “Female” at 7:30 p.m. and “Heat Lightening” at 8:50 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Bay Area Writing Project’s Young Writers will read at 7 p.m. at Moe’s Bookstore, 2476 Telegraph Ave.  

“On the Wall: The Art of Collecting Photography” A panel discussion sponsored by Pacific Center for the Photographic Arts at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Free, donations accepted.  

Helen Oyeyemi introduces her novel of a child torn between the worlds of her British father and Nigerian mother in “The Icarus Girl” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

“The Photographc Legacy of Claude Cahun” with Sandra Phillips, SFMOMA, at 6:30 p.m. at Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. Cost is $4-$6. 549-6950. 

Word Beat Reading Series with Cherise Wyneken & Tim Nuveen at 7 p.m. at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. 526-5985. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Summer Noon Concert with The Hipnotics at the Downtown Berkeley BART Plaza. Sponsored by the Downtown Berkeley Association. 

From Bastille to Bush, labor musicians, including Anne Feeney, at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$20. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Jug Free America at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Jason Davis & Jazz Pirates at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

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

The Welcome Matt, Demons Defeated at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082 www.starryplough.com 

Debbie Poryes/Glenn Richman Duo at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. ?

FRIDAY, JULY 8 

“Peace One Day” A documentary film by British actor/director Jeremy Gilley describing how he persuaded world leaders to have the U.N. declare Sept. 21 an International Day of Peace, at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2296 Cedar St. Wheelchair accessible. Cost is $5. 527-0450. www.peaceoneday.org  

Grizzly Peak Flyfishers monthly meeting at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Community Center, 59 Arlington Ave., Kensington. The July meeting will be a Fly Tying Extravaganza. GPFF’s most accomplished tiers will demonstrate their techniques, and help less advanced tiers improve their skills. There will be extra tools and materials available for beginners who wish to try this fascinating craft. Everyone who has tools and materials is encouraged to bring them. 547-8629. 

Berkeley Critical Mass Bike Ride meets at the Berkeley BART the second Friday of every month at 5:30 p.m. 

Digital Cameras with Alan Stross, photographer, at 1 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190. 

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. 

Salsa Dancing at “The Beat” Dance Studio at 8:30 p.m. Lessons with Joseph Gallardo. 2560 9th St. at Parker. 472-2393 www.wildsalsanights.com  

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, JULY 9 

Berkeley Path Wanderers’ Cerrito Creek Walk to explore Indian, Spanish and early El Cerrito history, as well as recent restoration work. Meet at 10 a.m. at the north end of Cornell St., south edge of El Cerrito Plaza shopping center. 848-9358. f5creeks@aol.com 

Sick Plant Clinic UC plant pathologist Dr. Robert Raabe, UC entomologist Dr. Nick Mills, and their team of experts will diagnose what ails your plants from 9 a.m. to noon at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. 643-2755.  

“Herbal Desserts with Lavender” Learn to make lavender ice cream and cookies. For ages 6-13 at 1 p.m. at Spiral Garden, 2850 Sacramento. Reservations required. 623-0882. 

Mini-Farmers in Tilden A farm exploration program, from 10 to 11 a.m. for ages 4-6 years, accompanied by an adult. We will explore the Little Farm, care for animals, do crafts and farm chores. Wear boots and dress to get dirty! Fee is $5-$7. Registration required. 525-2233. 

Kids Garden Club For children 7-12 years old to explore the world of gardening. We plant, harvest, build, make crafts, cook and get dirty! From 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $5-$7, registration required. 525-2233. 

Pastors for Peace Send-Off for the Peace Caravan to Cuba at 6 p.m. at Berkeley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. 528-5403. 

Celebrate Early Literacy at 10 a.m. at Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge St. 647-1111. www.habitot.org 

Pollution Solutions with a focus on indoor air quality from 1 to 3 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $8-$10. Registration required. 525-2233. 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tour of Oakland Airport and North Field. Cost is $5-$10. For details call 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org 

Mediterranean Gardens for the Bay Area at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-2351. 

San Francisco Mime Troupe “Doing Good” at 2 p.m. at Cedar Rose Park, 1300 Rose St. 415-285-1717. www.sfmt.org 

The Political Cartoons of Ward Sutton at 7 p.m. at the AK Press Warehouse, 7674-A 23rd. St., Oakland. 208-1700. www.akpress.org 

Summer Vocal Jazz Workshops for singers at all levels with Richard Kalman, Sat. at 12:30 and 2 p.m.. through Aug. 6 at Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin St. 524-6797. http://richardkalman.com 

SpiritWalking at the Berkeley Warm Pool Ability to walk on land not necessary. Sat. from 10 to 11 a.m., to Aug. 11. Cost is $3.50 seniors/disabled, $5.50 others. Bring a towel and deck shoes. 526-0312. well-being@pacbell.net 

Children’s Books for K-5 Teachers with Walter Mayes at 2 p.m. at Cody’s Books, on Telegraph Ave. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Sistaz N Motion Business Mixer from noon to 3 p.m. at Richmond Public Library, Madeline Whittlesey Community Room, 325 Civic Center Plaza, Richmond. http://sistaznmotion.tripod.com 

“Parasites of the Body of Energy?” a lecture with Samuel Sagan at 3 p.m. at Claremont Branch Library, 2940 Benvenue Ave. 882-0042. 

Meditation, Chanting and Music with Kali Ma at 6:30 p.m. at Inner Heat Yoga, 64 Shattuck Square. DOnation $10-$15. 540-9642. 

Basic Manners for Your Dog, a six-week class on Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at RabbitEars, 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Cost is $125. Registration required. 525-6155. 

SUNDAY, JULY 10 

Year of the Estuary Hike in the hills of the Miller Knox Regional Shoreline. Meet at 1:30 p.m. in the first parking lot off Dornan Drive near Pt. Richmond. Bring a sack lunch and water. 525-2233. 

Green Sunday meets to discuss “Green Candidates, Green Officeholders and Lessons Learned” at 5 p.m. at Niebyl-Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave. at 65th in North Oakland. 

Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tour of Mountain View Cemetary. Cost is $5-$10. For details call 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org 

Hands-on Bike Maintenance Learn how to perform basic repairs on your bike from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $85-$100. 527-4140. 

“Take Me Home” a benefit to support the filming of this documentary about children caught in the foster care system at 5 and 7 p.m. at La Peña, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $20 adults, $12 youth. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Campfire and Sing-a-Long Meet at 5:30 p.m. at the Tilden Nature Center and we’ll walk uphill to the campfire circle. Bring hot dogs, buns, marshmallows and long sticks. Dress for fog. Call for disabled asistance. 525-2233. 

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

San Francisco Mime Troupe “Doing Good” at 2 p.m. at Cedar Rose Park, 1300 Rose St. 415-285-1717. www.sfmt.org 

Social Action Forum with Dr. Robert Gould from Physicians for Social Responsibility, at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

“Darwin’s Nightmare” A film about the introduction of Nile Perch into Lake Victoria in Tanzania, which led to the endangerment or extinction of native fish, and famine in the area. At 5:30 p.m. at Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way, at Bowditch. Cost is $8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/calendar/index.html 

C. Clark Kissinger & Travis Morales on their new book “The World Can’t Wait. Drive Out The Bush Regime” at 6:30 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way. 848-1196. 

Basic Pet Rat Care Learn about habitat, handling, hygiene, diseases, food and water. Meet the rescued rats looking for homes. At 2:30 p.m. at RabbitEars, 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Donations appreciated. All proceeds go to Bay Area Rats Rescue & Care. 525-6155.  

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 

MONDAY, JULY 11 

National Organization of Women, Oakland/East Bay Chapter meets at 6 p.m. at the Oakland YWCA, 1515 Webster St. The speaker will be Jeffrey Mittman, the PATRIOT Act Campaign Coordinator for the Northern California Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union. 287-8948. 

Strokes with Dr. Loron McGillis at 10:30 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190. 

The Guru-Student Relationship at 6:30 p.m. at the Oakland Dharma House, 52 Hamilton Place. Cost is $36, preregistration required. 836-7544. 

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, JULY 12 

Rally for Youth Vote Join Berkeley teenagers in support of a meausre that would allow 17 year olds to vote in school borad elections in Berkeley. At 1 p.m. in front of the Berkeley BART station. 883-9091. 

“Ideas that Sustain an Unjust Economy” A conversaation with Terry O’Keefe at 6 p.m. at Café de la Paz, Shattuck at Cedar. Sponsored by the Sustainable Business Alliance. terry@sustainablebiz.org 

Road Cycling for Women Covering rules of the road, bike choice, clothing and accessories, at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Free. 527-4140. 

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. 524-9992. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org  

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

Kundalin Yoga six-week class, Tues. at 4:15 p.m. at Studio 12, 2525 Eighth St. Cost is $42. 841-4339. 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Don Worth will lead a current events discussion at 11 a.m. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, JULY 13 

Save the U.S. Supreme Court Rally at 5:30 p.m. at 14th and Broadway, Oakland to protect our rights and civil liberites. Sponsored by the National Organization for Women, Oakland/East Bay. www.oebnow.org 

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 

The Wonderful World of Worms We’ll learn how worms “see,” where they live, what they eat. For ages 8 to 12 at 10 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. We’ll be digging in the dirt so dress to get dirty. Cost is $5-$7. Registration required. 525-2233. 

Climbing Mt. Shasta Tips for first-time climbers with Eric White, climbing ranger with the U.S. Forest Service at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Free. 527-4140. 

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. 

Arab Women Film Festival “Hollywood Harems” and “Benaat Chicago” at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Donation $5. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

“Raymundo: The Revolutionary Film-Makers’ Struggle” A documentary on the life and work of Raymundo Gleyzer, at 7 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. 

Track Maintenance, a benefit party for Watchword Press with readings and music at 7:30 p.m. at Café Van Kleef, 1624 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5.  

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

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. 

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. 

“Searching Within” A free 9-week course, Wed. at 7 p.m. at 2510 Channing Way. Call to reserve a place. 652-1583. bayarea@gnosticweb.com 

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 

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. 

THURSDAY, JULY 14 

Where the Wild Things Live A nature program for 8-12 year olds to discover who lives where and why. At 11 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Fee is $5-$7. Registration required. 525-2233.  

“Rescuing Asian Black Bears in China” A lecture with Jill Robinson at 7 p.m. at the Oakland Zoo, 9777 Golf Links Rd, Oakland. Cost is $8-$10. 632-9525. www.oaklandzoo.org 

Parenting Class: Yoga with Baby for new and expecting parents at 10 a.m. at Bananas, 5232 Claremont Ave. Registration required. 658-7353.  

“The Lost Boys of Sudan” A documentary following two Sudanese refugees on their journey from Africa to America, at 7 p.m. at the James Irvine Foundation Conference Center, 353 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, Oakland. Reception at 6:30 p.m. Free. Sponsored by the Piedmont Diversity Film Committee. 835-9227. www.diversityworks.org 

Nonprofits and Grantwriting Workshop from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave. freeskoolyes@yahoo.com 

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 

World of Plants Tours Thurs.-Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botan 

ical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. Cost is $1-$5. 643-2755. http:// 

botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

“Eating for Health: A Family Plan” with Ed Bauman, Ph.D., Director of Bauman College: Holistic Nutrition and Culinary Arts at 5:30 p.m. at Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy, 1744 Solano Ave. 527-8929. 

FRIDAY, JULY 15 

Celebration in Opera and Song for Options Recovery Services with Lisa Houston, mezzo-soprano, Daniel Lockert, piano and Leland Morine, baritone at 8 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Suggested donation $30. 666-9900. www.optionsrecovery.org 

Contientious Projector Film Series will show “Beyond Treason” at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Unitraian Universalist Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. 528-5403. 

Harry Potter Midnight Costume Party to celebrate the release of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” at 12:01 a.m. (Sat.) at Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary and Garden Arts, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Harry Potter Book Release Party at 8 p.m. at Barnes & Noble, Bay Street, Emeryville. Crafts, trivia contest. Come dressed as your favoirte character. Book will not be released until 12:01 a.m on the 16th. 655-4002. 

Thinking of Becoming a Doula? at 2 p.m. at Change Makers, 6536 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Free. 728-8513. 

Salsa Dancing at “The Beat” Dance Studio at 8:30 p.m. Lessons with Joseph Gallardo. 2560 9th St. at Parker. 472-2393 www.wildsalsanights.com 

Berkeley Chess Club 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. 548-6310. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Creeks Task Force meets Mon. July 11 at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Erin Dando, 981-7410. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/planning/landuse/Creeks/default.html 

Council Agenda Committee meets Mon., July 11, at 2:30 p.m., at 2180 Milvia St. 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

citycouncil/agenda-committee 

Peace and Justice Commission meets Mon., July 11, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Manuel Hector, 981-5510. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/peaceandjustice 

Landmarks Preservation Commission meets Mon., July 11, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Gisele Sorensen, 981-7419. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/landmarks 

City Council meets Tues., July 12, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Commission on Disability meets Wed., July 13, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Don Brown, 981-6346. TDD: 981-6345. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/disability 

Homeless Commission meets Wed., July 13, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jane Micallef, 981-5426. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/homeless 

Planning Commission meets Wed., July 13, 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., July 13 at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-4950. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/policereview 

Library Board of Trustees meets Wed. July 13, at 7 p.m. at 2940 Benvenue Ave., Jackie Y. Griffin, 981-6195. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/library 

Commission on Early Childhood Education meets Thurs., July 14, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Angel- 

lique De Cloud, 981-5428. www.ci.berkeley. ca.us/commissions/earlychildhoodeducation  

Community Health Commission meets Thurs., July 14, at 6:45 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Kristin Tehrani, 981-5356. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/health 

West Berkeley Project Area Commission meets Thurs., July 14, at 7 p.m., at the West Berke 

ley Senior Center. Iris Starr, 981-7520. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/westberkeley  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., July 14, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/commissions/zoning  ?

The pursuit of fitness in nature continues, as does the Trails Challenge. This month we shift from the redwoods of the East Bay hills to the East Bay shore, exploring Point Isabel and Point Pinole. 

Fido has seen your Trail Log and wants one of his own. He’s also seen that bright green T-shirt and expects a leash of the same color. There are many opportunities for dog excursions along the 1,150 miles of trails within the 65 East Bay Regional Parks. But, like most things in life, there’s a right way to go about taking Fido along. 

A hiker needs to be in good condition to enjoy the trails, and the same goes for your dog. Before you leave home, evaluate his condition and that of the outdoors. Dogs absorb heat through fur and paws and can’t cool down as easily as humans. On warm days, opt for shade and rest stops. Paws can be damaged on rocks and hot pavement; they need to be toughened slowly. All in all, consider the length of the hike and start slow. 

Safe drinking water may not be available so carry your own; dehydration can come on quickly. Also carry a supply of plastic bags. Respect fellow hikers and the environment and act responsibly. Pick up your dog’s waste and deposit it in a trashcan. Don’t leave bags by the side of the trail. There is no “poop patrol” to pick them up. 

Dogs are usually permitted off-leash in undeveloped areas within most parks but must be under your control and a leash must be at hand. Ultimately, it’s your responsibility to know where they are allowed off-leash; negligence could result in a fine of up to $160. Your responsibility extends to knowing if your dog should be off-leash, how he interacts with other dogs and people. Always be aware of non-dog walkers approaching. Be courteous: call your dog until they pass. 

At the end of a successful hike check your dog for ticks and foxtails. Dogs can succumb to Lymes disease and arrow-shaped foxtails easily will work their way below the skin. Always check ears, eyes, nose and between toes for both of these pests. 

Trails Challenge #2: Point Isabel Regional Shoreline: 1.7-miles, rated easy, dogs permitted off leash.  

This park is a good test for you and your dog. The trail is short, the dogs are plenty and you’re never far from your car.  

Eye-pleasing views are standard fare at Point Isabel. The open blue of the bay with the Golden Gate Bridge and Angel Island will draw your attention. So will the myriad assortment of people and dogs sharing the trail.  

Start at the Isabel Street parking lot and follow the paved path along Hoffman Canal, across the bridge and onto the north section of the park. You’ll pass open grassy fields and depending on the tide, either water or mudflats. Beware; access areas are frequent for a refreshing swim or mud bath. Don’t despair; Mudpuppy’s Tub & Scrub is conveniently located next to the parking lot for an inexpensive solution. Remember, you’re both there to have fun! 

Trails Challenge #3: Point Pinole Regional Shoreline: 4.2-miles, rated easy, dogs permitted off-leash in undeveloped areas.  

Point Pinole is peaceful today. Twelve miles of trails meander through 2,147 acres of rare coastal prairie with quiet vistas along San Pablo Bay. But take a step back in time to before 1960 and peaceful would not have served as a descriptor.  

Between 1880 and 1960 four explosives companies in the area manufactured over two billion pounds of dynamite. Farmers and ranchers originally co-existed with the Nitro Powder Co. Forty years later Giant Powder Co. created its own town, complete with railroad station, schools, housing and recreation. Today only their footsteps remain in oddly shaped foundations, sunken bunkers, raised earth berms, wood pilings and partially visible railroad ties. 

This Trails Challenge hike is a gentle loop out to the point on Bay View Trail, returning via Marsh and Cooks Point Trails. Bay View Trail, accessed to the left after crossing Badger Bridge, leads out to the shoreline, through stands of eucalyptus, rolling grasslands and past marsh plants in vivid green and orange. This wide, mostly level trail has lots of shade as well as a cooling breeze off the water. A gravel base ensures dry boots on a rainy day. 

Hues are subtle but no less appealing, a palette of soft greens, tans and browns among the grasses and long strips of peeling bark off eucalyptus trunks, revealing interesting patterns below. Exposed mudflats reveal an assortment of driftwood, shells, algae and a stalking egret. 

Diversions are many. Benches are strategically placed and beach access trails lead down to the shore for relaxation and exploration. At the Packhouse trail marker, you come upon a raised earth berm, looking like a Point Pinole Pyramid with its cement foundation, massive wood beams and topping of native grasses. Nature can find a niche almost anywhere. 

As you approach the point and fishing pier the Bay View Trail winds right through an enticing picnic area, leafy and green. At the main road, turn left and head toward the pier, passing two Interpretive Panels. Built in 1977, the popular pier extends 200 feet over the bay. Bring your rod or watch hopeful anglers anticipating a catch of sturgeon or perch. Alongside, the Old Wharf pilings are all that remain of the shipping dock of Atlas Powder Co. 

The pier marks the halfway point of the hike. From here foot-weary hikers can catch the shuttle back. Trail Challengers can head back on Marsh Trail (follow sign “To Owl Alley.”) The meadow landscape is familiar, now with views to the north. Dabs of color stain grasses, birds sing, lizards soak up the sun—it’s hard to equate this peaceful scene with its bustling past. 

After a half a mile, a hidden treasure appears on the right, a lovely fresh water pond rimmed with cattails, reeds and benches. Coolly refreshing. From here the meadows widen; look closely to see foundations of the Giant company town. 

At the intersection with Cooks Trail, turn left for the Press House, home to the black powder press, the brawn behind Hercules Powder Co. Using 4,000 pounds of pressure, this press turned charcoal, saltpeter and sulfur into explosive material. 

Young eucalyptus serenade you along Cooks Trail. Tall and slender, a gentle breeze sets them swaying and creaking. Hopefully these moans are not a reflection of your own aches after 3.5 miles.  

The final leg of the hike takes you through the major picnic and recreation area of the park. Here broad lawns, shade, a small playground and ample picnic facilities entice you to end your day with a plate of BBQ, a chilled drink and a smile on your face. 

For more information see www.ebparks.org or call 562-PARK. Trail maps available. 

Point Isabel: From I-580 or I-880, take Central Ave. west to Point Isabel. Open 5 a.m.-10 p.m., no fee. 235-1631. 

Point Pinole: Take I-880, exit on Hilltop. Go east on Hilltop, right on San Pablo, Left on Richmond Parkway and right on Giant Hwy. Open 5 a.m.-10 p.m. Fees: $5/car, $2/dog. Shuttle operates daily 7:30 a.m.-3 p.m. except Tuesdays and Wednesdays. 237-6896.i

First, the breaking news: The Berkeley Daily Planet has captured a flock of prizes in the statewide Better Newspapers Contest sponsored by the California Newspaper Publishers Association. At the awards luncheon on Saturday we learned that we’d won two first prizes, for editorial pages overall and for an editorial cartoon by Justin DeFreitas, second prize for a spot news photo by Jakob Schiller, and honorable mentions (top 10 percent of entries in Northern California, statewide finalists) for local spot news (Matthew Artz), writing (Richard Brenneman) and for another DeFreitas cartoon. Please excuse us if we’re mighty proud of this record, especially since we’ve only been around for two years. 

Now, in classic Berkeley style, let’s all give ourselves a rousing round of applause! I say “ourselves” here because The Daily Planet couldn’t have won the prize for the best editorial pages without our many vigorous and prolific reader-contributors. Not only that, our brilliant editorial cartoonist Justin DeFreitas also contributes to these pages (as well as helping me edit them). Well done, gang. Even if We (that’s the regular editorial “we” now) sometimes think some of You (opinion writers) are dreadfully wrong-headed in your opinions, we appreciate your sending them along to us. 

This provides yet another opportunity to reflect on why we’re all gathered here together, a favorite theme on this page. I’m currently reading a new book, A Matter of Opinion, by Victor Navasky, a man described affectionately by Calvin Trillin as “wily and parsimonious.” He was for a number of years the editor of The Nation, and then around about 1994 he shifted gears and became its publisher instead. The chapter that most interests me is the one entitled “The Editor As Publisher”—I’m looking for tips on how he pulls it off, and in particular how he managed to bring the magazine into the black in short order after he took over the business side of the endeavor. That’s the wily and parsimonious part. But it’s at the end of a long book, and so far I’ve only gotten through the earlier chapters, where he explains why he’s doing it. 

He is a fan of Jurgen Habermas, a German philosopher whose theory Navasky sums up as “the idea that to flourish, democracy requires a continuous conversation, open argumentation and debate.” That’s the idea on these pages too. In a seminar at the New School which is transcribed on the Internet, Navasky elaborated on it: 

“The point is that in the present circumstance, with all the post-Cold War unresolved issues, with all of the issues that divide the tiny staff of editors at a magazine like The Nation, or like The National Review, that divide the country, and the world, and with the conceptual difficulty that characterizes this period as we attempt to get a handle on these issues -- that is a time that is ready-made for these journals that really do specialize in opening up the public arena, to public argument and discourse. So, that is the business we're really in….” 

Now, quite a number of fine journals have specialized in opening up the national public arena. But it’s much harder to find one which works on the local level to do the same thing, even though local issues tend to repeat themselves all over the country. Many newspapers have converted to the sound-byte school of letters to the editor, and their op-ed pages are dominated by syndicated or staff columnists. Instead of opening up the public arena, they’re closing it. We’ve been trying to reverse the trend, and based on the opinion of the contest judges (who came from all over the country) we might be doing something right. 

A major difference between what we’re doing and pure journals of opinion is that they can bounce off the widely disseminated national “hard news.” We’ll leave aside for a moment the fascinating topic of whether there’s any such thing as “objective” news coverage, and just point out that the public can’t engage in argument and discourse about current events if they don’t even know what’s going on. So we try (in 28 pages max) to do it all: to give readers enough solid factual information about what’s happening locally that they can form opinions and turn them into letters and commentaries for the public arena. Our news coverage is central to our mission. 

And we’ve learned something: Sometimes the readers are ahead of the reporters in knowing what’s going on. There was a fascinating little story in one of the dailies which pointed out that the major first reporting on the London bombing was sent in as cell phone text messages by on-the-site observers, with the first pictures coming from cell phone cameras. And many have commented on how the online non-professional bloggers were way ahead of the major media in exposing the now-famous Downing Street memo revelations. On the local level, we’ve never needed to do a story on what appears to be a major fiasco in A.C. Transit’s bus-buying because our readers are all over it.  

Although most of our correspondents send in their contributions as e-mail, it appears that a major advantage a printed newspaper has over on-line chats is that contributors are more careful about how they express themselves. They use conventional spelling and grammar for the most part, which makes their letters much easier to read (we do occasional cleanup). They tend to think about what they write, instead of just “flaming” as writers are tempted to do online. And many more readers can pick up the paper for casual reading on the bus or in cafes—we’re not limited to the techno-savvy. We print and distribute close to 30,000 copies of each paper, most of which are picked up, and using standard industry pass-around figures that means that about 50,000 pairs of eyes fall on some part of every issue.  

Which brings us, in a tortuous way, to the vexing question of distribution of free pick-up papers. We’re at the mercy of “the interests” even though we don’t charge for our copies. In the past few weeks both UC and the City of Berkeley have tried to curtail our free circulation. Could it have something to do with the way their recent deal has been hammered in our opinion pages? 

The business manager of the Daily Cal said this in an e-mail: “The Daily Cal has a licensing agreement with the regents which provides exclusive newspaper distribution rights on campus to the Daily Californian.” Do the regents really have the right to create a press monopoly? We can’t afford to litigate it, so we don’t know.  

And an eagle-eyed reader tipped us off that City of Berkeley employees confiscated three of our boxes on College Avenue which had been there for years. The person in City Hall who is responsible for policing boxes had previously promised to let us know if there were problems before seizing the boxes, but he didn’t do it. He now says he’s sorry, but the boxes aren’t back 

The Berkeley Bowl (a frequent topic among our contributors) and Cody’s Books on Telegraph have recently banned our wire racks with flimsy excuses. When we went into Cody’s on Friday looking for Navasky’s book, an employee told us that it was because metal racks set off the security devices at the door. There still were two wire racks for out-of-town papers next to the security device, however, though ours was gone. And no, he said, there was no other place in the store for copies of the Planet. It’s ironic that a business which makes much of the virtue of supporting local booksellers has no room at the inn for the local press. (We found the book at Moe’s, a loyal Planet advertiser, unlike Cody’s, and they have a nice wooden rack for all free papers right by their front door.) 

P.S. Jakob Schiller, our prize-winning news photographer and reporter who started with us as an intern, is particularly good on labor stories, with great pictures of picket lines, including some at the Berkeley Bowl. 

B

Mr. Tobey, who appears again today to our right, seems not to know that editors, not writers, always write the headlines. Headlines in this and most papers will always be the choice of the editor—we’re happy to clarify that for him. There’s a simple practical reason for this: headlines have to be adjusted to fit into space available. Also, we do try to write headlines to catch readers’ eyes, and “Landmarks Meeting of June 27th” just isn’t a very catchy title. And if Mr. Tobey did predict that a headline writer might combine the epithets “anarchist” and “suicide bomber” into the concept of “terrorist” in a headline, he should have used less, shall we say, “inflammatory” language in the first place.  

But that’s the simple part. More troubling is the way Tobey’s op-ed distorted the history of the calculated and deliberate attempts to destroy Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Ordinance, which has protected its historic resources and its neighborhoods for the last 25 years. I take personal exception to his charge that “the ‘landmarks experts’ on the LPC couldn’t be bothered to produce [their own draft] or even to offer constructive suggestions along the way.” Nothing could be further from the truth. In the years I was on the commission, we produced not one but two full drafts, and offered a host of constructive suggestions, most of which were ignored by the city staff which was supposed to be supporting our work. 

Tobey wasn’t even around for much of the five years this has been going on. The first time I ever saw him was when he started monitoring Landmarks Commission meetings a couple of years ago on behalf of Livable Berkeley, a new pro-development lobbying group. 

A little history lesson: In the first place, changing one short phrase in the existing ordinance would bring it into compliance with the state’s Permit Streamlining Act, which was all the City Council originally wanted. City staff, on their own initiative, chose to weigh down the ordinance language they offered with many more unnecessary changes in order to advance their own pro-growth agenda. That point has been exhaustively documented in these pages by me and many others, so I won’t waste any more of the readers’ time on it.  

The commission spent three long years trying unsuccessfully to clean up a series of inexcusably sloppy drafts, full of embarrassing errors, which were produced by the city attorney’s office and a string of poorly-educated planning department staffers. Next, the commission tried to get the job done by appointing an ad hoc committee of their own members to do it, of which I was one. We worked for several more months on our own time, with the pro-bono services of retired planner John English, to produce a straightforward and error-free draft, which we presented to the commission in December of 2002. But since this was just after a council election, outgoing commissioners were reluctant to adopt it. It took the newly appointed commissioners another year to get up to speed, in a period when the development boom also meant a massive increase in the commission’s workload. At the end of that year, a final draft was passed by the LPC which incorporated many compromises with staff pro-growth advocates. 

Big mistake. This turned out to be the classic error liberals make when they try to compromise. They lead off with concessions, hoping that their opponents will be public-spirited enough to appreciate them and make a few compromises of their own. And then the other side takes the concessions, thank you very much, and still demands everything they originally wanted in addition. That’s the genesis of the Planning Commission’s new draft, which incorporates many objectionable new wrinkles at the behest of the development lobby. The mayor is trying to ram it through before the City Council departs on its long summer vacation. 

Tobey and a couple of well-meaning but naïve liberals (Some of My Best Friends Are….) proposed a few more sacrificial compromises intended to placate the development boosters, but by this time the LPC wasn’t buying, nor did the pro-growthers seem to be placated. The current Landmarks Preservation Commission, a majority of them new to the commission since my time, appointed by councilmembers who seldom all agree on anything, has now recommended unanimously that the council stop and think before adopting either draft. The commission recognizes that the changes proposed are extensive enough to warrant a full report, as prescribed by the California Environmental Quality Act, about what their impact will be on Berkeley’s threatened historic resources.  

Cool heads on the City Council, if there still are any, would be wise to ask for this report before voting, since it now seems very likely that if they skip this step there are citizens willing to back up the request for an EIR with legal muscle. It just doesn’t look good to substitute a shoddy draft produced in a few months by an uninformed Planning Commission for the product of years of work by commissioners chosen for their expertise in the field of protecting historic resources.  

B