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The City Council is poised Tuesday to restore fire service after an uproar earlier this month over the closure of the Berkeley hills fire station.  

Four councilmembers are sponsoring a proposal that would require Berkeley to spend up to $300,000 to ensure that the city closes no more than one fire company at a time and Berkeley hills Fire Station 7 to remain open through the fire season, which ends Oct. 31. 

In June, the council agreed to close as many as two fire companies at a time to save an estimated $1.2 million in firefighter overtime. The council expected that double closures would be rare and that fire station 7 would be exempt, but that wasn’t how it turned out. 

Because of summer vacation schedules, 11 vacant firefighter positions and two firefighters on injury leave, the department now says that without more money to pay for overtime two companies would be closed three out of every four days over the summer, including Station 7. 

The $300,000 will be taken from $4.3 million put aside for street repairs. Fire Department officials have said that staffing shortages are expected to diminish by the end of the year when the city brings on 12 freshly-trained new firefighters. 

Landmarks Preservation Ordinance 

After a two-hour public hearing last week, the council is scheduled to debate proposed amendments to the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance. 

Before the council are overlapping recommendations from the Planning Commission, which has proposed amendments that the State Office of Historic Preservation said would weaken protections for historic buildings, and a proposal from the Landmarks Preservation Commission calling for the council to bring in an independent consultant to offer amendments. 

Cisco De Vries, chief of staff to Mayor Bates, said the city would likely work with interest groups on ordinance revisions over the summer in hopes of striking a compromise between the Planning Commission’s recommendation and amendments which were put forward by the LPC before it reversed course and called for the city to bring in a consultant.  

De Vries said there was a good chance that the council would not approve either commission’s recommendation in full. He added that any compromise recommendation would require a public hearing before the council acted. 

Although the item is on the council’s action agenda Tuesday, De Vries said he does not expect the council to vote on the issue until September. 

Tune Up Masters Appeal 

The council will again consider an appeal for a use permit for a condominium project at 1698 University Ave, the site which fomerly held Tune Up Masters. Earlier this year the council granted an appeal on grounds that the Zoning Adjustment Board approval violated state law. 

The ZAB granted the developer a 25 percent size increase (density) bonus for including condominium units to be sold at a price affordable to people making at or below 125 percent of the average local median income.  

But it turned out that for condominiums, the state only allows a 10 percent state bonus.  

The new project, approved by the ZAB, looks nearly identical to the old one because staff identified another section of state law requiring that builders who add units for low income tenants be granted concessions to make the building as profitable as it would have been without the cheaper units.  

Staff calculated that to make the developer’s venture profitable, the building would have to be 25 percent larger than otherwise allowed in the zoning ordinance. 

Density Bonus Subcommittee 

With projects like the Tune Up Masters site development frequently raising the issue of the state density bonus, city staff is asking the council to approve a joint subcommittee to look into how Berkeley should apply a state law giving developers bonus space for projects that include affordable housing. 

The current city interpretation of the density bonus has been criticized by residents who charge that it is a tool to help developers build more massive buildings than local zoning rules or state law would permit. 

A four-member subcommittee of the Zoning Adjustments Board, which is responsible for implementing land use, has been meeting with city staff on the issue. The city has proposed combining that subcommittee with one from the Planning Commission, which is responsible for developing land use policy. 

Councilmember Dona Spring, the council’s staunchest critic of the current density bonus, opposed bringing the Planning Commission into the process. “The Zoning Board knows the problem because they deal with it every meeting,” she said. “The planning commission is out of the loop.” 

In the staff report, Land Use Manager Mark Rhoades reasoned that a joint subcommittee made sense because, “it is highly inefficient for two or three different board or commission subcommittees to review the same information and develop their own overlapping procedural recommendations.” 

Other Issues 

With the Elmwood Theater slated to reopen July 28, the council is being asked to nearly double its loan to the theater’s ownership group for seismic repairs. Cost overruns and delays have sent costs spiraling from $90,000 to $170,000. 

The council will consider a proposal to give the city manager authority to approve capital improvements for up $200,000 without council approval. Currently the city manager can independently authorize expenditures of up to $50,000. 

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