Editorials

The recent report on diversity on Berkeley’s commissions, which was sparked by Councilmember Kriss Worthington with colleagues Darryl Moore and Max Anderson as allies, will provide food for thought for a long time in the city. I’ve only seen the news accounts, but haven’t read the report myself, or even seen a tight statistical analysis of its data or methodology, so I’m not in a position to comment intelligently on its results per se. But the question of whether students in a college town should be represented on civic bodies in proportion to their numbers in the population is an interesting one which lends itself to a bit of blue-sky analysis. 

No one would now argue that student residents shouldn’t be allowed to vote in local elections, but when I was the wife of a graduate student in a Midwestern college town that was taken for granted. When I was a “temporary” resident of Ann Arbor (we stayed 12 years) I argued (and would still argue) that a current student generation represents the class interests of all the students who will come after them, and that’s why they need to vote in local elections. Most places, including Berkeley, have now come around to that point of view. California has ever-tighter restrictions on becoming an official Californian for tuition fee purposes, but at the same time all students who are U.S. citizens can register to vote with no restrictions from the day they move in.  

But is that the same as saying that students should have exact percentage representation on all local governing bodies at all times? I’m not so sure. We’re not close to that yet, but should we be working toward it? 

Councilmember Worthington, whose district includes most of the younger students who live in the big dorms, is proud of his record in this area: about half of his appointments to commissions have been students. But veteran observers of students’ commission performance are not so sure that the results have been all good. They complain that student appointees miss many meetings, with exams and trips “back home” frequently given as excuses. Students can be tempted to accept appointments because they are a worthwhile notch on post-school resumes, but the tedious work of participation is less attractive. I myself have seen too many student appointees have trouble following the ball at commission meetings because they haven’t done their homework: haven’t read their packets or made the site visits needed for decision-making. I’ve seen others who illustrate the cliché that a little learning is a dangerous thing, who have attempted to cram a real-life situation with local humans involved into paradigms half-mastered from Planning 101.  

On the other hand, some of the best work on boards and commissions has also been done by student commissioners. It’s generally accepted that the high school member of the Berkeley School Board (who can’t even vote) is often the liveliest and most intelligent participant in discussions. Student commissioners like Jesse Arreguin have added vigorous independent voices to decision-making. Whatever problems there might be with the wrong students being put on commissions could be remedied by consistently finding the right students. 

One of the less desirable consequences of Berkeley’s shift to district elections from at-large elections is that many students are crammed into a couple of council districts. Before district elections, at least one and often more students were elected city-wide. When district boundaries were redrawn a couple of years ago, the council majority made an unsuccessful (and not very intelligent) attempt to create at least one district where students might hope to capture a council seat. If the “progressive” council sincerely wanted to create a student seat, their math was seriously off, and some have questioned their sincerity.  

The result in District 8 in the last election was to create a district where the beleaguered progressive long-term residents of the neighborhoods suffering most from university impact were marginalized by the decision of so-called progressives from other parts of town to support a student candidate who was sure to lose. Cynics have portrayed this campaign as a tactic aimed at corralling student votes for their mayoral candidate, with no real desire to elect a student councilmember. Bottom line: both progressive candidates, the student and the neighbor, lost. The most conservative candidate won. But since the mayor has revealed himself to be far, far to the right of the person progressives thought they were drafting, this might have been the plan all along. 

Here’s a modest proposal for remedying this sorry state of affairs. How about adding two more at-large councilmembers? This would probably ensure the election of a student voice to the council, since students could pool their votes regardless of where they lived. And with each at-large councilmember appointing commissioners, it would also solve the commission diversity problem. 

An incidental benefit of adding at-large councilmembers would to give perspective to the role of the mayor, who under the Berkeley City Charter should be little more than an at-large member with a few ceremonial duties thrown in. Recent incumbents have abrogated to themselves duties not allocated by the charter, like making back-room deals with the biggest local developers about how our city should be redesigned. If mayors were simply one of three at-large councilmembers, it might be harder for them to throw their weight around. Initiative, anyone?