The Opinion Pages

West Berkeley Bowl, Creeks at Planning Commission -more-

SAN FRANCISCO—At this week’s “Dia Sin Inmigrantes/Day Without Immigrants” march in San Francisco, I saw a beautiful, exciting and hopeful vision of the future of this country. -more-

Absent for over 15 years, Pacific Steel Casting (PSC) has finally made a return to the Berkeley Zoning Adjustments Board. The steel mill is requesting modification of their use permit No. 8957 for operating one of their three facilities on Second Street. A privately owned West Berkeley company, PSC has the distinction of being the city’s biggest stationary air polluter. This fact is also reflected in its long history of neighborhood conflicts, odor nuisance complaints, and abatement orders. -more-

At the recent community workshop on the Downtown Berkeley BART Plaza redesign plan, an anonymous leaflet was distributed that is full of factual errors and misinformation about Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) service, which AC Transit is planning for Telegraph Avenue, the Southside and Downtown Berkeley. -more-

The Planning Commission and City Council will soon be considering recommendations regarding revisions to the Creeks Ordinance. When property owners affected by the Creeks Ordinance were informed that it would be virtually impossible to rebuild their homes if they were destroyed, more than 600 attended the City Council meeting to express their outrage. It turns out that this is core issue for those directly affected by the Creeks Ordinance but also for almost everyone else in Berkeley. -more-

The current alignment of Strawberry Creek is well known, and its future location is up to the community. Frank Greenspan’s April 25 letter to the editor suggests that there is some public confusion regarding the current status of the Strawberry Creek and proposals to daylight it. The creek presently enters a five-by-six-foot arched box culvert as it leaves campus at Oxford Street. The culvert jogs diagonally under buildings to Allston Way, runs down Allston Way to near the post office, cuts diagonally under the YMCA to the Center Street side of City Hall, and diagonally crosses the northwest corner of Civic Center Park to Martin Luther King Jr. Way. The culvert runs in perfectly straight segments, whereas the natural channel did not. Thus, the existing culvert is already a “realignment” of the creek. -more-

How un-Berkeley can you be? Mayor Tom Bates and City Councilmembers Darryl Moore, Laurie Capitelli and Gordon Wozniak offered one possible answer to that question last Tuesday when they indicated support for a proposal to allow developers to convert landscaped rear yards into parking lots with no public notice, no public hearing, and no possibility of appeal by neighbors. -more-

Jerry Brown is running for attorney general for the same reason he ran for mayor of Oakland in 1998: “I don’t know what to do with myself when I am not running for office.” Soon after he became mayor, he looked for the next office to run for without an incumbent. He had his eye on Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat until she decided not to step down. So then he focused on the attorney general’s office. -more-