Opinion

A divided Alameda County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 Thursday to approve a $13.25 million, three-year voting machine contract with Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, ending, for the present, the county’s relationship with controversial Diebold Election Systems. -more-

UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium joined the ranks of Berkeley’s landmarks Thursday by a unanimous vote of the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC). -more-

• -more-

Thank you for Mr. Allen-Taylor’s stimulating review of Charles DeBose’s The Sociology of African-American Language. Not long ago I submitted a book review to a left leaning, youth oriented newspaper in San Francisco but was informed they don’t print book reviews. So thank you for encouraging us all to put our thinking caps on. -more-

Next year, the Berkeley Art Center hopes to celebrate its 40th anniversary. The Center, housed in a small gem of a Ratcliff building beside the creek in Live Oak Park, has been displaying the work of Berkeley artists since 1967. But the prospects for a 2007 celebration are far from certain. The more likely scenario is that Berkeley’s municipal art gallery will be forced to close down before its anniversary date arrives. Its budget has been shrinking every year and if the city cannot restore the grant for the coming year to the 2001 level, the Center will not be able to keep its doors open. -more-

A unhappy milestone has just passed. On May 31, our latest 15-year lease on Nexus from the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society expired. Although Nexus is attempting to negotiate with the Humane Society to purchase the property, the Humane Society had indicated they intended to place a metal fence around the vacated building on June 1. That fence did not go up on that date, but who knows about tomorrow? -more-

BEARING -more-

Last Wednesday night, I went to the school board’s public hearing to express my concern about how the superintendent’s proposed new parcel tax of over $19 million would be spent. -more-

Fifty years ago, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and public transportation, more specifically buses, became the stage from which the civil-rights movement was launched. The paradox is that today discrimination is alive and well in mass-transit bus service. In the Bay Area, for instance, a federal civil-rights lawsuit is pending in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, charging that the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission (which plans and allocates the majority of funding for the area’s transit needs) supports a “separate and unequal transit system” that discriminates against poor transit riders of color. -more-

It is possible to build housing at Ashby BART to create a sizable neighborhood park, and to make the neighborhood more livable. Let me describe what could be done in a sketchy way, using approximate numbers. -more-