If money talked, it could turn into a noisy campaign season this year. Preliminary campaign finance statements for the 2006 races that were released Monday show most candidates in the City Council and mayoral races, despite lofty Berkeley idealism, are in hot pursuit of the gritty greenback dollar. 

Mayor Tom Bates, who spent $231,000 in his campaign against incumbent Shirley Dean four years ago, already has a hefty $49,600 in his war chest, picked up from 350 contributors, some 75 from out of town. Four years ago, at this time, he had raised $35,000. 

Individuals can contribute only a maximum of $250 each, but there is no limit on the total funds that can be raised, according to Berkeley election law. Corporations, nonprofits and unions cannot contribute. Candidates had to file contribution reports for the first six months of 2006 by July 31. Complete lists of contributions are available on the City Clerk’s website.  

Mayoral challenger and former Planning Commission Chair Zelda Bronstein, who has raised $17,000 from 103 contributors—21 from out of town—points to Bates’ contributors, saying that a significant number “come from developers and their allies.”  

But Bates argues that he is collecting funds from among a “wide spread of people.” Developers such as Denny Abrams, Ali Kashani and Bill Falik are contributors, but so is union organizer Charles Idleson, California Nurses Association; Berkeley Citizens Action activist Nancy Gorrell and Councilmembers Laurie Capitelli, Linda Maio and Gordon Wozniak. 

Without quoting a number, Bates said he planned “to raise enough to get my message across.” He said he would be spending less than he had in 2002. He plans to have a campaign office open after Labor day; a campaign manager is coming on board in mid August. 

Bronstein’s funds come largely from neighborhood activists such as Martha Nicoloff, co-author of the Neighborhood Preservation Ordinance, writer and historian Susan Cerny, Middle East activist Barbara Lubin, cultural activist Bonnie Hughes, Planning Commissioner Gene Poschman, and Landmarks Preservation Commissioner Jill Korte. 

Bronstein said that while she expects to raise enough money to run her campaign well, she won’t match Bates dollar for dollar. “I don’t have the support of the development community,” she said. The funds raised to date, however “are respectable for someone in my position [as a challenger].” 

Bronstein is opening a campaign headquarters at Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Virginia Street, and will be hiring someone to head her campaign but won’t be hiring high-priced consultants, she said, noting, “I have a lot of excellent [volunteer] consultants.” 

Mayoral Challenger Christian Pecaut has raised $150 and candidates Zachary Runningwolf and Richard Berkeley did not file statements. 

District 7 

In UC Berkeley area’s District 7, incumbent Kriss Worthington’s raised $12,800; challenger George Beier took in $5,000 and lent himself another $6,000. Seventy-nine people gave Worthington contributions, with 18 coming from out of town. Beier got 30 contributions, with two from outside Berkeley.  

Beier declined to say how much money he would raise. “It’s very difficult to run against an incumbent,” he said, noting there were 100 people at the campaign kick-off. Worthington had raised about $5,000 by this time during his 2002 campaign and said he plans to match whatever Beier spent. 

Beier is sharing an office with Councilmember Gordon Wozniak on Telegraph Avenue, but said he paid June and July rent in July, which is why that expense is not reported on his expenditure form. Worthington said he is considering opening an office. 

Beier had a poll done by David Binder, but did not pay for it in June, he said, which is why it was not reflected on his campaign finance statement.  

“I don’t need to do a poll,” Worthington quipped. 

Among Beier’s better-known contributors are Barbara Allen, a regular budget critic at City Council meetings; Davida Coady, executive director of Options Recovery Services; Ed Munger Sr. and Ed Munger Jr., Telegraph Avenue property owners where Beier has his office; Michael Wilson, president of the Berkeley Property Owners Association; Robert Herr, attorney whose website says he represents “an array of developers, owners, managers and lenders in commercial and residential real estate development …” (Beier’s contribution form says Herr’s occupation is unknown and his employer is the Oakland Raiders.) Both Wozniak and his wife, Evie Wozniak, contributed to the campaign. 

“A lot [of contributions] are from family and friends,” Beier said, adding that Wozniak helped out by asking for funds from his donors. 

Among Worthington’s better-known funders are former City Councilmember/former mayoral hopeful Don Jelinek, Berkeley Citizen’s Action co-chair Linda Olivenbaum, Oakland attorney/School Board Member Dan Siegel and Dale Gieringer, director of California NORML, which works to legalize marijuana.  

Worthington said he won’t be hiring big-time consultants. “I can’t afford big money,” he said.  

Worthington spent about $41,000 on his 2002 campaign. 

District 8 

In the race that pits student and Rent Board Member Jason Overman against incumbent Gordon Wozniak in the southeast hills District 8, the incumbent has outspent the challenger 24-1. Wozniak has collected $24,400, while Overman, who has yet to officially announce his candidature, has collected no funds. 

Wozniak spent $73,500 on his last election, but, as he pointed out, that included a run-off race. He said he hasn’t yet worked at fund raising; his treasurer simply sent out letters to former contributors. He had raised $17,000 during the same period for his 2002 run. 

Some of the better-known names among his 167 contributors—just 10 of them from outside Berkeley—include Narsai David, KCBS food and wine critic; attorney Robert Herr and property management consultant Michael St. John.  

“I haven’t carefully looked over the lists,” Wozniak said, explaining that his treasurer sends him copies of the contributions. 

Overman, on the other hand, says his is “an insurgent campaign,” not part of the “moneyed interests in this city.” While Overman will be raising money, he said his campaign will depend mostly on volunteers. He said he would be able to beat out his better-funded opponent, as Phil Angelides did in his race against Steve Westley. 

“We will have the capacity to raise money and get the word out,” Overman said. 

District 4 

In the downtown-area District 4 incumbent Dona Spring has taken in $8,400, compared to challenger Raudel Wilson’s $4,800. 

Among those on Spring’s contribution list are neighborhood activist Dean Metzger, former Councilmember Don Jelinek, Berkeley Citizen’s Action Co-Chair Linda Olivenbaum, mayoral candidate Zelda Bronstein and Councilmember Kriss Worthington. 

Spring pointed out that much of Wilson’s support comes from the real estate community, which Wilson readily acknowledged. Among them are Soheyl Modarressi of Elite Properties, Mamood Mktari of Red Oak Realty, Robert Randall of Prudential California, Steve Schneider, independent real estate broker and Diane Verducci, also an independent real estate broker. 

Wilson said that so far the list is just of people he knows or that have reached out to him. “I haven’t held any fundraisers yet,” he said. That there are so many real estate brokers is “just a coincidence,” he said, noting that by the end of the campaign they will figure as a very small percentage of the contributors. 

“Who will the council member be beholden to when making a decision?” Spring asked rhetorically. 

Wilson said he has opened a campaign office at Fulton Street and Durant Avenue, but has not hired anyone to run the campaign. “I will do a lot myself,” he said. Spring does not plan to have a campaign office, but has hired neighborhood activist Nancy Holland as her campaign manager.

Former Mayor Shirley Dean says she’ll be on the campaign trail. 

But it won’t be as a challenger for mayor.  

Instead, she’ll be stomping for the Landmarks Preservation Initiative. 

In a phone conversation Thursday afternoon, Dean said she’d weighed her options. “How do you put together a campaign so late in the game?” she asked. Candidates have already raised funds and some organizations are already doing endorsements. 

The question of running for mayor surfaced last week, when community activist Merilee Mitchell, unbeknownst to Dean, took out some preliminary candidate papers in her name, and people began to call and ask her to run. 

Even though she won’t be holding an office, Dean said she’ll continue to make an impact, as she has over the almost-four-years she’s been away from City Hall. She’s worked to protect property-owners’ rights with respect to creeks, helped found Neighbors On Urban Creeks and has worked with the group Budget Watch, lobbying the council for various spending options. 

“I’m getting accustomed to being on the other side of the microphone,” Dean said, adding that the mayor and council should have to experience speaking from the public mic, especially when one has to put together thoughts in three—or sometimes one—minute. 

Dean said she has endorsed Gordon Wozniak and George Beier for City Council, but has not endorsed anyone for mayor. “My options are still open,” she said. “Nobody’s asked me.” 

At this point, “My first priority will be to get the Landmarks Preservation Initiative passed,” she said. 

Will she run in the next election? 

“I’ve got two years to sweat that decision,” Dean said.

On two 6–3 votes, the city council Tuesday endorsed ballot language and a legal analysis that backers of a landmarks ordinance initiative said misrepresents their proposal. 

Councilmember Betty Olds, who dissented along with Kriss Worthington and Dona Spring, said she was particularly concerned that the council was voting on language they’d just been given. 

“City staff is continuing their line of giving us the facts so late that we don’t have time to make an informed decision,” she said moments after Mayor Tom Bates had gaveled the session to an end. 

“(Deputy City Attorney) Zac Cowan made so many changes, it’s hard to tell what we were voting on. This is not being very transparent.” 

The language in question will face voters when they decide in December whether or not to vote for what is now officially described as the “Landmarks Preservation and Demolition Permit Applications Ordinance.” 

Tuesday night’s vote followed a public comment session in which every speaker criticized Cowan’s proposed language for the text that will appear on the ballot itself and for the city attorney’s “impartial analysis” that will be distributed in the voter information booklets that will be sent to all registered voters. 

Speakers included Laurie Bright and Roger Marquis, the two principal sponsors of the initiative, former Mayor Shirley Dean, mayoral candidate Christian Pecaut, Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) member Jill Korte, former LPC members Patti Dacey (recently ousted by Councilmember Max Anderson) and Becky O’Malley (Daily Planet executive editor), as well as several members of the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA). 

The critics charged that Cowan’s language aimed to put a negative spin on the ordinance, and failed to mention the law’s positive impacts. 

John McBride, a BAHA activist, argued that Cowan erred in his analysis by warning that the city might be sued in the event both the initiative and Proposition 90, a statewide ballot measure, are approved in the November elections. 

Cowan wrote that the city could be sued for any loss in property value if Prop. 90 passes, a measure billed as barring eminent domain actions by governments that seize land for private development. 

Lesser-advertised provisions of that measure also allow suits for any government actions, other than those conducted for public safety and welfare, that result in diminished property values. 

“We are speculating on a possible law,” said McBride, arguing that the analysis should only focus on existing statutes. 

Dean, who at the time of the meeting was considering a possible run against Mayor Tom Bates, said the council’s actions were “the most unbalanced and unfair I’ve ever seen.” 

Three votes followed. 

First, given the legally mandated choice of adopting the initiative language themselves or sending it to the ballot, the council voted for the latter option, with Kriss Worthington dissenting. 

Next came a vote on the ballot language, the maximum-of-75-words descriptive text that appears on the ballot itself. 

Cowan’s language was adopted, along with a minor tweak drawn from an alternative proposal submitted by BAHA. 

That language was passed on a six-three vote, with Olds issuing a stinging dissent: “I have never from the time I have been on this council seen anything come before us at the last second like this. My poor old brain has a hard time wrapping itself around this. It’s all a mess. We should have allowed the people more time” to comment. 

More debate followed about the analysis language, with two more minor tweaks. 

Questioned by Gordon Wozniak, Cowan said he was legally obliged to include the caution about the potential impacts of Prop. 90. “We’re obligated to give you the full picture, warts and all, the good points and the bad points” said the lawyer. 

Finally, on another 6-3 vote, the analysis was accepted. 

A copy of final versions of the ballot language and the analysis, as well as the initiative itself, is available on the city’s web site at www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/Elections/measures/2006/lpotta.pdf.  

Arguments coming 

The next stage for proponents and opponents is the drafting of the arguments that will accompany the analysis in the voter pamphlet. Drafts with a maximum of 300 words must be submitted to Acting City Clerk Sherry Kelly today (Friday). 

Once Kelly verifies that they fall within the length requirement, the drafts are then sent to the opposing sides, which will have until next Friday to draft a 250-word rebuttal. 

Following a public comment, the final drafts must be submitted to the Alameda County Registrar of Voters by Aug. 24, said Bright, who was busily drafting the proponent’s version. 

Bright said he doesn’t know who will draft the opposing version. “The names of both sides are kept confidential,” he said. 

Bright said he expects someone from the council to prepare the opposition draft, given that the same 6-3 majority in Tuesday’s votes had approved the first reading of a rival landmarks ordinance from the mayor and Councilmember Laurie Capitelli.

On Tuesday, many Berkeley residents came together to bring public safety awareness into their communities by celebrating National Night Out Day 2006. There were block parties throughout the city, which promised food, fun, and socializing. 

“It’s a time for public safety,” commented Officer Ed Galvan, Public Information Officer for the Berkeley Police Department. “The chief unveiled his plan to reduce crime in Berkeley by 10 percent … and each group of people received steering wheel locks.” 

The event kicked off at the Public Safety Building in Berkeley Tuesday night. Firefighters, police officers and city officials were in heavy attendance. The National Association of Town Watch sponsored the event. The goal was to show criminals that residents are ready to fight back.  

Galvan said, “It’s very symbolic to criminals that we’re still here and we are looking out for each other in the community.” 

National Night Out Day is usually pretty well attended in Berkeley. This year, forty-six block parties were held. 

“I thought the turnout was great,” said Berkeley Councilmember Dona Spring, District 4. “The police officers and firefighters came to each neighborhood group meeting and they would ask people about crimes in their area. The police told the residents to lock their windows and lock their doors ... that this is how crime happens.” 

The Berkeley Fire Department spoke about arson, which has been increasing in the city recently. 

“We do identify within Berkeley that there is an arson issue,” said Deputy Chief David Orth, Public Information Officer for the Berkeley Fire Department. “It tends to be somewhat cyclic. People tend to light trashcans on fire … but we’re in an urban area and we have an active population. We’re working hard to combat this issue through things like National Night Out.” 

Spring thought that National Night Out 2006 was a particularly great way to educate people on safety. 

“It’s the neighbor-to-neighbor approach,” she said. 

The City of Berkeley offers additional incentives for neighbors to come together and meet about issues of public safety. If the neighborhood signs on as a neighborhood watch group and holds a minimum of two meetings a year, they receive a free dumpster. 

Spring said, “You want your neighborhood looking neat and clean. Crime is more attracted to places where people don’t care about their surroundings.”

I dreaded the day when my mother would need to move into a nursing home. That day came, and a year and a half later, I enjoy her nursing home life on my visits—joining in Tai Chi or a round of mindgames, right alongside her. Her nursing home is so homey and hospitable that I wonder why more nursing homes aren’t like it.  

I put that question recently to the administrator of an East Bay nursing home that seems a lot like my mother’s—Salem Lutheran Home at 2361 East 29th St. in Oakland. A cluster of cozy dwellings atop a hill, Salem is a community made up of people at different stages of their elder years.  

Residents usually move into a cottage or apartment when they are still able to get around on their own. Then, as they begin to need help getting dressed, taking medication, or moving in and out of wheelchairs, they become part of the assisted-living program. They may still stay on in their own apartments with caregivers coming to them, and move to the main building only when they need more constant help.  

In the main building, residents showing signs of mild to moderate mental impairment live in clustered apartments and take part in programs meant to keep their memories going. Residents with more advanced dementia live in a different area, the Terrace. Residents who need round-the-clock skilled nursing care stay in the Care Center. 

Wherever they live, Salem residents are surrounded by art, music, gardens and animals. Following a model for eldercare called the Eden Alternative, Salem lets pets take up residence, as well as people. As I toured the main building with a staff member, I met the activities director’s Shih Tzu dog, who flopped down on the floor while the director joined a resident in impromptu song. In the Terrace, there’s a small aviary, and a bunny lives in the sunny activities room. On the patio just outside, residents sometimes water the flowerbeds (they sometimes water the concrete instead, I was told, but as all gardeners know, watering is relaxing whatever you’re watering). 

By the standards of pleasant living, Salem appears to be exemplary. By medical standards, as measured by state inspectors, the nursing care provided by Salem and its sister Oakland home, Mercy Retirement and Care Center, is outstanding. Both Salem and Mercy emerge from annual inspections with scores that couldn’t be better: no deficiencies for the past three years posted on www.medicare.com. 

How can Salem afford to offer such apparently high-quality nursing home care? 

For a start, Salem’s nursing care rates are higher than average for the East Bay. Monthly rates for the Terrace (for those with dementia) start at $4,750. Monthly rates for residents in the skilled nursing program start at $6,386. Rates for apartments and cottages are not as high, of course—studios start at $1,350 a month. Residents can rent month to month (with a one-time entry fee of $4,000). If they want to be assured of skilled nursing either at Salem or Mercy, however, they have to pay an entry fee that ranges from $20,000 to $150,000, depending on the size of their initial unit. Salem also takes a good look at would-be residents’ long-term assets. 

Although Salem needs to meet most expenses with income from residents, as a non-profit it has this advantage over for-profit eldercare: Salem administrators do not need to deal with stockholder or owner demands to make money.  

Salem’s nonprofit status, executive director Anita Ramlo told me, is one explanation for Salem’s ability to deliver good care. Because Salem is non-profit, and because Salem defines its mission in spiritual terms, it’s easier to talk with staff about their work as a calling, she said. That’s important because nurses and aides at Salem get about the same level of pay as nurses and aides elsewhere—certified nurses assistants (CNAs) without experience start at $12, licensed practical nurses at $25, registered nurses at $30 an hour. To attract good staff members and keep them, Salem needs to offer them something else. 

That something else, Ramlo said, is involvement in the running of the institution. Several Salem CNAs started out as housekeepers who took part in a program caring for the dying, then, with Salem helping out with the bills, went through training to become CNAs.  

To encourage CNAs to stay on, Salem has started training experienced aides to mentor newcomers. Salem also follows a collaborative model of decisionmaking, Ramlo said. “We’re small enough and we care enough about the staff that when we do mentor training, it doesn’t come across as a corporate program.”  

Experts agree that staff stability is a key element in providing good nursing home care: it’s hard on residents if their caregivers keep changing. At an awards dinner last spring, Arta Zygielbaum, the director of community relations who showed me around the main building, was surprised to see how long many of the staff members had worked at Salem—some received awards for 10-year and 25-year service. 

Volunteers supplement staff at Salem—children come in to work on the raised flowerbeds under the supervision of residents. A quilting group joins some of the residents in making quilts that are first displayed in the main residents’ dining room, then donated to Children’s Hospital. 

Showing me around, Zygielbaum shared her own thoughts about what makes Salem’s care unusual—for instance, the practice of delivering assisted-living care anywhere on the campus. While some retirement facilities rigorously separate patients who need help from those in “independent living” (the phrase often used, though not at Salem), Salem encourages mingling of residents in activities meant for everyone.  

As good as it looks and sounds, I’m sure there are downsides of life at Salem, as there are of life anywhere, especially when your body and mind are letting you down in ways you could hardly have imagined. But if I come to need the support of an institution in my elder years, I hope there’ll be one like Salem that I can afford. 

This, of course, is the fly in the ointment. America’s class divisions are sharp in nursing home care. Although skilled nursing patients at Salem who live long enough to deplete their own funds can go on Medi-Cal, Salem does not accept new residents already on Medi-Cal. Vast numbers of Americans who need nursing home care have to take what they can get—often bleak, understaffed wards where drugs replace secure environments and supervision. In one of the unpleasant ironies of American life, many frontline nursing home caregivers themselves would not be able to afford care like the care they’ve provided for so many others. 

There is no substitute for poneying up funds to improve the quality of publicly funded nursing home care, but funds alone can’t do the job. We need, too, a shift of attitude—a recognition that life in a nursing home is still life, and for nursing home residents like my mother, still very much life worth living.  

• To check the record of individual nursing homes: www.medicare.gov/NHCompare/Home.asp. 

• For a checklist of things to look for when considering a nursing home: www.medicare.gov/Nursing/Checklist.pdf. 

• For other useful information about eldercare, see the site for the California Association of  

• Homes and Services for the Aging: www.aging.org.  

• For more on the Eden Alternative: www.edenalt.com.  

• For other Elder Care Alliance communities: www.eldercarealliance.com.  

Salem staff photo 

Former elementary school teacher and Salem resident Martha Olson listens as first-grade students from Priscilla Hines Head Royce School read her a story. 

Former Oakland resident Carol Polsgrove lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where she teaches journalism at Indiana University. 

Supporters of neighborhood watchdog group Cleanaircoalition.net will be coming together with environmental and community groups this month to demand that Pacific Steel Casting make the results of their already delayed emission inventory report and health risk assessment available to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District and the City of Berkeley immediately. 

Willi Paul, director of Cleanaircoalition.net, told the Planet that plans for the protest will be discussed on Saturday. “People need to understand that PSC is withholding information from the air district, the city and the community. We cannot let this injustice go on any longer. It’s time to turn up the heat again,” he said. 

Pacific Steel has recently been receiving a lot of heat from environmentalists for spreading toxic air plumes over areas of Berkeley, Albany, El Cerrito and Kensington for decades. Due to their increased capacity and the volume of castings, the problem has grown greater and community members are demanding that the air district regulate and protect the public from health hazards.  

Nabil al-Hadithy, the City of Berkeley’s hazardous materials manager and secretary for the Community Environmental Advisory Commission, told the Daily Planet on Tuesday that the city had yet to receive the emission inventory reports. 

“We had anticipated the data to be forthcoming in May this year. It’s already running late by two months. It is important for the installation of the carbon filters by September. Unless we have the data for the inventory and the point sources, we cannot determine whether it is actually harmful to humans,” al-Hadithy said.  

He added that the new thing about this set of data was that a lot of sampling had been carried out at different venues. “Previously, a lot of information that regulators have had to carry out health risk evaluations on were based on models. This is going to be fresh data available from the actual location itself. That is why we are anxious to see it. But unless BAAQMD receives it from PSC, we will not be able to see it. I am very concerned about the whole situation.” 

Elizabeth Jewel of Aroner, Jewel & Ellis Partners, the PR firm for Pacific Steel, told the Planet that PSC had no comment on the issue except for the fact that they were working as hard as possible to get the report out. 

The PSC emission inventory report after being released to the City of Berkeley will be made available to the public. The city also notified the air district staff in late June that they had contracted with a separate environmental engineering firm to perform a separate review of the PSC emission inventory report and Health Risk Assessment, data and results.  

In a July 31 e-mail to Bradley Angel, executive director of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, Peter Hess, deputy air pollution control officer for BAAQMD, admitted that the submittal of the emission inventory report of PSC to the BAAQMD was behind schedule.  

According to Hess, the emission inventory report was already in the hands of the attorney for Pacific Steel Casting, and BAAQMD was “anxiously awaiting its receipt.” 

The e-mail further stated that the air district engineers were in near daily communication with the engineering and plant representatives of PSC to “ascertain the status of the emission inventory report and move the project along as soon as possible to completion.”  

Steve Ingraham, a long-time Berkeley clean air activist and Alliance Member told the Planet that he was disappointed in the failure of policy and enforcement.  

“BAAQMD is allowing PSC to keep polluting despite the delay in the promised information. Although one might expect more of the same from Pacific Steel Casting Co., it is high time that we demand that BAAQMD do its job and do it right. I believe that this coalition of groups will press this point home. We have the help of Greenaction, which has dealt with deceit from the air district and then prevailed with Red Star Yeast and an Oakland medical incinerator. On those two they had joined forces with Pacific Institute and we have the latter’s promise of assistance as well. Founding members of the West Berkeley Alliance for Clean Air and Safe Jobs are also lending their support,” he said. 

“Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice is ready to join with Berkeley residents who are concerned about the ongoing pollution from Pacific Steel and the ongoing foot-dragging by Pacific Steel and the Bay Area Air District. The Air District is improperly allowing Pacific Steel company to continue polluting even though the company continues to delay providing emissions test reports and this delays evaluations of the risk. Greenaction believes no company should be allowed to operate in a community unless the emissions of pollutants are proven to be safe, yet the Air District is allowing large amounts of pollutants to be emitted before it is proven safe. We will join residents in demanding clean air, healthy communities and justice,” said Angel. 

With respect to the status of the actual testing, Hess’s e-mail to Angel said that the emission source testing of the equipment under evaluation in the health risk assessment of the sources had been completed by an independent testing firm under the supervision of the air district staff. These emission source tests were “direct measurements of the emissions of air contaminants from the operations of individual pieces of equipment at Pacific Steel Casting.” 

Prior to testing, the air district staff had reviewed the emission source testing protocols and analytical analysis procedures in order to ensure accuracy and after the review and subsequent approval of the protocols and procedures, the air district engineers and inspectors observed the actual source sampling. 

Hess also mentioned in the e-mail that the additional source testing (now completed) to determine whether other compounds were being omitted from certain emission sources at PSC had taken much longer to be completed than had been originally assumed. 

He added that a separate independent environmental engineering consulting firm had reviewed the emission results and “combined the plant operational throughput information from Pacific Steel Casting to develop emission factors for the emission sources.” These emission factors contained in the emission inventory report would be used to develop the health risk assessment. 

With respect to how long BAAQMD would take to evaluate and take action on test and study results, Hess said that after the review of the emission inventory report was completed, the submittal would either be “approved or returned to the company and contractor for corrections.” 

After the Air District approves the emission inventory report, the health risk assessment could proceed “using the evaluation protocols and emissions approved by the air district” and after its completion it too would be subjected to a thorough review by the air district, independent consultants and state agencies.

Economic Development Manager Thomas Myers went from helping site 7-Elevens in South Central Los Angeles to working four-and-one-half years to get Berkeley Bowl situated on Oregon Street. 

After 13 years in the city’s Economic Development division, Myers will be moving on—to what, he’s not yet sure. He’ll be leaving in October. 

While citizen participation slows things down, “I wouldn’t trade speed for public input,” Myers said, pointing out that you can look four miles to the south to see the stark difference in Oakland’s development. It’s the slow process and citizen input that has made Berkeley what Myers calls a “series of unique places.” 

While Economic Development is staffed by just two people, Myers is not complaining. Work is done in teams. For example, it takes police, public health, planning and parks staff to work on Telegraph Avenue area issues. 

Moreover “Dave [Fogarty] is 18 people by himself,” Myers said, referring to the other person in the two-man staff, whom he touts for his “tutelage.”  

When he came to Berkeley from Los Angeles, Myers said he didn’t understand the culture. “Dave reminded me to tell the developers that we do things a little differently,” that the process would take time and that the public would have input. 

That style of focused development makes Berkeley a great place to live and to visit, he said.  

City Manager Phil Kamlarz said he’d be looking for a replacement who understands Berkeley’s particular needs. “Community development is different from economic development,” he said, explaining that the business areas overlap with residential and both must be considered when attracting and retaining business. 

The city needs to keep up the retail base in order to provide the services people want, Kamlarz said, noting that the city is facing the challenge of car dealerships that are threatening to leave.

With the deadline for their eviction from their home of the last 31 years fast approaching, the artists of the Nexus Institute are looking for a new home. 

“We’re sort of running around over here trying to find someplace we can locate without having our work disrupted,” said Aspy Khambatta. “As you can imagine, that’s going to be hard to do. And we have an enormous amount of stuff.”  

When Nexus leaves—possibly going to the old Ford plant in Richmond—it will mark just the latest in a series of losses of Berkeley’s once numerous artist communities. 

Three similar centers have vanished in recent years, including most recently the Drayage, a former warehouse at 651 Addison St. that had been converted into illegal live/work spaces that were shut down earlier this year by city officials. 

The Crucible at 1036 Ashby Ave., another collective, was forced to move to Oakland after run-ins with city officials in 2002, and the artists who inhabited the live/work spaces in another former warehouse at 2750 Adeline St. were evicted after a sale in 2001. 

The departure of Nexus follows a courtroom battle that pitted two well-liked nonprofits against each other in a classic landlord/tenant dispute, while triggering a schism within Nexus itself. 

The landlord in this case is the Berkeley–East Bay Humane Society, a charity founded in 1927 that recorded an income of $1.24 million in 2004. 

The tenant, Nexus, was founded in 1974 and recorded a far more modest income of $84,369 30 years later. 

Each group provides much needed services to a deserving clientele—the humane society offers care and support for starving critters while Nexus supports starving artists—and some in Nexus sought to settle the dispute outside the courtroom. 

“I thought it would be better to go to the City Council and to the public,” said Carol Newborg, who was ousted as an officer of the collective during a struggle she says has left the membership divided and troubled. 

“We lost some members,” Khambatta acknowledged, “but the majority stayed.” 

After losing a courtroom challenge of their eviction notice last month, the artists and woodworkers that make up one of the city’s last remaining art collectives may be forced to leave the city, Khambatta said. 

“The sheriff served us with an eviction notice on a Wednesday, giving us seven days to move out. We went back to court on Friday and requested a hardship stay. The judge gave us 40 days,” he said. 

Newborg said she had favored a more conciliatory approach, and said she felt the decision to go to court should have been made by a vote of the full membership rather than just the steering committee. 

“I was ousted as president because I disagreed,” she said. 

“We tried to avoid litigation,” Khambatta said, “but in the end, we didn’t have a choice. We had no help from the city.” 

Newborg disagreed, pointing to a letter of support from Jos Sances of the Civic Arts Commission. 

“It’s really a complicated mess,” she said. “There are other who would like to speak, but they’re afraid of getting kicked out.” 

Economic pressures 

A member of the collective since 1979, Khambatta said he regretted that officials of the Humane Society had broken off talks with the collective, which had hoped to work out terms to buy the property for themselves. 

Mim Carlson, the Humane Society’s executive director, is the only official of that organization allowed to discuss the issue, said a spokesperson for that organization, and is on vacation. 

In earlier interviews, Carlson said they had notified Nexus last October that their lease wouldn’t be renewed when it expired on May 31st. 

Carlson said the society needed to sell the buildings to raise money to replace their aging facility that occupies much of the same block to the east of the Nexus buildings. 

Nexus members responded by filing a petition to initiate proceedings to landmark the structures. Carlson and Humane Society supporters responded by asking to file a petition of their own. 

In the end, the Landmarks Preservation Commission landmarked the brick structure at Eighth and Carleton but declined to designate the metal buildings. 

The building they did honor was built in 1924 by the Austin Building Co.—the same firm that built the landmarked H.J. Heinz Co. factory of Ashby and San Pablo avenues—for Standard Die and Specialty Co. Formed in 1973 and located ever since in a unique collection of buildings at 2701-2721 Eighth St. in West Berkeley, Nexus is faced with the reality of a landlord eager to sell the property to raise much-needed funds. 

In addition to the landmarked building at the corner of Eight and Carleton streets that houses the collective’s gallery, members also work out of a pair of adjacent sheet metal buildings, one of which housed the plant that manufactured bombs during World War II. 

Aspy and fellow woodworker Daniel Caraco showed a reporter through the woodworking shop area Wednesday, a large, well-lit space filled with all manner of equipment, from massive planing and joining machines to the fine hand tools required for intricate detail work. 

“I’m afraid we won’t be able to find anything quite as nice. At least not in Berkeley,” Caraco said. 

Both Newborg and Khambatta note that the West Berkeley Plan requires anyone who purchases the buildings to replace at least 75 percent of the space for art and craft tenants. 

Prominently displayed high on one of the walls of the landmarked building is a “For Sale” sign, posted by Norheim & Yost, the Humane Society’s broker—the omen of yet one more change in the transformation of West Berkeley.

The Berkeley city attorney’s office has good reason to gloat over this week’s California Supreme Court ruling that the state’s universities aren’t exempt from paying for impacts of developments on surrounding communities. 

But that doesn’t mean the ruling will have much impact in Berkeley, said Deputy City Attorney Zac Cowan, who co-authored a key brief in the case with his boss, City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque. 

Others, like Anne Wagley, disagree. She’s one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit by Berkeley citizens who object to concessions the city of Berkeley, represented by Albuquerque and Cowan along with outside counsel, made to UC Berkeley in the settlement of its own lawsuit over UC Berkeley’s Long Range Development Plan. 

Cowan said that the cases are different because UC Berkeley’s growth is incremental and impacts an already existing infrastructure, unlike the development of the new California State University campus at Monterey Bay (CSUMB), where construction of an entirely new campus demanded creation of a new infrastructure. 

In addition, UC Berkeley officials have typically offered mitigation measures in the two key areas where CSU trustees claimed they were exempt: traffic impacts and fire protection. 

In City of Marina v. Board of Trustees of the California State University, the judges refuted the claim by trustees that previous court rulings barred any payments to other governments to mitigate the impacts of the new campus. 

While earlier rulings and the state constitution may block other agencies from levying taxes and assessments on the university system to pay for off-campus infrastructure improvements, the justices denied the claim by CSU trustees that they were equally barred from making voluntary payments. 

UC Regents supported that claim with an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief.  

At issue were provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) that require developers of projects to mitigate adverse impacts on the environment. 

New campus 

The CSUMB campus is located at the 27,000-acre site of Fort Ord, an army base closed by the Defense Department in 1994 and transferred to Monterey county and a variety of other agencies. That same year, state legislators created the Fort Ord Reuse Authority (FORA) to develop and implement the transition. 

The next year, FORA officials laid out a plan identifying $249.2 million needed capital improvements through 2015. 

Included in the plans was the 1,370-acre site the Army transferred to the trustees in 1994 for construction of a new CSU campus. The school opened in 1995 with 663 students, housed and taught in base buildings. Plans call for an eventual enrollment of 25,000 full-time students. 

Under state law, the trustees were obligated to prepare an environmental impact report (EIR) on their master plan, spelling out the effects of the new campus and specifying steps they would take to mitigate adverse impacts. 

The final documents approved by trustees defined five areas where they would not provide full mitigation: increased runoff that would overtax an inadequate storm drain system, demands on an insufficient water supply, traffic congestion on area roadways, overtaxing wastewater treatment systems and an increased demand for fire protection services. 

Complete mitigation, the EIR declared, would require the regional FORA to make regional infrastructure improvements. 

While FORA planned on the assumption CSU would contribute to the needed improvements, CSU trustees refused to offer anything for fire and road improvements; they also alleged the improvements were FORA’s responsibility and claimed they were legally barred from making any contributions. The trustees further claimed that the benefits conferred by the new campus would outweigh the negative impacts. 

The trustees said their decision to deny any mitigation funds for roadways and fire protection stemmed from a century of court precedents and state legislation. 

San Marcos case 

The key decision, cited repeatedly by the justices in their 44-page ruling, was the July 21, 1986 decision in San Marcos Water Dist. v. San Marcos Unified School Dist., which laid out the basic rule that unless special assessments were specifically authorized by the state legislature, local agencies couldn’t levy them against other agencies. 

The legislature responded with measures permitting such assessments for providing water, light, heat, communications, power, and garbage services and for flood and drainage control, sanitary purposes and sewage collection, treatment and disposal. 

In their EIR, CSU trustees agreed to provide payments for those services but not for the construction of roads and creation of fire protection services. 

Because legislators and the San Marcos ruling hadn’t specified roads and fires, all aspects of those services were the obligation of FORA, not CSU, the trustees argued. 

In response, the City of Marina filed suit. Joining with the city were six groups and the City of Davis that filed amicus briefs. Albuquerque and Cowan drafted a joint brief on behalf of the League of California Cities and the California State Association of Counties. 

The other groups siding with the city were the San Joaquin Raptor Rescue Center, Protect Our Water, the Central Valley Safe Environmental Network and West Davis Neighbors. 

Filing similar briefs on behalf of the CSU trustees were the Regents of the University of California and the Coalition for Adequate School Housing. 

The decision 

The court ruled unanimously that the trustees must vacate their decisions certifying the EIR and adopting their master plan, and set aside their finding that “overriding circumstances” justified approving documents that failed to provide measures to correct the negative impacts of the campus on its surroundings. 

While the courts had no authority to impose specific mitigation measures, the justices ruled, CEQA required them to adopt measures that would adequately mitigate the identified impacts 

The first issue the court dealt with was the claim that CSU couldn’t pay because precedents and law declared such payments “legally infusible.” 

Not so, ruled the justices. 

Simply because they couldn’t be imposed didn’t mean the trustees couldn’t pay them voluntarily to fulfill their CEQA obligations, the court ruled, finding that “the Trustees have misinterpreted San Marcos.” 

The trustees also “abused their discretion under CEQA by certifying an EIR that improperly fails to identify voluntary contributions to FORA as a feasible method of mitigating the environmental impacts of their project.” 

Indeed, “while education may be CSU’s core function, to avoid or mitigate the environmental impacts of its projects is also one of CSU’s functions.” 

Similarly, “the relevant law makes clear that a payment by the Trustees for the purpose of mitigating CSUMB’s environmental effects would not constitute an unlawful gift of public funds,” the judges ruled. Instead, “[s]uch a payment by the Trustees would have the public purpose of discharging their duty as a public agency” to mitigate negative effects as called for by CEQA. 

While the trustees also argued that mitigation of the campus’ impacts on wastewater, drainage, water supply, fire protection and traffic were FORA’s responsibility, the court held that state law mandated that costs “will be borne by those who benefit from them,” and that state agencies are required to budget funds to protect the environment from damages caused by their own activities, even if the effects are outside boundaries of the agency’s property. 

The court also struck down CSU’s claim that their adoption of the EIR and master plan were justified by overriding circumstances in which the net economic, legal, social, technological and other benefits outweigh the adverse effects of development. 

Local impact? 

What does the decision mean for Berkeley, where tensions are running high between town and gown as the university embarks on a massive expansion plan? 

“Not much,” said Cowan—at least for the moment. 

In Marina, the court was looking at the creation of an entirely new campus in a relatively undeveloped area with little or no existing infrastructure, while UC Berkeley’s expansion is taking place within an already developed city with an established infrastructure. 

Impacts in Berkeley are incremental, Cowan said, and the university has consistently offered mitigations in the area CSU trustees denied. 

“For instance, if a development produces enough new traffic to require installation of a new traffic signal, the university will agree to pay for that portion of the signal’s cost” related to the increase, he said. 

The university is also making payments for fire, storm drain, traffic and other impacts.  

Wagley (the Daily Planet’s Arts Editor) and her co-plaintiffs have filed a legal challenge to the settlement agreement between UC Berkeley and the city after Berkeley sued over impacts outlined in the university Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) through 2020. 

In that agreement, the city “dropped all current and future claims for uncompensated services it provides the University,” Wagley said. “The Settlement Agreement will run for the life of the LRDP, until 2020. This directly conflicts with the position the City took in their amicus brief in the Marina case.”  

Cowan said more problems could arise when the university files its final EIR on plans for a quarter-billion dollars in new construction at and around Memorial Stadium. 

“We’re far apart on what impacts are going to be significant and what it will take to mitigate them,” he said. 

For more background on the financial struggles between the university and local governments, see “UC Tax Exemptions Rooted In Law and Court Rulings” in the May 14, 2004, edition of the Daily Planet.

An Oakland judge Tuesday barred a November vote on an initiative that would have stopped waterfront development pending the creation of a new plan. 

The measure had been sponsored by a coalition of Albany residents and environmental groups opposing a Los Angeles developer’s plans for a mall on the Golden Gate Fields parking lot. 

Though one in four Albany voters signed petitions for the Albany Shoreline Initiative, its sponsors had failed to give the legally required notice before they started gathering signatures, ruled Alameda County Superior Court Judge Winifred Y. Smith. 

The judge ruled on a petition filed by Pacific Racing Association, the operators of Golden Gate Fields—where Los Angeles developer Rick Caruso had teamed with track owner Magna Entertainment on plans to build an upscale mall. 

The initiative, launched in response to the plan, called for a moratorium on waterfront development pending the completion of a waterfront specific plan and prohibited any new development within 600 feet of the shoreline. 

Named as defendants were Marge Atkinson, chair of Citizens for the Albany Shoreline (CAS) and a City Council candidate, and Albany City Clerk Jacqueline Bucholz. 

Smith ruled that Bucholz failed to fulfill her responsibility under state election law to verify that the petitioners had met all their legal obligations before she accepted the petitions for certification. 

Specifically, supporters filed to post copies of the initiative and petition in three public places, and similarly failed to publish a neutral summary of the measure as a legal notice in a newspaper declared eligible by a county court to publish such notices.  

“Proponents’ noncompliance deprived voters of the opportunity to review neutral information regarding the initiative, as the Legislature intended, in a pre-campaign environment,” Smith wrote. 

Following publication and posting, the law states, proponents are required to file affidavits with the city, which show how they met the requirements. 

Initiative supporters failed on all three grounds, Smith ruled. 

While supporters did publish a notice in the same paper the City of Albany uses for notices, that paper—the West County Times—lacks court certification. 

“We lost on a technicality,” said Robert Cheasty, a CAS activist and former Albany mayor. “There are two strains in recent decisions on the issue, and Judge Smith followed the more constrained course.” 

“Our focus, as always, is on protecting the shoreline,” said Atkinson, who left the door open for another petition drive. 

Calls and emails to Caruso spokesperson Matt Middlebrook, who campaigned for the mall project over the past year, were not returned. 

CAS had been joined for the initiative drive by supporters from the Sierra Club, Citizens for the East Shore Park and other groups. 

In one sense, the initiative supporters won, given that Caruso withdrew his project after the City Council refused his demand that the city agree to complete an environmental impact report before rejecting his proposal. 

The council denied the request on July 17 after a lengthy session that ended well after midnight, and Caruso announced to a supporter, as he left council chambers, that he was pulling the project. 

Atkinson said she isn’t convinced his withdrawal is permanent, and Mayor Alan Maris told a reporter during Smith’s court hearing July 19 that he hoped Caruso would reconsider. 

Five days later, the City Council voted to implement one of the initiative’s key proposal, a waterfront planning process to “include evaluating and identifying desired alternatives that can realistically be implemented.” 

Initiative supporters are continuing the fight, with a Save Our Shoreline Benefit plans at Ashkenaz in Berkeley next Friday.

“Since its heyday during World War II, when workers from Richmond’s Kaiser shipyards filled the streets and sidewalks,” we learn from Richmond Councilmember Tom Butt’s e-mail forum, “Macdonald Avenue has reflected the common patterns of American downtowns. Many businesses have struggled to maintain economic viability in a climate of shifting commercial development and shopping patterns.” 

The street’s name reflects how important the city of Richmond once was to the Bay Area, even before the heady days of the ’40s when the city’s Kaiser shipyards were turning out the country’s wartime armada. According to the National Park Service, Augustin Macdonald, who moved to what later became Richmond from his native San Francisco, was the founder and director of the Chambers of Commerce in Oakland, Richmond, and San Francisco, and was the president of the Alameda County Historical Society and the California State Historical Association. He conceived the idea of a transcontinental rail terminal at Point Richmond and a direct ferry service to San Francisco, which led directly to the oil refinery industry moving to the Richmond area. Macdonald had interests in land, water, mining, oil and timber enterprises throughout California. 

But it is the wartime era for which Macdonald’s avenue is best known. Photographs of that period show a bustling thoroughfare, full of cars and shoppers and an active nightlife that ranged from big bands to country and western reviews. While those days are long gone, Councilmember Butt’s e-mail entry concludes that “the vital [Macdonald Avenue] corridor that hosted scores of shops, restaurants, public services and entertainment venues during World War II is still alive in the memories of many residents.” 

Several Richmond-based organizations, including the city itself, want to make sure those memories don’t die. 

This Saturday, August 5, begins the first of a five-part effort to preserve Richmond’s downtown history when longtime city residents are asked to bring their recollections to a “Memories of Macdonald” meeting from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Richmond Museum of History, 400 Nevin Ave., in Richmond. Along with the museum, the event is being co-hosted by the Richmond Community Redevelopment Agency, the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park, the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, and the Richmond Main Street Initiative. 

The six-month “Memories of Macdonald” project is part of the Macdonald Landmarks Project of the Richmond Redevelopment Agency. The landmarks project director is Berkeley resident Donna Graves, who coordinated the highly acclaimed Richmond Bay Trails Marker project and has been working on the Frances Albrier permanent interpretive historical plaque at Berkeley’s San Pablo Park. 

“Residents and business owners, both oldtimers and newcomers, [are] invited to bring their photos, memories and memorabilia associated with Macdonald Avenue” to Saturday’s Richmond Museum of History event, Graves said in a prepared release. “To fully document the evolutions that have affected the neighborhood, we will encourage stories of recent history as well as those of the past. Volunteers will collect photos and artifacts from participants and will either scan the objects for inclusion in a digital database, or catalog them as donations to the museum. Participants will be invited to record a brief ‘Macdonald memory’ at one of several digital video stations staffed by high-school-age youth from East Bay Center for the Performing Arts.” Because many of the performing arts youth are bilingual themselves, Graves said, “participants will be able to share their stories in their own languages, including Spanish and Southeast Asian dialects.”  

Graves held a similar event last January at the Frances Albrier Community Center at San Pablo Park to gather oral and artifact community history of the park. 

“The audience for ‘Memories of Macdonald’ includes residents, organizations and businesses most involved with the downtown community today,” Graves added. “This audience is wonderfully diverse in age, race, ethnicity, class, language, and, most importantly, in perspective. Our goal is to attract as wide a spectrum of storytelling as possible by inviting a broad range of participants. However ‘Macdonald memories’ are not limited to the present population of the neighborhood, so another important audience consists of people with connections to Macdonald living in Richmond and the greater Bay Area.” 

Many of the stories, pictures, or other memorabilia collected at Saturday’s event could end up as part of permanent historical markers that will eventually be placed in Richmond’s downtown area. 

The Macdonald Landmarks team is directed by Graves and made up by lead designer Michael Reed of Mayer-Reed Design, sculptor James Harrison, writer Chiori Santiago, and photographer Lewis Watts, the same team that developed the acclaimed Richmond Bay Trail Markers. 

Following Saturday’s event, youth from the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts will work with the Landmarks project team and performing arts center faculty to produce a 10-minute “Macdonald memories” video and to create artwork for the Macdonald street markers. 

In September, the project will organize four historical walking tours of Macdonald Avenue similar to the Richmond historical bus tours currently operated by the Rosie the Riveter National Park. The culmination of the project will be an intergenerational community dance at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, with the performance coordinated by nationally recognized San Francisco-based aerial dancer and choreographer Joanna Haigood. The dance will be housed at the East Bay Center’s Winters building, which served as a popular dance hall during Richmond’s wartime years.

These days Nadine Ghammache thinks of little else than Lebanon, the tiny country by the sea where she was born. 

“The last two and a half weeks, there isn’t a minute between my wake time and my sleep time and dreams, where I don’t have the agony right here at my finger tips,” said Ghammache, sipping coffee Wednesday morning on the terrace of La Peña Cultural Center, where she works. 

Ghammache is a mother of two and an Albany School Board member. Two of her sisters are in Lebanon. “I stumble with my words because there is nothing in the dictionary to describe what the Lebanese people are going through,” she says. 

A little smaller than Connecticut and populated by some 4 million people, Lebanon has suffered more than 500 mostly civilian deaths according to Human Rights Watch. Ghammache describes the recent attacks as simply a stepped-up version of military incursions by Israel into southern Lebanon that have been going on since the founding of Israel in 1948. (The Israeli government might disagree. Some argue that the bombing is in retaliation for Hezbollah’s abduction of two Israeli soldiers.)  

Ghammache, who came to the United States when she was 19, recalls her youth in Beirut as carefree. “I’d wake up when the sun rose up, I was out the door, went to the beach, rode my bike, met up with friends, went to movies—movies from all over the world, Italian, French, Indian….” 

Ghammache had a special relationship with the sea, a few blocks from her home. “I’d sit there and I’d talk to the sea,” she said. 

Ghammache’s father had a gift shop for a while in a district teeming with life. “It is Telegraph Avenue multiplied by 100,” she said – sidewalk cafes, ice cream shops, grocery stories, movies, bowling alleys, and night clubs. Since there was no set drinking age, teens could go there, sip their drinks and wax philosophical for long hours with friends. The area “was like a treasure chest,” she said. 

It was generally safe: “We hitchhiked up and down the country. You would feel that everyone is your uncle or your aunt.” 

Ghammache was from the middle class and went to a private Catholic boarding school, where classmates were both wealthier and poorer than she. Her father was a Maronite Christian and her mother was a Greek Orthodox Palestinian, whose family sought refuge in Lebanon from the Israelis in 1948. 

While most of the students at school were Maronites, many were Muslim. (According to the July 26 New York Times, Christians make up about 35 percent of the Lebanese population, with Maronites 25 percent and other Christians 10 percent. Sunni Muslims make up about 25 percent, Shiite Muslims make up about 35 percent and Druse comprise about 5 percent.) 

There was a mixing of people of different religions. Some of Ghammache’s close friends growing up were Muslim—they went to each other’s homes. There were Muslim families in the seven-story apartment building where her family, with its six children, lived.  

It wasn’t until she was an adult that Ghammache began to understand the colonialist mind-set of her French teachers at the school who forbade the children to speak Arabic. “You had to speak French. Arabic was treated as a foreign language,” she said. If you got caught speaking Arabic, you had your weekend going-home privileges taken away. “The way to get out of it was that you snitch on someone else,” she said. 

Ghammache remembers when she became conscious of animosity with Israel: the children were sent home from school one day. It was 1967 and conflict had broken out with Israel and reached Beirut. The family stayed inside, with the shutters closed, and stocked up on sugar, flour and dry milk, she said. “My house overlooked the airport. I got to see the Israeli planes blowing up the airport. This was my first experience with Israel as an aggressor, but in reality, whether I understood it or not, it was always there.” 

She remembers being out at recess and getting jolted every day by the passing Israeli airplanes. “Every morning around 10 o’clock there were always two (sonic) booms, two planes. That will make you jump,” she said. 

“What do you call that constant presence of that military monster that is constantly hovering over you?” 

After high school and before coming to the U.S., Ghammache spent time working with refugee women in the south of Lebanon, where she began to understand the depth of the poverty there. These are the people out of which Hezbollah has grown. 

The U.S. media has distorted the nature of Hezbollah, Ghammache says. It is a political, social and military movement originally formed to combat the Israeli occupation following Israel’s 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon. “They’re not differently-looking people,” Ghammache said. “It’s like the Canadians going after the Democrats. They are part of the daily life, very deeply integrated into life.” 

The people of southern Lebanon “have been aggressed and aggressed and aggressed for decades,” she said.  

Ghammache believes Israeli aggression into south Lebanon is to claim the land. The soil is “rich, dark, red earth that you just want to roll into,” she says. 

But whatever the reason, the level of violence from Israel is evident. Ghammache said she struggles to understand. “Why that level of viciousness? Is it really the destruction of ‘terrorism?’” 

In a report released Aug. 3, Human Rights Watch says the aggression, in some instances, constitutes war crimes. “The pattern of attacks shows the Israeli military’s disturbing disregard for the lives of Lebanese civilians,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, in a prepared statement. 

Ghammache goes on to ask why Americans—and she includes herself—do not take responsibility for sending tax dollars to destroy children. “By displacing a third of the population, have we created a safer world?” 

The Israelis are not in touch with the horror they create, she says: “Why can’t the Israelis stop their rhetoric for a few seconds and be in touch with that, to realize that these are human beings, to see the children play around, to pick their flowers and their vegetables and breathe in the sunlight? Why are we talking about terror? People just want to live.”

While the controversy continues over the all-but-total destruction of the massive, historic Ninth Avenue Terminal as part of Oakland’s Oak To Ninth Development Project, the City of Richmond is quietly moving forward with the development of one of its waterfront areas that preserves the similarly historic Ford Assembly Building. 

Last month, Oakland City Council approved a deal with Signature Properties to build 3,100 condominiums on public waterfront property between Oak Streets and Ninth Avenues. The project includes demolition of all but 15,000 square feet of the 180,000-square-foot Ninth Avenue Terminal, a 76-year-old warehouse building that sits directly on the estuary with views of both the water and the wharves and sailboats along the Alameda shore. 

As part of its approval of the project, Oakland City Council directed the issuance of a new request for proposals (RFP) to preserve up to one-half of the terminal or, if that cannot be done, to require that Signature Properties preserve another 5,000 square feet of the original building under its current project. But at least one local preservationist, Oakland Heritage Alliance President Naomi Schiff, calls that position “illogical.” 

“If you issue an RFP to preserve the building while you issue several documents saying that such a preservation is not feasible, why should developers answer the proposal?” Schiff asked in a telephone interview. “But, of course, illogical positions have never been much of an obstacle in Oakland.” 

In response to Oakland City Council’s approval, a coalition of local organizations—including the League of Women Voters of Oakland, the Northern Alameda County Chapter of the Sierra Club, the Green Party, and the Coalition of Advocates for Lake Merritt (CALM)—immediately launched a petition drive seeking to put a referendum on the ballot to block the development. 

In addition, two lawsuits were filed in state superior court last week against the project, one by the Oakland Heritage Alliance (OHA) that focused on the demolition of the terminal building. 

According to the OHA lawsuit, “the council’s decision to permit wholesale demolition of the terminal left OHA no alternative to bring this case to prevent unlawful destruction of this A-rated historic building, protect the most significant remaining monument to Oakland’s long and colorful maritime heritage, and remedy violations of the law.” 

Citing projects in the upper bay in Contra Costa County that advanced development while preserving existing historic maritime buildings, OHA President Schiff said that “if Vallejo and Richmond can do it, surely Oakland can save one lousy building.” 

The Richmond development Schiff was referring to was the Ford Assembly Building Reuse Project, a mixed-use project currently being developed on Richmond’s waterfront. 

In addition to keeping intact the entire 517,000-square-foot former Ford Plant, which once manufactured tanks for United States military forces during World War II, the Ford Project preserves open waterfront space along San Francisco Bay, including spectacular views of the San Francisco skyline. Included in the building will be office, live/work, research and development, light industrial, retail, and event and public gathering space. 

The Rosie The Riveter National Park has already mapped out space for a visitor center and museum on the section of the building closest to the water, and the Internet wine merchant Wine.com recently signed a lease as the building’s first commercial tenant. 

The Ford Project being developed by Orton Development Company of Emeryville is actually Richmond’s third attempt to preserve and restore the building, which Richmond Community & Economic Development Agency Director Steve Duran says “certainly wasn’t a slam dunk.” 

Duran says that Forest City, selected by Richmond after the city issued its first RFP on the project, dropped its project to turn the building completely into residential development “because it determined that the engineering costs were too much,” and Duran says that a second developer, Assembly Plant Partners, was “underfunded” and could not get bank funding for its proposal to develop the plant on an arts and cultural theme. 

The development head hopes that Orton, which has a long history of industrial building restoration throughout Northern California, will have better luck, noting that with the signing of Wine.com “he’s on his way.” 

Duran said the 23-acre waterfront property that houses the Ford Plant “is actually more valuable without the building. You can’t save all your historic resources. If you try to do so, you will stagnate and you won’t grow as a city. Like most cities in the Bay Area, there’s a tension in Richmond between the growing population and the lack of available housing. That’s always a tough debate. There was a lot of pressure to build more housing at that location. But the Richmond City Council decided that because of the significance and the beauty of the building, the restoration and re-use could be an economic catalyst for the Richmond waterfront area that would be far above the land’s current economic value without the building.” 

Orton could not be contacted for this story. But a recent New York Times article quoted company president Eddie Orton as saying that he is dividing the project into several segments. 

“It’s too big for any one use,” Orton told the Times. “We needed a manageable amount of space in each of the different segments so we wouldn’t overwhelm the marketplace.” 

The Times reported that Orton, who bought the property for $5.4 million in 2004, expects to have the building’s first phase fully leased by August. Orton estimated that the entire project would cost approximately $60 million, with $8 million coming from public financing. 

Orton is no stranger to Oakland. Following its establishment in 1984, the company’s first acquisition was the Vulcan Foundry near High Street and San Leandro Street, an industrial property that Orton turned into a highly successful artist colony and studio in a formerly depressed area of the city. The project also included the Vulcan Café, a Thai restaurant. The company has also developed the old Mother’s Cookies Factory on East 18th Street in Oakland, the Safeway Ice Cream Plant in West Oakland, and the 200,000-square-foot Temescal complex on Seventh Street in Berkeley. 

And this is not the first time the Oak To Ninth and Ford Assembly Building Reuse projects have been compared. 

In a 2005 feasibility study for adaptive reuse of Oakland’s Ninth Avenue Terminal, the University of California, Berkeley, City Planning 290E class devoted a section to the Ford project to demonstrate what might be done with the Ninth Avenue Terminal, writing that “the current proposal to destroy the majority of the Ninth Avenue Terminal fails to see the opportunities that lie within the adaptive reuse of the structure. Throughout the country, cities have successfully turned old waterfront industrial buildings into thriving centers of arts, culture, and commerce. 

These complexes help build a new and existing sense of place and history … Like the Ninth Avenue Terminal, the Ford Assembly Plant building was constructed on bay fill and has a unique vantage point over the Bay, with views of San Francisco. Another point in common is that both buildings are located in industrial areas that are being converted into more livable residential zones. 

Richmond residents recognized the uniqueness of the warehouse space by supporting its designation to the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. This designation is making it possible for Emeryville based Orton Development to utilize a 20 percent historic preservation tax credit deduction on all rehabilitation expenses incurred during the development process. 

The UC Berkeley study added, “Orton Development will be accommodating the Bay Trail through orienting signage and a public access easement along the waterfront portion of the crane building’s wharf. A similar model could be employed at the Ninth Avenue Terminal, allowing joggers, cyclists, and walkers to walk along the Oakland Estuary.”

City Planning Director Dan Marks has issued a stinging rebuke of UC Berkeley’s key environmental document covering its massive expansion plans for Memorial Stadium and its surroundings. 

In a 54-page critique, he describes a university so intent on raising funds that it is willing to ignore serious risks to the lives of its students, as well as those of parents and others who attend events at the stadium. 

In the document presented to the Planning Commission Wednesday night, Marks slams the university for its “dismissive attitude toward the City of Berkeley and its citizens” and assails a document he said is full of critical flaws and factual errors. 

The target of his criticism is the draft environmental impact report (DEIR) prepared by Design, Community & Environment, a Berkeley planning firm headed by David E. Early—the same firm that drafted the university’s 2020 Long Range Development Plan. 

“It appears that the university has prepared a DEIR that seeks to justify actions it had already determined to take before the DEIR was prepared, without sufficient environmental effects or alternatives,” wrote Marks. 

Marks called the document legally inadequate, and chided the university for failing to offer the real alternatives required by the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) for the quarter-billion-dollar complex of buildings reviewed by the DEIR.  

“We respond to comments in the final EIR,” said Jennifer Lawrence McDougall, a principal planner for the university. “We don’t have any other comments about the city’s letter.” 

A call to David Early wasn’t returned by deadline. 

Marks said “fund-raising considerations and concerns of alumni” rather than compliance with CEQA seemed to be driving the process, starting with a conceptual design for the 132,500-square-foot Student Athlete High Performance Center that were sketched out two years ago—well before the start of the EIR process. 

Had the university’s concern been the safety of students, officials would have begun by retrofitting the seismically unsafe stadium—a building constructed directly over the Hayward Fault. 

“But it is our understanding that Phase II of the project that includes the Stadium retrofit remains unfunded, while fundraising proceeds on Phase I, construction of a new fitness center attached to the crumbling and dangerous stadium,” Marks wrote. 

Noting that the DEIR declares that even with a seismic retrofit, the risk of injury and death from earthquakes at the stadium can be reduced “to less than significant levels,” Marks said “it is essential that the Campus seriously consider and analyze the option of relocating the stadium to other sites.” 

One possibility he suggested was the Oakland Coliseum after the A’s lease expires. 

Underestimated 

“The skimpy information that the DEIR includes is difficult to find, inconsistent and frequently underestimates the magnitude of projects,” offering only “snippets of information” about crucial details, Marks wrote. 

One example he cited was the parking lot planned for a site northwest of the stadium beneath Maxwell Family Field. 

The DEIR “does not indicate the specific size of the Maxwell Field parking structure, which will probably be more than 325,000 square feet,” he wrote. 

One snippet related to the mammoth garage is a fleeting mention of a 12- to 15-foot-high wall around three sides of the structure that would be out of character with its historic surroundings, including the recently landmarked Memorial Stadium. 

“Other critical information is simply omitted,” he wrote, including the ”extraordinary amount of excavation” needed to construct four underground parking levels, as well any analysis of its environmental impact—including the high volume of truck traffic that would accompany the dig and subsequent construction. 

In addition to the training center parking structure and eventual stadium retrofit, the project includes construction of a 186,000-square-foot building that would join offices and functions of the university’s law and business schools. 

Marks wrote that the document is also notable for what it doesn’t include, such as the cumulative impacts of the projects when added to other nearby and pending projects, including major renovations at Bowles Hall, just across from the parking structure, and the planned demolition of the Bevatron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a short drive up the hill from the stadium complex. 

Other failures 

Other failures Marks cited include: 

• Use of inappropriate analytical methods and standards of significance in evaluating impacts: 

• Lack of accurate descriptions of the document’s regulatory framework; 

• Omission of any evidence that the university is carrying out mitigation measures promised in the EIR for the Long Range Development Plan. 

• The absence of discussion of how the university has “followed its own adopted policies as they apply to the project.” 

• Lack of accurate descriptions of how city General Plan policies and regulations would apply were the project within municipal jurisdiction; 

The document is “so fundamentally flawed,” he wrote, “that the only way to fully rectify these shortcomings is to substantially revise and recirculate the document.” 

The usually phlegmatic Marks laced his report with stark adjectives as he worked his way through a critique of each of the sections of the two-volume DEIR. 

UC Berkeley’s environmental review of the stadium area expansion has been freighted with controversy from start. 

After attending a Dec. 8, 2005 scoping session held by the university to gather input on the scope of the review, Marks told the Landmarks Preservation Commission four days that that he had been distressed to learned the university was already working on building designs before the review began. 

Because an EIR is supposed to consider alternatives to projects under consideration, the fact that the university had already committed money to plans was a sign that any alternatives raised would be little more than symbolic. 

“By the time it’s in schematics, it’s done,” Marks told the commission. 

The university is planning to use private contributions to fund the major projects. The university has been cagey with information from the beginning, starting with the initial press conference called to unveil the project. 

When a reporter asked if the second level tier to be added above the stadium rim included luxury sky boxes—premium seating for wealthy fans and corporations—Birgeneau professed ignorance, as did other officials. 

The acknowledgment of a fact that seemed self evident to journalists would only come later. 

The City Council will hold a special meeting at 5 p.m. today (Tuesday) to hash out the wording describing the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance that voters will see when they vote in November. 

City staff provides the ballot wording itself—the description of the measure that appears in the box next to the “yes” and “no” boxes—as well as the city attorney’s analysis for the election booklet sent to all voters. 

Laurie Bright, one of the two principal sponsors of the initiative, and other initiative backers have criticized the proposed analysis language drafted by Deputy City Attorney Zac Cowan. 

They are proposing an alternative, which Bright said will be in the city’s hands this morning. 

Bright said he and fellow advocates of the initiative “will attend the meeting and we will be protesting in the boldest possible manner the very unfair advantage the Cowan is taking of his opportunity to do an analysis that is supposed to inform the public.” 

In response to the initiative, the council last week voted unanimously to delay a second reading of rival legislation sponsored by Mayor Tom Bates and Councilmember Laurie Capitelli that contains major revisions of the landmarks law. 

By tabling a second vote on the mayor’s ordinance, the council avoided the threat of a referendum—a petition drive that would block enforcement of the new law until the electorate had a chance to vote it up or down. 

The initiative that voters will face in November is effectively the ordinance now in effect with minor changes to make it conform to the state’s Permit Streamlining Act, which sets deadlines for action on building permit applications. 

In a memorandum to the council, Acting City Clerk Sherry M. Kelly said her office had verified 2,863 of the 3,253 signatures on petitions for the ordinance, well in excess of the 2,007 required. 

City costs for the election will amount to about $10,000, she wrote. 

If voters pass the initiative, the Bates/Capitelli ordinance would become moot, and only another initiative could overturn or modify the resulting law. 

Marks weighs in 

In a separate memorandum Berkeley Director of Planning and Development Dan Marks wrote that staff could find no significant impacts in the initiative beyond those already contained in the current ordinance, “and no further mitigations are warranted.” 

But that doesn’t mean the measure couldn’t produce costs arising from litigation in three areas, he said: 

• lawsuits that required the city to defend the initiative; 

• suits filed by developers based on claims that delays in processing their applications violated their civil rights; 

• claims that could result from possible reductions in property values, if Proposition 90 passes in the November statewide election. 

“The process allowed under the initiative would clearly continue to conflict with the PSA, in violation of State laws passed to protect the rights of applicants,” Marks wrote. 

“That’s ridiculous,” said Bright. “First, it conflicts with every other credible legal person we’ve talked to who say just the opposite, and second, the initiative itself subordinates all timelines to state permit streamlining laws. I don’t know why they keep bringing that up because it can’t happen. It’s not relevant.” 

Bright said the initiative’s only revisions of the existing law were suggested by the state’s office of historic preservation (SHPO) in two letters issued when the city was considering the changes that were subsequently embodied in the Bates/Capitelli ordinance. 

“The initiative is basically the current ordinance with the updates suggested by SHPO. There is nothing in it that contravenes state laws,” Bright said. 

Bright called the Prop. 90 argument “just silly,” and said “all the statistics you can look at say that historic preservation in a community raises property values.” 

Even without the impacts of possible litigation, Marks wrote, the initiative “would likely continue the existing ordinance’s negative impact on the provision of housing and affordable housing, due to the long and unpredictable process for development action and review permitted by the existing ordinance.” 

Similarly, he wrote, the initiative would “continue the negative impact on business retention and revitalization” because of long processing times for applications when compared to other jurisdictions. 

Because an initiative can only be modified by another initiative, Marks wrote that amending the ordinance to comply with the law would result in further costs from the electoral process. 

Proposition 90 

Billed as an anti-eminent domain measure, Proposition 90 would not only bar government seizure of private property for use by private developers but would also allow owners to sue any time legislation not directly related to public health and safety exerted a negative impact on property values. 

The measure has roused the strong opposition of the League of California Cities, the California Fire Chiefs and Police Chiefs association and the American Farmland Trust, among others. 

Billed as the Protect Our Homes Initiative, the effects of the measure exert a far broader reach than simply protecting homeowners from losing their properties to development. 

Under provisions of the initiative, anything that limited the ability to develop property to anything less than the maximum extent allowed by existing law could result in litigation against the agency that attempts to moderate the project. 

Opposition to eminent domain has united an unusual coalition of progressives and property libertarians, sparked in part by their reaction to the widely publicized June 23, 2005, U.S. Supreme Court Kelo v. City of New London decision that held local governments could seize property for private development even if the project’s economic success wasn’t assured. 

Circulation of the Proposition 90 initiative petitions was bankrolled by a March 10 $1.5 million donation from the New York-based Fund for Democracy, the creation of libertarian developer Howard Rich. According to a July 13 story in Capitol Weekly, Rich has funded similar measures in Nevada, Arizona, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Oklahoma and Montana. 

Rich is a major backer of Reason magazine, chairs Americans for Limited Government and sits on the board of the Cato Institute, which drafted the economic program for President Ronald Reagan’s first term. He is also a funder of term limit campaigns across the country.

A poster to promote Berkeley’s libraries shows Michele Lawrence smiling in a white turtleneck and red blazer, pearls in her ears and an open novel in her hands. She looks kind and composed, every bit the spokesperson for a wholesome public service announcement—but for the novel.  

The novel she cradles—a novel she holds dear, a novel she herself selected for the photo shoot—is D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. 

“It was the first book I received from my English teacher [ex] husband,” she explained earlier this month. “When I read the book I realized he was not after my mind.” 

Lawrence is not best known, at least not publicly, for innuendo. 

The 59-year-old superintendent of Berkeley schools is better recognized as an unyielding administrator—as respected for restoring stability to the district as she is criticized for exercising a top-down management style. 

On July 16, she marked five years as the chief of the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD)—no small feat given that the position has been, by her own admission, the hardest job she’s ever held.  

Lawrence entered the district in 2001 on the eve of a multimillion-dollar deficit and a crisis in central administration. The school board, whose members were known, on occasion, to take opposing viewpoints simply to contradict one another, was in need of leadership. The high school was in shambles. 

Prior to moving to Berkeley, she had never lived outside a 25-mile radius in Southern California. After a decade as superintendent of the Paramount Unified School District in Southern California, Lawrence, a former art teacher, counselor and principal, was prepared for new challenges, but not to this extent, she said. 

“I knew the district had financial problems, but I never imagined they were as serious and as tenuous as when I walked in,” she said. “Berkeley, as a community, has always had such a reputation and a cachet for public education that I made the assumption that the district was stable and had good infrastructure. I discovered that was not the case.” 

Lawrence, BUSD’s first Latina superintendent who, began chipping away at the budget deficit with a three-year fiscal recovery plan. She reorganized departmental offices to repair the district’s tattered internal structure, and filled top administrative positions with people she trusted, including Jim Slemp, whom she hired as principal of Berkeley High. Lawrence credits Slemp, now entering his fourth year at the school, with anchoring the school. 

By 2004, BUSD had slashed more than $14 million from the budget. To compensate, Lawrence and the board pushed for the emergency ballot Measure B of 2004, which passed--and was the only local tax to do so that year. 

This year, for the first time since before Lawrence assumed control of the district, the county Office of Education considers the district solvent. By several accounts, central offices are running smoothly, the high school is at a lull and the school board gets along (so well, in fact, detractors label it a “rubber-stamp board.”) 

“We needed someone who said, ‘This is what we need to do and we’re going to do it,’” said school board Director John Selawsky. “Michele at the helm steered us out of trouble.” 

There is still work to be done, though, Lawrence says: passing a new measure, ironing out details of the district’s school lunch initiative and shoring up curricula at the middle school level, among other plans. Lawrence’s contract, under which she earns about $195,000, is up in 2008, but she plans to stick around “’till they bury me,” she said. 

That is not great news for the district’s employee unions. Both the Berkeley Federation of Teachers (BFT) and the Berkeley Council of Classified Employees characterize relations with Lawrence as “not … what I consider to be positive,” said BFT President Barry Fike. Employee layoffs during budget cuts and a bitter labor battle last year between the teachers’ union and the district heightened animosity toward Lawrence. 

“The superintendent has by and large chosen to not take the approach that we [BFT] would prefer, an approach that calls on teachers to work together with administration in a partnership towards the vital education goals before us,” said Fike, in an e-mail. “Instead, her approach has been largely top-down.” 

Of late, Lawrence has fielded criticism for the district’s failure to narrow the achievement gap—disparities in academic performance between Berkeley’s white and African-American students are larger than in any school district in Alameda County, according to state Department of Education data. 

Lawrence said she “absolutely and resolutely denies” ignoring the achievement gap. Still, organizations like United In Action, a local, minority student advocacy group, and Parents of Children of African Descent have said the district, under Lawrence’s guidance, hasn’t done enough to address inequity. 

“I think she sees what needs to be done, and she will try to get from Point A to Point B to do that. I think that has a lot of effectiveness. But I think it’s less effective when you’re dealing with softer issues, more complex issues … like addressing why students are failing,” said Karen Hemphill, a candidate for school board, whose children attend Berkeley schools. “These are the types of things where that style is not going to work, especially in Berkeley.” 

Lawrence has taken additional heat from the wider Berkeley community, particularly in cases where the district path crosses with city interests. District officials have repeatedly grumbled about the lengthy city review processes that hold up important projects, like the BUSD bus yard, which remains unused while the city processes permit applications. Meanwhile, the district begrudgingly leases temporary facilities at $400,000 a year.  

At a neighborhood meeting in May, Lawrence submitted to verbal volley with resident John McBride, who challenged her to send West Campus development plans to a city design committee. When McBride’s comments sufficiently grated on her patience, Lawrence shot back: “Why is it every time I see you, I want to slap you?” 

The comment was playful—mostly. (McBride said he found it “comic but unnecessary.”) Lawrence is anxious to relocate district headquarters, currently housed in the seismically unsafe Old City Hall building, to West Campus posthaste, and won’t capitulate to any protractions--a stance often at odds with the democratic ways Berkeley citizens so highly regard. (A recent construction estimate came in well over initial projections, calling into question the very viability of the project.) 

“The participation, the democratic process is both magnificent and cumbersome,” Lawrence said. “We tend to want to have all voices heard … (and) it completely slows down the process. I’ve come to understand and appreciate that, but it still slows down the process.” 

Retired BUSD teacher Rick Ayers, who said he has “had his differences” with Lawrence when Berkeley High School was first broken up into small schools, sympathized. 

“Berkeley is so split and divided. She’s got to live the political compromises of the culture,” he said. “It’s a job I wouldn’t want.” 

Lawrence conceded she hasn’t had an easy ride. “Berkeley is the toughest place I’ve ever worked,” she said. “I feel very proud that I’m upright and happy.” 

As Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) officials gear up for the second parcel tax campaign in two years, some citizens question whether district administrators have done enough to ensure that school resources stay with Berkeley students. 

Illegal interdistrict transfers, where parents provide fake residency documents to get their children secure spots in desirable schools, are a given in many high-performing Bay Area school districts. But in Berkeley, the problem is exacerbated, critics say, because school district policy is far too lax.  

“There’s a very loosy-goosy attitude about it,” said Oakland resident Anne Kasdin, whose daughter attended Berkeley High as a legal transfer. “Parents lie to get their kids into schools. Everyone knows it’s happening, but nobody wants to talk about it … It’s been going on for years in Berkeley. I even know of families who ask (friends) if they can use their Berkeley address, and they say, ‘no, it’s not ethical.”  

To prove Berkeley residency, parents or guardians must show three documents, including at least one utility bill. But as Lorraine Mahley pointed out in a letter to the editor in the Planet, “Utility companies don’t care whose name is on the bill as long as the bill gets paid.”  

Other districts, like Alameda, Castro Valley and Livermore Valley unified school districts, additionally require lease agreements or escrow papers. Mahley suggests BUSD adopt a similar mandate. 

“I think it’s a good idea,” said school board Director John Selawsky. “I’m going to ask the school district to do that … I know there are people who give false documentation and we have nothing in place to regulate that, so we could tighten that up.” 

Based on information gathered at a meeting of local superintendents, Superintendent Michele Lawrence insists BUSD policy mirrors that of other school districts. 

“Our school district isn’t any more strict or any less strict,” she said. 

Each year, the 9,100-student school BUSD grants students legal interdistrict transfer permits on a space-available basis, contingent on students’ academic standing, attendance and discipline records. For the 2006-2007 school year, the district accepted 354 of 552 applications, which accounts for 3.8 percent of the student population. The vast majority hails from Oakland and Richmond.  

Those figures do not include all non-Berkeley students, since the district cannot account for illicit transfers. (The district does make house calls to verify residency, however, Lawrence said.) 

Illegal interdistrict transfers are “a highly known thing,” said retired Berkeley High School teacher Rick Ayers. “There are the wealthy kids from the Oakland hills, whose parents want to position them in an urban school so they can say, ‘Oh, look where we went to school,’ and then there are the poor kids who want to get in. …It’s not that Berkeley is that great. It’s just a testament to how bad schools are in Oakland and Richmond.” 

BUSD, under former Superintendent Jack McLaughlin, encouraged students from out of town, under the premise that robust enrollment spells more state money. In 2001, BUSD had 673 legal transfers. 

But that philosophy has changed under Lawrence who does not believe it is judicious to increase enrollment for the sake of funding, particularly since state funds have steadily dwindled over the years. 

BUSD now relies on parcel taxes for about 20 percent of the budget, which means the cost to educate Berkeley students—whether they’re legal or not—increasingly falls on Berkeley residents. 

Two years ago, the district passed emergency Measure B. This year, the district is asking Berkeley voters to renew that measure in addition to the Berkeley Schools Excellence Project, which combined with Measure B, will provide the district with about $19.6 million a year for 10 years.  

“Voters, parents and taxpayers need to feel confident that the scarce resources … are helping Berkeley students first, then students from outside of Berkeley can be admitted as resources allow,” Mahley wrote. 

But even if the district adopts new protocol, parents will still find a way to circumvent the system, Selawsky said. 

“If people go to that length to forge utility bills, they’ll go to the same lengths with lease agreements,” he said. “I suspect it’s not going to solve the problem entirely.”

The Alameda City Council approved construction bids for the development of a controversial theater project in downtown Alameda Wednesday, dealing a blow to opponents who insist the project is out of scale with the area.  

Councilmembers awarded $9.1 million and $8.8 million contracts to Overaa Construction Inc., a Richmond company, to respectively develop a parking garage and restore a defunct Art Deco theater at the corner of Central Avenue and Oak Street, in the heart of downtown. 

The project also includes a seven-screen cineplex, whose construction costs will fall to private developer Alameda Entertainment Associates. Construction for all three components is slated to begin by the end of September, said Jennifer Ott, city development manager. 

The vote spells trouble for the opposition, Citizens for a Megaplex-free Alameda (CMFA), an ad-hoc group that has consistently spoken out against the project. The group filed a lawsuit against the city for allegedly failing to conduct appropriate environmental review prior to approving the project. An Alameda Superior Court judge rejected the case June 30. The group plans to appeal that decision and will seek an injunction against construction, CMFA member Ani Dimusheva said Monday. 

“We’re hoping we still have a case for environmental impacts,” she said. “We’re seeking an environmental report because we believe the project is too big and it’s going to have adverse impacts.” 

The complex will include a two-story, 54-foot-tall cineplex, a 350-space parking garage and the restoration of the Historic Alameda Theater. The project, budgeted at $30.2 million, also includes 6,100-square feet of retail space. 

Construction should be complete by fall 2007, Ott said. 

Mayor Beverly Johnson, Vice Mayor Marie Gilmore and Councilmember Frank Matarrese voted in favor of the contracts. Councilmembers Tony Daysog and Doug deHaan voted no. Both Matarrese and Johnson have filed papers seeking reelection this November, and Daysog has filed papers for mayor, according to the city clerk’s office.

Faced with threats of a lawsuit, the City Council has begun to explore ways to increase both the number of people allowed to speak directly to the council at its meetings and the variety of topics the public can address.  

“I want it discussed at a time when the public is present,” said Gene Bernardi of SuperBOLD (Berkeleyans Organizing for Library Defense), referring to the fact that discussions about the matter are now taking place at the Agenda Committee, which meets at 2:30 p.m., when most working people find it difficult to attend. 

Until recently, the council limited to 10 the number of speakers—chosen by lottery—at the public comment session; each was permitted to speak for up to three minutes on whatever topic the person wished. 

The problem, SuperBOLD said, was that when more than 10 people want to address the council, some are not heard. Moreover, some council issues the public might want to address are not heard at all. 

“The public comment lottery system improperly denies willing speakers the right to address the council and [library] board at public meetings, and it improperly prevents certain agenda items from receiving public comment,” wrote Sophia Cope, attorney with the Oakland-based First Amendment Project, in a letter to the city attorney. 

If adequate public comment is not provided, the First Amendment Project plans “possible litigation” on behalf of SuperBOLD, Cope wrote in April. 

Over the last month or so, Mayor Tom Bates has been experimenting with public comment procedures. Fifteen people have been chosen to speak for two minutes each. At the close of the 30-minute public comment period, he has then called upon those whose issue—or whose side of the issue—has not been addressed. 

“We’re trying out different ideas,” Bates said in a phone interview Monday. “We’re experimenting with it.” 

Bates defended the decision to discuss public comment at the daytime Agenda Committee meetings, noting the public can give input in writing and that most of the council chooses to attend the meetings, even though only four are members. 

In a phone interview Friday, Councilmember Kriss Worthington applauded the changes, but called for more. 

“In the past months, more members of the public have been allowed to comment. That is a step forward,” he said, noting, however, the rules changes have been confusing. “Rules one week are different from the next. We need a system where we know what the rules are.” 

Worthington is working on a sunshine ordinance, which he says will address public comment rules as well as other open meeting procedures. 

Addressing the changes he would like to see, Worthington said he wants to continue to hear the random 15 speakers at the beginning of the meeting. But he would like to add an opportunity for others to speak just before their items of interest are heard. Many cities, including Oakland, Millbrae, Sunnyvale, Walnut Creek and Richmond, allow comment just before an item on the agenda.  

But Bates said he thinks that would not work in Berkeley. “Some people would speak on 20 items,” he said. 

Scheduling public comment is a “real balancing act,” said Councilmember Linda Maio, noting that she’s gotten valuable information from public comment. Maio suggested that large groups that come to address the council could be given 10 minutes to speak. 

Public comment cannot be “open-ended,” she said. 

If everyone were allowed to speak, council meetings could go “too late to get business done,” Maio said. 

The remedy for late-night council meetings is not to limit speakers, but to adjust meetings so that special meetings are held for public hearings, which tend to be long and well attended, Worthington said. 

Bates said he’s not opposed to additional meetings. 

He pointed out that on July 25, the public comment period extended to more than hour, causing the meeting to end after midnight. 

“The later the council meets, the more irrational the discussion gets,” Bates said. 

Not everyone thinks drastic change is necessary. Sherry Smith, past president of the League of Women Voters, argued that “very few people have been excluded from speaking.” 

Still, Smith congratulated Bates on trying to make sure that “no one point of view has been excluded” by calling on people to share opposing views. 

But Bernardi pointed out that calling on people from the “other” side of an issue is not always valid.  

“Some people say that they were not pro or con [on an issue], but they have something to say about it,” she said. 

Contending that the council is “dragging its feet” in making change, Bernardi said new rules should already have been written. “They knew [summer] recess was coming up. Tom Bates wants to look like he’s doing something.” 

But Bates said the agenda committee will finalize its proposals in September, then send them to the full council. “It’s not like it’s going to be chiseled in stone,” Bates said, explaining there will be room to fine-tune new rules.

Federal government “anti-terror” activities have penetrated a number of Northern and Central California cities including Berkeley, according to an ACLU report released last week: “The State of Surveillance: Government Monitoring of Political Activity in Northern and Central California.” 

“The monitoring of political groups and free-speech protest activities should come as no surprise in light of the vast resources committed to intelligence gathering post 9/11 and the gutting of regulations protecting political and religious activity from unwarranted government surveillance,” says the report, which describes spy activities directed toward peaceful demonstrations in Fresno, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley. 

The local incident featured in the report was an April 2005 demonstration at UC Berkeley, sponsored by Berkeley Stop the War Coalition, aimed at military recruitment on campus. 

The incident was described in an April 21, 2005, Department of Defense Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) report released to the ACLU by the Department of Defense following a freedom of information request and subsequent lawsuit. 

The information released describes the demonstration—the “incident type”—as “specific threats,” and describes the subject as “direct action planned against recruiters at University of California at Berkeley.” 

The source, whose name has been redacted from the released report, is described as “a special agent of the Federal Protective Service, U.S. Department of Homeland Security.”  

“Are we turning into a police state?” Matthew Taylor, a member of the Berkeley Stop the War Coalition, asked in a phone interview Monday. “What we have here is that the administration has conducted an illegal war [and is] conducting other illegal actions to cover up.” 

Documents released thus far do not reveal how or the extent to which the Berkeley Stop the War Coalition has been monitored by federal government agencies, said Mark Schlosberg, Police Practices Policy Director of the ACLU-Northern California.  

Students first learned through an NBC news report that the April 2005 protest had been reported in the TALON database. Subsequently the ACLU pursued documents related to the report. 

It is unknown how an email describing plans for the protest got into the TALON database. It was through an agent, but it is not known whether the Stop the War group was infiltrated, if emails were appropriated, or if they got to TALON via another method. 

To get answers to these questions, Schlosberg said, “We have to go to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). It’s like a treasure hunt.” (The FBI conducts anti-terrorism investigations with other law enforcement agencies through the JTTF, according to the ACLU report.) 

“Homeland Security was created to protect the American people from terrorist activities—not monitor political dissent on college campuses,” Schlosberg said in a July 18 press release. 

The ACLU is calling on cities to institute measures to safeguard the right to protest. 

“Although this right exists as a legal principle in California, there is little regulation in place to enforce it,” the report says. Although the report noted that Attorney General Bill Lockyer wrote a document known as the Lockyer Manual that requires “that law enforcement must have reasonable suspicion of a crime to engage in surveillance of political activity,” an ACLU survey of 94 police departments found that “not one department of the 94 respondents had policy or training materials that referenced the Lockyer Manual.” 

“Berkeley does not have a policy that restricts the police department from monitoring groups,” Schlosberg noted.  

Both Schlosberg and Mayor Tom Bates said they thought the Police Review Commission had a subcommittee that was examining agreements made between the department and federal anti-terrorism agencies. However, Sharon Kidd, acting PRC chair, said that no such subcommittee exists. 

“I don’t want these people running roughshod over our population,” Bates said. “I want to be sure policies are in place.” 

The complete ACLU report can be found at http://www.aclunc.org/.

The California Supreme Court ruled today that the trustees of California State University must prepare a new environmental impact report on a planned expansion of a campus in Monterey County. 

The campus, known as CSU Monterey Bay, occupies 1,370 acres of the 27,000 acres of the former Fort Ord Army base. 

The campus was established in 1994 after the Army left the base and opened the following year with 663 students. Plans are now under way to expand the college into a major institution enrolling 25,000 students. 

The high court said the trustees must redo their environmental report to include a plan for alleviating impacts on infrastructure such as roads and fire protection outside the campus but within the base. 

The court’s unanimous ruling was issued in San Francisco in a lawsuit filed by the Fort Ord Reuse Authority, a state agency set up by the Legislature to plan for financing and construction of infrastructure improvements on the former base. 

The court said the mitigation plans in the revised report could be either actions taken within the campus, such as reducing automobile use, or a plan to reimburse the reuse authority for a share of infrastructure improvements. 

The trustees had agreed to pay for part of drainage, water supply and wastewater management and none for roadway and fire protection improvements needed outside the campus boundaries. 

They argued unsuccessfully that agreeing to payments to the reuse agency would be an unconstitutional gift of public funds because state property is exempt from taxation. 

But Justice Kathryn Werdegar wrote in the court’s ruling that voluntary payments would be only one option for mitigation and could not be considered a tax. 

Werdegar wrote, “The plain language of the California Constitution does not support the trustees’ position that voluntary mitigation payments are impermissible.” 

California State University is the largest university system in the nation, with 23 campuses and 405,000 students statewide.

Will the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Bevatron building and Iceland become the city’s newest landmarks? And will the Drayage fall to the wrecking ball? 

All are up for consideration Thursday night, when the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) meets at 7:30 p.m., in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave., at Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

Lab officials oppose landmarking the Bevatron building in the hills above campus, which housed the massive particle accelerator that was the site of Nobel Prize-winning experiments. 

The landmarking effort began as a last-ditch effort by critics who fear the demolition and subsequent caravans of waste-filled trucks down Berkeley streets would result in citizen exposures to a variety of toxic substances, including radioactive dust and asbestos particles. 

Iceland, a skating rink at 2727 Milvia St., has been embroiled in a dispute with city officials who want the owners to replace the current cooling system which uses ammonia, a hazardous substance. 

The owners have asked the LPC to continue the hearing until November. 

Commissioners will also consider a request to demolish the Drayage, a former warehouse at 651 Addison St., which had become an artists’ colony, featuring spaces converted into live/work units by the artists who lived there. 

City officials ordered them out because the conversions had never been approved by the city and were judged dangerous by fire inspectors. 

Because the structure is more than 40 years old, the demolition was referred to the LPC for review by city planning staff. 

Other items on the agenda include a hearing to landmark 1770 La Loma Ave. and to declare 2411 Fifth St. a structure of merit, a landmark designation for structures that have undergone significant alterations since they were first built.

Californians knew global warming was real even before temperatures soared past 110 degrees in many regions for days and killed at least 75 people statewide, according to a survey released by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). 

Conducted before July’s record-breaking heat wave, the PPIC survey also revealed a marked increase in concern about climate change. Six years ago, in another PPIC survey that asked Californians to identify the state’s single most important environmental issue, zero percent of respondents picked global warming. In the latest survey, released July 26, 8 percent chose it. 

“Public opinion is finally starting to move on this topic,” said PPIC survey director Mark Baldassare. Californians, he said, “are so concerned (with global warming) that two-thirds actually want the state to address this issue—completely independent of the federal government.” 

In the liberal Bay Area, where Al Gore’s film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, can make white people talk back to the movie screen, a full 12 percent of PPIC respondents cited global warming as their top environmental concern. 

Eight in 10 Californians called global warming “very serious” or “somewhat serious.” Blacks and Latinos were more likely than whites and Asians to call global warming “a very serious threat to California’s economy and quality of life.” 

Republicans, on the other hand, remain unclear on the concept—only one in four called global warming “very serious.” 

Despite most Californians’ new awareness of climate change, the top environmental concern for state residents across all regions and races remains the air they breathe. One in four Californians chose air pollution as their top environmental concern.  

Most concerned about air quality were residents of Los Angeles and the rapidly growing Inland Empire and Central Valley. Thirty-one percent of Inland Empire residents named air pollution as their top issue, the highest of all regions surveyed. Riverside county is the fourth most polluted region in the world behind Jakarta, Calcutta and Bangkok.  

There were significant differences across racial and ethnic lines, however, in perceptions of how serious a health threat regional air pollution posed. Blacks (38 percent) and Latinos (31 percent) called air pollution “very serious” in their areas, while whites (18 percent) and Asians (13 percent) were less worried about breathing dirty air. 

“Environmental issues are often referred to as white, middle class issues,” Baldassare said. “That is no longer the case in our state.” 

The PPIC has watched the percentage of Californians reporting asthma as a condition afflicting themselves or a family member inch upward, from 37 percent in July 2003 to 41 percent today. The proportion reporting asthma as a problem was highest in the Central Valley (52 percent) and Inland Empire (50 percent). Children in the Central Valley suffer asthma rates higher than anywhere else in the state, according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. 

Who or what is to blame for all this bad air? Californians overall finger emissions from personal vehicles (26 percent). Broken down regionally, Central Valley respondents seemed unsure who the culprit was. More than any other area, Central Valley residents split the blame among personal vehicles (19 percent), commercial vehicles (14 percent), population growth and development (14 percent), industry and agriculture (16 percent) and pollution from outside the area (18 percent). 

When it comes to Californians’ favorite manifestation of power—horsepower, in the form of an internal combustion engine mounted on four wheels—residents want the government to pressure auto makers to make cleaner cars. Majorities of voters across political lines and regions surveyed by the PPIC supported tougher air pollution standards on vehicles. Even 56 percent of Republicans were willing to see tougher standards on new cars, trucks and SUVs—and even if it drove up the purchase price. Whites (83 percent) and blacks (70 percent) were most likely to support such policies; smaller majorities of Latinos (63 percent) and Asians (62 percent) agreed. 

California’s Republicans may support curbing auto pollution, but they also want more oil. Seven in 10 Republicans surveyed said they support more drilling off the California coast, oil-soaked birds and otters be damned. But a majority of Californians (56 percent) still opposes drilling, a percentage that Baldassare says hasn’t budged in the past few years, even with skyrocketing fuel costs. 

Those higher gas prices affect different races disproportionately, the survey found. Whites (47 percent) were significantly less likely to report cutting back on their driving, compared to blacks (64 percent), Asians (63 percent) and Latinos (62 percent), who felt pinched at the pump. 

A full 81 percent of Californians favor more government spending to find alternative sources of fuel for automobiles, with little difference between Democrats (87 percent), Republicans (82 percent) and Independents (85 percent). Solar and wind power are popular with Californians, though a slight majority (52 percent) still says no to new nuclear power plants. Not so for Republicans, who support more nuclear plants (58 percent). 

A large majority of respondents said they’ll take their concerns about the environment into the voting booth. Eight-five percent said candidates’ positions on air pollution, global warming and energy policy will be somewhat or very important in determining their vote in this November’s gubernatorial election. 

The PPIC’s findings are based on a telephone survey of 2,501 California adult residents conducted from July 5 to July 18. Interviews were conducted in English, Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese). 

The PPIC is a private, nonprofit public policy research organization based in San Francisco. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation funded the poll, whose sampling error is plus or minus 2 percent. 

1. Where were you born and where did you grow up, and how does that affect how you regard the issues in Berkeley and in your district?  

I was born in Charleston, S.C. Lived for a couple of years in Evanston, IL. Then essentially spent the next 18 years in Dubuque, Iowa. I came to Cal as a graduate student in 1966. It was an interesting community in the sense that at that time Iowa was Republican dominated by the lower parts of the state, and the county I grew up in was 80 percent Democratic and was Catholic. The four-lane road used to stop at the border of the county because we were a Democratic county in a Republican state.  

There are some similar problems [between Berkeley and Iowa]. Problems finding kids things to do in the summertime. We had flooding problems on a major scale. The big difference is that it was an isolated urban area surrounded by—for 50 or 60 miles—farmland. Another difference was that there were very few job opportunities for anybody with an advanced degree. So typically, my high school class, most of the people either went into the military or went away to college. Most of the good jobs were at John Deere. We had a really big John Deere plant. And a meat-packing plant. Those were the good blue-collar jobs. The meat packing plant went belly up and John Deere had cutbacks. 

2. What is your educational background, and how did that help prepare you for being a councilmember? 

I earned my undergraduate degree in chemistry with a minor in physics and math. I came to Cal as a graduate student and got a Ph.D. in chemistry and worked for 30 years as a research scientist, primarily doing what people call nuclear physics. Basic research. I’m not a real people person. I worked in a laboratory. I worked with equipment. I also did a fair amount of administration, so I understand how big organizations work. The university is bigger than the city. 

The Lawrence Berkeley Lab is not so different, with about 3,500 employees. I think what helps me with the city is I’m comfortable with numbers. I like to understand things. Land use is a whole different thing. It’s kind of crazy. 

Many of the issues—particularly around the budget—I’m comfortable with because I understand numbers. I’m also a scientist. I’m curious to know how something really works. I like the idea of making structural reforms rather than dealing case by case, putting out fires. That gives me a certain kind of perspective. 

I also came to Cal as a graduate student, so I was a student for a number of years. During five or six years I must have lived in seven different places. I got married. We bought a house. I’m a long term resident; I went through a whole stage of living around, so I think I have some feel for what students face in the city. And as a homeowner, I lived for a long time on the edge of the college, at Dwight Way and Piedmont. I have some feel for the different parts of town because I lived there as a student.  

3. What are the top three most pressing issues facing your district (8)? 

Two of the biggest ones are traffic and crime. The third is basic services. Traffic is because two of the biggest streets in Berkeley—Ashby, which handles about 30,000 cars a day, and the Derby corner that runs into the University, which handles about 30,000 cars a day as well—run through my district. College Avenue has a fair amount of traffic as well. 

Between 4 and 6 in the afternoon one mother and her children were at John Muir school. It took her about a half an hour to return home during commute traffic because College was so crowded. So there’s a lot of frustration around traffic. 

There’s a lot of concern about the Caldecott Tunnel. If people had a magic wand they would like to move that traffic somewhere else, but nobody else wants it either. It seems the East Bay was designed to run north/south, not east/west. But yet, the most recent population growth has been to the east to the Walnut Creek area. 

The other problem with that, which makes it worse, is when I started working for Lawrence Lab 30 years ago I would guess that 75 percent of my colleagues lived in Berkeley. With the recent long range development plan, a smaller percentage of university staff and faculty don’t live in Berkeley. It’s down to about 25 percent. In the meantime the university has gotten bigger; the difference is most of the faculty and staff live further away and commute. So I think what we really need to do is: the university has been building a lot of student housing. They’ve been bringing the students closer and 90 percent of them walk or use mass transit. 

But for most of the faculty and staff there’s no ownership housing for them. We could do more by building some condominiums. The university could help more by subsidizing initial loans in buying housing so that faculty and staff can live closer and not have these long commutes. That’s one big problem that has no easy answers. 

The second issue is crime. My district is a very diverse district because it goes from north campus all the way to the Oakland border and then into the Berkeley hills. The Berkeley hills are fairly different, and you get close to campus and you have lots of students. So you get a big range from 100 percent renters to 100 percent homeowners with huge economic differences. Long-term residents stay here for four years and then move on to jobs in other places.  

The biggest crime problems are actually closer to campus. We have this huge property crime spike down in the south campus area. Here’s some recent data in the south campus area. The rate of all break-ins for the month doubles in late August and early September when the students come back. Even in the homeowners’ area we have a fair amount of crime. We get a lot of complaints about car break-ins. Cars stolen. People breaking into garages. Some burglaries. Stuff like that. 

The third issue is city services. Half of the district is students. The other half is homeowners who have just bought new homes and are paying $20,000 in property taxes. They really have high expectations of services. We’ve cut city staff 10 percent over the last three years. We get a lot of complaints on all types of things: “Why are my streets not cleaned?”  

We also have problems when people move out. Students have accumulated all these old beds and furniture that they just dump on the sidewalk. We need to make sure we have lots of dumpsters. You don’t need that level of services all year long. The Greeks (fraternities and sororities) do a cleanup. So we are trying to get the community more involved. 

4. Do you agree with the direction the city is heading? Why or why not? 

That assumes that the city is a ship. The city is more chaotic. I support Mayor Bates in getting some things done. He’s trying to get the council focused and get to the issues and try and move on. I think the city 1) has tremendous inertia and 2) there is no simple game plan. The council responds to pressures from the constituents. The biggest problem we had in the last three years was the budget crisis. We had to deal with that and we’re now coming out of that. We can’t print money like the feds. 

5. What is your opinion of the proposal to develop a new downtown plan and the settlement with the University of California over its LRDP? 

I supported the settlement agreement. Berkeley, like most university towns, has a town/gown problem because you have this big independent entity and then you have the city. In many ways we’re co-equals, but we’re not entirely co-equals. We’re a state agency and we’re a municipality. I think it’s important that we work out some sort of working relationship. We’re going to fight for our interests but I don’t think you can fight all the time. If you have a total adversarial relationship with the university you’re just fighting. Then you have much less of a chance of influencing them. 

So I think it’s important that Berkeley, at this point, has a working relationship to get things done. If you don’t do that the city will have problems and the university will have problems also. The university is a national treasure. 

The problem is that most of the employees don’t live in Berkeley. We get a lot of the problems from the traffic and their expansion. We only get some small piece of the benefit.  

A lot of critics say, “Gee, the university causes more problems than benefits.” I think the way you have to deal with that is to go to the state and say look, the state should really give some mitigation fees for us having the university to help counteract some of the negative impacts it has rather than just saying were going to fight it. We also have a lot of really bright people over there, and if we can get them engaged in trying to adopt some of the solutions, I see Berkeley can act as a test bed. We can really be a model city in some ways. 

I think it’s important that we stand up for our rights but we have a good working relationship. I really give the mayor and the new chancellor credit. They meet regularly and they’re working things out. It’s not perfect but I think we’re making some progress.  

I think the downtown area plan is an area that we can do some joint planning. For one thing, look at the university parking garages. They use them during the day and in the evening they are mostly empty. Downtown, we’ve basically been destroying parking because we’ve been putting buildings up on parking lots. We have a need in the evening for parking spaces. Rather than the city build more parking garages and the university build more parking garages, it would be nice in some ways to build a common one. They use it during the day and we use it at night. 

Also, I think one of the ways to revitalize Telegraph is to get University staff and faculty to shop more on Telegraph. 

6. How do you think the mayor is doing at his position? Are you considering running for mayor, and if so, what changes would you try to make? 

I think Mayor Bates is doing a good job. He’s accessible. He comes down to your office. He will chat with you. You can walk into his office and chat with him. If you disagree with him on an issue he will work with you on the next issue. Personalities don’t get involved. I like his vision—in what he’s trying to do for the city. And I’m not planning on running for mayor. 

7. Has Berkeley’s recent development boom been beneficial for the city? What new direction, if any, should the city’s development take over the next decade?  

I think the development boom has been beneficial. Berkeley’s population has been constant for the last 30 years. One of the reasons is from the ’70s to 2000 we built almost no new housing. So some of it was catching up from that. I’m a little concerned now that we’ve been building so much rental housing that we have kind of a rental housing glut. 

Rents have been flat for the last four years. We have rent stabilization. What we really have a problem with is that ownership housing costs have been dramatically going up. I think we could encourage more condominiums. In the past four years 80 percent of the units have been rentals. Now the new projects are more 50/50. 

I think we also have a problem where people object a lot to the scale and the mass of these new projects. And I have some problems with that as well. The problem with these is we’re kind of caught between local city ordinances and the state. Berkeley has an ordinance where you say you have to have 20 percent of your units to be affordable. But as soon as you do that, the state says you have to give the developer 35 percent density. So a three-story building ends up being four. 

8. How would you characterize the political climate in Berkeley these days? 

Berkeley has just an incredible number of energetic people engaged on everything from local issues to national issues. The political climate is always bubbling, I would say. It peaks around election cycles. In November of 2004 was the presidential election and I think, in some degree, the city was lost in that titanic struggle between the forces of light and darkness. Berkeley was only one of three cities that voted 90 percent for Kerry. 

We’re an unusual town in that way. The budget looks better and we should have more money to put into services and start some new programs. We need to invest in our youth which is going to be our future. I’m optimistic. 

9. What is your favorite thing about Berkeley? 

The tree-lined streets. And the neighborhood commercial areas. I live about a half a mile from the Elmwood shopping district. We have dinner and browse at the bookstore and then walk back home. It’s one of the things that is really spectacular. 

10. What is your least favorite thing about Berkeley? 

Traffic. I think of the one vacant lot on Haste and Telegraph. It would be nice for something to happen there. Sometimes the cynicism of people of Berkeley. It’s popular sometimes to be cynical. You have to be an optimist.

Paintballs redux 

Berkeley’s phantom paintballer has been at it again, reports police spokesperson Officer Ed Galvan. 

On July 20, the mysterious pigment blaster nailed a 23-year-old Berkeley resident as she walked along the 1700 block of University Avenue at about 7:30 p.m. 

Within moments of that attack, police received a second call, with the victim in that case a 15-year-old who was hit on her lip as she walked along San Pablo Avenue near the Cedar Street intersection. 

Earlier in the day, publicity about the rash of attacks had triggered another call, this one reporting an incident that had happened on July 12. In that case, a 12-year-old boy was struck in the back as he walked along University Avenue near Acton Street. 

None of the victims saw their attacker—nor did any of the other folks who have been hit in the recent rash of attacks. 

The mysterious shooter could face some serious jail time if caught, since police are looking at each incident as a case of assault with a deadly weapon. 

Trash arsons 

Someone is setting Berkeley’s trash afire, reports Officer Galvan. 

Police are investigating three separate incidents in which persons unknown have ignited the contents of waste receptacles. 

Police found the first blaze at 1:17 a.m. last Monday when they responded to a report about noisy skateboarders near the Shattuck Avenue/Channing Way intersection. Once on scene, they found a trash can ablaze, but no sign of the fire bug. 

The next call came 84 minutes later, this time reporting that the contents of a city trash can were ablaze on Telegraph Avenue near the corner of Dowling Way. 

The next call, which came in at 8:40 p.m. on Tuesday evening, came from staff at the North Berkeley Senior Center, reporting on a trash can blaze a week earlier that had charred a wooden bench outside the 1901 Hearst Ave. center. 

Another mysterious fire was reported on July 21, when firefighters who responded to a parked car fire in the 2700 block of Sojourner Truth Way were unable to find a non-suspicious reason why the vehicle burst into flames. 

Marina shooting 

A 20-year-old Richmond man was shot in the Hs Lordship’s parking lot in the Berkeley Marina about 2:30 on the morning of July 22, reports Officer Galvan. 

Summoned by a report of gunshots heard in the Marina, Berkeley Police arrived as two cars were leaving the Marina. In the parking lot they found the victim, suffering from a non-life-threatening gunshot wound and unwilling to give his name. 

With a little encouragement, the fellow finally identified himself, and said his attackers were fellow Richmond folk. 

He was taken to Highland Hospital for treatment of his injury. 

SUV attack 

The driver of a black Yukon SUV drove her vehicle into a pedestrian after she and her friends had tried and failed to crash a party in the 1300 block of Alcatraz Avenue about 10 p.m. on July 22. 

The victim wasn’t seriously hurt, and the Yukon was gone by the time police arrived. 

Blanketed bandit 

A tall man wrapped in a blanket walked into the Marina Lodge at 975 University Ave. about 9 p.m. on July 20 and—after telling the clerk he had a gun concealed beneath his wrap—demanded the contents of the till. 

The bandit departed after the clerk complied. 

Intimidators busted 

Three young fellows braced an 18-year-old Oakland man as he walked along the 2400 block of Telegraph Avenue just before midnight on the 20th, then demanded his money. 

The man complied, then promptly called police, offering descriptions of the trio. A prowl car soon found a group that matched the particulars, and after an ID session, busted two of them, both juveniles. 

Shoe assault 

Police arrested a 24-year-old Emeryville man after he allegedly attacked his Berkeley girlfriend with her own footwear. 

Police responded to the woman’s call at 9:03 a.m. on July 23, and arrived at her residence in the 2200 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Way in time to name the suspect, who was charged with assault with a deadly weapon, battery on a partner and making a criminal threat. 

Sexual assaults 

Police have few leads in two reported sexual assaults. 

While the first was reported on July 20, the incident took place 11 months earlier in the parking lot of a Berkeley cannabis club—just which one the caller couldn’t say. 

The caller was a relative of the victim, underage at the time of the incident. The young woman herself was unwilling to cooperate with investigators, Galvan said. 

Both the caller and the victim are Redwood City residents, said Galvan. 

In the second incident, which occurred last Monday, the victim said she was beaten and raped by a man she only knew by his street name. 

The case has been referred to investigators, Officer Galvan said.

Arab Culture’s Genius To Communicate Beyond Itself 

Damascus is one of the oldest cities in the world. For over three millennia, it served as the terminus for the ancient Silk Route that linked traders from East Asia to the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Its durability offers testimony to an Arab genius for communicating with cultures beyond its own. 

Today that same Arab genius is manifesting itself in Lebanon where fierce Israeli bombing has been unable to pulverize a population where literally everyone, whether urbanite, suburbanite or villager, has a cellular phone. 

Military analysts interviewed by the New York Times credit Hezbollah’s surprising success against one of the most disciplined and well-equipped armies in the world to its practice of “net war”—”small, agile, units... operating with flattened command structures that are ... computer literate, propaganda and Internet savvy, and capable of firing complicated weapons to great effect.” 

Yet even if Hezbollah had not perfected this new style of 21st century combat, the cell phone would have equalized aggressor with aggressed by ensuring that no act of destruction remains invisible. On the global media stage, the most ephemeral images—Israeli teenage girls writing love notes on artillery shells, Lebanese toddlers huddled in an apartment building about to be blown apart by smart bombs—are now immortalized by the Internet’s long tail. Cell phones can alert sophisticated tracking systems to the whereabouts of a suspected target, but when everyone has a cell phone, whom do the aggressors target?  

The people of the Middle East—indeed the entire world—watch the images as a “failed” state is being burned at a medieval stake. That country is Lebanon, which is much smaller than Israel, which in turn is much smaller than Syria, whose capitol is Damascus. 

The White House and the Pentagon have finally intervened to evacuate predominantly middle-class people—pillars of what the U.S. defines as Lebanon's “democratic” state. Left behind are the poor, as happened in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina last year. And the poor in South Beirut will want revenge, as do the people of the Gaza Strip. 

Middle Eastern history reminds us that the scandal of destruction does not preclude durability. Those who are destroyed can project themselves onto successor generations. Revenge is evil because it can never be erased—having a soul means you carry evil beyond your death. But sacrifice in the name of love has had an even more lasting impact. 

Jesus was put to a horrible death by the Romans. Despite quarrels over the meaning of his crucifixion, many people began emulating his sacrifice. Within three or four centuries, many Europeans were converting to Christianity. Two or three centuries after that, Christianity was being preached in China. 

Then a new religion, Islam, burst onto the West Asian scene, coinciding with a new era of peace and prosperity in China under the Tang dynasty. Long before he fled Mecca for Medina, the Prophet Muhammad was a merchant who made frequent trips to Damascus. By then Arab and Persian merchants were already ensconced in the huge metropolis of Canton. Today, Canton is home to one of the oldest mosques in the world. 

No culture in the world has been so successful at internationalizing itself—whether through its merchants or its prophets—as has the Arab culture, a culture of the desert. If Lebanon is the new Damascus, the key to its survival rests on this genius, now harnessing itself to the cell phone. 

Franz Schurmann is professor emeritus of UC Berkeley, and cofounder of Pacific News Service.

Berkeley Unified School District teachers who received letters informing them that their salaries would be cut for skipping classes May 1, the day of immigrant rights rallies nationwide, received their paychecks for the month of July on Monday. 

Berkeley Federation of Teachers (BFT) Vice President Cathy Campbell told the Daily Planet that that there have been no reports so far of any kind of paycuts from the teachers. “We would have definitely heard from the teachers if their salary had been deducted,” she said. 

BFT President Barry Fike said that at a recent meeting with BUSD superintendent Michele Lawrence, he had made it very clear that BFT would file a grievance if the teachers’ pays were docked. “We do not see any kind of justification for deducting anybody’s pay. Our interpretation is this particular kind of action qualifies as personal leave and therefore it does not violate their contract.” 

Fike added that it remained unclear what kind of action the district was going to take regarding this issue. “We have received a list from BUSD of all the teachers who were absent from school on May 1 and have sent each of them a letter saying that BFT would represent them in case their pay gets deducted. At this point we can say that it was not just teachers with Latino last names who got letters threatening them that their pay would be cut. Caucasian teachers were also targeted. Also, from the content of the letters it looks like they were circulated from a central source, although BUSD denies this,” Fike said. 

BUSD spokesperson Mark Coplan told the Planet that the school district is still discussing the matter with the unions and no action has been taken with respect to deducting pay from the teachers as of yet. 

One of the most heart-rending dialogues in English literature is a short scene in Macbeth.  

A messenger tells Macduff,  

“Your castle is surprised; your wife and babes 

Savagely slaughter’d.” 

“My children too?” Macduff asks, unbelieving.  

“Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge, To cure this deadly grief,” says his colleague Malcolm. But revenge against the childless Macbeth won’t cure Macduff’s pain:  

“He has no children. All my pretty ones? 

Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? 

What, all my pretty chickens and their dam 

At one fell swoop?” 

“Dispute it like a man,” says Malcolm. 

Macduff replies: 

“I shall do so;  

But I must also feel it as a man:  

I cannot but remember such things were, 

That were most precious to me. Did heaven look on, 

And would not take their part? Sinful Macduff,  

They were all struck for thee! naught that I am, 

Not for their own demerits, but for mine, 

Fell slaughter on their souls.” 

Reports of events in Lebanon over last weekend were poignantly reminiscent of this scene. A web search on the words “dead children” brings up many different accounts, one more painful than the next, of the death of 37 little ones in a refugee house in Qana. “There is something fundamentally wrong with a war where there are more dead children than armed men,” the U.N. humanitarian chief said, calling for a cease fire. His estimate was that a third of 600 dead in Lebanon were children. Both sides in the conflict have repeatedly looked to heaven to take their part, as did Macduff, but as he recognized, the slaughter of the innocents was not because of their own faults, but was caused by the warring adults on both sides.  

The Israelis at first seemed to announce a 48-hour ceasefire in order to let the blood settle, but what they gave with one hand they took away with the other. NPR “Morning Edition” host Renee Montagne did a stellar job on Monday of nailing Brig. Gen. Ido Nehushtan, who told her that Israel is not under “a full suspension” of aerial bombing but will target only “immediate threats,” including Hezbollah missile launchers and command-and-control headquarters. “Excuse me, then, that sounds like no suspension at all,” said Renee: “Has the air campaign so far not been about getting Hezbollah? Surely you’re not intentionally targeting civilians? So what’s the difference?...Given that Hezbollah hides behind civilians… how can Israel continue to pursue a military strategy when so many civilian deaths are inevitably part of it?” she asked. The general’s responses were mostly double-talk, ending with a suggestion that no army before had ever hidden behind civilians. “You see, we’re fighting a war—a horrible war—against an enemy that has no divisions, has no tanks, has no war plans,” he said.  

During the American revolution the revolutionary army hid among civilians, but the British army didn’t retaliate by shelling cities.  

As we learn from Macbeth however, deliberately killing the families of the enemy does have a long history in warfare. Renee’s question still hangs in the air: what’s the difference between intentionally killing civilians and inevitably killing civilians? 

Relentless syndicated cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall last Thursday tracked the history of collective punishment of civilians from the time of Nazi Germany (50 civilians executed for each German soldier killed) to the present day. He estimated that as of the time he wrote (July 20) more than 500 Lebanese civilians had been killed by Israeli bombs, while 15 Israeli civilians had died in Hezbollah rocket attacks and 14 Israeli soldiers had died in combat. Last weekend’s death toll probably changed the numbers but not the ratio of Lebanese civilian deaths to Israeli deaths, about 30 to 1, by Rall’s estimate. Are these deaths inevitable or intentional, and is there a moral difference? 

One of the handful of correspondents who periodically accuse this paper of anti-Semitism suggests that our editorial opinions are formed by listening to KPFA. It’s embarrassing to admit this, but we rarely listen to KPFA. We do listen to the BBC on KALW in the middle of the night, and we sample the world press and radio in English and French on the Internet from time to time. But when KPFA (which my correspondent must listen to avidly) seems to be converging with world opinion from many different sources, with the exception of the usually tame and cowardly U.S. media, intelligent people should recognize that something new is going on.  

We don’t have to go farther than our local newsstand to see how the invasion of Lebanon is playing out around the world. The headline on Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle was “Israel Pauses Air Strikes After 37 Children Killed.” Well, no. The strongly pro-Israel Chronicle only wished that had happened, but as Renee Montagne’s interview with General Nehushtan Monday morning revealed, Israeli leaders didn’t end up displaying such good sense after all.  

Many Israelis are aware of the perilous path their leaders are placing them on, but are powerless to stop them. There are many eager Malcolms urging Israelis and Arabs to “dispute it like a man,” but there are also many sensible voices around the world, Jewish and non-Jewish, saying that the blood of slaughtered Lebanese children will be the seed of future Islamic martyrs.  

What genuine support of Israel means could be summed up by the public service ad cliché, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk.” Real friends don’t let friends jump lemming-like off cliffs, in pursuit of the “medicine of great revenge” ostensibly for two captured soldiers. Sooner or later Israel and its neighbors will have to come to terms. 

A LITTLE HELP, PLEASE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

If somebody doesn’t come up with $125 by Aug. 7, I’m out of the mayor’s race.  

I wasn’t running to be mayor, of course, but as a candidate I’d be able to get some ideas out to people. 

On July 25 I found out I had two days to get 150 signatures to the city clerk’s office, or pay $1 by Aug. 7 for each signature I didn’t get.  

Nobody told me about this. They posted it on their bulletin board June 2, and it was, they said, my responsibility to know about it. 

But they hadn’t told me that either. 

So I’m 125 signatures, or $125, now, short. 

I’ve had some pretty good ideas in the past. I thought up and organized the North Berkeley Plan, the Intercollective Network, the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, the original Berkeley Food Conspiracy. 

I ran John Denton’s campaign for re-election to the City Council, and was the author of three successful administrative complaints, on behalf of the poor, proving the City of Berkeley was out of compliance with Federal Community Service regulations.  

I found the Ecology Center a new home when it lost their lease and went defunct, and over three million copies of the community newsletters that I founded and edited have been distributed free to the people of Berkeley. 

There’s more, but that should give you the idea. I have a few more ideas for our city, that I think are pretty good too, but if I’m not a candidate, well, who cares? 

I can’t afford the $125 fee. 

Who else can I ask? 

You can call me at 355-4873. 

Richard Berkeley  

• 

PREJUDICE IS SHOWING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

So Latinos are taking jobs from Americans! Do they come on horses with rifles, and say gimmie your jobs? Do they sneak into town at night, mug you, and say I want your job. No, the newly arrived immigrants do back-breaking work in the fields, kitchens and factories that Americans won’t touch. 

The next time intolerant white folk, Republicans and anti-immigrant forces say Mexicans are taking our jobs tell them their prejudice is showing and to take their bigotry and shove it. 

Ron Lowe 

Grass Valley 

• 

CITY AND UC 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

From the day I heard that a secret deal had been struck between the city and the university I have been concerned that Berkeley gave away too much in its haste to settle its LRDP suit. Berkeley signed away its ability to collect additional fees from UC if the recently decided lawsuit (City of Marina vs. Board of Trustees of the CSU, S117816) came down in Berkeley’s favor.  

Based on Monday’s state Supreme Court decision, it seems that my concern was more than just academic. According to the settlement Berkeley’s city government signed, we will have to bide our time for another 14 years before we will be able to negotiate for any money from UC. 

It was interesting to see that Assistant City Attorney Zack Cowan who filed a brief in the city’s behalf in the original suit, filed another brief opposing the citizen’s suit seeking to overturn the settlement and to reopen negotiations. What a waste of city money. 

Vincent Casalaina 

• 

GLOBAL WARMING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Now that all but a handful of us have made it through climate change, I am reminded that about 20 years ago I interviewed a handful of local ecology editors on the subject of global warming. Two answers were memorable. 

One was that “the best and hardest working people trying to save the planet say it can’t be done.” The other was that “we can plant trees until kingdom come, the planet can not last past 2050.” 

The latter was from the inestimable Gar Smith, long-time editor of Earth Island Journal. Some years later, Gar changed his coda to 2010. 

Arnie Passman  

• 

BUSD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Sandra Horne’s letter of Aug. 1 is not only inaccurate, but egregiously so. The Berkeley Unified School District is audited annually by an independent auditor, licensed by the state of California, which adheres to standard and widely accepted governmental practices. The annual audit includes findings and recommendations that the board has, over the past few years, addressed and implemented. In addition, since I have been on the board the district has had independent audits performed on its business office, our food services department, the independent study program, and has performed an asset management study. Our budget is also reviewed by the county Office of Education, which makes a determination on its legitimacy, accuracy, and the district’s ability to meet all obligations (including a required reserve). 

In comparison, the city does not regularly conduct outside audits, does not have to balance its budget nor have it approved by any entity or agency other than itself, and can in fact spend more money than it has revenues to cover (and in fact often does). Which system has more accountability and credibility? 

John Selawsky 

Director,  

Berkeley School Board 

• 

MANAGMENT CULTURE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Michele Lawrence is part of the management culture at the BUSD that consistently conflicts with Berkeley’s cultural values. Closing the achievement gap sounds like a hot button sound byte to efficiency experts but it is integral to the philosophy that continues to provide a world class education to the students of Berkeley High School. The Berkeley schools management team should be nurturing a cooperative relationship with its unions, not only because it reflects our values, but because working together we can make necessary changes while honoring our traditions. Lawrence fails to acknowledge the needs of students from under-represented populations in the District. She encourages an adversarial relationship with non-management faculty and union staff. This is counter to the interests of Berkeley’s parents because it interferes with the diverse, challenging, and progressive educational priorities of our hard-working Berkeley teachers. Lawrence rarely appoints Berkeley residents to management positions. Her appointees are typically from the same efficiency regime mentality that causes the incredibly high turnover rate currently rising within administrative teams district-wide. The qualification she seems to value most highly in her appointments is a lack of reluctance to make enemies among existing faculty and staff. 

Melinda Zapata 

• 

MEMORIAL STADIUM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Having grown up on Panoramic Way and also going to football games for 45 years at Memorial Stadium, I think you might be interested to know that not everybody on the hill is against the proposed renovations to the stadium. And as far as moving the stadium or playing the games at the Oakland Coliseum because of an earthquake during a game, guess which stadium would have its soil liquify? Let me give you a hint: It’s not in Berkeley.  

Matthew Shoemaker 

• 

DUCK AND COVER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It would be great if City Planning Director Dan Marks would add the occupants of Hesse, McLaughlin and Davis Halls to his list of potential victims were the Hayward Fault to experience an earthquake (“City Planning Director Issues Scathing Critique of UC Stadium Expansion Report,” Aug. 1). 

All three buildings, which are near the stadium, have been rated “poor” by the university’s own seismic evaluation program, and all three have yet to be scheduled for actual seismic upgrades (as opposed to “planning” for them). In the case of McLaughlin, the building keeps getting pushed down the list. In contrast to the stadium, which is occupied by large numbers of people only a few days a year, these buildings house offices, labs, at least one library, and classrooms that are in use year-round. 

Obviously, as evidenced by the fact that we are surrounded by new construction, it’s easier to raise money for new buildings (or at least to start them) than to take care of what the university already has. In the long run, that approach is short-sighted. Even if staff are considered expendable or replaceable, the students and faculty represent a considerable university investment. Perhaps there should be a seismic surcharge on capital project donations for retrofit projects, similar to the new surcharge non-unionized employees will start paying next July to keep the pension fund solvent.  

Phyllis Orrick 

• 

HOLD UCB TO ITS PROMISE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Now that educational institutions do have to pay for their impacts, or otherwise mitigate them, (cities won the Marina decision), why not require UCB to fully mitigate the traffic impacts of their LRDP and SEQSS expansions? Pay full transportation demand management nexus fees like other developers? 

Our legal footing is now sound and the city has the right to withdraw from the settlement agreement and require a no new net increase in ADT (average daily traffic) to campus from UC or payment of all of the infrastructure changes required to accommodate the planned UCB growth—sewers, roads, sidewalks, stormwater, etc. 

Let’s hold UCB to their promise to be a good neighbor and a good citizen of Berkeley. 

Wendy Alfsen 

DAPAC member 

• 

NOT THIS TIME 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have always voted in favor of tax increases for Berkeley schools, but unless something changes this time, I’ll be voting no this November. 

Based on your recent news story, the district administration is taking a far too casual approach to interdistrict transfers. Superintendent Michele Lawrence is quoted saying that Berkeley’s policy isn’t any more or less strict than other districts. 

If Berkeley is just as strict as Oakland, it’s not enough. Oakland kids are desperate to get into Berkeley schools. The reverse is not true. 

I feel bad for those Oakland kids, but Berkeley taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize the Oakland system’s disfunctions. 

The BUSD had better take this issue seriously before the November election. Clearly, the documents that Berkeley demands to prove residency are not adequate. And I question the superintendent’s claim that the district makes house calls to verify residency. Does she mean spot checks or something systematic? Did they make two house calls this year or 200? We need the district to communicate to the community what’s up, in very clear terms. 

Taxes are very high. If taxpayers are subsidizing the education of outside students, and the district takes a lax attitude toward the issue, why should we vote to tax ourselves further to keep this sham going? We shouldn’t. If the district can’t fix this problem, I predict a big “no” vote for the parcel tax in November. 

Tom Case 

• 

BUSD ENROLLMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am pleased that Mr. Selawsky is looking into changing documentation required to enroll in BUSD schools. I also agree with him when he says, “If people go to that length to forge utility bills, they’ll go to the same lengths with lease agreements.” That is why BUSD must hire someone devoted to making home visits and checks on enrollment paperwork. Parent and taxpayer confidence depend on it. 

Lorraine Mahley 

• 

PROP. 89 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Our citizens’ group, Californians for Sensible Political Reform, originated in Berkeley and supports ending “pay to play” politics and “leveling the political playing field.” So do backers of Prop. 89 like Mr. Miller and Mr. Townley (see the Planet’s July 17 and July 21 editions). However, unlike they and other proponents of Prop. 89, we don’t think taxpayers need to spend hundreds or even tens of millions of dollars to achieve these objectives (visit our blog-site, www.noprop89.blogspot.com). We can’t imagine why Mr. Miller and others in his organization keep insisting that the much more expensive and therefore wasteful approach taken by Prop. 89 is preferable, unless it’s because Prop.89 would also give the keys to the State Treasury to politicians Mr. Miller or Mr. Townley support (perhaps including themselves!). 

Yet we live in an era of inexpensive websites (which can be set up for a few hundred dollars) and free blog-sites (such as ours!). We also live in a state where a candidate for statewide office who accepts campaign contribution limits can present his or her qualifications and positions to every registered voter in the Secretary of State’s Official Voters Guide for less than $5,000. No other source of information about candidates, we suspect, is distributed more widely nor read as carefully by California’s voters. So why would Mr. Miller and Mr. Townley have us believe that giving candidates tens or hundreds of millions of dollars under Prop. 89 isn’t wasteful? Perhaps they and other supporters of Prop. 89 and public campaign financing want us to believe perceptions instead of realities. 

Keith Winnard 

• 

ALBANY DEVELOPMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Rick Caruso, the Los Angeles mall developer, ignores an important fact: Albany voters do not want a shopping mall next to Golden Gate Fields. Not to be deterred by public opinion, the racetrack on the one hand filed suit to stop our Albany Shoreline Protection Initiative, while on the other hand Mr. Caruso, a Bush Ranger who reportedly, “recently met with Karl Rove” (page 19), has returned with additional tricks up his sleeve: First, blame others for his own failings. Mr. Caruso blames the City Council for not accepting his formal application. For more than a year he has been pitching incomplete development plans at “coffees” held in the living rooms of his few but vocal supporters. Meanwhile, he repeatedly breaks serial promises to submit the actual application to the city—no application has ever been submitted. Second, create a “McGuffin”—an Alfred Hitchcock movie device that gets the characters together, pits them against each other, but in the end turns out to be as worthless as the Maltese Falcon. The McGuffin here comes in the guise of an over-reaching resolution to grant unprecedented, special privileges to one developer. Drafted by Caruso for submission by Councilmember Okawachi, the motion to adopt failed for lack of a second, but the blame game rages on. And lastly, threaten that Albany’s loss will be Berkeley/Richmond’s gain. If the mall leaves us for another suitor, then Albany suffers the under-reported traffic consequences, but receives none of the exaggerated tax revenues. In reality, Berkeley has measures on the books that basically preclude development of this mall at the stable area on the Berkeley side, south of the racetrack. And the purported Richmond site to the north sits atop an un-remediated toxic waste dump. So much for other suitors. In conclusion, protecting the shoreline is a global challenge being fought largely locally in Albany. Citizens throughout the East Bay are invited to join to protect the shoreline, which belongs to all of us. See our website at albanyshoreline.org for information. 

Bill Dann 

Co-chair, Citizens for the Albany Shoreline 

• 

DEATH OF DEMOCRACY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In July 2006 democracy died in Albany, California. Several years ago Albany voters approved Measure C, which gives them the authority to approve or decline any development on the Albany waterfront. What the voters did not know was that the Albany City Council, City Hall staff, and special interests in Albany and El Cerrito were determined that one thing would never happen on the Albany waterfront; nothing that generated any revenue for the city would ever be built. The small amount of waterfront land that is public in Albany is such a polluted and unsanitary dump that the city has been unable to give away the land for free to the East Bay Regional Park District. Despite this fact, when a developer offered to, on a privately owned unused parking lot which is also at the waterfront, clean up the area, build a 17-acre park, extend the Bay Trail, expand an existing wetland, provide low-income housing, build shops and restaurants, and permanently pay all costs to maintain the area, the city refused to accept his application for review, turned down his offer to pay for an EIR, which he is required by law to do, and severely criticized him for meeting extensively with citizens to show them his proposal and modify it according to their suggestions.  

At a July 17 City Council meeting one councilmember, Jewel Okawachi, tried to pass a resolution which would have allowed an EIR to be done and thus given Albany voters extensive information on which to base a decision as to whether they wanted this development. The four other City Council members refused to vote on her resolution. By their actions the city and its cohorts made sure the developer’s proposal would never be voted on by Albany citizens. They were afraid it would be approved. And what is it City Hall wants done with the waterfront? They want to close the Golden Gate Racetrack, lay off its many employees, give up the tax revenue generated by the track, buy the Racetrack land, valued by the city’s own attorney at over $100 million, and use taxes paid by Albany homeowners to maintain only a park. And how will they pay for the land? At the July meeting Councilmember Robert Lieber suggested the city could get “bond money or maybe a grant.” I’m sure allocating millions of dollars to build a park in Albany is a high priority for funding agencies. The track generates approximately $700,000 in tax revenue and the development would have generated another $2 million. City Hall wants to forfeit that revenue when the its own budget is going into deficit, it has million of dollars in unfunded needs, and it wants voter approval in the November election for millions in new bond debt. It’s time for a tax payer revolt in Albany and a new City Council. 

Stephanie Travis 

Albany 

• 

RANKED VOTING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Today, the Oakland City Council should lead the United States toward better elections that use the “instant runoff” (IRV) vote-counting system. More accurately termed “Inclusive Ranked Voting,” IRV allows many benefits:  

Because ranked voting can count any of our choices instead of just one, IRV implies that more ballots will counted to determine the winner. More voices of more voters will be included in govt. decisions, the goal of democracy.  

When voters’ second and third choices are also needed to win, politicians will have to reach out to everyone instead of catering to polarized special interest groups.  

Ranked voting empowers minority voters and groups instead of splitting votes between narrowly focused candidates. IRV reform has strong support from Sen. Barak Obama and U.S. representatives Cynthia McKinney and Jesse Jackson Jr. Modernizing from the old-fashioned “lesser-of-two-evils” election system cuts costly hostile mudslinging and the influence of campaign money. Voters do not have to risk their only voice on only one candidate  

Starting in San Francisco and Berkeley, the Bay Area has already at the forefront of ranked voting reform. Oakland voters can now get national attention by making an informed decision on IRV modernization this fall.  

Making more votes count can only help improve turnout and help bay area priorities. All Alameda county cities should follow Oakland and consider IRV measures for the November ballot.  

Sennet Williams 

• 

NO SMOKESCREENS, PLEASE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Some home-safe spectators and far-from war-zone dangers “experts” opine that Israel’s reactions are “disproportionate. What proportions do they propose to apply when a rocket explodes on their heads?  

War is ugly-no question about it, not following rules of ethics, proportions or “fairness”!  

And please: No evasions, camouflage and smokescreens anymore! Hezbollah’s social services (schools, clinics, etc.) have always had religious strings (of extreme Shi’a) attached to them! Had they given their unconditional charity “candies” lovingly—there wouldn’t have been any such strings attached! And the Lebanese recipients of such “charity bait” ate it, lovingly accepting them (as if they could not have created/replicate such rewards to themselves, on their own), forgetting, in the process, that there’s a price to pay! Some Lebanese say they deplore/comdemn Hezbollah’s actions (cheap talk equals no walk)!  

Well, someone has had to welcome, allow Hezbollah in, host them, etc., or has the Hezbollah “snuck” in “overnight” to their territories without their knowledge during the six years since 2000, when Israel has completely withdrawn from Lebanon? 

The Lebanese people took to the streets in masses to protest Syria’s presence in their country (until they succeeded in expelling it)! Where have these Lebanese been when the Hezbollah (whom they “didn’t like/want”) was ushered into their territories? Otherwise, if they allowed them in, that makes them Israel’s’ avowed enemy, doesn’t it?  

Well, please help me out here! I need clarity: have the Lebanese welcomed/invited/hosted Hezbollah or not? If the first is applicable then, they’ve got to know: every action has a reaction (price)! Yet, if the second option is the truth—where has their action of defiance and rejection of the Hezbollah been—to back up their “anti”-Hezbollah rhetoric? 

Abe Plamer 

• 

TIMES THAT TRY MEN AND WOMEN’S SOULS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

If Thomas Paine were alive today he’d tell us that it is not the times that try our souls but the news of the times. Print and electronic news outlets devote half their time giving us entertainment disguised as news and the other half giving us persuasion and opinion disguised as information. Events in the Middle East are especially disguised and although instances are too numerous to count, two characterizations might suffice: “Crisis in the Middle East” and “Mass Migration in Southern Lebanon”. 

What’s deemed crisis involves a sovereign state (Israel) with a 10-to-1 advantage in military resources and an NGO (Hezbollah) with a 10-to-1 population advantage. Characterizing killing and maiming hundreds of civilians, one-third of them children, with bombs and rockets and destroying buildings, roads, homes, bridges, airports, etc. as a crisis reduces savagery and barbarism to “unstable” and “stressful” conditions.  

By using the words “mass migration” news outlets imply that commanding civilians across the border in a neighboring state to leave their homes or be killed merely amounts to several hundred thousand people setting out to “settle” in a “new location.” 

Thus, does print and electronic media merit being compared—a la Thomas Paine—to “summer soldiers” and “sunshine patriots,” and he’d probably allege further that those who cheapen human misery cheapen themselves. 

Marvin Chachere 

San Pablo 

• 

XXXXXXXXXX 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

There are three disturbing elements of hatred facing Jews today. All of them are related. The first and perhaps most ubiquitous in many corners of the world is vicious, pronounced anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is historically popular with angry paradigms searching for a convenient target to blame. Mel Gibson, the son of a genuine Holocaust denier, reveals liquor-loosened feelings about Jews causing wars. In many unfortunate societies today, you’ll find Jew-hating virtually institutionalized in school curriculums, popular media, and by heads of state, who project and deliver their hate with vigor and effervescence while other heads of state watch and approve. 

Holocaust denial, the second disturbing thread, is not just the domain of fools like Gibson’s father. Ever-popular and disseminated widely throughout Muslim chords, it remains appallingly unchecked, which means it becomes reality for millions of the uninitiated. 

A third and most viciously hostile category of hate is venomous anti-Israel sentiment, endorsed and promulgated by many who read and contribute to this newspaper. The Berkeley Daily Planet, along with strident local radio stations, openly and frequently gratify, support, encourage, and reinforce those whose sole purpose is to wipe out Israel. In spite of Israel’s moderation and withdrawal from Gaza, destructive, inherently violent groups have made it clear: Israel simply has no right to exist, and many on the Local Left have become alarmingly proficient at justifying those groups.  

What gets overlooked here is that by eloquently broadcasting the anti-Israel tirades, this newspaper and the associated support mechanisms serve all three categories of hatred. If an angry skinhead or rageful Islamist listens to these stations or reads articles by people like Homayun or O’Malley, they find resonating redemption and reinforcement for not only the genocidal destruction of Israel, but also for their hatred toward Jews everywhere, and for their imbecilic belief that the Holocaust never happened. Supporting one tenet of hatred serves to buttress all three. 

For those who share the venom of anti-Israel fervor under a mask of locally brewed progressive fulfillment, beware of your ideological bedfellows. Hezbollah wrote the book on murder and terror and their Lebanese collaborators are paying a dear price. 

Leon Mayeri 

• 

GENOCIDE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Anyone in Congress who supports this genocide does not represent me and many others in this country. Destroying a country’s infrastructure, killing millions of innocent civilians, including children, is inexcusable. I will never vote for anyone who supports this insanity. What Israel is doing to Lebanon is worse than what Hitler did in Germany. Hezbollah is merely an excuse for Israel to wipe out Palestine. 

Linda Stewart 

Oakland 

• 

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

There is no civilized excuse for ignoring the international rules of engagement that prohibit states from targeting and killing civilians. Israel and any other state that kills civilians and destroys civilian infrastructure must be condemned, not defended. 

Michael Jacob 

Oakland 

• 

QUESTIONING BECKY’S FACTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In Becky O’Malley’s most recent attack on Israel she suggests that there is something fundamentally wrong with an Israeli war plan in which so many more civilians are killed than fighters. But this is not factually correct. The press has reported that some 500 civilians have been killed. There is no authoritative estimate, much less exact tally of Hezbollah’s dead, so no civilian to fighter ratio can be calculated. The reason is that causality figures come from the Lebanese government. But the only government in Hezbollah controlled areas is, well, Hezbollah itself. And they aren’t saying. 

Becky again fails to even mention in passing that every single Hezbollah rocket that is fired at Israel is intentionally aimed at woman and children. The Nazis blitzed London’s civilians, and wreaked their reward in Dresdan. That wasn’t proportional, either. But the difference is more profound, yet. Unlike the Allies at Dresden, Israel is desperately trying to avoid civilian casualities in this war that Hezbollah, together with Iran and Syria, has declared upon it. And Becky should not forget that, whereas Israel is happy to leave Lebanon to its peaceful fate, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran overtly call for the destruction of Israel, and soon, if left unchecked, they will have the nuclear weapons to achieve this. But readers should expect no retrospective tears from O’Malley if the unthinkable does happen. 

John Gertz 

• 

DAILY PLANET = HEZBOLLAH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Becky O’Malley would have one believe that Israel is fighting Hezbollah simply as revenge for its kidnapped soldiers. What utter nonsense! Israel knew that Hezbollah was accumulating deadlier and deadlier missiles provided by Iran. Should it have waited until Hezbollah acquired rockets capable of hitting major population centers such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem? After all, by Hezbollah’s own declaration the rationale for garnering such deadly weapons was to ultimately fire them at Israel. 

Of course, O’Malley spouts the typical “disproportionate” rubbish we have heard from the lips of consistent Israel-bashers like Kofi Annan and his anti Semitic Muslim friends at the UN. Yes, there have been more civilian casualties in Lebanon than Israel. But only an idiot would believe this to be Israel’s intent. O’Malley might try to use some logic: it does Israel absolutely no good to kill civilians—quite the contrary when it comes to world opinion. 

What O’Malley somehow fails to comprehend is Hezbollah’s cynical and craven strategy of storing and launching missiles from within civilian neighborhoods. Correspondingly, is Israel supposed to simply sit back and have its citizens murdered because the rockets are launched from Lebanese neighborhoods? One might conclude that O’Malley doesn’t believe Israel, unlike any other nation in the world, has the right to defend its citizens. 

While Israel time and again has given the Lebanese due warnings to leave said neighborhoods (what other nation at war ever does that?), you don’t hear of Hezbollah offering any such warnings to the Israelis, do you? Why is that? Critics like O’Malley might consider the following pertinent point, indeed the true heart of the matter: Hezbollah leaders such as Nasrallah have said time and again that their intent is “the disappearance of Israel.” 

But then again, there does appear to be a salient sense of “proportion” which O’Malley and her fellow Israel demonizers might find most acceptable: the obliteration of Israel. In this vein, their arguments appear congruent with Hezbollah... 

Dan Spitzer 

Kensington 

• 

IRAEL’S CLIENT STATE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Let’s face it, we’re Israel’s bitch. We invaded Iraq, in part, to protect Israel’s “Eastern Front” and to establish permanent military bases there, for which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon expressed his gratitude. We routinely protect our “client” from world public opinion for the consequences of its heinous acts in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and, now, Lebanon by threatening to use our veto in the UN Security Council. Currently, we are expediting the delivery of bombs to our “friend” and, at its request, oppose a cease fire. Shortly, as the “neo-con” war mongers in the Administration and Congress ratchet up the rhetoric, we will probably be given the “green light” by our “proxy” to bomb the smithereens out of Iran.  

Bill Tilden 

Oakland 

• 

GRAVE  

MISUNDERSTANDING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Becky O’Malley’s editorial of Aug. 1 on the Israel-Lebanon war was based on a grave misunderstanding. The war is not about getting revenge for two kidnapped soldiers. In the big picture, they are minor importance. The war is about the chances for attaining peace and justice in Israel-Palestine in this generation. 

The end game for decades of war was in sight: Israel withdraws—whether unilaterally or in deals—from Lebanon, Gaza, and 90-plus percent of the West Bank; and the Palestinians get a state for the first time in history. But this scenario works only if Israelis get peace on their borders in return, something they have not had for 60 years. 

The cross-border attacks by Hamas from Gaza and by Hezbollah from Lebanon deliberately threaten this plan. They state that the war against Israel goes on even after withdrawals, even across international borders. If that stands, then Israel would have to return to her previous strategy of occupying neighboring territory in order to push her enemies back from her heartland.  

The current hope is that a fierce response in Gaza and Lebanon will establish the principle that borders are real and secure and quiet. If that is established, then withdrawal and the rest of the peace plan can proceed. 

C. Fischer 

Recently I returned to an area near my former home on Canyon Road near UC Stadium. I spent the afternoon walking around the stadium, and on up to the beautiful UC Botanical Gardens. And there I picnicked, surrounded by beautiful flowers and birds singing. 

One birdsong was particularly wonderful and I could hear it for a long time as I hiked home along the fire road, all the time marveling at bay-leaf saplings growing from fallen trunks, wild honeysuckle, thimbleberries, and tasty plums. That special bird trilled from the wilder places in Strawberry Canyon, reminding me of the truth that wilderness gives man a feeling of happiness. UC Berkeley’s top brass seem to have lost touch with this element, and with appreciation and responsibility for their natural environment for themselves and for their students, employees, and neighbors. 

As UC advances further and further into micro science, nano tech, genetic engineering, stem cell research, they seem to lose the big picture of what is most important of all, our green planet and life itself. By comparison, the green dollars of such research and development are miniscule, and can be as deadly as Lawrence Livermore Labs bioterrorism research. 

And so, remembering the 100 Live Oak trees UC plans to cut down just west of the stadium to make room for development, another haunting song came to me, this one from a former Daily Planet opinion page: 

“Where have all the (environmentalists) gone? Has UC replaced every one?” And now when we need wisdom more than ever before, “… will they ever learn?” We need UC to do the right thing, and at least do no harm. Look around us: global warming, bizarre flooding, tree-killing diseases like Sudden Oak Death, people killers like West Nile virus, Avian Flu, and Lyme disease. Can UC Berkeley stop paving over the earth and begin to heal it? 

There is a strong relationship between environment and disease and UC could be in the forefront of this save-our-planet research. An example from UC’s own backyard: when a Lyme disease carrying deer tick bites a western fence lizard, something in the lizard’s blood kills the Lyme disease bacteria inside the tick! Then when that tick bites a human it will not cause Lyme disease! No nano tech or stem cell is necessary, just Mother Nature! 

We must protect our natural environment, the oak trees and Strawberry Canyon. There are smarter, alternative places to develop or redevelop on campus, including over or under parking, and closer to BART. UC should work with citizens and downtown interests to create Berkeley Go-Round clean-air vehicles and people-movers so we can have what they teach—not what they do—compact, sustainable, livable development, growth limits, and town/gown relationships to mutually protect our welfare and environment. 

UC may truly not be aware of the consequences and cumulative effects of all the recent university and private development in the city. This past winter, because so much of the earth has been paved over and trees cut, rainwater from campus could not find its way into the soil. During rainstorms, runoff from UC, washed redwood duff from lower campus through the streets all the way down to Sacramento Street. That water collected oil and filth and flowed into the storm drains to San Francisco Bay where it will disrupt food chains starting with the tiniest organisms. In some parts of West Berkeley the water flooded city streets so deep that people paddled canoes! 

We don’t need to develop all of UC’s projects in Berkeley, especially when other areas of the state are more suitable, cheaper, and other cities have space and the desire for a part of the UC campus. 

Merrilie Mitchell is a Berkeley resident.

The front page article by Suzanne La Barre in the Aug. 1 edition celebrating Michele Lawrence’s five years as BUSD superintendent gave me pause to consider my own views about the current state of BUSD and the City of Berkeley. Let me share them with you. 

I swim at Willard Pool. This is my major form of recreation and activity for staying healthy. This is the case for many other adults who use the pools in Berkeley. The last several years I have noticed that there are a lot of stones at the bottom of the pool, especially at the south east corner where the pool and the Willard school yard share a tall fence and locked gate. Why do stones litter the bottom of the pool? The obvious answer is that Willard school kids are taking aim and tossing these objects over the 12-foot fence and gate into a body of water that is for the most part off limits for their use during most of the day. You can’t blame the kids for showing their frustration. 

My own views have come partly from my involvement with trying to preserve the wonderful neighborhood pools that the current generation of Berkeley folk has inherited from our farsighted forbears. The citizens and educators who built King, Willard, West Campus, and the warm pools on School property a half century ago knew the whole community benefits from having access to swimming. Adults and school kids learn water safety, recreation, and a healthy lifestyle with the benefit of friendly neighborhood water parks-pools. This was a win-win situation which allowed everyone to come out ahead because the City of Berkeley and the BUSD work together to maintain pools and run aquatic programming. This is the fantasy version. 

Actually, the school district and the city have for years fought over the funding of pool maintenance and improvements. The district for decades has put zero money into the pools while using the pools for PE classes and high school sports events. When the city, due to a lack of funding these last several years, asked the district to help fund the pools the district responded by ending their aquatic PE programs at Willard and King middle schools. Due to a full court press by the United Pool Council, the PTAs and concerned city and school staff a modified aquatic PE schedule has been reinstituted this last year during the early fall and late spring at Willard and King middle schools. This is a very good thing but the district is still not contributing to the funding of these pools and these pools face closure nine months out of the year. This is the reality of the tough no nonsense management style of Michele Lawrence. We all lose, specially the kids whose health and safety are used as pawns in this single minded effort to control the budget process with the city. 

Actually the reality is much worse, the warm pool is facing being evicted from a building slated to be torn down by the district on the high school campus. The current warm pool users will be homeless and out of luck if the BUSD is permitted to procede with their redesign efforts. 

In my opinion the BUSD under the leadership of Michele Lawrence gets an F for community relations. This is the community which has in the past been so generous with the district by passing special tax measures for the schools. Even though I have a child attending Berkeley High, this year I will think very long and hard about voting for any more special tax measures. I am throwing stones back until the larger community is heard and dealt with. 

Bill Hamilton is a Berkeley resident.

Tom Bates is telling people that I tried to stop the West Berkeley Bowl. Once again, he’s spinning the truth like a top.  

Fact: My position, repeatedly stated in the press and at the Planning Commission, the Zoning Adjustments Board, and the City Council, has always been that the people of West Berkeley want, need and deserve a neighborhood grocery store. 

Fact: The new Bowl is not a neighborhood grocery store. At 91,000 square feet, it’s over twice as large as the existing Bowl. It is the size of a Wal-Mart. 

Fact: The Bowl’s permit process was delayed by the Bowl’s owner, Glenn Yasuda, and by the city’s planners and consultants.  

In July 2003, when he was trying to crush the union drive at the existing Bowl, Mr. Yasuda withdrew his application for the new store. It wouldn’t have looked good, after all, to be seeking big favors from the city while trampling on workers’ rights to organize. When he (wrongly) thought he’d beaten the union, Mr. Yasuda resubmitted the application. 

City staff and consultants also had a hand in the Bowl’s lengthy approval process. As the city’s planning director wrote to the Council: “The unusual duration is due in part to the city’s decision, relatively late in the process, to prepare an environmental impact report, and also to oversights and errors by the applicant’s traffic consultant and the city’s environmental consultant, which necessitated recirculation of the EIR and the extension of the review period.” 

Fact: What finally got the city to require an EIR for the Bowl was the report prepared by the independent traffic engineer who’d been hired by the West Berkeley Traffic and Safety Coalition (TASC). 

Fact: TASC consisted of the new Bowl’s near neighbors, West Berkeley residents and businesses. 

Fact: I, a north Berkeley resident, worked with TASC, in part by paying for legal advice. 

Fact: The EIR said that the new Bowl will generate 50,000 vehicle trips a week.  

Fact: The intersections at Seventh and Ashby and at Ashby and San Pablo are already jammed with traffic. 

Fact: An elementary school with 400 children is across the street from the new Bowl’s site. 

Fact: At the council in June, I supported TASC’s recommendations for:  

• A 62,000-square-foot store (the EIR’s Alternative C, half again as large as the existing Bowl). 

• Traffic barriers and other traffic mitigations. 

• Maintaining the property’s industrial zoning so as to prevent the further gentrification of West Berkeley. 

I also supported the petition signed by 27 businesses, including Ashby Lumber, Scharffen Berger Chocolate, Inkworks Press and Urban Ore, that asked the city do an economic impact report before moving forward with the project. And I endorsed the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union’s appeal for a card check union election at the new store. 

Fact: On June 13, Tom Bates ignored all of these requests and voted with the Council majority (Councilmembers Anderson, Spring and Worthington abstained) for a 91,000-square-foot store, no traffic mitigations, no card check election, and a zoning change from industrial to commercial.  

Tom Bates advertises his environmental credentials. So he ought to explain why he chose not to require traffic barriers around a project that will generate 50,000 vehicle trips a week in an already congested area with an elementary school. If he thinks that Wal-Mart-sized projects should not have EIRs, he should explain that, too. 

Tom Bates talks about the city’s need for sales tax revenue. So he ought to explain why he ignored a petition signed by 27 West Berkeley businesses asking for an economic impact report on the new Bowl. Does he really think that a grocery store (there’s no sales tax on food) will yield more taxes than those 27 businesses?  

Tom Bates says he’s promoted inclusiveness in Berkeley political life. So he ought to explain why in the matter of the Bowl, he ignored all the stakeholders but one: the owner of the business.  

Mr. Bates touts his progressive character. So he ought to explain why he failed to support the union’s request for a card check election at the new store, even as he handed the Bowl’s aggressively anti-union owner a zoning change worth $10 million.  

Mr. Bates does not talk about the need for honesty in government. Nevertheless, he ought to explain why he keeps spinning truths he finds inconvenient. 

Former Planning Commission chair Zelda Bronstein is a candidate for mayor. 

LEAGUE OF  

WOMEN VOTERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I wish to correct a serious misimpression left by a quote attributed to Councilmember Gordon Wozniak in the story “Council Looks at UC Election” that appeared in your July 25 edition. 

Mr. Wozniak is quoted as having said that “It was a valid election [the ASUC student body election held in April] run by the League of Women Voters.” 

Had Mr. Wozniak (and the Daily Planet) checked with us, we could have told him and you that the League does not “run” the ASUC election. Since 1979, we have offered our services as consultants on fair election process, and served as poll-watchers. When we have seen election rule infractions, we have pointed them out to the Elections Council, with whom we have our contract for services. The Elections Council then proceeds to try to cure or bring sanctions against those responsible, and the final arbiter of all election controversies is the ASUC Judicial Council. 

The bottom line is that the ASUC Elections Council “runs” the ASUC election, and under their by-laws and elections rules, the Judicial Council has the final say about sanctions against rule violators. 

Thank you for letting us clear up this serious misunderstanding of the role of the League of Women Voters in the ASUC elections process. 

Sherry Smith 

ASUC Elections Committee,  

League of Women Voters of Berkeley, Albany and Emeryville 

• 

UNDER WATER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

About the ongoing concern expressed by the Friends of the Ocean View-Sisterna Historic District over an old house on Sixth Street: Given that by the end of the century all the houses in that area will be under water, along with the entire bay shoreline, let me suggest that you consider turning your attention to more serious matters. 

Jerry Landis 

• 

WRONG NAME 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In your July 28 story, “Massive New UC Lab to Rise at Downtown’s Edge,” you mention Hong Kong business man Li Ka-Shing. I believe that you incorrectly refer to his last name as Ka-Shing, when in fact “Li” is his last/family name, and Ka-Shing is his first/given name. 

John Hanley 

Oakland 

• 

SIDEWALK DISPLAY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am adding my voice to the complaint of Karla James in the July 28 Daily Planet, regarding the habit of Berkeley Honda on Shattuck and Carleton, parking display cars on the city side walk. Not only do they obstruct foot traffic in this way, they also follow another practice, which obstructs auto traffic, sometimes parking cars at right angles to the curb, jutting out into the much used turnout exit from Reel Video. I first noticed this while trying to walk home through this obstacle course three weeks ago. When I reached home, I telephoned the police. The officer I spoke to said that was the problem of the Traffic Department (or some title like that) and gave me the telephone number. I immediately called the number. A machine answered, stating business hours for that office (I WAS calling within the business hours) but I was told to leave a message and my phone number; I would be called, and the problem, whatever it was, would be dealt with during business hours. Three weeks. Nothing has changed. No one has called me back. 

Dorothy Bryant 

• 

TOWER OF SONG 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Justin DeFreitas’ review of the film Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man was pretty much right on. The film’s one saving grace was, as DeFreitas pointed out, Rufus Wainwright.  

The ultimate sacrilege in the film was to have a female vocalist massacre Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” This is one of the more beautiful expressions of male sexuality ever put to music and lyric. To hear it sung with the sensitivity and intensity with which Cohen wrote it, listen to any of Jeff Buckley’s interpretations, from for example, the album Live a L’Olympia, or the EP Live from the Bataclan. These and the versions from the remastered Grace album are available as CDs at Amazon.com, or you can stream them, with much less fidelity, from the Peyote Radio Theater media player at www.jeffbuckley.com. “Hallelujah” is also on the DVD Jeff Buckley Live in Chicago setlist. In the process you will hear some incredible solo guitar playing. 

If the film introduced some to Cohen’s music and wordplay, it was not a total loss. 

Richard Holmquist 

Richmond 

• 

OAKLAND POLICE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It is outrageous that the Oakland police have wasted their time and our tax dollars with their spying on and infiltrating the local anti-Iraq war movement some three years ago. If the aim of the police was to “prevent violence,” perhaps they should have instead infiltrated and investigated the Oakland Police Department, since there was a police riot with the firing of many rubber bullets on May 12, 2003 at the peaceful protestors sitting-in at the Port of Oakland. These two officers and all their superiors who approved this attack on our civil liberties and our freedoms should be fired immediately. Don’t we have enough real crime in Oakland with murders, armed robberies, assaults and burglaries for the police to deal with? 

James K. Sayre 

Oakland 

• 

CITY AUDITOR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I can only guess that John Selawsky is looking for a fatter paycheck when announcing that he is considering a run for the city auditor position. Selawsky as School Board director and member of the school’s audit committee has failed and refused to implement at the school district even the most basic and minimum auditing requirements recommended by the the Government Accountability Office.  

Furthermore, Selawsky has failed to be an independent board member and does not provide oversight over the school administration. He failed to vote against a single pay increase for administrators. Yet, where was he when the teachers’ contract was being negotiated? 

Several years ago, school board members asked for a 30 percent raise, telling us among other justifications, that they would pool this money to hire staff to assist the board to develop an independent oversight function. That has not happened. Instead, the board is wholly dependent upon the superintendent for all its information, for all its data. The board performs no independent evaluation of whether the data is valid, whether the analysis is correct, and whether other points of view have been omitted. This is why so many of us consider the School Board a rubber stamp. 

Of course, the School Board and administraiton, as a single voice will tell you that all is well with the schools. But given the high level of administrative secrecy under which the school system operates, the true situation at the schools often remain hidden from public view. Even simple actions to encourage democracy are not taken. For example the school district’s audit committee’s meeting times and agendas aren’t even posted on their website. 

John Selawsky is totally inappropriate to be our city auditor. 

Sandra Horne 

• 

ENROLLMENT POLICY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I want to thank Lorraine Mahley and David Baggins for their constructive, civil letters regarding BUSD’s out-of-district student enrollment policy and my own letter of last week. I want them both to know, and the residents and taxpayers of Berkeley, that I will encourage our staff to implement a procedure similar to the one used in Albany that requires a lease agreement or house title as proof of residency to ensure that Berkeley students and only those students legally permitted within the Berkeley schools are the recipients of Berkeley’s continued largesse. Once again, thank you for the suggestions and your comments. 

John Selawsky 

Director, Berkeley School Board 

• 

FORE ERNEST—WITH GROANERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

How fortunate for our town and times we had such a prophet for non-profits as our beloved Ernest Landauer—a poet, first and coremost.  

Two other devotions of Ernest need remembering: his there-at-the-creation when the Ecology Center opened at College and Derby around 1980, and his last gig as director of the Bay Area Funeral Society; how much financial heartbreak he saved folks in passing. 

In delightful memory, puns are weaving my heart and soul, and I say, dear friend: You shall be mist, and we shall feel your great spirit on Pacific winds, where I believe you have gone to rest—and jest.  

Also, all my best to the loved of Thunder, Julian White and Floyd Dixon.  

Arnie Passman 

• 

IN PRAISE OF ERNEST 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I want to join Osha Neumann (Planet, July 28) in saluting the life of Ernst Landauer, my first professor of Sociology at UC Riverside in 1963. Ernst Landauer did indeed love words, so much so that he wanted his students to come to understand the meaning of the most potent on their own. For example, he refused to define Durkheim’s term, “moral density.” He wanted us to “figure it out.” I also recall that he was responsible for bringing to the campus the filmmaker, Jean Renoir. And, I remember him telling us “public schooling has taught you not to think.” 

As an educator and sociologist I am very grateful to have been taught by Ernst Landauer, a sui generis teacher, indeed. I mourn his passing. 

Molly Freeman 

• 

SIDEWALK TRASH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I absolutely agree with Yolanda Huang’s message, especially its last sentence. The property managers (North Berkeley Properties) of the apartment building I live in won’t address root causes. They could give new tenants guidance in not creating seething piles of fly- and rat-attracting garbage on the sidewalk in front of our building, but the suggestion has gone continually unheeded. They don’t have to walk through this unhealthful mess every day, and neither do the people in the group of investors who own the building. 

Sandy Rothman 

• 

TWO NUMBERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Apropos Yolanda Huang’s letter concerning sidewalk trash, it may be helpful to inform readers of these two numbers. 

1. City of Berkeley Public Works Customer Service: 644-6620. It is my understanding that the city will come to pick up illegal dumping. 

2. Alameda County Computer Resource Center (ACCRC): 528-4052. They are located in Berkeley on EastShore Freeway. ACCRC recycles computer hardware for nominal fee and, to my understanding, CRT monitor drop off is now free. 

J. Herbert 

• 

CONCERNED IN ALBANY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

After reading a mailing from Concerned Albany Neighbors I read several things that concerned me. The letter called the initiative a “takeover attempt by special interest groups.” It troubling to see environmental concerns often labeled as special interests groups while we are all deeply connected to the earth and depend upon it for our very existence. Our environment needs special safeguards to protect it from interests for profit. Environmental concerns should not be considered special interests, but the interests of all of us. Unfortunately, that is not always the case so we need the watch guard groups to safeguard us and remind us of our responsibilities. Financial gains can drive us to make decisions without the proper consideration for the environment and our future. It seems to me that in this situation the special interests that we need to be aware of are Golden Gate Fields and Ladbroke. I have concerns about letting the groups who are poised to profit do the majority of the planning even if we are given the choice to refuse in the end. 

I am also confused when the people supporting the initiative are considered “dominated by people who do not live in Albany” according to the correspondence from CAN. It seems very clear to me that Golden Gate Fields and Ladbroke are the groups that are dominated by people from out of town. 

Susan Adame 

Albany 

• 

THE FACTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In “Kitchen Democracy Donation Draws Scrutiny,” you state that Wozniak’s $3,000 donation provoked questions on the appropriate use of city funds. At Tuesday’s City Council meeting, the concern was reiterated that we cater to a narrow segment of the Berkeley population. 

Let’s look at the facts. Our community of nearly 750 Kitchen Democracy citizens spans all eight Berkeley districts. They have cast more than 1,000 votes on city-wide issues and on local issues covering six of the eight districts. 

It is true that District 8 is disproportionately represented in our community—but there is nothing devious here. We live in district 8; that’s where we know people; that’s where KD started just last March. 

Look behind the vote tally on our home page and you’ll find a diverse community thriving with articulate perspectives. Many are written by busy citizens using KD to participate for the first time in local government. What could be more inclusive than that? 

We’re thankful that City Council eventually approved the donation—it will help us continue to provide this public service. The next time you have five minutes on a connected computer, come to KitchenDemocracy.org, read what the experts and your neighbors are saying, then speak your mind and and help us build a better Berkeley. 

Robert Vogel and Simona Carini 

• 

LIBRARY METHODS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The library requires staff in the branches to perform an activity that can have no apparently useful purpose—and which has the undesirable result of delaying the availability of periodicals to the public. 

Namely the requirement that periodicals must be “logged in” before they can be put out on the shelf. This logging in often gets backed up in performance, with the result that the periodicals are sitting in the “to do” stack rather than being available for the patrons. 

Recently a further wrinkle has been added. Now the periodicals are delivered as usual to the branches. The branches then send them to the central library for “processing.” When this eventually occurs, the periodicals are sent back to the branches. 

This system makes no sense: 

1. What can be learned from “logging in” magazines? 

2. Why cannot this be done at the branch, if it must be done? 

Someone could learn something by observing the procedure at Oakland branches. The magazines are mailed to the branches; and the staff puts them out on the floor without further wasted and delaying effort. 

Bill McIntyre 

• 

THE JEWISH SOUL  

IN TODAY’S WORLD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Hebrew priniciples of Tzedaka (Concern for the Well Being of Others) and Tikkun Ollum (Responsibility for Mending the World) are inherent traditions of Jewish heritage that have lifted up the human race. 

Now, progressive Jews criticize Israel’s contemporary behaviors and uphold these traditions of empathy and caring about the outcome of the world. They are the ones who tend the Jewish soul while modern Israel is an empty shell of material acquisition and militarism. 

N C Delaney 

• 

BUSH / CHENEY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

How can you trust and have sympathy for George W. Bush and his allies who have stolen two straight presidential elections? You don’t have to bash Bush but it is the duty of every conscious citizen to point out the egregious, and yes criminal activities that the GOP and religious conservatives have fostered over the past five years.  

Conspiracy against democracy, lying the United States into war, call it what you will, Bush/Cheney have done it to America.  

Never in my 63 years have I witnessed anything like this group of deceivers. Whether a Democrat, liberal, progressive, Green, Independent, it is our duty to stand up to this dark and malignant force that has cast its shadow on America. 

Ron Lowe  

Grass Valley

The Bush administration’s foreign policy—whatever it is—is in ruins. Iraq and neglected Afghanistan are sinking into macabre violence. Israel has launched a bloody regional war, with conspicuous support from a diplomatically isolated United States. India is recovering from a major terrorist atrocity. Terror plots against North America are an apparent growth industry. 

Meanwhile, North Korea has developed nukes (with help from our very good friend Pakistan) and now a missile that may someday reach U.S. territory. Should this, or anything else, emerge as a genuine threat to American security, don’t expect our military to respond. It’s far too bogged down in an Iraqi quagmire that this nation imposed on itself for no real reason. 

How again did we get into this mess? 

A few upper-crust Yalies—all notably successful in staying far away from their own generation’s war in Vietnam—got the keys to the White House in 2001. And after a deceptively easy game of capture-the-flag in Kabul, they thought it would be fun to play at war. 

Yalie-in-Chief George W. Bush thought it would be keen-o to settle his daddy’s old score with Saddam Hussein. He beheld the power and courage of the U.S. armed forces and saw toy soldiers at his disposal—playthings, the way medieval boy nobles saw their private armies.  

W. had never seen an actual war, of course. He’d spent his Vietnam draft-eligible years in (and AWOL from) a safe, coveted spot in the Air National Guard “Champagne Corps.” 

Vice Yalie Richard Cheney, who’d dropped in and out of New Haven twice as prologue to his epic “academic” draft deferment, was happy to order up a second Iraq war for the Bush family. He’d messed up the first one, and he could mess up a second. Either way, it would benefit Halliburton—whose $20 million severance gift was a lifelong reminder that what was good for Halliburton was good for Richard Cheney. 

Eager to concoct an intellectual justification for this fool’s errand was Cheney’s old Pentagon protégé, former Yale nutty professor Paul Wolfowitz. Channeling Dr. Strangelove, Wolfowitz solemnly informed us that reigniting the Bush/Hussein clan pissing match would somehow “transform” and “democratize” the Middle East, and that Iraqis would “greet us as liberators.” 

In assuming that any civilization would willingly transform itself at swordpoint, Wolfowitz and fellow neoconservatives remarkably mirrored a mad tenet of the extremist Wahabbi sect of Islam that rules Saudi Arabia. Wahabbism is what incubated Osama bin Laden. The Wahabbi notion of conversion through killing continues to fuel lethal Sunni Muslim violence against Shiites. 

Strategic acumen like Wolfowitz’s isn’t won easily. During Vietnam, the future warlord fought valiantly on the battlefields of the University of Chicago’s graduate school, earning the Purple Onion for irony.  

Cheney’s longtime Yalie consigliere, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, handled backroom jobs like promoting fabricated claims about Saddam’s alleged arsenals—and retaliating against truth-telling debunkers like Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Libby now awaits a perjury trial. 

But it’s not like four guys from Yale can run, or wreck, a country alone. It takes a virtual residential college. Stephen Hadley, a Yale Law School graduate now making us less secure as Bush’s National “security” [sic] advisor, helped Cheney and Libby spread fabrications linking Saddam to a 9/11 plotter and to African uranium. 

Fellow Yale Law graduate John Yoo cooked up the Bush administration’s judicial rationales for torture. He’s now teaching Constitutional Law at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall. (Lovely thought.) Another far-right product of Yale Law, Samuel Alito, is dismantling our civil liberties as Bush’s latest Supreme Court appointee. 

Shredding American goodwill at the United Nations is U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, a Yale twofer (he sat out Vietnam at Yale College and then Yale Law). Bolton once famously declared: “If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” 

Destroying the CIA from within—Al Qaeda, just drool—was Spy Kid Yalie Porter Goss. Until his recent forced resignation as agency director, Goss shoved out knowledgeable veteran spooks, replacing them with incompetent, often shady cronies. 

Black Bag Yalie John Negroponte, the new director of national “intelligence” [sic], will keep enforcing mistaken espionage groupthink. It’s all in the club, actually: Negroponte and Goss have been friends since Yale’s Class of 1960, where they were even fraternity brothers. Talk about casting the widest possible net for talent! 

So there you have it. A bunch of cosseted ruling-class pips who’d made damn sure they’d never seen a real war—Cheney once said he’d “had other priorities” than serving in Vietnam—decided that, by Jove, it would be princely fun to throw one. So they sent our nation’s steerage class off on a desert suicide mission. 

The cost so far: some 2,570 of our little people dead, and counting; untold tens of thousands of Iraqis killed; and our nation’s international reputation shattered. 

Now in tracing these old school ties, I don’t mean to suggest some occult Old Blue agenda behind this self-selecting group of red-state-oriented ghouls. Nor do I mean to slam Yale itself, one of the world’s great universities. Its students are whip-smart and unusually hard-working. Under today’s more meritocratic admissions standards, W. or Cheney probably wouldn’t get in, let alone out. 

Yale is hardly the only distinguished university to have led the nation astray. Harvard’s “best and brightest” in the Kennedy cabinet marched us into the Vietnam quagmire. The University of Chicago originally miseducated neocons like Wolfowitz. 

But there’s something spookily efficient about the Old Blue pipeline to power. Besides the pack around W., other big dogs who attended Yale College and/or Yale Law School include Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham, John Kerry, Howard Dean, Joseph Lieberman, Clarence Thomas, and Anita Hill. 

A Yale graduate has occupied the president’s and/or vice president’s office throughout the last generation. A Yalie has been at either the top or bottom of the last two Democratic presidential tickets. 

It’s not that Yale has distinctively failed to endow its graduates with moral character befitting public service. It’s failed at a distinctively high level, because its old-boy network is so strong. 

I’ll confess that even the little backwoods Ivy League college I attended (Dartmouth) could challenge Yale in promoting the pursuit of power unbound by moral considerations. Dartmouth’s public-affairs office busily celebrated any student or grad who scored a plumb D.C. internship or job. But I remember far less discussion of the ends to which power was put.  

Fortunately for the nation and its sobriety, the highest office a Dartmouth graduate has ever held is the ceremonial vice presidency (Nelson Rockefeller, 1974-77). But I can only assume that Yale students get simmered in a similar sense of privilege and entitlement to “lead.” 

Many have been genuine leaders. When America faced real threats not of our own making, Yalies heroically rushed to serve, rather than sending the uncredentialed to fight their battles. (See Marc Wortman’s recent book The Millionaires’ Unit for stunning World War I examples.) At home, Yale students have struggled prominently for peace in Vietnam, civil rights, and justice for janitors. 

But given who runs the country, let’s just hope that by next fall, the spreading disaster in the Middle East is recognized as a “teachable moment” in New Haven’s classrooms. 

Michael Katz may actually be a Skull and Bonesman, writing under an elaborate disguise to divert attention from an unimaginably darker conspiracy.

Suzanne La Barre wrote an interesting report on the July 25 City Council meeting pertaining to the crisis of the Berkeley Housing Authority (BHA). While the governing body of BHA (the nine City Council members and only two appointed members at large), assumes the posture that it just now recognizes that new governance is essential to the stability of the agency, the cry of “Shocked! Shocked!” sounds a bit hollow given the history. Let’s see if we can round up the usual suspects! 

In the early 1980s, the governing body of BHA went from an independent board to the City Council. On the third Tuesday of the month they meet for about half an hour before the council meeting. Did it take 20 some-odd years for the members of the board to conclude that it “had too much on its plate ... to adequately oversee Housing Authority staff and operations”? Then, since 2003, HUD designated BHA a “troubled” agency, for various administrative and managerial inadequacies, including a backlog of inspections and re-evaluations, and housing quality issues. In the past three years what part of “troubled” did they not understand? Is it that HUD funds BHA for $27.4 million a year and is now threatening to take its money elsewhere? Is it that the plight of poor people is generally underrated, especially when those doing the rating do not have to worry about having a roof over their head? 

Last Tuesday, according to Daily Planet reporter Suzanne La Barre, more than three-dozen tenants “flooded” the City Council meeting. That public response to the housing crisis was stimulated by an ad hoc handful of people from the community who had the courage to make an appearance and get media attention. I submit that it also got the City Council’s attention. Councilmember Spring submitted a two part motion: that the council adopt a resolution in favor of turning the authority over to another body, and secondly that an announcement be sent out to all Section 8 and Public Housing tenants from BHA inviting people to a public meeting for 2 p.m. Aug. 26 at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Ms. La Barre correctly reports that the council did not vote on the resolution because it was not on the agenda, but she did not cover the fact that they unanimously adopted the motion to send out notices and have a public meeting of tenants. 

The aforementioned citizens who now call themselves the Committee to Save Berkeley Housing Authority, with Councilmember Spring, initiated that meeting. Committee members worked on the wording for the notice and began to secure speakers and arrange an agenda for the Aug. 26 meeting, the intended purpose of which is to activate Section 8 and public housing tenants to act in their own behalf by petitioning their Federal representatives and demanding that HUD protect affordable housing. Housing Director Steve Barton seems to have a different viewpoint on the scope of this meeting. He sees the meeting as “informational,” having the new BHA manager describe, “what is going on.” Would it be too rude to ask how she or he will know “what's going on” being appointed only as of July 31, having the job for less than a month that has seen three new directors since the beginning of the year? 

Mr. Barton also proposes “the Section 8 tenants … can (be) invited to a meeting with the Section 8 Resident Advisory Board.” What Mr. Barton did not say is that the Section 8 Resident Advisory Board (RAB) does not exist in any sort of meaningful way; it does not have elected board members, and it lacks four out of the five board members needed to constitute an official body, and it has not officially met for two years. It is not the intention of the people who activated this grassroots campaign to turn the public meeting over to a non-existent, bureaucratic-front organization. We expect that when the dust settles the public meeting will take place in the manner and with the intention with which it was proposed and voted on by the City Council. 

Eleanor Walden is a member of the Rent Stabilization Board.

First, I want to thank the many Berkeley residents who have indicated their support for me to enter the race for mayor this November, particularly Merilee Mitchell who took out papers to gather signatures in-lieu of filing fees (even though I didn't know about it at the time); and to all of you who collected signatures, signed your names, sent me e-mails, called me, wrote me letters and stopped to talk to me in the grocery store, on the street or at various meetings.  

I am amazed and overwhelmed by the amount of your support, which seems to be growing daily. Besides being greatly surprised by your numbers, I am deeply touched by your kind words, willingness to work for my candidacy and most of all by your enthusiastic encouragement. I am also humbled by the faith you have shown in my ability to resolve the many concerns that you have expressed. 

I greatly regret to have to tell you that I have decided not to run. Starting so late makes the process much more difficult. In 2002, Mr. Bates and I raised about the same amount but he was able to contribute an additional amount, around $100,000, of his own funds to his campaign. I do not have the personal resources to compete with that. Some groups have held endorsement interviews and made their decision long before before my name was put  

forward.  

In my view, this campaign would be on an uneven playing field for a two-year term. The four-year term coming up in 2008 is by far more appealing from the standpoint of putting together an effective campaign. 

I believe that I can better serve the city that I love so much by my active involvement in some of the important issues that we are facing. I am full of hope that my voice, along with yours, will help shape a city government more responsive to the community than what we have experienced over the past four years. Some of the issues that I will be involved in over the next few months include working for: 

• Approval by the voters of the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance Initiative on the November ballot. This initiative involves retaining the 30-year old ordinance that has served the community so well, plus a few minor changes suggested by the State Office of Historic Preservation. Berkeley's neighborhoods should not be put at risk just because a few developers want the wheels greased in their favor. 

• Persuading the university to rescind, rewrite and recirculate the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) on the seven projects included in the proposal to retrofit Memorial Stadium. City planning staff has boldly declared the current DEIR, concerning what is by any definition a massive project that will permanently change the face of the city, as totally inadequate, lacking information, and misleading. Our city must support our neighborhoods regarding this staff analysis by actively following through with the university by every means possible—first, by ensuring that accurate and complete information on impacts is understood and, second, by undertaking any and all appropriate actions. 

• Seeking a greater emphasis on funding for basic city services, police and fire and infrastructure repair. I have been working with BudgetWatch, a group dedicated to informing people about the budget. In addition to greater resident awareness of budget impacts and decisions, and more citizen involvement in those decisions, we seek adequate city funding for police and fire, no closure (brownouts) of fire stations and developing a real plan to address the mounting infrastructure deficit. 

• Completing the work begun by Neighbors on Urban Creeks regarding the Creeks Ordinance and protection of our local creeks and watershed. Neighbors on Urban Creeks successfully achieved several recommendations for revisions to the Creeks Ordinance but much work remains to be done: to find methods which will actually improve the quality of our urban creeks; and to enact a comprehensive watershed management plan that is environmentally sensitive and also prevents the repeated flooding that has caused so many  

problems for Berkeley homes and businesses. 

• Devising mechanisms to protect neighborhoods from the destructive nuisance of drug houses, out-of-control liquor stores, and other nuisances that are the focus of crime. Residents must no longer be put in harm’s way in order to close down drug houses that are destroying their neighborhood while the city sits on the sidelines and takes no action to declare such places as public nuisances. 

• Opening an honest dialogue to find solutions to prevent the damage caused by overdevelopment from too dense, too tall and too big buildings. The essence of what has made Berkeley a wonderful place in which to live is currently being threatened by development which is out-of-scale with its surroundings. The council simply engages in hand wringing when they hear objections from neighborhoods. Solutions must be actively sought. Additionally, the council must stop the management of the planning process and allow the true vision of the community to emerge in areas like the Ashby BART Station. 

• Engage in community discussions on re-structuring the full range of Berkeley governance issues. We must make government function in a more open and democratic way with no more closed- door decisions, or last-minute actions taken without citizen review. We must restore confidence in citizens and boards and commissions that their input means something, and that rules on speaking times are clear. We must explore whether the Council should have at-large members, higher compensation and how to achieve greater accountability. 

I will be busy. The list above is not complete and I am still writing my book on an insider's experience with Berkeley politics. Good luck to us all in uniting to protect and preserve Berkeley. It’s a very special place. 

Shirley Dean is the former mayor of Berkeley and a current political activist.

Erica Schoenberger is scrolling through her photos of Maphaphateni, a small village in the “Valley of 1,000 Hills” northwest of Durban in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Province. She is looking for a particular image that crystallizes the difference between a project funded by the World Bank and one sponsored by the Colorado-based organization, Engineers Without Borders (EWB). 

A full professor of geography at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Schoenberger has just returned to Berkeley from South Africa where a team of 15 students from the Hopkins chapter of the EWB put in irrigation systems for two community gardens run by grandmothers. The women, known as the “Isthembe” (“Commitment”) group, take care of over 100 children orphaned by AIDS.  

HIV/AIDS has infected over 40 percent of the rural population in the province, making even mega-killers like malaria look almost benign in comparison.  

The photos stream by, a kaleidoscope of rolling hills, simple houses, and earnest looking students digging ditches and hefting plastic pipes. There are pictures of the grandmothers, one in which they are laughing it up at a ceremony marking the end of the project. 

Schoenberger, who spends eight months a year in Maryland, and four months in Berkeley, is a sort of bi-coastal scholar. She earned a BA in history at Stanford, and a PhD at UC Berkeley in city and regional planning. The department she teaches in—the Department of Geography—is an unusual one, a merger of geography and environmental engineering.  

“It is important to train a generation of engineers who can read the social landscape,” she says, pausing at an image of several women dressed in long dresses and bright headscarves. Instead of just dropping in and whipping up some technical solution to a problem, the program works with local people to figure out what kind of technology is appropriate for the specific cultural, social and historical context of a given community. 

EWB was formed in 2000 to draw together engineers, professors, and students to help developing countries with their civil and environmental engineering needs. The group is installing solar panels in Rwanda, clean water systems in El Salvador, and building schools in tsunami-ravaged Southeast Asia. Projects include villages in Kenya, Nicaragua, Haiti, Macedonia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Belize, and Mali. The organization has nine member countries, plus provisional chapters in 35 countries from Argentina to Turkey. 

While Johns Hopkins has a reputation “as a very conservative place,” says Schoenberger, the program attracted students across the engineering spectrum, from standard brick and concrete types, to bio-medical engineers. The team also included two public health students. While the project gets some funding from the School of Engineering and individual departments, the bulk of the money for the South Africa trip—about $40,000—was raised by the students themselves. 

The field experience may be the most real-life, hands-on engineering these students do, because most engineering departments are wrapped up in theory, says Schoenberger. “No one tinkers anymore, no one messes with things. Here the kids get to see and feel engineering, not do just abstract good, but dirt good.” 

She finally zeros in a photo of an odd looking device whose design hardly suggests its use. It consists of two narrow metal bars with a handle in the middle. “It looks like it could be in a gym at Guantanamo,” she chuckles, “part exercise machine, part torture device.” The apparatus is a “treadle pump,” and the idea is for someone to stand on the two metal bars while holding on to the handle. Then the person pumps up and down as if on a kind of primitive StairMaster, creating a pumping action that raises the water from a stream to the gardens. 

It is low tech, requires no power, and it works—providing that an elderly woman can stand on the two bars and vigorously pump for a goodly time. “This is the World Bank in action,” she says. “Low cost, low tech, and totally inappropriate.” The women are too old to work the pump, and their charges are too young. 

The garden is critical because the little community subsists on small pensions that the grandmothers draw from the state. The gardens are an important food supplement. Normally the water is hauled uphill in pans and drums, an exhausting and never ending ordeal. According to a United Nations study, women and girls carry water an average of four miles a day in the underdeveloped world. Because it is so difficult to transport, water is saved in containers, which in turn can easily become contaminated. Water-born diseases kill some 13 million people a year, most of them children under five. And yet world wide, only about $3 billion out of the $80 billion in foreign aid goes toward improving access to clean water. 

And, as Maphaphateni illustrates, sometimes that aid is wasted on technology projects that bear no resemblance to what is actually needed. 

The Johns Hopkins team installed “ram pumps” which work by harnessing the momentum of the stream to pump water uphill 24 hours a day. No grandmothers are required to stand on narrow rails while doing heavy cardiovascular workouts, and the group can maintain the pumps without outside supplies. The water is pumped into 5,000 liter tanks and then distributed to the gardens through irrigation piping,  

Putting in the irrigation pipes was the job of the students, and it was hot and heavy work. “The kids dug hundreds of meters of trenches,” says Schoenberger. 

In the process they not only learned how to install the system, they learned how to start off by talking to the local people and working from there. “The idea (behind the project) is to grow engineers who will not take World Bank money and do something stupid, but to take that money and do something smart.”  

The EWB group, in partnership with the local Church Agricultural Project, plans to install ram pumps in more villages during upcoming visits. It is also investigating the possibility of biogas generators to provide cheap and sustainable electricity. Biogas can be produced from compost and human and animal wastes. 

EWB is a non-profit, but is not the slightest bit averse to taking money from anyone, including the World Bank. The KwaZulu-Natal Province project actually applied to the Bank for funds, hoping to get in on the huge organization’s 2006 emphasis on water. “But we didn’t get the money because the World Bank was focused on drinking water and this was irrigation water,” she says, rolling her eyes.  

EWB chapters are spreading in campuses across the nation, although so far there is none in the Bay Area. Schoenberger thinks this is a situation that ought to be changed. “EWB’s motto is ‘Building a better world one community at a time,’” she says, which she thinks is an excellent goal. “But it could take a thousand years to achieve it if we had to rely on bake sales to fund it. If we could put the EWB philosophy together with the kind of money the World Bank gets to play with, you might really see some dramatic changes.” 

She urges people to check out EWB’s website at www.ewb.jhu.edu and www.ewb-usa.org. If you want save the grannies of the world from treadle pumps, lend a hand.

Driving home on Tuesday evening, Aug. 1, I passed one of the officially sanctioned National Night Out Events, this one sponsored by the East Bay Dragons (African-American) Motorcycle Club, who had already begun to cordon off the block at 88th and International on the side of their clubhouse. National Night Out, from its website, is a campaign involving “citizens, law enforcement agencies, civic groups, businesses, neighborhood organizations and local officials… Along with the traditional display of outdoor lights and front porch vigils, cities, towns and neighborhoods ‘celebrate’ NNO with a variety of events and activities such as block parties, cookouts, [and] visits from local police and sheriff departments.” 

Ironic, isn’t it? 

Readers with good memories will recall the last time the Dragons held a block party and got a visit from the local police department. We wrote in this column in the fall of 2005: “And on the Sunday before Labor Day, Oakland police shut down the Dragons’ annual 88th Avenue block party at 5 p.m., and then conducted a sweep in which they ordered the crowds of people off of International Boulevard in the vicinity of the Dragons’ clubhouse. The Dragons do this every year on Labor Day weekend, blocking off 88th between International and A Street and playing music and selling sodas and barbecue. They have events for the kids as well as for teenagers, young adults, and the older crowd. It’s one of the yearly highlights of our neighborhood. The crowds are enormous, and club members handle both the security and the cleanup themselves.” 

I never got an explanation from police or city officials why the Dragons’ Labor Day event had to be shut down just prior to sundown. As is usually the case with the Dragons’ events, there didn’t appear to be any violence or other problems, even though 88th and International is in the heart of Oakland’s killing zone, and one of the roughest neighborhoods in the city. I only noted, then, that the closure happened a couple of weeks after some trouble at a night-time dance sponsored by a couple of black motorcycle clubs at the Kaiser Convention Center. The East Bay Dragons were not part of the Kaiser Convention Center events, but, you know, Oakland police and (some) Oakland city officials sometimes get their black guys confused… 

So what changed in the 11 months between Labor Day, 2005 and National Night Out, 2006? Politics, maybe. And a murderous, bloody year in Oakland that has left Oakland officials suddenly begging the same community to “get involved” that it was earlier ordering to “close down” and “get back.” 

In the midst of what is becoming an all-too-typically horrific period in which five were shot and three were slain over last weekend, Mayor Jerry Brown took time out from his attorney general campaign duties to tour the 12th and Peralta streets neighborhood where 57-year-old Clinnetta Simril had been shot in the head and placed on life support. Or maybe this was part of his attorney general campaign duties. In any event, following his West Oakland tour, Mr. Brown told Oakland Tribune reporters “I saw a number of kids hanging around, (up) to no good.” 

It would be interesting to learn from Mr. Brown what criteria he used to come to that particular conclusion. 

Mr. Brown, after all, has a history of making accusations against citizens (unnamed and therefore unable to defend themselves) so that the mayor can make a political point. 

In 2003, when he was trying to take over the Oakland-owned Malonga Casquelord Center (then called the Alice Arts Center) for his private, non-profit Oakland School For The Arts, Mr. Brown tried to justify the takeover by making accusations against some men who the mayor said were “hanging out” around the Arts Center. Both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Berkeley Daily Planet quoted Mr. Brown as saying at the time, “They’ve had people hanging out there. When you have young children taking dance classes, you have to be careful about the people you have running around there. You can make an argument they are not compatible with dance studios and kids.” 

Why were these people “hanging out” in front of the Arts School? Well, they were tenants living in SRO’s on the top floor of the Malonga Casquelord Center, many of whom were also artists who participated in dance companies located at the center. Many of these Alice Arts Center tenants spent their afternoons at the sidewalk café outside the center and the arts school, waiting for their rehearsals or dance classes to begin. Were these tenants a danger to the Arts School students? Mr. Brown seemed to be the only one who thought so, or, at least, pretended he thought so in order to make a case that the tenants should be moved and his Arts School students should stay. The African dance-based Malonga Casquelord folks, who were busy creating the downtown sidewalk cultural atmosphere the mayor kept saying he wanted, were apparently not exactly the type of culture he was talking about.  

But back to Mr. Brown’s West Oakland Tour. The Tribune reported that the mayor revealed he is working on the latest of his anti-crime strategies, this one to be called “Operation Ceasefire,” the Tribune noting that “the details of which [Mr. Brown] expects to release soon.” We’ll try to be patient. 

The Tribune went on to quote the mayor as saying, “There have been a number of young people involved (in these shootings), occasionally hitting innocent bystanders. ... There are a lot of kids that need a lot of upbringing and they aren’t getting it; it shows up as kids on street corners doing things they shouldn’t.” The newspaper reported that Mr. Brown was not blaming the police for the upsurge in Oakland’s violent crime, adding that the mayor noting that “It’s tough, they are working overtime, doing everything they can, and if anyone has a better idea, the chief would (welcome) it.” A police spokesperson noted that “the community has to roll up its sleeves and pitch in.” 

And do what, exactly? 

Several years ago, leaders of Oakland’s original, non-violent, parking lot sideshows went to Oakland city officials and asked them to help set up legalized, sanctioned, safe sideshow venues off the city streets. This was after Oakland police had driven the original non-violent sideshows out of the parking lots and into the streets, creating the sometimes-chaotic situation we have today. Oakland police officials were initially interested in the idea, traveling to San Diego to study a similar program in that city, and contacting a promoter who would help put the venues together. City Councilmember Desley Brooks held a couple of meetings with police officials, promoters, and sideshow participants to try to put the project together. But Mayor Brown and City Council Public Safety Chair Larry Reid talked against the proposal, and it was put on hold for several years. It was revived, again, by Councilmember Brooks during the summer of 2005 debate over Mr. Brown’s “arrest the sideshow spectators” ordinance, in which the Daily Planet reported that “some other councilmembers—Henry Chang and newcomer Pat Kernighan, for example—went on record saying that any discussion of stepping up penalties on sideshow participants should also include a discussion of legal alternatives.” 

A year has passed, and we’re still waiting. 

Would setting up a legalized, sanctioned, off-street sideshow venue have prevented the murderous events of Oakland, 2006? Probably not. But it would have opened an important dialogue and started a partnership between East Oakland street youth, the Oakland police, and city officials that could have been a valuable tool in the current attempts to abate Oakland’s violence, much of which is centered among our youngsters. And if the legalized sideshow idea was a bad and unworkable idea, rather than shooting it down entirely, the police department, the mayor’s office, and other city officials should have continued the meetings with the sideshow advocates, encouraging them, and working together to come up with a better plan acceptable to both sides. 

But a pattern emerges. Oakland citizens in some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods—the East Bay Dragons with their 88th Avenue block parties or the original sideshow participants with their proposal for a sanctioned, legalized sideshow venue—come up with plans to address the problems in Oakland’s mean streets. The city shuts them down. And then, months later, city officials complain that they cannot get citizens to “roll up [their] sleeves and pitch in.” 

Perhaps we would, if the city would only stop taking our shirts. 

I can feel another rant coming on and this one has been coming for some time. I’m definitely involved in the world of real estate, for better AND for worse. Rather than simply sharing construction knowledge with people at their homes, a lot of what I end up doing involves checking over houses that are in the sale process, and this means examining the product of sales preparation, of last-minute, minimally budgeted spin and fluff. Even the term “flipping” a house sounds more like making a crepe than building a home. There’s a vernacular to these things that’s not unlike reality TV or aerobics classes and it’s become so predictable that there are genuinely days in which I can’t remember which flip I’ve been inside of for three or four hours. Yes, one had two baths and three bedrooms and the other was four baths with an in-law downstairs but the “look” of these places is often so similar, due to the vernacular of choices that there isn’t much difference beyond square footage. 

Sadly, I’m also speaking about a wide range of original styles from the craftsman bungalow with Clinker brick to Deco houses of the ’40s with Air-Stream modalities embossed into the stucco exteriors. Every house from every era has a style, a message and a flavor. They’re not all the same nor should we wish them to be so. They’re not in lockstep and they don’t read the same books. Unfortunately, when many remodeling contractors prepare houses for sale, they too often try to apply a template remodeling scheme and this results in a loss of the real charm, beauty and the fun of the original designs. Also, it often means a loss of the function inherent in the original plan. 

One of my pet bugaboos in this vein is the current madness for granite. What is it about granite? Well, I know, but it’s fun to snark the question. The answer is that it has the “oeuvre” of wealth.  

Like so many features found in “just-remodeled” houses, granite has become so commonplace that whatever value it once bore has been diluted by its overuse. It’s also used without any real thought for the type of aesthetic it sits with. Granite, when used in a Roman villa, might seem apropos but as a part of a McMansion, it simply becomes ordinary. 

I’d argue that the money spent on granite is wasted by those who are seeking the feel of wealth and prestige when more of that particular appeal might better be found in buying some very nice pieces from one of the better salvage yards and building around them. If what you want to do is impress your friends with your pocketbook, do as the Hearsts did and fly to Italy and buy up the salvage of the great churches or villas and ship them home to your architect (of course, hiring Julia Morgan couldn’t hurt), but buying a lot of granite and flooding the surfaces of your kitchen with it just ends up looking like a lack of imagination. 

Other than granite, there also seem to be a few other vernacular item found in the flip houses I see nearly every week. There are the seven new Home Depot lighting fixtures that scream “fake old-fashioned lamp” and make a wonderful old house look very much like a brand new stucco box.  

There are the new brass and glass fixtures in the bathroom along with the brand new Home Depot bargain tile in the bathroom. Now this is often really sad since so many of the bathrooms from the past are actually in fairly good shape and had the most incredible tile imaginable. The colors and combinations of colors were great. Also, the tile was often of extremely hearty quality and while they might be somewhat chipped or cracked, this is often minimal and more than compensated for by the fact that they will look far better in 10 years than the cheap vitreous tile that people put down in place of the wonderful green ’40s tile that they took out. Pest companies are often quick to tear out old tile baths that are really just fine and covering only a small amount of decay. Some pest companies are quite good in this respect but the criticism is still valid. 

More than a few of the flips I’m seeing today have a full set of vinyl double-glazed windows in them and while this might be fine for a simple modern stucco building, it’s a pretty sad choice on a 1930s Craftsman home. There are good choices that can be made when remodeling an old gem and I have nothing against the person who wants to buy a neglected old house, fix it up and turn a profit. It a good business if you can make it pay and it preserves and enhances our built environment when it’s well done. That said, there are better and worse choices that can be made.  

Here are some suggestions: Look at how these houses were first done and if you don’t know, get educated. There is a lot of information to be gleaned from the Internet, books and from looking at minimally modified homes in the area. Many older homes had tiled kitchen. Tile is relatively easy to do, costs a reasonable sum and can be fabulous if done with style and care. Don’t be afraid of color or pattern but consider what suited the house when it was built. This doesn’t mean mimic; it just means consider. Think about the impact of your choices and where modernization is done, see if you can “tip your hat” at the history you are working within. Pick up some color from the rest of the house or the curve of the doorways or the tile in the old fireplace or the trim from the hallway. These little measures can “pull the house together” and allow you more freedom to do something wild or outrageous. 

Try sanding the floors and finishing with a low gloss. The old oak floor so many of our houses have were never meant to be glossy. Sanding can be nice but don’t overdue it. For kitchen remodels, consider real linoleum. Linoleum was very common from the teens through the ’50s and is very durable and looks great. It’s a far better choice than vinyl. Think about repainting the old cabinets and getting some genuine knobs from the period. If the ones you have are covered with paint, soak them and put them back up. This can also apply to the hinges, doorknobs, mortise locks, doorbells and other metal appointments that have been painted over. It also applies to old light fixtures. If you take the time to soak and re-install these old features, you can breathe new life into a house that’s become flat and boring. Lastly, when you paint—and painting is well worth the trip—try to use some color. Don’t even think about white. Remember that even in the prim and uptight Victorian age, the houses were painted outlandish, brash and passionate tones. Don’t be afraid of color, even if you’re fixing up to sell. People don’t really want white. They’re just afraid of what the neighbors will say. The best remodels I see and the ones that buyers fight over have great colors. Often, each room has it’s one set of colors. If it’s good enough for the White House… 

In conclusion, if you’re looking for a vernacular, start with the one that we’ve been given in the form of history. It’s not a dictate, just a guide but it’s a much better one for our stock of old ladies than the one that Expo has to offer.

The Alameda Antiques Flea Market happens on the first Sunday of the month. It’s a good show for five bucks, a stroll through the surreal, and, if you’re my age, just a bit unsettling to see so many of your own childhood artifacts labeled “vintage.”  

If you’re half my age, you can explain to the sproggen that no, Mommy and Daddy didn’t have cell phones when they were in kindergarten; Yes, we did think just making that thing go ’round and ’round was fun. Wear sunscreen and wind-resistant hats, and pony up for a sausage or a churro or two and lots of drinks—there’s no shade at all—and start early, 9 a.m.-ish. Things are winding down by 3 p.m. 

That’s when you make a nice side trip for coffee and greens. Live greens that you can bring home and grow. Encinal Nursery is modestly tucked into a lot on (surprise!) Encinal, one of the parallel streets that cross the island heading away from the old naval station. Good for citrus trees; among others, including bai makrut, I saw a calamondin with variegated leaves.  

Lots of things there with variegated leaves, in fact, including a couple of tri-colored rubber plants and other interesting houseplants. I grabbed a four-inch sago palm for inside, and for outside, a four-inch coleonema, a handy small size. Roses, Japanese maples and other traditional stalwarts, and a stack of firewood, too, if you want to Be Prepared.  

For the coffee, you’ll need to go ’round to Lincoln Avenue, another of those parallels, to Thomsen’s Garden Center. The Vines coffee and gift shop is upstairs, for a cup and a pastry and some coffee beans to take home. The gift shop displays jewelry, scarves, and assorted handsome things to look at; it’s more of the artist and artisan persuasion then the faux-country ruffles-and-chickens sort. You can sit on the deck and survey the little nursery, or take your coffee around as you shop.  

The day we dropped in, this was the most fragrant nursery around. The jasmine was still blooming—including one-gallon vine-trained specimens—and a table of big lilies greeted us. Someone brushed the mints in passing, and I couldn’t resist a pot of intensely bright-scented Moroccan mint, for tea. Of course, the coffee from the shop perfumed the air too. Lots of other blooms, and lots of foliage color.  

One showstopper was the single (so far) bloom on one of the five-gallon semi-hardy hybrid Dutchman’s-pipe vines, which one of the workers there showed me when she saw me taking notes with my camera. Atop that weirdly scrotal “pipe” was a soft, silken flare of petal, patterned like burgundy gingham and big enough to cover the palm of her hand.  

Iris and John Watson run the paired enterprises. Iris also writes for Alameda magazine, a handsome glossy bi-monthly that might pay even less than the Daily Planet, and I hear she has a TV show too. She and her staff are friendly and smart, and the atmosphere of the place is quite engaging. Even the bashful lovebird in a cage by the lilies hailed us cheerfully. 

Encinal Nursery 

2057 Encinal Ave., Alameda  

522-8616 

9 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Monday–Saturday  

9 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday 

Thomsen’s Garden Center  

1113 Lincoln Ave., Alameda 

522-8489 

9 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday 

9 a.m.-5:50 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.  

Closed Thurdays. 

Vines Coffeshop open 8 a.m.-5 p.m.  

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in East Bay Home & Real Estate. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.

What About Quake Insurance? 

There are some who are under the mistaken impression that their homeowner’s insurance will cover damage to their home and possessions caused by an earthquake.  

One way to try and protect your most valuable asset is to buy earthquake insurance. Although policies seem to have improved in recent years, they are still expensive and usually carry a fairly high deductible amount in case of a loss.  

Before buying such a policy, be sure and investigate your options carefully. If your home is properly retrofitted (or built since codes became more rigorous), your need for earthquake insurance has gone down significantly, and some say in this case you have no need for earthquake insurance.  

Larry Guillot is owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and kit supply service. Call him at 558-3299, or visit www.quakeprepare.com.

The recent heat wave has been difficult for my husband, Ralph. He is often bedridden, and because he can’t move or perspire properly, he is prone to overheating. Ralph doesn’t know he’s too hot until it’s too late.  

We keep him unclothed. We point fans in his direction, and wipe him down with cold washcloths. Unfortunately, these ministrations are not enough to prevent discomfort. We need to change his position often, but when he’s lying on his side, he can’t use his computer. Ralph without his computer is a man trapped watching endless hours of TV. This makes him very unhappy, which means all of us who help take care of him are, by association, unhappy too.  

During one of the hottest days I thought it prudent to get Ralph up, into his wheelchair, and into an air-conditioned building. His attendant, Andrea, and I could then air out his bed and replace the damp sheets with clean, dry linens. While we waited for the outside temperatures to go down, Ralph and I could see a movie.  

Andrea and I dressed Ralph, hoisted him up, and placed him in his wheelchair. We combed his hair, strapped on his foot protectors, and assisted him into the van. I drove us to Emeryville, a ten-minute drive that took 30 minutes due to traffic and poor planning. It wasn’t poor planning on our part as we left our house 50 minutes before the start of the movie. No, the blame can be placed on the city of Emeryville and everyone involved with the multiple traffic lights on 40th and Shellmound streets, and to all the people who chose, like us, to beat the heat by hiding inside the AMC theaters at Bay Street.  

By the time we finally arrived at the parking garage, I was hot. Not hot as in sweaty, although I was that too, but hot because of the time it took to get there, and because there were no handicapped parking spaces available. Ralph drove himself backwards down the ramp and out of the van. I left him by the elevator while I found a place to park. I returned, pressed the button for the lift, helped him squeeze inside, and then we got stuck. After a lot of pushing and pulling, grunting and cursing, we emerged onto the fourth floor. During the excitement in the elevator one of the wheelchair’s footrests fell off. I had to figure out a way to temporarily reattach it. We wheeled inside the theater just as the opening credits for The Devil Wears Prada rolled across the screen.  

And then the incident that clinched my crankiness occurred. All the seats set aside for the handicapped and their companions were taken except for one. The empty seat was occupied by a purse. The purse belonged to the woman who sat in the seat next to it. When I asked her if she was saving the spot for someone, she said no. She removed the purse and put it on her lap.  

Ralph maneuvered his wheelchair into the space beside the now unoccupied seat. I sat down, and the movie started. Ralph immediately fell asleep. I watched Meryl Streep treat everyone around her with calm, calculated cruelty. It was a silly, vapid film, but I thoroughly enjoyed Ms. Streep’s ice queen performance as Miranda Priestly. I wish I could be more like her character so that the next time I go to the theater and discover a purse occupying the seat that rightfully belongs to a handicapped person or his or her companion, I can act like Ms. Priestly. Thanks to the movie, I now recognize Hollywood’s interpretation of bad taste. With snake-like hooded eyes and nostrils flaring, I’ll let the person who owns the purse know what I think of her Prada knock-off and her selfish, inconsiderate behavior.  

In some ways, we humans are educating ourselves about the planet that sustains us the way the owner of a cranky old car educates herself about how cars work: We learn about systems and parts when they break down and we’re forced to figure out why. Partly that’s a matter of perceived urgency that gets grants written and funding done—“pure” research is a delicious notion, but it’s rare that anyone can get the time, facilities, and support to study a matter just because we all get intrigued by it.  

Studies aside, there’s the matter of which things get the attention of the broader public. That attention eventually drives some funding, of course, from foundations with close oversight from nonspecialists. And sometimes several foci come together, and something pops up that nobody had imagined. Sometimes that something is the importance of a known fact or substance, importance that is greater than anyone had assumed. 

Lately there’s been media handwaving and even actual information about carbon sequestration. Five, 10 years ago, how many of us had ever heard the phrase, let alone known what it is or why it matters? It matters because carbon in the air, combined with oxygen as carbon dioxide, is a “greenhouse gas”; that is, when there’s lots of it in the upper atmosphere, it helps create that greenhouse effect that’s destabilizing the weather systems we’ve had for a long time, making the world’s air a bit warmer by trapping solar heat that used to escape. It doesn’t take much, just a few degrees, to get glaciers and polar ice caps melting and ocean temperatures rising and currents changing, including upwellings that feed sea life (and then us) and surface changes that make storms stronger.  

Carbon sequestration is an ecosystem service (another new term: the life-support the world gives us) that helps put the brakes on this career. Plants, in particular, make themselves out of elements including carbon. Remember that thing about how they “inhale” carbon dioxide and “exhale” oxygen? They keep that carbon atom and make it into their flesh. 

As long as they live, they keep the carbon they accumulate out of the air. Imagine how much carbon is in a hundred-foot tree, or an acre of grassland or chaparral. When they die and decay, or burn, that carbon goes back up in real or virtual smoke. When trees are cut down, they stop working, even if the carbon in the lumber stays there for (optimistically) a few centuries. The waste, the sawdust, the trampled understory, starts decaying then and there. 

But there’s more to the forest than the trees.  

Under all that green stuff, way down in the dirt, there’s serious and complicated action going on. Roots are growing, absorbing nutrients from the soil, engaging in the dark half of that great dance of making. Roots are permeable, and so is the whole substance of the forest, or the field, or wherever plants grow.  

Trees and many other plants, when we look closely, aren’t isolated, aren’t independent, aren’t even quite separate entities. They absorb what they need from the soil with the help of the mycorrhizal network, the web of fungi under the surface that lives in symbiosis with many plants. People who garden with native plants and who keep bonsai are finding that a bit of soil from a plant’s original home might inoculate its new one with the right organisms to help the plant flourish.  

Mycorrhizae are performing another ecosystem service that has only recently come to light. The USDA published a report by Don Comis on work by Sara F. Wright and Kristine A. Nichols that suggests that a substance called glomalin, discovered by Wright in 1996, does indeed glom onto quite a lot of carbon—27 percent of the carbon in soil. It binds organic matter to mineral particles in soil. It also forms soil clumps—aggregates—that improve soil structure and keep other soil carbon from escaping. 

Glomalin is produced by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (order Glomales, hence the name) on plants’ roots, from carbon they trade for other nutrients and water. The fungi produce glomalin, apparently to seal themselves and gain enough rigidity to carry the stuff across the air spaces between soil particles. The fungi grow only on the newest root tips; the glomalin sloughs off the dissolving older hyphae and stays in the soil for seven to 42 years.  

There are ways like no-till farming to encourage glomalin production, but keeping a piece of ecosystem intact in its original form seems to keep the stuff in the soil in greatest amounts. Yet another reason to keep our collective hands off, to avoid breaking what we don’t understand well enough to fix.  

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

See the forest for the trees? A lot of “ecosystem services” take place underground, out of sight.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 4 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “Night of the Iguana” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. through Aug. 12. Tickets are $12. 649-5999.  

Aurora Theatre “Permanent Collection” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through Aug. 5. Tickets are $28-$45. 843-4822. www.auroratheatere.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Footloose” at 8 p.m. Fri. and Sat., and Sun. at 2 p.m. at Contra Costa Civic Theater, 951 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito, through August 5. Tickets are $12-$20. 524-9132. www.ccct.org 

Encore Theatre Comapny and Shotgun Players “The Typographer’s Dream” at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through Sept. 3. Tickets are $15-$30. 841-6500.  

Impact Theatre “House of Lucky” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through Aug. 26. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. 

Woodminster Summer Musicals “The King and I” Fri.-Sun. at 8 p.m., through Aug 13 at Woodminster Amphitheater in Joaquin Miller Park, 3300 Joaquin Miller Rd., Oakland. Tickets are $21.50-$35.50. 531-9597. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Ball & Chain” Pre-marital show for Gretchen Grasshoff and Jordan Mello, reception at 7 p.m. at Boontling Galery, 4224 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Show runs to Aug. 27. www.boontlinggallery.com 

“Catching Ripples” Paintings and sculptures by Eric Helsley and “Those Bucolic Places” paintings by Carol Paquet. Reception at 5 p.m. at Esteban Sabar Gallery, 480 23rd St., Oakland. 444-7411. 

“Sound and Vison II” A group show of works influenced by music. Reception at 7 p.m. at Auto3321 Gallery, 3321 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Show runs to Aug. 13. www.auto3321.com 

“Mercury Rising” A group show of new works by 15 Bay Area artists. Reception at 5 p.m. at Robert Tomlinson Studio, 25 Grand Ave., Oakland. Exhibition runs to Aug. 31. 866-8808. 

FILM 

“Atenco: Rompiendo el Cerco/ Breaking the Silence” with music by Francisco Herrera at 7:30 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Free. 581-7963. 

“Cartography of Ashes” A documentary on the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 at 7 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org.  

“Shaken Not Stirred: Martinis, Music and Mayhem” at 5 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. 

Jewish Film Festival From noon to 10 p.m. at the Roda Theater, through Aug. 5. For complete listings of films see www.sfjff.org. Tickets are $10 and up. 925-275-9490. 

Janet Gaynor “Small Town Girl” at 7:30 p.m. and “Ladies in Love” at 8:50 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Jimbo Trout and the Fish People with Birdlegg and the Tightfit Blues Band outdoor concert at 5:30 p.m. at Park Place and Washington Ave., Pt. Richmond. 237-9375.  

Bay Area Blues Society Concert at 5 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. 

Bolokasa Conde & Les Percussion Malinke concert and doundounda dance party at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15-$20. 849-2568.  

Ray Cepeda, Latin, salsa, rock, at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Sage, The Nomad, Two Seconds, The Moanin Dove at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0886.  

Charles Ferguson Latin Jazz Quartet at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373.  

Wylie & the Wild West at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Scott Amendola Trio at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

AJ Roach and Adam Benjamine at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Tito y su Son de Cuba at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054.  

Brazuca Brown, Brazilian, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Ten Ton Chicken, Cosmic Mercy at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

Set it Straight, Lifelong Tragedy, Deadfall at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

Translator, Uptones, Penelope Houston and others at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $20-$25. 451-8100.  

Mose Allison at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $10-$20. 238-9200.  

SATURDAY, AUGUST 5 

THEATER 

Shotgun Players “Ragnarok: Doom of the Gods” Sat. and Sun. at 4 p.m. at John Hinkle Park, through Sept. 10. Pass the hat donation after the show. 841-6500.  

FILM 

Frank Borzage “Lazy Bones” at 6:30 p.m. and Janet Gaynor “A Star is Born” at 8:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Bay Area Poets Coalition holds a memorial for the poet Maggi H. Meyer followed by an open poetry reading, 3 to 5 p.m., at Strawberry Creek Lodge Dining Hall, 1320 Addison St. Park on the street, not in Lodge parking lot. 527-9905. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Coterie Dance Company “My Soul Moves” at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $13 children, $15 adults. 925-798-1300. 

UC Summer Symphony at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Donation $5. 717-2126. 

Larry Stefl Jazz Trio at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. 

Motor Dude Zydeco at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Ba-Tu-Ke at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $12. 849-2568.  

André Sumelius Quartet at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Ken Mahru & David Serotkin at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

The David Thom Band, traditional bluegrass, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Sitting Duck, Planting Seeds, The Year One at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0886.  

The Blue Roots, Naked Barbies at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082.  

Verse, Have Heart, Shipwreck, Hostile Takeover at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, AUGUST 6 

FILM 

Janet Gaynor “Delicious” at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

UC Berkeley Summer Symphony at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall UC Campus, Donation $5. 717-2126. 

Twang Cafe with Dave Gleason’s Wasted Days and Pickin’ Trix at 7:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. All ages welcome. 644-2204.  

Transbay Skronkathon BBQ from 12:35 p.m. on, at 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakland. with live music to 11 p.m. Donations requested. 649-8744. http://acmemusic.com 

Americana Unplugged: Square Pegs Bluegrass Band at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Sharon Knight at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Frederick Hodge, international café music at 2 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $8. 525-5054. 

Irene Chigamba & Erica Azim, mbira music from Zimbabwe, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

This is my Fist, One Reason, Hot New Mexicans at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

Royal Society Jazz Orchestra at 5 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $15. 525-5054.  

MONDAY, AUGUST 7 

CHILDREN 

Gary Laplow sing-along at 7 p.m. at the Rockridge Branch of the Oakland Public Library, 5366 College Ave. 597-5017. 

Rafa Cano, Spanish sing-along for children, at 10:30 a.m. at PriPri Cafe, 1309 Solano Ave., Albany. Free. 528-7002. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Last Word Poetry Series with Mary Rudge and Lenore Weiss at 7 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 843-7439. 

Michael Rothenberg and Marat Nemet-Nejat read at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Margaret Emerson reads from “Eyes in the Mirror” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Actors Reading Writers: “Longing and Perversity” stories by Jeffrey Eugenides and Ian McEwan at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave.  

Poetry Express features Jan Steckel, followed by an open mic at 7 p.m. at Priya Indian Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Blue Monday Jam at 7:30 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $5. 451-8100.  

Sophie Milman at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s. Cost is $6-$12. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

TUESDAY, AUGUST 8 

CHILDREN 

Colibri, an interactive journey through the music of Latin America, at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

NATya Indian Dance Storytelling through dance at 7 p.m. at the Rockridge Branch of the Oakland Public Library, 5366 College Ave. 597-5017. 

FILM 

Civil Liberties Film Series “Dissent” from the ACLU “Freedom Files” TV series, with guest speaker Jim Chanin, civil rights attorney, at 7 p.m. at the Richmond Library Community Room, 325 Civic Center Plaza. 620-6561. 

Screenagers “Thirteen” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

”Alien” a screening to benefit the Zapatistas at 9:15 p.m. at Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $7. www.speakeasytheaters.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Dan Berger on “Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity” at 7 p.m. at AK Press Warehouse, 674A 23rd St., Oakland. 208-1700. 

Leigh Raiford, Steven Estes, Kathryn Nasstrom talk about “The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Brazuca Brown and Southwest Nomadic, Brazilian, Gypsy, Reggae at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Debbie Poryes & Friends at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Salif Keita at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $30. 238-9200.  

Jazzschool Tuesdays at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 9 

THEATER 

California Shakespeare Theater “The Merchant of Venice” opens at the Bruns Amphitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., Orinda. Tues.-Thurs., 7:30 p.m., Fri.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 4 p.m. through Sept. 3. Tickets are $15 and up. 548-9666. 

FILM 

“The Day the Earth Stood Still” Science-fiction film from 1951 at 7:30 p.m. at The Fellowship of Humanity, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net 

Janet Gaynor “The Young in Heart” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

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

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.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Cease Fire: Words and Music Against the Siege of Lebanon and Palestine at 7:30 p.m. at La Pena Cultural Center. Donation $10. 849-2568. 

Jazz Function at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473.  

Roy Zimmerman in “Faulty Intelligence” An evening of satirical songs, Wed.-Fri. at 8 p.m. at The Marsh Berkeley, 2118 Allston Way, through Aug. 24. 800-838-3006.  

Michael Coleman Trio Jazz Jam at 8:30 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. 451-8100.  

Tropical Vibrations at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

Los, Jeff Henderson at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8. 848-0886.  

Salif Keita at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $30. 238-9200.  

THURSDAY, AUGUST 10 

FILM 

Beyond Bollywood “The Terrorist” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Citizenship, Civic Activity and Political Engagement” An evening with Steven Hill, Carol Pott, and Arthur Blaustein at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Summer Noon Concert with BabShad Jazz at the Downtown Berkeley BART station. Free.  

Kris Delmhorst, songcrafter, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Travis and Friends at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

The Hot Toddies, Skeleton Television, The Nomad at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. 

Pete Escovedo Orchestra at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s. Cost is $15-$24. 238-9200. 

The Criterion Collection continues to set the standard for classic film on DVD. The company recently released a three-disc set of Orson Welles’ long-neglected 1955 film Mr. Arkadin (also known as Confidential Report) that contains a wealth of material documenting the film’s murky history. Just as Criterion gave the deluxe treatment last year to Welles’ 1972 F For Fake, so this year the company has produced a respectful and informative package for Arkadin that does well to salvage the mystery and reputation of this confounding movie.  

The line on Mr. Arkadin is that it is essentially a surrealist version of Citizen Kane, taking the earlier film’s plot and form and elevating every aspect to absurdist heights. Arkadin follows the pattern of Kane by sending a young man off in search of the mysteries of an older man’s life. However, in the case of Mr. Arkadin, the older man is still alive, has in fact commissioned the search, and kills off each witness the younger man uncovers in an attempt to erase his unsavory past, with the goal of protecting his daughter from the disturbing truth behind the family’s wealth. It’s a good enough plot for a pulp movie, but Welles tried to elevate it to something more meaningful and significant, as well as baroque, and that didn’t sit too well with the film’s producer, or its distributors. Eventually, as with so many other Welles projects, the film was taken out of his hands before he could finish it. The result is a film often regarded as his poorest effort. 

Mr. Arkadin has its roots in a weekly English radio show Welles starred in called The Lives of Harry Lime, a series exploiting the character he made famous in the 1949 Carol Reed film The Third Man. In the early 1950s, Welles was working on his screen version of Othello, traipsing all over Europe on a dwindling budget, desperately trying to raise cash to finance the film. An English producer proposed the radio series and Welles seized the opportunity to make some easy money, cranking out these slight entertainments for a year while he continued to make Othello. 

The script for Mr. Arkadin grew from three of these radio shows, and the Criterion DVD includes all of them, providing a fascinating glimpse into the genesis of the film. 

There are any number of published critiques comparing Kane and Arkadin, some merely tracking the similarities between the two, others taking a psychoanalytical approach, positing that Welles himself was burdened by his earlier greatness and was seeking to somehow negate it through the latter film’s perverse fantasy. However, an often overlooked aspect of Arkadin is that it provides something of a blueprint for Welles’ later works, as many of its scenes, and even individual shots prefigure those of Touch of Evil (1958), the would-be B movie that Welles transformed into a noir masterpiece, and The Trial (1962), Welles’ feverish adaptation of Franz Kafka’s nightmarish novel. 

All of these films reflect Welles’ favored themes: power, regret, betrayal among men, and a strong hint of nostalgia. But what’s interesting about Arkadin is that it uses devices and shots that are replicated almost exactly in Welles’ later films. It’s as if he was so disappointed in the failure of Arkadin that he couldn’t bear to abandon some of its finer moments. 

All three films feature Akim Tamiroff in key roles, usually as a sort of clownish character to be abused by Welles’ tyrants. Toward the end of Arkadin, there is a scene in which Welles looms over Tamiroff as Tamiroff lies on a bed, the wrought-iron bedframe decorating the edge of the image. A few years later, Welles, backed this time with Hollywood money, would stage a similar scene much more elaborately in Touch of Evil, with gaudy flashing neon lights illuminating Welles’ Hank Quinlan as he stalks Tamiroff’s Uncle Joe Grande around a hotel room, strangling him and leaving him to wilt over a similarly ornate bedframe.  

Also in Arkadin, Tamiroff, in another hotel room, at one point moves toward a high window, stepping on a chair as though he is about to escape. Again, in Touch of Evil, Tamiroff, in an effort to escape the murderous Quinlan, climbs toward a high window and shatters it in an escape attempt before Welles pulls him back down. 

One more parallel is in each film’s closing scenes. In Mr. Arkadin, Paola Mori, Arkadin’s daughter, offers a stoic and ambiguous epitaph for her deceased father: “He was capable of anything.” The line is uttered almost without inflection—a frequent problem with Mori’s acting, but in this case the tone is intentional. Likewise, Touch of Evil closes with another exotic beauty—this time Marlene Dietrich—eulogizing the fallen Captain Hank Quinlan with another terse remark: “He was some kind of man.” These closing lines are almost Hemingwayesque in their simplicity, providing stark, dry conclusions to otherwise elaborate melodramas.  

Other aspects of Arkadin show up in The Trial, another of Welles’ independent European productions. The film again features Tamiroff in a key role and is edited to resemble a nightmare, with canted camera angles and disorienting cuts from one off-kilter shot to another. Welles had been something of a pioneer in independent filmmaking, demonstrating with his Macbeth that film could be a living, breathing organism, that it didn’t require the polished sheen of Hollywood. He sought to prove that film could be more free-flowing, deviating from scripts and indulging whimsical tangents with improvised shots and dialogue. Usually his experiments paid off. In the case of Mr. Arkadin, they didn’t. 

Welles never finished editing the film before its producer took it out of its hands. It was released in a compromised form, Welles’ elaborate flashback structure having been replaced by a chronological re-ordering of the scenes. The Criterion release presents three versions: the re-edited European version, an even more heavily re-edited American version (re-titled Confidential Report), and a brand new version in which historians and researchers have attempted to restore Welles’ original editing pattern, reconfiguring the picture to reflect, as best as can be determined, what Welles had originally intended. The result is a more coherent and artistic film than heretofore suspected. 

Mr. Arkadin may still be a failure but few directors fail as spectacularly as Orson Welles. The Criterion edition provides beautifully restored prints that showcase its photography, as well as a host of extra features that help to provide a clear picture of just what exactly Welles was striving for with this film and how and why he failed.  

MR. ARKADIN (1955) 

Directed by Orson Welles. Starring Welles, Paola Mori, Robert Arden, Akim Tamiroff.105 minutes, $49.95. www.criterionco.com.

While it makes sense that Orson Welles’ Mr. Arkadin would bear certain resemblances to Citizen Kane, it seems unlikely that a movie like Brothers of the Head, an independent faux documentary about conjoined twins turned rock stars, would draw on the same film for inspiration. But early on in the movie there is an homage of sorts to Kane, an allusion that sets up an interesting parallel.  

Brothers of the Head tells the tale of conjoined twins under the control of a former vaudeville impresario who has designs on transforming them into rock stars, much as he had previously exploited Siamese twins on the variety stage. 

The film is set in 1970s England, just as glam rock was giving way to punk, and is shot in the mockumentary style, complete with handheld cameras, footage made to look aged and archival, and latter-day reflective interviews with the main characters as they look back on their youth. 

The reference to Citizen Kane comes early on, and it is jarring to those who recognize it, as at least a handful of viewers at a recent preview screening did, judging by the grunts and gasps that greeted the scene. The shot uses a nearly identical setup to the Welles scene and a distinctive camera movement that clearly mimics the 1941 film, drawing a parallel between the two movies.  

In Citizen Kane, the young Charlie Kane is seen playing in the snow. The camera then pulls back through a window to reveal the interior of the family home, where the mother sits down at a table to sign papers turning over custody of her child to a banker as the father stands nearby, protesting to no avail. In Brothers of the Head, the twins are seen outside as the camera pulls back through a window to reveal their father signing over custody of his boys to the impresario as a sister stands by in silence.  

The device is employed during a film within a film, an unfinished biopic of the brothers called Two-Way Romeo. Two-Way Romeo is presented throughout as a silly movie, and the reference to Kane is primarily intended as humor, a satirical jab at the aspirations of the film and the pretentiousness of its director. But the use of the reference presents a valid parallel as well, as Brothers of the Head is in many ways a reworking of the basic structure of Citizen Kane. Brothers features a series of interviews with the major players in the lives of Tom and Barry Howe, each trying to delve into the collective mindset of the twins. The story, based on a novel, makes use of many of the near-cliches that always permeate literary tales of twins, but it succeeds in its treatment of them and even at times transcends them, creating a movie that, however flawed, is certainly interesting and ultimately worthwhile.  

The most compelling aspects of the film are the performances of the twins, played by Harry and Luke Treadway. The two brothers manage to create a single entity, a unified whole, and a wholly convincing one at that. Their posture, as well as the physical nature of their connection, places them in a near-constant embrace, emphasizing the intense emotional bond between them. As unlikely as it seems, they manage to convey a stage presence that is not only acceptable, but compelling, like Jagger and Richards rolled into one—the strutting, cocky, defiant singer and the brooding, silent guitarist.  

Directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe too often resort to shadowy, overwrought impressionism and spend entirely too much time on the duo’s live performances, causing the film to flag at times. But every now and then, something happens that wakes us up—a stirring emotion, a hint of mystery, a surprising plot twist—something that reawakens the drama and mystery. 

But even with these flaws, I found myself, hours later, still thinking about the film, even reconsidering my reaction to it. Its air of mystery somehow began to seem more intriguing after the fact and I found myself eager to revisit the film, to see if there was something I missed—to see if, as with Citizen Kane, there were layers of meaning and emotion that were not readily apparent on first viewing. Orson Welles believed that a movie should not reveal all its secrets in a single viewing, that a film should give the audience far more information, far more density and complexity than could possible be digested all at once. Brothers of the Head has something of this quality to it. It may not have been enthralling, but it cast enough of a spell that I found myself wanting to return to it, to take the time and expend the energy to delve deeper into its impressionistic imagery and further explore the lives of its tortured protagonists. 

BROTHERS OF THE HEAD 

Directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. 

Starring Harry Treadway, Luke Treadway, Tom Bower, Bryan Dick, Steven Eagles, Tania Emery, Sean Harris, Nicholas Millard.  

90 minutes. Rated R.  

Playing at Shattuck Cinemas.

“You gouge out an eye for keener sight. Is blindness vision?” 

—Frigge to Odin 

In a landscape of gray granite slabs and boulders, in front of a primitive structure with massive stone lintel-like dolmens, at the foot of the stony amphitheater of John Hinkel Park, a troupe of players open their trunk of masks and costumery to reenact the End of the World: Ragnarok: The Doom of the Gods, Shotgun Players’ free offering to a summer day. 

The End has happened before, and will again, but not just as repertory theater. The Players break up the mythic action by musing on the meaning of what they act out (presumably before some mead-soaked audience of Viking vassals and their liege lord, as much as the Berkeley picnickers sprawled in the leafy shadows of the hillside): “We tell the stories the Norse cook up; we can’t change them ... These are gods. There’s nothing funny about gods. They’d as soon kill you as look at you ... Hope at the end? This is the End of the World, but look at the bright side?” And Snorri (after the skald, Snorri Sturlesson?), head of the troupe (played by Ryan O’Donnell), reassures Helga (Erin Carter), his pregnant wife: “We’re not in it.” “Are you sure?” she counters. 

The ensemble of ten pulls out the stops to tell the story of the pagan gods awaiting their long-heralded doom, running through the changes of a variety of modes: “Presentational Theater,” Physical Theater, storytelling, a kind of pageantry, song, dance, and very impressive puppets for Loki’s monstrous brood which make brief but effective appearances. This isn’t Wagner’s Gotterdamerung, but something more intimate, to be told in a wintery hall at a feast, or in a summer glen, to kill time. The gods prove to be the ultimate party animals, killing time (and a few Strange Ones along the way) engagingly, as they slip ever nearer the awaited brink. 

There are all the episodes familiar to anyone who ever browsed a copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology as a kid. Thor (Nikolai Lokteff) and the always suspect halfbreed (part god, part Primal shape-shifter) Loki (a particularly effective Ben Dziuba) go spying on those Funny Ones, the Primals (aka Strange Ones, Fierce Ones, Frost Giants, etc.) under the pretext of a social call, only to be asked to join in the fun-and-games and losing. Thor is unable to down a horn in a drinking bout. It turns out to be the ocean. “I thought it was lousy beer!” he blurts out. Swift Loki is unable to leave the racing blocks before his effete opponent holds up the token of victory—his opponent is Thought, faster than motion itself. Mighty Thor is wrestled to a draw by an aged crone (Old Age herself, who is beaten by no one) played by Rebecca Noon. 

Thor also shows up in drag as a bride, his bristly beard veiled, disguised as beautiful Freya (a charming Jessica Kitchens), as blackmail for his stolen hammer. When it’s returned as the bride-price, he takes the wedding party over the top with it, as surely as disguised Ulysses dealt with Penelope’s suitors. 

But it’s not all fun and games, or shock-and-awe from life-size, animated action figures. There’s the death of Baldur (Danny Webber), the beloved god of light. It seems nothing can kill him ... except a sprig of mistletoe shot to his heart. “I’ve lost my son. Tell me how to grieve!” shouts Odin the All-Knowing (Roham Shaikhani). 

And underpinning it all is a very topical anxiety: security, the trade-off between Love and safety emphasized over and over. Is the return of Thor’s hammer worth the loss of the goddess of Love as a hostage bride? Or is the building of unbreachable walls for their haven, Asgard (or, as the red-nosed Funny One with the hardhat, Darren Blaney, calls it in Texan, “Ass-Gard”), an exchange for Freya, who makes life worth living, who is in fact the wellspring and continuity of life itself? 

The playwrights of this original production, Conrad Bishop (who also directed—and very well) and Elizabeth Fuller (a fine Frigge) explain the anachronisms in the program notes thus: “We look at the past—whether we call it history or myth—in the way we look at a pond’s surface, seeing a few things beneath the water but struck most strongly by our own reflection. And as any politician knows, the past becomes the story we tell about it. More dangerously, we become the story we tell about it.” 

This post-Christian, secular Humanist-ized treatment of myth veers back and forth between the irony of Plato and the burlesque of a Fractured Fairy Tales cartoon. 

It ends with a round dance, Loki in the middle, representing the long-awaited disaster, heralded by a bugler (no archangel) who complains he’s never blown the thing. And it does end on a note of hope—life goes on, the unborn baby kicking, a slip from Yggdrasil, the World Tree, potted up. 

And the show goes on, too, weekends till Sept. 10. 

It’s one of the things Shotgun does best; you don’t have to wait till the end of the world to enjoy yourself. 

RAGNAROK: THE DOOM OF THE GODS 

4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays through Sept.; 10. John Hinkle Park. Donations requested. 841-5600. 

I can feel another rant coming on and this one has been coming for some time. I’m definitely involved in the world of real estate, for better AND for worse. Rather than simply sharing construction knowledge with people at their homes, a lot of what I end up doing involves checking over houses that are in the sale process, and this means examining the product of sales preparation, of last-minute, minimally budgeted spin and fluff. Even the term “flipping” a house sounds more like making a crepe than building a home. There’s a vernacular to these things that’s not unlike reality TV or aerobics classes and it’s become so predictable that there are genuinely days in which I can’t remember which flip I’ve been inside of for three or four hours. Yes, one had two baths and three bedrooms and the other was four baths with an in-law downstairs but the “look” of these places is often so similar, due to the vernacular of choices that there isn’t much difference beyond square footage. 

Sadly, I’m also speaking about a wide range of original styles from the craftsman bungalow with Clinker brick to Deco houses of the ’40s with Air-Stream modalities embossed into the stucco exteriors. Every house from every era has a style, a message and a flavor. They’re not all the same nor should we wish them to be so. They’re not in lockstep and they don’t read the same books. Unfortunately, when many remodeling contractors prepare houses for sale, they too often try to apply a template remodeling scheme and this results in a loss of the real charm, beauty and the fun of the original designs. Also, it often means a loss of the function inherent in the original plan. 

One of my pet bugaboos in this vein is the current madness for granite. What is it about granite? Well, I know, but it’s fun to snark the question. The answer is that it has the “oeuvre” of wealth.  

Like so many features found in “just-remodeled” houses, granite has become so commonplace that whatever value it once bore has been diluted by its overuse. It’s also used without any real thought for the type of aesthetic it sits with. Granite, when used in a Roman villa, might seem apropos but as a part of a McMansion, it simply becomes ordinary. 

I’d argue that the money spent on granite is wasted by those who are seeking the feel of wealth and prestige when more of that particular appeal might better be found in buying some very nice pieces from one of the better salvage yards and building around them. If what you want to do is impress your friends with your pocketbook, do as the Hearsts did and fly to Italy and buy up the salvage of the great churches or villas and ship them home to your architect (of course, hiring Julia Morgan couldn’t hurt), but buying a lot of granite and flooding the surfaces of your kitchen with it just ends up looking like a lack of imagination. 

Other than granite, there also seem to be a few other vernacular item found in the flip houses I see nearly every week. There are the seven new Home Depot lighting fixtures that scream “fake old-fashioned lamp” and make a wonderful old house look very much like a brand new stucco box.  

There are the new brass and glass fixtures in the bathroom along with the brand new Home Depot bargain tile in the bathroom. Now this is often really sad since so many of the bathrooms from the past are actually in fairly good shape and had the most incredible tile imaginable. The colors and combinations of colors were great. Also, the tile was often of extremely hearty quality and while they might be somewhat chipped or cracked, this is often minimal and more than compensated for by the fact that they will look far better in 10 years than the cheap vitreous tile that people put down in place of the wonderful green ’40s tile that they took out. Pest companies are often quick to tear out old tile baths that are really just fine and covering only a small amount of decay. Some pest companies are quite good in this respect but the criticism is still valid. 

More than a few of the flips I’m seeing today have a full set of vinyl double-glazed windows in them and while this might be fine for a simple modern stucco building, it’s a pretty sad choice on a 1930s Craftsman home. There are good choices that can be made when remodeling an old gem and I have nothing against the person who wants to buy a neglected old house, fix it up and turn a profit. It a good business if you can make it pay and it preserves and enhances our built environment when it’s well done. That said, there are better and worse choices that can be made.  

Here are some suggestions: Look at how these houses were first done and if you don’t know, get educated. There is a lot of information to be gleaned from the Internet, books and from looking at minimally modified homes in the area. Many older homes had tiled kitchen. Tile is relatively easy to do, costs a reasonable sum and can be fabulous if done with style and care. Don’t be afraid of color or pattern but consider what suited the house when it was built. This doesn’t mean mimic; it just means consider. Think about the impact of your choices and where modernization is done, see if you can “tip your hat” at the history you are working within. Pick up some color from the rest of the house or the curve of the doorways or the tile in the old fireplace or the trim from the hallway. These little measures can “pull the house together” and allow you more freedom to do something wild or outrageous. 

Try sanding the floors and finishing with a low gloss. The old oak floor so many of our houses have were never meant to be glossy. Sanding can be nice but don’t overdue it. For kitchen remodels, consider real linoleum. Linoleum was very common from the teens through the ’50s and is very durable and looks great. It’s a far better choice than vinyl. Think about repainting the old cabinets and getting some genuine knobs from the period. If the ones you have are covered with paint, soak them and put them back up. This can also apply to the hinges, doorknobs, mortise locks, doorbells and other metal appointments that have been painted over. It also applies to old light fixtures. If you take the time to soak and re-install these old features, you can breathe new life into a house that’s become flat and boring. Lastly, when you paint—and painting is well worth the trip—try to use some color. Don’t even think about white. Remember that even in the prim and uptight Victorian age, the houses were painted outlandish, brash and passionate tones. Don’t be afraid of color, even if you’re fixing up to sell. People don’t really want white. They’re just afraid of what the neighbors will say. The best remodels I see and the ones that buyers fight over have great colors. Often, each room has it’s one set of colors. If it’s good enough for the White House… 

In conclusion, if you’re looking for a vernacular, start with the one that we’ve been given in the form of history. It’s not a dictate, just a guide but it’s a much better one for our stock of old ladies than the one that Expo has to offer.

The Alameda Antiques Flea Market happens on the first Sunday of the month. It’s a good show for five bucks, a stroll through the surreal, and, if you’re my age, just a bit unsettling to see so many of your own childhood artifacts labeled “vintage.”  

If you’re half my age, you can explain to the sproggen that no, Mommy and Daddy didn’t have cell phones when they were in kindergarten; Yes, we did think just making that thing go ’round and ’round was fun. Wear sunscreen and wind-resistant hats, and pony up for a sausage or a churro or two and lots of drinks—there’s no shade at all—and start early, 9 a.m.-ish. Things are winding down by 3 p.m. 

That’s when you make a nice side trip for coffee and greens. Live greens that you can bring home and grow. Encinal Nursery is modestly tucked into a lot on (surprise!) Encinal, one of the parallel streets that cross the island heading away from the old naval station. Good for citrus trees; among others, including bai makrut, I saw a calamondin with variegated leaves.  

Lots of things there with variegated leaves, in fact, including a couple of tri-colored rubber plants and other interesting houseplants. I grabbed a four-inch sago palm for inside, and for outside, a four-inch coleonema, a handy small size. Roses, Japanese maples and other traditional stalwarts, and a stack of firewood, too, if you want to Be Prepared.  

For the coffee, you’ll need to go ’round to Lincoln Avenue, another of those parallels, to Thomsen’s Garden Center. The Vines coffee and gift shop is upstairs, for a cup and a pastry and some coffee beans to take home. The gift shop displays jewelry, scarves, and assorted handsome things to look at; it’s more of the artist and artisan persuasion then the faux-country ruffles-and-chickens sort. You can sit on the deck and survey the little nursery, or take your coffee around as you shop.  

The day we dropped in, this was the most fragrant nursery around. The jasmine was still blooming—including one-gallon vine-trained specimens—and a table of big lilies greeted us. Someone brushed the mints in passing, and I couldn’t resist a pot of intensely bright-scented Moroccan mint, for tea. Of course, the coffee from the shop perfumed the air too. Lots of other blooms, and lots of foliage color.  

One showstopper was the single (so far) bloom on one of the five-gallon semi-hardy hybrid Dutchman’s-pipe vines, which one of the workers there showed me when she saw me taking notes with my camera. Atop that weirdly scrotal “pipe” was a soft, silken flare of petal, patterned like burgundy gingham and big enough to cover the palm of her hand.  

Iris and John Watson run the paired enterprises. Iris also writes for Alameda magazine, a handsome glossy bi-monthly that might pay even less than the Daily Planet, and I hear she has a TV show too. She and her staff are friendly and smart, and the atmosphere of the place is quite engaging. Even the bashful lovebird in a cage by the lilies hailed us cheerfully. 

Encinal Nursery 

2057 Encinal Ave., Alameda  

522-8616 

9 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Monday–Saturday  

9 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday 

Thomsen’s Garden Center  

1113 Lincoln Ave., Alameda 

522-8489 

9 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday 

9 a.m.-5:50 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.  

Closed Thurdays. 

Vines Coffeshop open 8 a.m.-5 p.m.  

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in East Bay Home & Real Estate. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.

What About Quake Insurance? 

There are some who are under the mistaken impression that their homeowner’s insurance will cover damage to their home and possessions caused by an earthquake.  

One way to try and protect your most valuable asset is to buy earthquake insurance. Although policies seem to have improved in recent years, they are still expensive and usually carry a fairly high deductible amount in case of a loss.  

Before buying such a policy, be sure and investigate your options carefully. If your home is properly retrofitted (or built since codes became more rigorous), your need for earthquake insurance has gone down significantly, and some say in this case you have no need for earthquake insurance.  

Larry Guillot is owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and kit supply service. Call him at 558-3299, or visit www.quakeprepare.com.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 4 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

Ballroom Dancing every Friday at 8 p.m. at the Veterans Memorial Building, 200 Grand Ave., Oakland. Live band and refreshments. Cost is $10. 925-934-9129. 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. 548-6310, 845-1143. 

SATURDAY, AUGUST 5 

Victorian House Tour on Angel Island Open just one weekend a year, Sat. and Sun. Tickets are $7-$15. 415-435-3522. www.angelisland.org 

A Vision for Creek Restoration Plans with local officials, environmental groups and community members to promote community-based planning from 1 to 4 p.m. at Parchester Village Community Center, 900 Williams Dr., Parchester Village, Richmond. 415-693-3000, ext 109. 

Farm Stories and Songs Come clap your hands, your paws, or anything you got! Hear some fun songs and stories, then meet the animals at 11 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

“To Bee or Not to Bee” An educational puppet show on the complex society of the honey bee, at 2 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Kids Garden Club for children ages 7-12 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 Area, Tilden Park. Registration is required. Cost is $6-$8. 636-1684.  

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.  

Oakland Heritage Walking Tour of Earthquake Impacts of the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes from 10 a.m. to noon. Meet at the Fire Alarm Building on Lakeside Drive, opposite the Main Library. Cost is $5-$15. 763-9218.  

Walking Tour of Jack London Waterfront Meet at 10 a.m. at the corner of Broadway and Embarcadero. Tour lasts 90 minutes. For reservations call 238-3234.  

Robot Workshop using recycled materials, for children age 5 and up from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Lakeview Branch of the Oakland Public Library, 550 El Embarcadero. Reservations required. 238-7344. 

Learn About Pets with Maggie Yates, Human Education Coordinator for the Berkeley Humane Society at 2 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

Produce Stand at Spiral Gardens Food Security Project from 1 to 6 p.m. at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon St. 

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.  

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755.  

Yoga for Peace Sat. from 9:30 to 11:00 at Ohlone Park, MLK and Hearst St. North Berkeley. Bring a yoga mat, warm blanket, and a peace sign.  

Adult Fast Pitch Softball every Sat at noon. For location call 204-9500.  

SUNDAY, AUGUST 6 

East Bay Peace Lantern Ceremony from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at the north end of Aquatic Park. Decorate lantern shades, fold paper cranes, hear Japanese flute and drum music, watch the lanterns float on the lagoon at sunset. 595-4626. www.progressiveportal.org/lanterns 

Transbay Skronkathon BBQ from 12:35 p.m. on, at 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakland. with live music to 11 p.m. Donations requested. 649-8744. http://acmemusic.com 

Natural History Field Sketching with Tara Reinertson, naturalist, from 9 to 11 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. Bring your pencils and sketchbook. 525-2233. 

Make A Felt Doll Meet our flock of Black Welsh Mountain Sheep, then learn how to turn their wool into a fun felt project. For ages 8 and up. Cost is $7-$12. Registration required. 636-1684. 

Oakland Heritage Walking Tour on Oakland’s Streetcar Heritage from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Cost is $5-$15. Reservations required. 763-9218.  

Free Hands-on Bicycle Clinic Learn how to keep your bike in excellent working condition through safety inspections, from 10 to 11 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Bring your bike and tools. 527-4140. 

East Bay Atheists meets at 1:30 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. Prof. Barbara McGraw will talk on the views of our nation’s founders in the separation of church and state. 222-7580. 

Summer Sunday Forum with Stephen Zunes on current policies of the U.S. at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Spiritwalking: Aqua Chi(TM) at 10 a.m. at the Berkeley High Warm Pool. Cost is $5.50, $3.50 seniors & disabled. Bring your own towels. 526-0312. 

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 

Buddhist Psychology with Sylvia Gretchen on “Loosening the Hold of Fear” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, AUGUST 7 

Talk on Aquatic Park Restoration Learn about the WPA-built lagoons at Berkeley’s Aquatic Park and the egrets, herons, shorebirds, and waterfowl, at 7 p.m. at Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin. 848-9358. www.fivecreeks.org 

National Organization for Women Oakland/East Bay Chapter meets at 6 p.m. at the Oakland YWCA, 1515 Webster St. The speaker will be Mandy Benson, CA NOW, who will discuss Proposition 85, the far right’s latest attempt to restrict reproductive rights. 287-8948. 

“Delaying (or Accelerating) the Degenerative Disease of Aging” with Bruce Ames at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $5. www.hillsideclub.org  

Red Cross Blood Drive 8 a.m to 1 p.m. at Kaiser Permanente, 901 Nevin Ave., Richmond. Call for appointment 307-2721. 

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group for people 60+ years old at 10:15 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Cost is $3. 524-9122.  

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. 548-0425. 

Stress Less Seminar at 6:30 p.m. at New Moon Opportunities, 378 Jayne Ave., Oakland. Free, registration required. 465-2524. 

McGee Avenue Toastmasters meets at 7:30 p.m. at McGee Ave Baptist Church, 1640 Stuart St. 

TUESDAY, AUGUST 8 

Tuesday is for the Birds A tranquil early morning walk in Point Isabel. Meet at 7 a.m. at the Rydin Rd entrance. Bring water, sunscreen, binoculars and a snack. 525-2233. 

“Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity” with author Dan Berger at 7 p.m. at AK Press Warehouse, 674A 23rd St., Oakland. 208-1700. 

”Alien” a screening to benefit the Zapatistas at 9:15 p.m. at Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $7. www.speakeasytheaters.com 

Civil Liberties Film Series “Dissent” from the ACLU “Freedom Files” TV series, with guest speaker Jim Chanin, civil rights attorney, at 7 p.m. at the Richmond Library Community Room, 325 Civic Center Plaza. 620-6561. 

Horray for Herps Meet some unusual animals aboard the Zoomobile of the Oakland Zoo at 11 a.m. at the Elmhurst Branch of the Oakland Public Library, 1427 88th Ave. 615-5727. 

“Backpacking in the High Sierra” A slide presentation with Brandon Andre at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 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. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

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

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 9  

Full Moon Walk at John Miur National Historic Site See nocturnal animal and plant life and walk the same trail John Muir walked with his daughters. For reservations and details of meeting time and location, call 925-228-8860. 

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. 

Cease Fire: Words and Music Against the Siege of Lebanon and Palestine at 7:30 p.m. at La Pena Cultural Center. Donation $10. 849-2568.  

Community Conversations on the Crisis in the Middle East with Molly Freeman of Brit Tzedek at 7:30 p.m. at JGate in El Cerrito, near El Cerrito Plaza and BART. 559-8140.  

“The Day the Earth Stood Still” Science-fiction film from 1951 at 7:30 p.m. at The Fellowship of Humanity, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. 548-9840. 

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

Stress Less Seminar at 6:30 p.m. at 378 Jayne Ave., Oakland. Free, but registration required. 465-2524. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at 6:30 p.m. at the Berkeley BART Station. www.geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, AUGUST 10 

“Citizenship, Civic Activity and Political Engagement” An evening with Steven Hill, Carol Pott, and Arthur Blaustein at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

Predators and Their Prey Meet the animals at 10:15 p.m. at the Lakeview Branch of the Oakland Public Library, 550 El Embarcadero. 238-7344. 

Richmond Southeast Shoreline Area Community Advisory Group meeting at 6:30 p.m. at Richmond Convention Center, Bermuda Room, 403 Civic Center Plaza at Nevin and 25th St. 540-3923. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Tilden Room, MLK Student Union, UC Campus. To make an appointment call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE. 

East Bay Macintosh Users Group meets to discuss Windows on a Mac at 6 p.m. at Expression College for Digital Arts, 6601 Shellmound, Emeryville. www.ebmug.org 

Urban Renaissance High School Open House from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. at 967 Stanford Ave., Oakland. 302-9199.  

World of Plants Tours at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 1 

CHILDREN 

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

Gary Laplow sing-along at 7 p.m. at the Dimond Branch of the Oakland Public Library, 3565 Fruitvale Ave. 482-7844. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Paul Robeson: The Tallest Tree in Our Forest” Tues.-Sat., noon to 5:30 p.m. at The African-American Museum, 659 14th St., Oakland. Exhibition runs to Aug. 26. 637-0199. 

“2006 Digital Printmaking” Exhibition of large format digital prints by the Berkeley City College Multimedia Dept. at Addison Street Windows, 2018 Addison St, through Aug. 31. 525-8247. 

“Form and Light” Photographs by Eric Nurse on display at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park, Tues.-Sun. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. though Aug. 27. 525-2233. 

FILM 

Jewish Film Festival From noon to 10 p.m. at the Roda Theater, through Aug. 5. For complete listings of films see www.sfjff.org. Tickets are $10 and up. 925-275-9490. 

Screenagers “Chain Camera” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

George Lakoff will talk about “Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

Open Mic with Austin Vice featuring Anthoney Pulsipher, at 8:30 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $10. 451-8100.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

Sonny Fortune and Rashied Ali at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200.  

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 2 

FILM 

“Metropolis” German 1927 film on class differentiations in the future, at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. 

Janet Gaynor “The Farmer Takes a Wife” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Dustin Long reads from “Icelander” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

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,  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Roy Zimmerman in “Faulty Intelligence” An evening of satirical songs, Wed.-Fri. at 8 p.m. at The Marsh Berkeley, 2118 Allston Way, through Aug. 24. 800-838-3006. www.themarsh.org  

Whiskey Brothers at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473.  

Ektaa, Indian Classical music and dance, at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Curse of the Zero, Empathy, Hippe Grenade at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8. 848-0886.  

Akosua, Ghanaian-American vocalist, guitarist, composer at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Michael Coleman Trio Jazz Jam at 8:30 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. 451-8100.  

Sonny Fortune and Rashied Ali at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, AUGUST 3 

EXHIBITIONS 

“2006 Digital Printmaking” Exhibition of large format digital prints by the Berkeley City College Multimedia Dept. Sidewalk reception at 6 p.m. at Addison Street Windows, 2018 Addison St. Exhibition runs through Aug. 31. 525-8247. 

“An American Social Landscape” Paintings by Patricia Schaefer. Reception at 4 p.m. at MetroCenter, 101 Eighth St., Third floor, Oakland. 817-5773. 

Paintings by Vivian Prinsloo, South African artist. Reception at 5 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery 2911 Claremont Ave. Exhibition runs to Aug. 13. 848-1228. 

FILM 

Jewish Film Festival From noon to 10 p.m. at the Roda Theater, through Aug. 5. For complete listings of films see www.sfjff.org. Tickets are $10 and up. 925-275-9490. 

Frank Borzage “The River” at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Free screening. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“My America: Mid-century Photography” with Drew Johnson at 6:30 p.m. at The Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. Cost is $6-$8.  

Joe Quirk reads from “Sperm Are from Men, Eggs Are from Women: The Real Reason Men and Women Are Different” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

Larry Everest discusses “Oil, Power and Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda” at 7:30 p.m. at Revolution Books in Berkeley, 2425 Channing Way, under the Sather Gate parking lot. 848-1196. 

Word Beat Reading Series with H.D. Moe, Marsha Campbell and Eli Elijah Le Lys 7 p.m. at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. 526-5985. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Summer Noon Concert with Sara and Swingtime at the Downtown Berkeley BART station. Free.  

Mo’Rockin’ Project, Amam & Friends at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12. 525-5054.  

“Past Present Future” Students of the Ailey Camp perform at 7 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Free, but reservations suggested. 642-9988.  

Keola Beamer, slack-key guitar and vocals from Hawai’i at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761.  

The B-Cups, Placenta at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082.  

Jonathan Richman and Los Nadies at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $20. 849-2568.  

Fear of the Outdoors at 8 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $5. 451-8100.  

Mose Allison at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s. Cost is $10-$20. 238-9200.  

FRIDAY, AUGUST 4 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “Night of the Iguana” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. through Aug. 12. Tickets are $12. 649-5999.  

Aurora Theatre “Permanent Collection” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through Aug. 5. Tickets are $28-$45. 843-4822. www.auroratheatere.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Footloose” at 8 p.m. Fri. and Sat., and Sun. at 2 p.m. at Contra Costa Civic Theater, 951 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito, through August 5. Tickets are $12-$20. 524-9132. www.ccct.org 

Encore Theatre Comapny and Shotgun Players “The Typographer’s Dream” at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through Sept. 3. Tickets are $15-$30. 841-6500.  

Impact Theatre “House of Lucky” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through Aug. 26. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. 

Shotgun Players “Ragnarok: Doom of the Gods” Sat. and Sun. at 4 p.m. at John Hinkle Park, through Sept. 10. Free, with pass the hat donation after the show. 841-6500.  

Woodminster Summer Musicals “The King and I” Fri.-Sun. at 8 p.m., through Aug 13 at Woodminster Amphitheater in Joaquin Miller Park, 3300 Joaquin Miller Rd., Oakland. TIckets are $21.50-$35.50. 531-9597. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Ball & Chain” Pre-marital show for Gretchen Grasshoff and Jordan Mello, reception at 7 p.m. at Boontling Galery, 4224 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Show runs to Aug. 27. www.boontlinggallery.com 

“Catching Ripples” Paintings and sculptures by Eric Helsley and “Those Bucolic Places” paintings by Carol Paquet. Reception at 5 p.m. at Esteban Sabar Gallery, 480 23rd St., Oakland. 444-7411. 

“Sound and Vison II” A group show of works influenced by music. Reception at 7 p.m. at Auto3321 Gallery, 3321 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Show runs to Aug. 13. www.auto3321.com 

“Mercury Rising” A group show of new works by 15 Bay Area artists. Reception at 5 p.m. at Robert Tomlinson Studio, 25 Grand Ave., Oakland. Exhibition runs to Aug. 31. 866-8808. 

FILM 

“Atenco: Rompiendo el Cerco/ Breaking the Silence” with music by Francisco Herrera at 7:30 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Free. 581-7963. 

“Cartography of Ashes” A documentary on the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 at 7 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org.  

“Shaken Not Stirred: Martinis, Music and Mayhem” at 5 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. 

Jewish Film Festival From noon to 10 p.m. at the Roda Theater, through Aug. 5. For complete listings of films see www.sfjff.org. Tickets are $10 and up. 925-275-9490. 

Janet Gaynor “Small Town Girl” at 7:30 p.m. at “Ladies in Love” at 8:50 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Jimbo Trout and the Fish People with Birdlegg and the Tightfit Blues Band outdoor concert at 5:30 p.m. at Park Place and Washington Ave., Pt. Richmond. 237-9375.  

Bay Area Blues Society Concert at 5 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. 

Bolokasa Conde & Les Percussion Malinke concert and doundounda dance party at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15-$20. 849-2568.  

Sage, The Nomad, Two Seconds, The Moanin Dove at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0886.  

Charles Ferguson Latin Jazz Quartet at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373.  

Wylie & the Wild West at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Scott Amendola Trio at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

AJ Roach and Adam Benjamine at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Ten Ton Chicken, Cosmic Mercy at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

Set it Straight, Lifelong Tragedy, Deadfall at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

Translator, Uptones, Penelope Houston and others at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $20-$25. 451-8100.  

Mose Allison at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $10-$20. 238-9200. w 

SATURDAY, AUGUST 5 

THEATER 

Shotgun Players “Ragnarok: Doom of the Gods” Sat. and Sun. at 4 p.m. at John Hinkle Park, through Sept. 10. Free, with pass the hat donation after the show. 841-6500.  

FILM 

Frank Borzage “Lazy Bones” at 6:30 p.m. and Janet Gaynor “A Star is Born” at 8:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Bay Area Poets Coalition holds a memorial for the poet Maggi H. Meyer followed by an open poetry reading, 3 to 5 p.m., at Strawberry Creek Lodge Dining Hall, 1320 Addison St. Park on the street, not in Lodge parking lot. 527-9905. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Coterie Dance Company “My Soul Moves” at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $13 children, $15 adults. 925-798-1300. 

UC Berkeley Summer Symphony at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall UC Campus, Donation $5. 717-2126. 

Larry Stefl Jazz Trio at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. 

Motor Dude Zydeco at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Ba-Tu-Ke at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $12. 849-2568.  

Ken Mahru & David Serotkin at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

The David Thom Band, traditional bluegrass, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Displace at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0886.  

Mark Little Duo at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

The Blue Roots, Naked Barbies at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082.  

Verse, Have Heart, Shipwreck, Hostile Takeover at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, AUGUST 6 

FILM 

Janet Gaynor “Delicious” at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

UC Berkeley Summer Symphony at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall UC Campus, Donation $5. 717-2126. 

Twang Cafe with Dave Gleason’s Wasted Days and Pickin’ Trix at 7:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. All ages welcome. 644-2204.  

Sharon Knight at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Frederick Hodge, international café music at 2 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $8. 525-5054. 

Irene Chigamba & Erica Azim, mbira music from Zimbabwe, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

This is my Fist, One Reason, Hot New Mexicans at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

MONDAY, AUGUST 7 

CHILDREN 

Gary Laplow sing-along at 7 p.m. at the Rockridge Branch of the Oakland Public Library, 5366 College Ave. 597-5017. 

Rafa Cano, Spanish sing-along for children, at 10:30 a.m. at PriPri Cafe, 1309 Solano Ave., Albany. Free. 528-7002. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Last Word Poetry Series with Mary Rudge and Lenore Weiss at 7 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 843-7439. 

Michael Rothenberg and Marat Nemet-Nejat read at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Margaret Emerson reads from “Eyes in the Mirror” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Poetry Express features Jan Steckel, followed by an open mic at 7 p.m. at Priya Indian Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Blue Monday Jam at 7:30 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $5. 451-8100.  

Sophie Milman at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s. Cost is $6-$12. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

An orchestra of marimbas playing “Down in Mexico, Joyous Mexico” ... Drinking Rum Cocos on the verandah of the Hotel Costa Verde, while below, the patrona’s nightswimming with the local boys, and that big lizard’s chafing at the end of his rope, and a hurricane’s brewing up ... 

It’s the scene for Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana, put on by Actors Ensemble of Berkeley in Live Oak Theatre. 

It’s tough being the Reverend Shannon—and he’d be the first to admit it—chased by the freshly widowed patrona, chased by the “child musical prodigy” along for the ride with the Texas Baptist schoolmarms on the tour bus he’s guiding, chased by Miss Fellows, implacable ombudswoman for the vacationing ladies ... and chased by “the spooks,” or Blue Meanies or whatever, the personal Eumenides that have tracked this ex- minister since he was locked out of his Virginia church on a false charge of “atheistical sermons.” Who ever had it like this? And all in a tropical paradise? Not since Gauguin ... 

Mexico as the gringo’s devil in paradise spawned a few other literary mementos of the same vintage as Tennessee’s, which is set in 1940 near Acapulco, but was first staged in the early ‘60s. Williams’ original is practically the only stage rendition of note that comes to mind, capturing a lingering note from The Summer House, sole play by Jane Bowles, wife of Paul. 

At the Costa Verde, Shannon’s the Alpha—or is it Omega?—male, fending off all female comers. The other men are factotums, mere tourists, other tour guides, or the vague, conversational ghost of his old friend, the sport fisherman who owned the hotel, and listened to the erstwhile holy man’s tales of woe when the mood hit, while maintaining a menage of silence with his wife. “Why do you always come here to crack up?” queries the reasonable widow. “It’s the hammock, Maxine, the hammock by the rain forest.” 

But trundling out of the blue, shoving a wheelchair, comes Shannon’s match in the spinsterish shape of the globetrotting granddaughter of “the oldest living practicing poet,” who doesn’t pursue him, but tells him of small acts of love, instead, like the evening in a sampan with the fat, bald and fetishistic shy Australian woman’s undergarment salesman. 

Most of these creatures are at that end of their tether, just like the iguana—except the tourists. At least, they say as much—and admit they’re hustlers. 

Laura Jane Bailey plays Maxine coarse, loud and down-to-earth. Miss Fellows (who’s at the end of her patience, not tether) is the no-nonsense schoolmarm non plus ultra in Virginia Handley’s characterization. Handley also seems to have some real fun alternating as one of the German tourist gargoyles-in-shades, strutting and singing Nature and imperialist songs, or listening, anachronistically, to the Fuhrer’s Reichstag speech on a transistor radio. 

This goes especially ditto for her complement, Richard Dorn, splendidly overbearing as the boisterous Nazi holidayer, but all business when playing Jake, who comes to replace Shannon at the helm of the tour bus. Katie Krueger is a frantic child music prodigy, frank and precocious in her approach to the collarless minister. 

The best turn of all is Margery Bailey as Hannah, Shannon’s “stand-up Buddha,” a self-possessed, prepossessing performance, like the one her character puts in, arriving penniless, with a declaiming, “97-year-young” moribund poet (ably played, or posed, recited—and whined, by Lewis Campbell). Having to act as foil, or counterfoil, to all these over-the-top monsters of ego and want is a tough job, and Bailey does it with poise and characterization as finely shaded as Hannah’s charcoal sketch portraits, hawked to the tourists.  

Jeff Bell cuts a fine figure as bedevilled Shannon, and communicates the irrepressible seediness of a minister-on-the-skids at moments, but doesn’t convey the necessary gravity with the skid that makes Hannah exclaim, “when somebody I respect acts like a small, cruel boy ...” or another remark, “You’re still indulging yourself in your Passion Play performance ... another bit of voluptuous self-crucifixion!” This makes him seem to saw the air, getting loud a bit too often like a frantic Lear trying to outshout the storm.  

Others rush the lines, too, and some of the blocking (and the tussle between Shannon and Maxine) comes off awkwardly. It’s a long play and a temptation to speed it up might be present, but director Eddie Kurtz, an artistic assistant at The Rep, may be responsible for some of these slips, which lose Williams’ syncopated rhythms that slip on a comic banana peel as the masks fall off of even the most seemingly dignified. 

Rose Anne Raphael’s set places the action well, if maybe a little less crumby than the casa should be—a recurrent fault in recent Williams revivals. Tennessee’s is still a great play to go see, unless you’re booked in for Puerto Vallarta or Cabo ... after the show, you may just rush home to cancel. 

NIGHT OF THE IGUANA 

8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays through Aug. 12. $12. Live Oak Theatre,  

1301 Shattuck Ave. 649-5999.  

www.aeofberkeley.org.

In some ways, we humans are educating ourselves about the planet that sustains us the way the owner of a cranky old car educates herself about how cars work: We learn about systems and parts when they break down and we’re forced to figure out why. Partly that’s a matter of perceived urgency that gets grants written and funding done—“pure” research is a delicious notion, but it’s rare that anyone can get the time, facilities, and support to study a matter just because we all get intrigued by it.  

Studies aside, there’s the matter of which things get the attention of the broader public. That attention eventually drives some funding, of course, from foundations with close oversight from nonspecialists. And sometimes several foci come together, and something pops up that nobody had imagined. Sometimes that something is the importance of a known fact or substance, importance that is greater than anyone had assumed. 

Lately there’s been media handwaving and even actual information about carbon sequestration. Five, 10 years ago, how many of us had ever heard the phrase, let alone known what it is or why it matters? It matters because carbon in the air, combined with oxygen as carbon dioxide, is a “greenhouse gas”; that is, when there’s lots of it in the upper atmosphere, it helps create that greenhouse effect that’s destabilizing the weather systems we’ve had for a long time, making the world’s air a bit warmer by trapping solar heat that used to escape. It doesn’t take much, just a few degrees, to get glaciers and polar ice caps melting and ocean temperatures rising and currents changing, including upwellings that feed sea life (and then us) and surface changes that make storms stronger.  

Carbon sequestration is an ecosystem service (another new term: the life-support the world gives us) that helps put the brakes on this career. Plants, in particular, make themselves out of elements including carbon. Remember that thing about how they “inhale” carbon dioxide and “exhale” oxygen? They keep that carbon atom and make it into their flesh. 

As long as they live, they keep the carbon they accumulate out of the air. Imagine how much carbon is in a hundred-foot tree, or an acre of grassland or chaparral. When they die and decay, or burn, that carbon goes back up in real or virtual smoke. When trees are cut down, they stop working, even if the carbon in the lumber stays there for (optimistically) a few centuries. The waste, the sawdust, the trampled understory, starts decaying then and there. 

But there’s more to the forest than the trees.  

Under all that green stuff, way down in the dirt, there’s serious and complicated action going on. Roots are growing, absorbing nutrients from the soil, engaging in the dark half of that great dance of making. Roots are permeable, and so is the whole substance of the forest, or the field, or wherever plants grow.  

Trees and many other plants, when we look closely, aren’t isolated, aren’t independent, aren’t even quite separate entities. They absorb what they need from the soil with the help of the mycorrhizal network, the web of fungi under the surface that lives in symbiosis with many plants. People who garden with native plants and who keep bonsai are finding that a bit of soil from a plant’s original home might inoculate its new one with the right organisms to help the plant flourish.  

Mycorrhizae are performing another ecosystem service that has only recently come to light. The USDA published a report by Don Comis on work by Sara F. Wright and Kristine A. Nichols that suggests that a substance called glomalin, discovered by Wright in 1996, does indeed glom onto quite a lot of carbon—27 percent of the carbon in soil. It binds organic matter to mineral particles in soil. It also forms soil clumps—aggregates—that improve soil structure and keep other soil carbon from escaping. 

Glomalin is produced by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (order Glomales, hence the name) on plants’ roots, from carbon they trade for other nutrients and water. The fungi produce glomalin, apparently to seal themselves and gain enough rigidity to carry the stuff across the air spaces between soil particles. The fungi grow only on the newest root tips; the glomalin sloughs off the dissolving older hyphae and stays in the soil for seven to 42 years.  

There are ways like no-till farming to encourage glomalin production, but keeping a piece of ecosystem intact in its original form seems to keep the stuff in the soil in greatest amounts. Yet another reason to keep our collective hands off, to avoid breaking what we don’t understand well enough to fix.  

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

See the forest for the trees? A lot of “ecosystem services” take place underground, out of sight.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 1 

Tuesday is for the Birds A tranquil early morning walk through Claremont Canyon. Meet at 7 a.m. at 7173 Norfolk Rd., Oakland. Wear long pants and bring water, sunscreen, binoculars and a snack. 525-2233. 

“Obsessed with the Nose: Climbing El Capitan” with Hans Florine at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

“Watershed Wildlife: From Macroinvertebrates to Mammals” A workshop to explore animal life in and out of a creek, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Arroyo Viejo Recreation Center, 7701 Krause Ave., Oakland. Cost is $25. Pre-registration required. 665-3546. 

National Night Out A community discussion on the drugs and violence that plague our community,From 6 to 9 p.m. at McGee Ave Baptist Church, 1640 Stuart St. 843-1774. 

Adoption and Foster Care Information Workshop from 7 to 9 p.m. at Alta Bates Hospital. Free, but reservations required. 553-1748, ext. 12. 

Discussion Salon The U.S. and World Economies at 7 p.m. at 1414 Walnut by Rose. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers meets at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm. 524-9992. 

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

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 2 

Berkeley Path Wanderers Explore Berkeley’s would-be state capitol. Meet at 10 am at Northbrae Church, Los Angeles and The Alameda. www.berkeleypaths.org  

“Be Wise: Prevent Scams, Fraud and Identity Theft” with Elder Financial Protection Network and SAIF and Assemblymember Loni Hancock at 10:30 a..m. at Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. RSVP if you would like to attend. 559-1406. 

Wild Animals of the Bay Area Meet the animals at 3 p.m. at the Melrose Branch of the Oakland Public Library, 4805 Foothill Blvd. 535-5623. 

Family Lawn Bowling Lessons from 5 p.m. to dusk at Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club, 2270 Acton St. 841-2174. 

“New to DVD Series” will screen “Transamerica” at 7 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

American Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation from 10 a.m. to noon in Oakland. For more information, phone Anne at 594-5165.  

“Metropolis” German 1927 film on class differentiations in the future, at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton 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 and a warm hat. 548-9840. 

JumpStart Networking Share infromation with other entrepreneurs at 8 p.m. at A’Cuppa Tea, 3202 College Ave. at Alcatraz. Cos tis $10. 652-4532. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6:30 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. 848-1704.  

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 

THURSDAY, AUGUST 3 

East Bay Vivarium An introduction to insects, lizards, amphibians and reptiles at 11 a.m. at the Brookfield Branch of the Oakland Public Library, 9255 Edes Ave. 615-5725. 

Alameda County Community Food Bank Celebration and Information from 1 to 4 p.m. at First Baptist Church 534 22nd street, Oakland. 635-3663, ext. 354. 

“Surfing for Life” A documentary on active surfers in their 70s, 80s and 90s, at 1:30 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave.526-3720. 

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755.  

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. at Spud's Pizza, 3290 Adeline at Alcatraz. jstansby@yahoo.com 

FRIDAY, AUGUST 4 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

Ballroom Dancing every Friday at 8 p.m. at the Veterans Memorial Building, 200 Grand Ave., Oakland. Live band and refreshments. Cost is $10. 925-934-9129. 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. 548-6310, 845-1143. 

SATURDAY, AUGUST 5 

Victorian House Tour on Angel Island Open just one weekend a year, Sat. and Sun. Tickets are $7-$15. 415-435-3522. www.angelisland.org 

A Vision for Creek Restoration Plans with local officials, environmental groups and community members to promote community-based planning from 1 to 4 p.m. at Parchester Village Community Center, 900 Williams Dr., Parchester Village, Richmond. 415-693-3000, ext 109. 

Farm Stories and Songs Come clap your hands, your paws, or anything you got! Hear some fun songs and stories, then meet the animals at 11 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

“To Bee or Not to Bee” An educational puppet show on the complex society of the honey bee, at 2 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Kids Garden Club for children ages 7-12 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 Area, Tilden Park. Registration is required. Cost is $6-$8. 636-1684.  

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.  

Oakland Heritage Walking Tour of Earthquake Impacts of the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes from 10 a.m. to noon. Meet at the Fire Alarm Building on Lakeside Drive, opposite the Main Library. Cost is $5-$15. 763-9218.  

Robot Workshop using recycled materials, for children age 5 and up from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Lakeview branch of the Oakland Public Library, 550 El Embarcadero. Reservations required. 238-7344. 

Learn About Pets with Maggie Yates, Human Education Coordinator for the Berkeley Humane Society at 2 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

Produce Stand at Spiral Gardens Food Security Project from 1 to 6 p.m. at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon St. 

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.  

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

Yoga for Peace Sat. from 9:30 to 11:00 at Olone Park, MLK and Hearst St. North Berkeley. Bring a yoga mat, warm blanket, and a peace sign.  

Adult Fast Pitch Softball every Sat at noon. For location call 204-9500.  

SUNDAY, AUGUST 6 

East Bay Peace Lantern Ceremony from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at the north end of Aquatic Park. Decorate lantern shades, fold paper cranes, hear Japanese flute and drum music, watch the lanterns float on the lagoon at sunset. 595-4626. www.progressiveportal.org/lanterns 

Natural History Field Sketching with Tara Reinertson, naturalist, from 9 to 11 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. Bring your pencils and sketchbook. 525-2233. 

Make A Felt Doll Meet our flock of Black Welsh Mountain Sheep, then learn how to turn their wool into a fun felt project. For ages 8 and up. Cost is $7-$12. Registration required. 636-1684. 

Oakland Heritage Walking Tour on Oakland’s Streetcar Heritage from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Cost is $5-$15. Reservations required. 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org 

Free Hands-on Bicycle Clinic Learn how to keep your bike in excellent working condition through safety inspections, from 10 to 11 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Bring your bike and tools. 527-4140. 

Summer Sunday Forum with Stephen Zunes on current policies of the U.S. at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Spiritwalking: Aqua Chi(TM) at 10 a.m. at the Berkeley High Warm Pool. Cost is $5.50, $3.50 seniors & disabled. Bring your own towels. 526-0312. 

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, AUGUST 7 

Talk on Aquatic Park Restoration Learn about the WPA-built lagoons at Berkeley’s Aquatic Park and the egrets, herons, shorebirds, and waterfowl, at 7 p.m. at Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin. 848-9358. www.fivecreeks.org 

National Organization for Women Oakland/East Bay Chapter meets at 6 p.m. at the Oakland YWCA, 1515 Webster St. The speaker will be Mandy Benson, CA NOW, who will discuss Proposition 85, the far right’s latest attempt to restrict reproductive rights. 287-8948. 

“Delaying (or Accelerating) the Degenerative Disease of Aging” with Bruce Ames at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $5. www.hillsideclub.org  

Red Cross Blood Drive from 8 a.m to 1 p.m. at Kaiser Permanente, 901 Nevin Ave., Richmond. Call for appointment 307-2721. 

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group for people 60+ years old meets at 10:15 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Cost is $3. 524-9122.  

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. 548-0425. 

Stress Less Seminar at 6:30 p.m. at New Moon Opportunities, 378 Jayne Ave., Oakland. Free, but registration required. 465-2524. 

McGee Avenue Toastmasters meets at 7:30 p.m. at McGee Ave Baptist Church, 1640 Stuart St. 

ONGOING 

Energy Saving Program for Residents CYES is running its 7th annual summer program, providing direct-installation of CFLs, retractable clotheslines, showerheads, and more. Services available in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond. Free. 665-1501. 

Child Care Food Program is available without charge to all children enrolled in The Berkeley Unified School District, Early Childhood Education progam, based on income eligibility guidelines. Please call for details 644-6358. 

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tues., Aug. 1 at 5 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil