Editorials

In the mail this week, a flood of glossy brochures, soliciting votes for the upcoming election. If you’re confused by them, you’re not alone. 

Case in point: the one mailed with “Issel for School Board” as its return address. On the front: a photo of candidates Issel, Riddle and Hemphill, wearing yellow “Yes on A” t-shirts, accompanied by (and wearing a matching t-shirt) Tom Bates. Maybe you didn’t know that Tom was running for school board? Or that the mayor of Berkeley in general couldn’t control school spending? Or maybe you thought that the other two school board candidates also supported Measure A? 

Inside, toothy photos of all four plus cute pictures of kids. 

And on the back, on a big yellow square:  

On Nov. 7, vote for our children’s future!  

3YES on A.  

3 Mayor Tom Bates.  

BERKELEY SCHOOL BOARD: 3Karen Hemphill 

3Shirley Issel 

3Nancy Riddle. 

You might be excused for thinking that the supporters of Measure A have also endorsed Bates for mayor and are backing the three other candidates listed.  

This does no good for Measure A. The obverse conclusion is that if you don’t like Bates, you should vote against A. Tying what should be a non-partisan vote on a tax measure to partisan city government politics, or for that matter to selected school board candidates in a contested race, does immeasurable harm to the measure’s chance of passing.  

Bates’s opponent Zelda Bronstein is also a strong supporter of Measure A. Since it needs a two-thirds majority the measure will need her voters as well as his, and there’s just no reason to alienate them.  

And in fact, it looks like those chickens are coming home to roost. The board of the North East Berkeley Association has just come out against Measure A, as have the neighborhood association umbrella groups BANA and CNA. Others who have some reason to dislike Bates (or the three School Board candidates) will be tempted to vote no on A too. 

You can’t really tell who manufactured this particular dirty little piece. It lists the addresses of all four candidates in microprint on the bottom of the back page, but also has, in large print, www.BerkeleyMeasureA.org. But this website says nothing about Measure A supporters’ endorsements for mayor or school board, though it does list some of the politicians who endorse A, among them Bates and ex-Mayor Shirley Dean, but not (significantly or oversight) Bronstein.  

This technique is one we’ll see more of in the next few weeks. My guess, if I were forced to guess, would be that if we could trace the funding for this mailer, the link would go back to Tom Bates’ campaign war chest. It’s traditional in California politics, particularly with the Sacramento crowd where he and his friends have been hanging out, to try to grab the coattails of the person or program that’s likely to be a winner. In Berkeley, school taxes are more popular than motherhood or apple pie, both of which have many local detractors.  

But we’ll never be able to trace it, of course. Last week we learned that the much vaunted Berkeley Election Reform Act is not worth the yellowing paper it was written on back in the idealistic early seventies. In the course of trying to track the nefarious activities of the Chamber of Commerce political action committee Business for Better Berkeley and the various hats it hides under, we discovered that BERA is full of loopholes ready to be exploited by old pros like Bates. A 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Buckley v. Valeo, severely limited government ability to control campaign spending, as did subsequent cases following it. The Berkeley city attorney panicked and excised from BERA any provisions she thought might not follow Buckley, and as a result it’s as full of holes as a hunk of Swiss cheese.  

It’s likely that in the next couple of weeks, and especially in the last week before the election, we’ll be seeing a lot of last minute hit pieces with murky provenance like this one. Even if sponsors might eventually claim authorship, it now won’t have to be until after the election, since the first reporting period has come and gone. The second one isn’t over until October 26, and there are plenty of chances for late filing with few penalties. Business for Better Berkeley PAC had its hand very lightly slapped by Berkeley’s Fair Campaign Practices Commission for transgressions in the 2000 election. In the 2002 election BBG turned $8500 of its proceeds over to the organization which was the precursor of Livable Berkeley, the pro-development lobbying group, with no need to account for the source of the funds. They paid for some effective last-minute hit pieces against Measure P, a height limitation measure opposed by the development industry. The thousands of dollars collected at BBG’s Sept. 21 fundraiser this year have yet to be reported, but it’s a sure bet that this kind of money is destined to be funneled into some kind of last minute propaganda piece released under shadowy auspices. Measure J, re-enacting the Landmark Preservation Ordinance, is one likely target. 

Here’s what the Planet can do to help with this problem: Anyone who gets any kind of suspect hit piece in the waning days of the campaigns should send it immediately to us by mail to 3023A Shattuck Ave. (or if it’s in the last couple of days before the election, bring it by our offices). We’ll scan it and put it on the web as a PDF file, and we’ll give the “hittee” a chance to respond either on our website or in our print edition if time allows. If everyone in Berkeley who cares about good government functions as a collective truth squad, we might let a little sunshine into this election.  

THE DAILY PLANET  

ENDORSES: 

Mayor: Zelda Bronstein 

District 1: No endorsement 

District 4: Dona Spring 

District 7: Kriss Worthington 

District 8: Jason Overman 

Measure A: Yes 

Measure I: No 

Measure J: Yes 

More to come...