Public Comment

Recent Daily Planet stories on Association of Bay Area Governments housing quotas, transit-oriented developments, so-called “affordable housing,” “inclusionary housing,” and, most egregious of all, “Sustainable Berkeley” are all just local manifestations of the Agenda 21 policy document. Agenda 21 was adopted at the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development, by more than 170 nations in 1992. President Clinton implemented this document in the United States by executive order with no congressional debate or involvement. Since the adoption of this policy, all across the country’s local councils, “visioning councils,” “working groups,” “charrettes,” et al have been set up with no voter input and have been given the power to transform communities using “smart growth,” transit-oriented developments (TOD), “transit villages,” “urban growth boundaries,” “traffic calming,” and “pack ‘em and stack ‘em” government housing projects which are built by private developers who get preferential development agreements with local government subsidized by your tax dollars.  

The overriding principles are that single family homes and the automobile are to be slowly eliminated and urban living near to mass transit is to become the norm—nothing more, nothing less than the “Europization” of America. Only the most wealthy elite will be able to have homes with any surrounding land and private property will eventually become a thing of the past as it, as the automobile, is deemed “unsustainable.” In the past, high density “affordable” (government) housing” has been built in New York, Chicago and other large cities and become the ghettoes of today; many of these “projects” have been torn down due to crime and uninhabitable living conditions. 

“Central planning,” our controllers of today, claim that the public consensus is that land use should be controlled. They use scare tactics and phony population projections to justify their unconstitutional power over our lives and ability to own and use private property. The Bay Area’s regional government entity, ABAG relies on population projections from their own hired consultants to justify the housing quotas they impose on local communities. Patti Dacey’s recent letter to your paper entitled “Housing Quotas” rightly states “ABAG’s manipulations of these civic virtues [to build “affordable housing and provide decent public transportation] to demand the degradation of our quality of life is reprehensible.” Ms. Dacey is correct but there is little that can be done because local elected government is fast becoming a thing of the past and is being replaced by unelected appointed regional government bodies and councils that have vast power over the way we live. As with Sustainable Berkeley, the average citizen will be completely shut out of the process and large amounts of grant money will be spent for vague and high sounding purposes with no accountability to the citizenry. 

In his piece entitled “Agenda 21 and the United Nations,” Henry Lamb, writer and executive vice president of Eco-Logic states: 

“Agenda 21 is a 300-page, 40-chapter, ‘soft-law’ policy document adopted by the delegates to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The document is not legally binding; it is a set of policy recommendations designed to reorganize global society around the principles of environmental protection, social equity, and what is called “sustainable” economic development. At the heart of the concept of sustainable development, is the assumption that government must manage society to ensure that human activity conforms to these principles.” 

Some excellent downloadable pamphlets on the benign sounding concept of “sustainable development” can be found at the Freedom 21 Santa Cruz website, www.f21sc.net. These pamphlets should be given to every public official to alert them to the overriding schemes they are implementing or to—at the very least—let them know you are on to what they are up to. 

“Sustainability” as mandated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, is based on their stated belief that: “Humanity’s collective imperative now is to shift modern society rapidly onto a sustainable path or have it dissolve of its own ecologically unsustainable doings." In fact, the concept of “sustainability” rests on the false belief that the world is on the fast track to destruction and will soon run out of non “renewable” resources. In his excellent book entitled A Poverty of Reason: Sustainable Development and Economic Growth,” author Wilfred Beckerman of the Independent Institute in Oakland refutes the concept of sustainable development and demonstrates that government interference actually creates the problems it purports to solve.  

Redevelopment is another tool used by planners to usurp local land use authority. In my small unincorporated community of El Sobrante I became aware of the virtual takeover of the major corridors—by a large redevelopment plan including the power of eminent domain—when I was elected to the Municipal Advisory Council in 2002. Massive public opposition has so far caused Contra Costa County officials to back off of their original plan, but now they are “updating the general plan” of the same area included in the El Sobrante redevelopment plan. This is nothing more than an end run around redevelopment and will result in the same tightly controlled land use policies that would have come about had the original redevelopment plan been implemented. 

I urge the citizens of Berkeley to hang tough and oppose “transit villages,” “affordable housing” projects, and small business-busting, planning monstrosities such as the “North Berkeley Plaza.” Try to attend the “Sustainable Berkeley” meetings and hold the bureaucrats accountable for their plans for your city. 

Marilynne Mellander is a 37-year resident of El Sobrante, and is the coordinator of saveelsobrante.com, a property rights activist, and a member of Municipal Officials for Redevelopment Reform (MORR).