Editorials

There’s plenty of blame to go around in the Berkeley Housing Authority situation. A friend of a friend took a job there briefly a few years ago, after a successful career at similar agencies elsewhere, and left quickly after describing the organization to my friend as “sneaky, underhanded and dysfunctional.” An elderly tenant whose rent is supplemented with a Section 8 certificate says that her landlord successfully claimed that she hadn’t paid her rent when she actually had, and therefore he collected double rent for at least several months. Others complain that even though they had Section 8 certificates they were never able to get into Berkeley apartments because vacancies always went to friends of staff.  

Kriss Worthington has been complaining about injustices on behalf of tenant constituents for the whole 10 years he’s been in office, but could rarely get solutions. And such problems probably go back even farther than that.  

I myself tried to help a disabled friend find a place to live when he was being evicted perhaps six or seven years ago. My quest took me to the office of then City Manager Weldon Rucker, where the door was always open to citizens with grievances. When the Housing Authority came up, Weldon just shook his head. “I’m putting Steve Barton on it,” he said, “but if Steve can’t fix it, we’ll have to do something else.” Well. it turns out Barton is no Hercules—he hasn’t been able to clean up the mess at the Berkeley Housing Authority in the time he’s been there. The agency turns out to be even worse than the Augean Stables which the Greek hero tackled.  

That said, there’s absolutely no excuse for City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque’s bizarre memo last week attacking not only Barton and the agency staff (most of whom he inherited with the job) but also City Manager Phil Kamlarz and Deputy City Manager Lisa Caronna, all for not always following her advice to the letter. It’s obvious that at the end of this process Barton dropped more than one ball as the agency spun out of his control, but any experienced manager will tell you that if your subordinate fails, it’s really partly your own failure for putting someone in a job they couldn’t do. In that sense no one on the city staff should be let completely off the hook, including Kamlarz and Rucker and, even more egregious, their predecessor James Keene. But the real culprits are any and all of the City Council members and all the mayors involved over at least the last 15 years: Tom Bates, Shirley Dean and Loni Hancock.  

And, of course, the city attorney for all that period, Manuela Albuquerque herself, who watched the City Council doing double duty sitting as the Housing Authority for all these years, with perfunctory monthly meetings, some lasting no more than 10 minutes, allowing serious irregularities to be repeatedly swept under the rug. In what is sometimes vulgarly referred to as a CYA memo, she said last week that “at many successive junctures, city management at every level failed to follow legal advice on how to identify and rectify the full scope of the serious and growing operational problems at the BHA. Had they taken the legal advice, it might have been possible to avoid the current crisis.” But the list of lapses she provided to support this accusation, some substantial but many minor, were clearly not disagreements with legal conclusions but demonstrations of what happens when management is in over its head.  

It’s never the lawyer’s job to substitute her own managerial judgment for that of the client. Albuquerque might sincerely feel that she could do a better job than the current managers—after all, she had applied for the job Caronna eventually got. But her own current job is to advise, not to castigate or execute. And it is absolutely never appropriate for anyone, manager or attorney, to go public with scathing accusations about specific employees, not even if they’re true: not about Kamlarz, Caronna or Barton, and most emphatically not about the easily identified people referred to as “interim director” and “temporary help” in Albuquerque’s flaming memo. There are lawsuits galore just waiting to happen over this.  

And almost every person in Berkeley who’s ever passed the California Bar (and there are a lot of us, practicing and non-practicing) can recount other instances where Albuquerque’s legal calls, usually made on behalf of powerful interests, were very shaky. Ask, for example, once-and-current attorney Anna de Leon, now in the process of suing the city of Berkeley because of special favors granted, with Albuquerque’s blessing, to Patrick Kennedy’s Panoramic Interests regarding the Gaia Building. Or the three Landmark Preservation Commissioners (I was one of them) who filed suit because they were bumped from LPC deliberations on Temple Beth El’s building project on specious legal grounds not invoked in any other case before or since. Or the ACLU, which was forced to take the city of Berkeley as represented by Albuquerque to court to prove a simple proposition that anyone who’s taken constitutional law ought to know: government can’t make laws which restrict the content of speech, even if the speaker is just a dirty panhandler. These are only a few instances from a very long list in a very long history of questionable legal advice dispensed during Albuquerque’s tenure, now more than 25 years, possibly longer than that of anyone she now blames for the city’s many problems. 

When Tom Bates was running for mayor, one of his top advisors, an excellent attorney, told me and others he was sure Albuquerque would be gone if Bates was elected. At least one council candidate, now a member of the mayor’s voting bloc, said the same thing. Didn’t happen—why?  

A roguish citizen suggested to me, only half in jest, that the city attorney might be Berkeley’s own J. Edgar Hoover, keeping files of discrediting details about everyone in city government both hired and elected, so that they are afraid to tangle with her. It will be interesting to see whether her current campaign to re-position herself as whistle-blower and manager-wannabe will succeed or fail.