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Back in the darker ages of Berkeley City Council history—before Berkeleyans Organizing for Library Defense (SuperBOLD) threatened a lawsuit last year—citizens hoping to speak to their elected officials at the public comment period would fill out a card a clerk would throw into a contraption with cards from all the other hopeful speakers. The city clerk would spin the device and choose 10 cards.  

Only these 10 people would be permitted to speak. 

Prodded by the threatened litigation, Mayor Tom Bates abandoned the lottery system and began experimenting with various formats in order to let every person speak to the council who wishes to, as is required by the Ralph M. Brown Act, according to SuperBOLD attorneys from the First Amendment Project. 

Now Councilmember Kriss Worthington is calling for the experimenting to stop—the rules for public comment vary slightly at various council meetings—and to put the new rules into law. 

Other topics on tonight’s council agenda include the city budget, designating Berkeley’s transit corridors as “priority development areas” and adopting a pilot residential parking plan for the south-of-campus area. Before the regular meeting, the council will hold a 5:30 p.m. workshop on the city’s sustainability efforts. 

Codifying public comment 

If adopted, the new rules would: 

• Allow the mayor to adjust the time speakers would have to address the council: when there are five or fewer speakers, each can talk for two minutes each; when there are six to nine speakers, the mayor can ask each to speak for 1.5 minutes, and when there are ten or more speakers, the time would be reduced to a minute. 

• Allow public comment on items not on the agenda immediately after action on the consent calendar. 

• Mandate that all people be allowed to attend the public meetings; if the venue is too small, the meeting should be adjourned to a larger venue.  

“I think the public has a right to know ahead of time what the rules are,” Worthington said. “Having rules that keep changing and evolving is confusing. I don’t think any one person should be able to change the rules.” 

A few weeks ago, City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque told the Daily Planet she was concerned that the large number of public speakers caused the council meetings to go too late. (She said she didn’t think adding more meetings to the council schedule would help.) 

But Worthington said public comment should be a priority. “Listening to the public is one of the most important things a councilperson does,” he said. 

Adopting Priority Development Areas 

Mayor Tom Bates is also urging the council to adopt “priority development areas,” designating locations along traffic corridors as appropriate for future development. 

In adopting the policy, “the council is not committed to requesting funding for or approving any project,” the mayor wrote in his report to the council. 

The urgency for the council to adopt the PDA quickly, Bates says, is so that, if the senate and assembly pass pending legislation, the city would be able to submit applications to the Association of Bay Area Governments/Metropolitan Transit Commission by the June 29 deadline. 

The areas targeted would be along Telegraph, University, San Pablo, South Shattuck avenues and Adeline Street as well as downtown. The Planning Commission approved a similar recommendation last week. 

Pilot parking for Southside 

Councilmembers Gordon Wozniak and Kriss Worthington are proposing a pilot parking policy whereby one side of the street in the Telegraph Avenue area would be parking for residents only and the other side would allow two-hour parking for transients and long-term parking for residents who have a sticker indicating they are residents. 

The area that would be designated is Dwight Way on the north, College Avenue on the east, Derby Street on the south and Telegraph Avenue on the west. 

Sustainability workshop 

The city runs some 80 programs with a combined $27 million budget that supports environmental sustainability, including greenhouse gas reduction, zero waste goals, environmentally preferable purchasing policies, watershed protection and more.  

“Sustainable development focuses on improving the quality of life for all of the Earth’s citizens without increasing the use of natural resources beyond the capacity of the environment to supply them indefinitely,” wrote former Housing Director Stephen Barton in a report that will be before the council tonight. 

“This will be first in a series of workshops on sustainability,” Energy Officer Neal De Snoo told the Daily Planet on Monday.