Opinion

In the last few days we’ve heard about a lot of crime in the area near our South Berkeley office. Our neighborhood association has reported at least three nearby hold-ups in broad daylight, and a frequent correspondent in the adjacent Temescal area has sent us a letter (in this issue) about a frightening unprovoked assault on a pedestrian by a gang of young teens who didn’t even appear to be looking to rob the victim. -more-

Just a bit of weeping and gnashing of teeth accompanied the interrupted consummation of the apparent deal between local politicians and the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce last week. Mayor Bates and some council allies made a vigorous show of enacting new laws aimed at getting untidy people out of shopping districts, seemingly in return for the Chamber Political Action Commitee’s cash contributions to their re-election campaigns, but in the end nothing was enacted except concept statements, and everyone knows the devil’s in the details. -more-

PRO-MASS TRANSIT, -more-

Parking in the Elmwood hangs by a tenuous thread. The proposed retail complex to be housed at the old Wright’s Garage near Ashby and College will have no on-site parking, and the only requirement owner John Gordon must meet is to try to provide parking. He doesn’t even have to try very hard! -more-

Our community, in particular, South Berkeley, is experiencing a gnawing anxiety about the apparently unstoppable will of Verizon/Nextel to install throughout South Berkeley a cell phone antenna net. This is an expression used in the cell phone industry and now also part of the accepted and incorporated lingo of our city planning department staff. -more-

The supporters of closed borders and deportations are not a fringe minority. Millions—including a majority of “liberal” elected officials like our California senators—favor the policy of walling off the United States at the Southern border. I visited the border last month. I talked with a few of the people deported from the Sonora desert of Arizona. I saw the bottoms of their feet torn to shreds after walking day and night in the desert sun and sand, and heard of beatings and humiliation at the hands of the private militarized Wackenhut company under contract with Homeland Security. Eight people were known to have died in the desert during four days I was there. One of the men we talked with was a San Francisco chef who had had to return home to the Yucatan for family affairs. Another was a peasant woman from Morelos the soles of whose feet I had to cut off because they were just dead separated skin. She cannot survive in Mexico because U.S. imports have financially ruined Mexico’s peasant agricultural base. Is this the kind of investment that letter writer Robert Gable believes will help get the Mexican economy back on its feet—the dumping of subsidized surplus US corn and other commodities on the Mexican market under NAFTA? -more-

IMMIGRATION -more-

A giant backyard redwood tree is felled on the summer solstice. Former California Gov. Ronald Reagan once was quoted as saying, “If you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all.” This was back in the 1960s, I believe, when there was a strong environmental movement to save many of the remaining pristine groves of the Coast redwood tree (Sequoia sempervirens) in Northern California from impending cutting. Thousands of acres of prime native habitat dominated by these towering giant trees were eventually saved. Several weeks ago one of my neighbors told me that a landowner several properties down the street had applied for a permit to cut down our local landmark redwood tree, which dominates our block. It is probably over one hundred feet high and is possibly one hundred years old. I called the telephone contact number on the public notice that was posted on the telephone pole and after leaving a couple of messages and waiting a couple of days (this is in Oakland, the city that seemingly has much trouble doing much of anything right and/or in a timely fashion…), and was told that, yes, the owner had applied for a tree-cutting permit because its roots were beginning to affect his duplex’s foundation. -more-

In this, the “Year of Health Care Reform” in California, it’s ironic that the governor in his May Revise would fail to fund a reimbursement rate increase for providers of some of the most cost-effective preventive health care in the state. The cost of such an increase—$24 million—is just a speck of the overall $104 billion state budget—especially compared to the cost of doing nothing. -more-

Although I sent an e-mail to all the Berkeley City Council members and the mayor, opposing the planned bar/restaurant at Ashby and College, it took your June 19 editorial dated to alert me to the stealth disregard of the Neighborhood Commercial Preservation Ordinance that citizens of the Elmwood worked tirelessly to get passed. The variance granted by the Zoning Adjustments Board, specifically so a watering hole can dispense hard liquor in a neighborhood that clearly opposes it, is more of the same that we are getting from the mayor and those who support his vision of asphalting all open spaces and denying the needs for parks and playgrounds in districts that need them. -more-