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The one-story building with a wooden facade at 1505 Shattuck Ave., targeted for demolition and a proposed mixed-use development by its owner, has sparked controversy in North Berkeley. Photograph by Michael Howerton.
The one-story building with a wooden facade at 1505 Shattuck Ave., targeted for demolition and a proposed mixed-use development by its owner, has sparked controversy in North Berkeley. Photograph by Michael Howerton.
 

News

Landmarks Commission Considers Demolishing Squires Block Building

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday July 03, 2007

Controversy is mounting over a proposed use permit and an application to demolish a one-story commercial building in the historic Squires Block in North Berkeley which was submitted for review to the Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC). 

Neighbors say that 1505 Shattuck Ave. is a historic structure which shouldn’t be demolished, while its owners cite a former landmarks decision to refute its right to protection. 

A public hearing is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the North Berkeley Senior Center, when residents can comment on the demolition proposed to permit construction of a new 4,820-square-foot, two-story, mixed-use building at 1505 Shattuck. 

The building is one of three owned by upscale clothing store Earthly Goods owner Allen Connolly on the Squires Block. 

Other buildings at the site include a single-story commercial building at 2106-08 Vine St., a two-story commercial building at 2100 Vine St. (Earthly Goods) and a single-story storage building which would be demolished as part of the project. 

Since the buildings are over 40 years old, the application was forwarded to the Landmarks Preservation Commission in March 2005 to consider the historical significance of the buildings proposed for demolition. 

The commission designated all of the Squires Block as a city structure of merit, while indicating in particular that the buildings at 2100 and 2106-08 Vine St. were of historic interest, but not the one at 1505 Shattuck Ave. 

1505 Shattuck could be “altered or demolished without prejudice for a new contextual store/residential building,” the designation stated. 

The structure of merit designation said that the Squires Block had architectural value as a reconstruction (which was done in 1979-1980) of a “splendid example of a Queen Anne two-story Victorian store building in its original location.” 

Berkeley residents Harry and William Squires set up North Berkeley’s first drug store at 2100 Vine Street. It also served as the location of North Berkeley’s first branch Post Office for almost 60 years. 

At one point, the Berkeley Unified School District used the second floor for students, to relieve overcrowding while it sought funds for new schools. 

According to the landmark application, the original store at 2100 Vine was a single establishment which split into two separate stores by 1919, both opening into Vine Street.  

It was later turned into one large store and has been the site of Earthly Goods since 1979. 

The commission’s designation stated that the main building, with characteristics such as an enlarged 1902 footprint, restored towers and original mansard detail with scalloped shingles and second-story bay windows, was a “visual reminder” of the original architectural character of the neighborhood. 

2104-8 Vine St. is a contributing structure at the site which first appears on the 1950 Sanborn map. Toward its rear end is a low brick storage shed which appeared in 1929 and 1950 marked as “Dry Cleaning.” 

Located at the southeast corner of Shattuck and Vine, the single story flat-roofed building at 1505 Shattuck is believed to have been constructed as part of the 1979 work done at the Squires Block. 

Although building permits are missing from the city files, the landmark application states that “the construction at 1505 Shattuck is of 1970s style.” 

According to a posting on the Northside Neighbors Association listserve by Daniella Thompson, who publishes berkeleyheritage.com for the Berkeley Architectual Heritage Association and is a freelance writer on historic architecture for the Planet, the Sanborn fire insurance maps illustrate that 1505 Shattuck has existed as an address since 1911 and that it appears in the 1929 and 1950 editions of the maps. 

The 1929 and 1950 maps, Thompson said, show 1505 Shattuck as a “very small store adjacent to a larger store at 1503 Shattuck.” 

Thompson concludes that the “building’s facade has changed more than once,” leading the LPC to determine that the “building has lost its historic integrity.” 

Thompson said that portions of the building could be historic and, if so, should be preserved. “It would be a good idea to investigate it,” she said. 

Owner Connolly, in an e-mail to the community in June, denied that the building was historic and described it as being “a late 1950s concrete block structure with a redwood veneer applied to the front 27 years ago by him.” 

Other area residents remained skeptical about the demolition and want more information about the proposed development and accommodation for a possible increase in parking. 

 

Berkeley High School old gym 

The LPC will consider landmarking the Berkeley High School (BHS) gymnasium at 1920 Allston Way Thursday. The public hearing was closed at the May 3 meeting.  

Landmark commissioners failed to reach a consensus at the June 7 meeting, with a motion to declare the 85-year-old structure a landmark failing on a 4-3-1 vote. 

A minimum of 5 votes is required for granting landmark status.  

The gym is home to the warm water pool—a lifeline for the East Bay’s disabled community—which the school district plans to demolish according to its South of Bancroft master plan 

The BHS South of Bancroft project, which was approved in January, includes tearing down the old gym and building a combination of classrooms and exercise rooms. The stadium on the football field will be rebuilt and the parking lot inside the grounds will be torn down, with the resulting space used only for athletic purposes thereafter. 

 

 

 


UC Illegally Buried ‘Thousands Of Truckloads’ of Toxic Soil In Richmond, State Says

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday July 03, 2007

UC Berkeley and a Swiss multinational must clean up thousands of truckloads of toxic-laden soil illegally buried at the Richmond site of a planned 1,330-unit housing complex, state officials ordered Friday. 

“What we had feared has been verified,” said Assemblymember Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley, Richmond). “It confirms my fears and the fears of the neighbors, which have been shown to be terribly correct.” 

Much of the contaminated earth and cinders buried at Campus Bay came from the adjacent, university-owned Richmond Field Station, according to a pair of certified letters sent to the university and AstraZeneca. 

The letter to UC Berkeley and the Swiss agro-pharmaceutical conglomerate from Charlene Williams, chief of the Department of Toxic Substances Control’s (DTSC) Enforcement and Energy Response Program for Northern California, outlined the violations. 

She also ordered the university and AstraZeneca to begin to establish “within 15 days of receipt of the Summary of Violations” a schedule for removing and treating thousands of truckloads of contaminated soil from a site where 1,330 homes had been planned atop a small mesa of contaminated earth. 

Much of that soil had been transferred there from the university’s adjacent Richmond Field Station. 

The order confirms the suspicions of local activists like Ethel Dotson and Sherry Padgett, who had charged that another state agency had bungled its oversight of a massive cleanup at the sites between 2002 and 2004. 

That effort was overseen by the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, which has since ceded control to the DTSC. 

University officials had argued against the transfer of regulatory oversight, demanded by local activists in part because the water board has no staff toxicologists—scientists trained in evaluating hazardous substances and their treatment—while the DTSC is well-equipped with the experts. 

“The university and AstraZeneca both said things were fine. Now we know that was incorrect. They were not doing just fine,” said Hancock, who said that at least 3,000 truckloads had been illegally buried at the site. 

Padgett said the total could be even larger. 

Alleged violations cited by the DTSC for both the university and AstraZeneca include: 

• Treatment of hazardous waste without a permit; 

• Disposal of hazardous waste at an unauthorized point; 

• Shipment of hazardous waste to an unpermitted facility; 

• Storage of hazardous waste without a permit or authorization, and 

• Transfer of custody of hazardous waste to an unauthorized trucking firm. 

Two other allegations were lodged solely against AstraZeneca:  

• Failure to submit hazardous waste shipment manifests within 30 days and 

• Failure to properly characterize hazardous wastes 

Among the contaminants cited were organic compounds—PCBs and perchlorethylene (PCE)—as well as the hazardous metals mercury, cadmium, arsenic, zinc, copper and selenium. 

 

Penalty issue 

While no penalties are specified, the violation notices state that nothing in the letters would “preclude the DTSC from taking administrative, civil or criminal action as a result of the violations.” 

Padgett, an activist with Bay Area Residents for Responsible Development (BARRD), worked next to the sites during the massive cleanup locals dubbed “the big dig.” 

While praising DTSC for ordering the removal of the contaminated earth, Padgett asked, “Do they pay a penalty, or are they going to be allowed to negotiate their way out of it?” 

Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin agreed. “What was upsetting was that there was no penalty issued for putting our people at risk,” she said. 

One of the early advocates of a handover of regulatory oversight from the water board to DTSC, McLaughlin did hail the letters as a positive step. 

“At least the DTSC is rising to the task of identifying what went wrong,” she said. “They need to be very clear in their instructions to both keep the community safe and make sure there are no more negative impacts” on the environment. 

“It’s an opening that allows the right kind of dialog to take place.” 

McLaughlin made the long history of contamination of both sites and a call for regulatory oversight a central issue in her election to the City Council in 2004. She was elected mayor last year. 

Padgett and McLaughlin are two members of the Community Advisory Group (CAG) established by DTSC to monitor the cleanup at the site, which is being supported in part by funding from Cherokee-SImeon negotiated by BARRD attorney Peter Weiner. 

The group continues to question the adequacy of information provided by the university, which recently declined a request to attend a meeting of the group’s toxics committee. 

CAG Chair Whitney Dotson, who grew up in Parchester Village, a segregated housing development near the site, said he hoped the DTSC would maintain a rigorous follow-through. 

“I am concerned because the university has been able to make things disappear if they’re done quickly enough,” he said. 

 

Contaminated past  

Both sites along the Richmond shoreline southeast of Marina Bay had been targeted for massive development, despite century-long legacies of chemical manufacturing using highly toxic substances. 

The easternmost Campus Bay site housed a chemical manufacturing complex from 1897 to 1997, which included among its products a variety of agricultural poisons and fertilizers as well as other compounds. Some uranium processing also occurred, though just how much remains unclear. 

Just to the northwest, the university’s Richmond Field Station (RFS) had been the site of a plant that manufactured explosives and ammunition using a compound of mercury, a toxic metal. 

Further complicating the picture was the disposal of wastes from the chemical plants at Campus Bay site on the property now occupied by the RFS. 

Much of the wastes came in the form of cinders from iron pyrites, fool’s gold processed at the chemical plants for the manufacture of sulfuric acid. The cinders contain a range of hazardous metals. 

A 1,331-unit condo and apartment complex had been planned for Campus Bay by Cherokee-Simeon, a joint venture of Bay Area developer Simeon Properties and Cherokee Investment Partners, a company which bankrolls projects on reclaimed hazardous waste sites.  

Those plans are currently on hold. 

 

University plans 

UC Berkeley had partnered with Simeon Properties to transform much of the Richmond Field Station—located between Campus and Marina bays—into a corporate and academic research park dubbed Bayside Research Campus. 

Plans called for between 1 million and 1.5 million square feet of new buildings on 70 of the field station’s 152 acres to provide a focus for joint ventures between university scientists and the corporate world. 

Research parks are an increasingly common feature of universities which are turning to corporate alliances to capture revenues from patents to replace the dwindling share of college pasts paid for by taxpayers. 

During a February, 2005, Richmond City Council meeting which ended in a vote calling for DTSC oversight, Mark B. Freiberg, director of the university’s Office of Environmental Health and Safety, told councilmembers the school was quite happy running its own RFS cleanup under Water Board supervision and urged a vote against the resolution calling for the regulatory handover. 

Freiberg repeated almost word-for-word the statement in an earlier email to the council from university public relations Director Irene Hegarty, which claimed the RFS had been included in the council resolution only because of its “confusion” with Campus Bay—a point McLaughlin refuted. 

The council then voted unanimously to ask the state Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees both agency, to hand jurisdiction over both sites to the DTSC—which became official on May 13, 2005, thanks in part to the efforts of Hancock, who had convened a legislative hearing at RFS to examine both sites. 

According to the university’s April, 2004, call for developers, “the development of the site will be targeted to those University-related or private sector entities involved in industrial, scientific, or technological research.” 

Though construction had been planned to start in July 2006, the change in regulatory oversight and subsequent reevaluation by DTSC forced the university to table its development plans. 

 

Critical period 

All of the actions cited by the DTSC occurred between 2002 and 2004, when most of the buildings at the AstraZeneca were demolished, ground into powder and buried at the site. 

Work was also underway simultaneously at RFS, with the university conducting its own cleanup under the water board’s supervision. 

According to the DTSC, the university used at least nine trucking companies which didn’t possess the required state hazardous waste handling registrations: American Pacific, Baires Trucking, Chapman Trucking, G.A. Grau, Hernandez Trucking, L&M Express, Mark Dross Trucking, Marzette Transportation and Remedial Transportation. 

According to the letter sent to Greg Haet, the companies weren’t registered for all or part of the time they were hauling wastes from the site. 

Only one such violation was charged to AstraZeneca, the use of Marchbanks trucking, which was unregistered when it hauled two loads of hazardous waste in August, 2002. 

Some of the violations charged to AstraZeneca included burial of more than 2,000 of truckloads of improperly treated waste from the university site beneath the capped site where the housing development was planned. 

Just what will happen to the waste remains an issue. 

Padgett says she is concerned because the material has been intermixed at the site with the product of other excavations, including digs conducted in the shoreline marsh at the Campus Bay site. 

“How could they ever identify it again? It’s all mixed together,” she said. 

Most of the RFS soils were contaminated with metals above the levels allowed for storage beneath the mesa at Campus Bay, 350,000 cubic yards of earth and cinder capped with a thin layer of mixed cement and paper. 

Most of the waste had originated at the plants formerly located at Campus Bay rather than the university site’s mercury-based explosives plant. 

AstraZeneca bears responsibility at Campus Bay because it was the last operator of the plants there. The site is currently owned by Cherokee-Simeon, which had planned the housing project—which consisted of high-, mid- and low-rises. 

Because of volatile hazardous chemicals on the site, the proposal had called for fans beneath some of the buildings to blow away any accumulating toxins, as well as garages on the ground floors of many of the structures. No plants could be grown for human consumption of the site’s soil. 

The Campus Bay cleanup was conducted by LFR Levine-Fricke, an Emeryville multinational firm specializing in toxic waste cleanups. 

James Levine, formerly a principal in LFR Levine-Fricke, is now a developer, planning to build a casino/resort complex at Richmond’s Point Molate, another site with a history of contamination dating to its past as a U.S. Navy refueling station. 

Levine had left the firm prior to the cleanup. 

The cleanup plan, formulated while he was still with the firm, cost AstraZeneca only about $20 million by calling for burial of treated wastes at the site, rather than hauling them off to a licensed hazardous waste disposal facility. 

That plan initially saved the chemical conglomerate an estimated $80 million of the $100 million it had budgeted for the cleanup. 

Noting that the letters DTSC sent were primarily concerned with events at the field station, Padgett said she hoped more action would be coming from the agency addressed to events at Campus Bay.


Lawyers Question UC Stadium Settlement Offer

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday July 03, 2007

While UC Berkeley may have offered to downsize a planned parking structure northwest of Memorial Stadium, opposing lawyers say that’s not enough to derail the lawsuits holding up construction of a new high-tech training gym. 

Furthermore, the offer—floated through a statement to donors by University Athletic Director Sandy Barbour—wasn’t presented to at least two of the attorneys in the suits, said two of the lawyers now suing the university. 

According to Barbour, in a message last month to donors, the offer would “drastically reduce the size of a new parking lot under Maxwell Field,” which would only replace spaces lost to construction in the area without adding new slots. 

Lawsuits by the city, two groups of tree supporters and the Panoramic Hill Association seek to block university plans to build a $125 million gym along the west wall of Memorial Stadium, the site of a grove of coastal live oaks. 

The university’s proposal would reduce the total number of spaces in the underground lot planned for construction beneath Maxwell Family Field from 911 to 500. 

Michael Lozeau, attorney for residents of Panoramic Hill said his clients might be interested in discussions if the university “took a pencil to the SAHPC and phases I, II and III” of construction of the so-called Southeast Campus Integrated Projects (SCIP). 

Those projects include the Student Athlete High Performance Center (the SAHPC), a 186,000-square-foot high tech gym to be built at the site of the stadium grove currently occupied by tree-sitters protesting their planned demolition. 

The university picked a contractor to build the gym on March 28, Hunt Construction Group, which specializes in building sports facilities. 

University officials picked the firm after Alameda County Superior Court Judge Barbara J. Miller had ordered a halt to any construction activities at the site pending the outcome a hearing on the lawsuits scheduled for Sept. 19. 

“We haven’t seen anything,” said Stephan Volker, the environmental law attorney whose clients include three groups, Berkeley City Councilmember Dona Spring and other individuals. 

Volker and Lozeau said the university is legally obligated to present any settlement offer to all the parties in all the lawsuits. 

“I don’t think it’s a real offer. They can’t settle without our consent,” said Volker, “and we’re in this for the duration. I expect to take it all the way to the Supreme Court.” 

Another action was filed by Friends of Tightwad Hill, representing fans who will lose their free views from an expanse of hillside about the stadium’s east wall, which will be blocked by raised seating. 

The SCIP projects include the gym and parking structure, a major new building that will provide offices and a common area for meetings of the law and business schools, and a major retrofit of the stadium itself, including the addition of a press box and luxury sky boxes for big ticket donors about the western wall. 

The plans also include permanent night lights, a bone of contention with residents of the hillside above. 

While a settlement of the city’s earlier lawsuit challenging the university’s Long Range Development Plan 2020 blocked most new city lawsuits challenging university projects, the SCIP plans were specifically excluded. 

Another contention by Barbour—that a university-funded seismic study of the gym site proved it is safe for new construction—has also been challenged by the opposing lawyers, including Berkeley City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque.


Out-of-State Groups Fund Term-Limit Opposition

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Tuesday July 03, 2007

A former Oakland Assembly-member running for outgoing State Senator Don Perata’s District 9 Senate seat says she doesn’t believe that a term limits initiative will pass next February, allowing Perata to run again. 

Meanwhile, Perata’s charge that a recent term limits initiative-related complaint filed against him with the California Fair Political Practices Commission by a California organization is actually the work of “an out-of-state group” appears to be backed up by filings with the state and online documents uncovered in a Daily Planet investigation. 

State Senate President Perata (D-Oakland) was first elected in 1998 in the aftermath of the resignation of former Congress-member Ron Dellums and the election of former District 9 State Senator Barbara Lee to replace Dellums. California’s term limitation law should have ended Perata’s Senate career in 2004, but a favorable California attorney general’s opinion opened a loophole that allowed Perata to serve a third term. The law currently terms Perata out at the end of the 2008 legislative year, but an initiative on the California February presidential ballot would allow the Oakland State Senator and a handful of other veteran Sacramento legislators to serve one more term. 

Former District 16 Assemblymember Wilma Chan (D-Oakland) and current District 14 Assemblymember Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley) have both announced their intention to run for Perata’s District 9 Senate seat in the June 2008 Democratic primary. 

Last week, Chan said by telephone that while she would like to see term limits extended, she does not believe the February initiative will pass. 

“I was termed out [of the Assembly] before I was ready to leave, so I’d like to see some leeway with the law,” Chan said. “But there have been several recent attempts to overturn term limits at the ballot box, and none of them has succeeded. So the likelihood of passage is not high.” 

Asked if that meant she was proceeding forward with the 2008 Senate election as if term limits will not be extended and Perata will not run, Chan said, “pretty much.” 

But asked if she would drop out of the race if Perata is able to run for re-election, Chan was more equivocal. “I haven’t thought much about that,” she said. “I would have to meet with Senator Perata, as well as talk it over with my own followers, before I made a decision.” 

Assemblymember Loni Hancock’s Chief of Staff, Hans Hemann, had earlier said flatly that Hancock would not run for the District 9 seat if Perata is able to run for a fourth term. 

Chan has been down this road before. In 2004, while still in the Assembly, she was an announced candidate for Perata’s termed-out seat until Perata received the favorable Attorney General’s opinion allowing him to run again. Following Perata’s re-entry into the State Senate race that year, Chan backed out. 

There was other news last week that might or might not have an effect on the February term-limit initiative vote. 

On Friday, the Sacramento Bee and the Oakland Tribune were reporting that a group calling itself the California Term Limits Defense Fund filed a complaint with the California Fair Political Practices Commission asking that the commission investigate allegations that Perata had extensively used election campaign money for his own personal use. 

The complaint referenced allegations that originally surfaced in a May 23 Bob Gammon story in the East Bay Express. 

The Tribune article quoted Bob Adney, director of the California Term Limits Defense Fund, as accusing Perata of using campaign money “as his own personal slush fund.” 

The Bee quoted Perata as saying that the complaint had been filed by “an out-of-state group” that “want[ed] to kill any effort to change term limits.”  

An official with the Fair Political Practices Commission said the commission had “received it and it is under review by the commission staff.” 

In the complaint, provided by e-mail by Adney, the Term Limits Defense Fund Director” requests the FPPC to investigate and commence civil or administrative action against State Senator Perata for his illegal use of campaign funds for personal expenses. In the interim, the undersigned requests the FPPC to initiate action for an injunction compelling State Senator Perata to cease and desist violating the PRA.” 

The complaint continues: “Attached to this letter as Attachment ‘A,’ is a list of expenses reported by Senator Perata and his various controlled committees having occurred in the past five years which appear to present personal rather than political expenses. … Attachment ‘A’ is merely a highlight on an entire list of expenditures the undersigned alleges were personal appropriations paid for by funds from Senator Perata’s various controlled committees. The full list of expenditures is found attached to this letter as Attachment ‘B.’ It is each and every expenditure listed in Attachment B for which the undersigned is filing a formal complaint against Senator Perata, and for which the undersigned requests the FPPC to investigate and commence civil or administrative action.” 

Attachment B, included as a link to the Friday Flash Report post, appears to be a list of campaign donors identical to that posted on the East Bay Express’ 92510 blog on May 23 in connection with the newspaper’s Perata campaign expenditure story. 

A review of online documents left the impression that the Defense Fund has a limited history in California, and extensive roots in other parts of the country. 

Filings with the California secretary of state’s office show that the Defense fund was originally formed as the Committee For Real Term Limit Reform, then changed its official name to the California Term Limits Defense Fund. On Friday, immediately after news reports appeared linking the group to a Fairfax, Virginia-based organization called Term Limits America PAC, an amended filing appeared on the Secretary of State’s website showing that the group had changed its name again, to the “California Term Limits Defense Fund Sponsored by the Term Limits America PAC with help from Advocates Of Term Limits.” Other Secretary of State filings by the group amplify that financial relationship to the Term Limits America PAC,” with the group calling itself the “California Term Limits Defense Fund sponsored and major funding by Term Limits America PAC.”  

A filing with the Secretary of State’s office in early June showed that the only contribution the California Term Limits Defense Fund has received is $50,000 from the Virginia-based Term Limits Defense Fund. 

Shortly after he was hired as director of the California Term Limits Defense Fund, in an early June interview in Jon Fleischmann’s Flash Report [http://www.flashreport.org/], a California Republican blog, Bob Adney indicates that his experience in political action comes entirely outside of the Golden State. “I started my involvement in politics while in High School,” Adney says. “A teacher ran for mayor in Poughkeepsie, New York and I worked for her campaign. She was a Republican running in an overwhelming Democratic city and she won handily. It was a great experience and I realized then that I had been bitten by the political bug. I left New York and graduated from the University of Maryland. While in college, I volunteered and worked on numerous campaigns. I've worked in races on New York, Maryland, and Nevada. One of the political highlights of my career was running a state Senate campaign in Nevada in which a 20-year incumbent was unseated in a huge upset. I've also worked for the Nevada Legislature and on two initiative campaigns last year in Nevada.” 

The California Term Limits Defense Fund lists only a treasurer, Kelly Lawler of Willows, California (Glenn County, near Sacramento). Lawler shows up as treasurer on a number of Republican and conservative campaign committees including the Protect Our Homes Coalition that supported the Proposition 90 zoning law initiative in 2006 (its largest donors in the first quarter of 2006 were the Fund For Democracy of New York at $1.5 million and Montanans in Action at $600,000), and OCPAC, which supported conservative Republican Congressional candidates in the 2006 general election. 

 

**** 

The California Term Limits Defense Fund and its parent organization, the Term Limits America PAC, as well as the Term Limits America front man, Howard Rich, appear to be part of a complex interweaving of national conservative political action and funding organizations whose foundations and interconnections bloggers and newspapers have been trying, unsuccessfully, to unveil. 

From the Sept. 26, 2006 Sunlight Foundation website, a poster named “Mrs. Panstreppon” describes some of those organizations and their leaders: 

“Jackson Stephens … is the chairman and vice-president of Club For Growth.Net. Stephens also is the secretary and Howard Rich is the president of the Club For Growth State Action. 

“[The National Association for Workers And Employers Rights] [an anti-union organization] is headed by Richard Quinn Jr., a former South Carolinian state legislator whose father is Richard Quinn, a controversial political consultant who numbers John McCain among his clients. 

“William A. Wilson is NAWER's treasurer. Wilson serves as a director or officer for numerous conservative not-for-profits, often alongside Howard Rich. A partial list of some of those organizations: US Term Limits, US Term Limits Foundation, Term Limits America PAC, America At Its Best, Council For Responsible Government, Parents In Charge (formerly Legislative Action Drive), SocialSecurityChoice.org, and SocialSecurityChoice.org Foundation.” 

From the Center for Public Integrity in an Oct. 27, 2006 article by Josh Israel: 

“Reading the mountain of news stories about him this year, you’d have every reason to think that Howard Rich’s pockets—at least when it comes to his favorite political causes—are plenty deep. Many stories have suggested, for example, that Rich may have poured more than $10 million into ballot initiatives that will be put to voters on November 7. 

“’The property-rights movement, as it is known, has a major new benefactor—Howard Rich, a wealthy libertarian real estate investor from Manhattan,” The Washington Post recently reported. “He has spent millions—estimates run as high as $11 million—to support initiatives that will appear on ballots throughout much of the West. 

“But … reports filed with the Federal Election Commission from 1980 through October 2006, in fact, show only $190,050 in … contributions from Rich. More than a third of that amount went to two political groups that are connected to Rich’s own organizations. Over the years Rich has given a total of $25,500 to Term Limits America PAC [emphasis added], which is registered at the same address in Fairfax, Virginia, as William A. Wilson, a political consultant who’s an officer of at least five organizations that Rich leads.” 

From the July 6, 2006 BOREGASM blog on that year’s attempted term limitation initiative on the Oregon ballot: 

“Oregon has long been a laboratory for cranky zillionaires to perfect their electoral Frankensteins. The amount of money that pours into the state over “local” issues is often astonishing. So, while the focus is on the term limits crowd, what is happening is, in many ways, typical of the manner in which home rule is being poisoned by out-of-state money—and, as Follow The Money notes, over 90 percent of all races are decided by who has the most money. The voting part seems to have less and less to do with it. 

“Well, never fear. US Term Limits (and their PAC Term Limits America, founded and funded by Howard Rich) is willing to drop six figures any time that the Usual Suspects ask. And, as in 2004 (and 2002, 2000, 1998, 1996, 1994 and 1992), the vast majority of all monies have come from shadowy right-wing contributors from out of state. 

“As of the May 2006 campaign finance filing date, the Oregon Term Limits group [recorded] a donation of $5000 for legal fees … from “Americans for Limited Government” which has the same address as “US Tax Limits”—which is unsurprising, since both are chaired by the same gentleman, Howard Rich (no pun intended) who also serves on the Board of Directors of the (Libertarian) CATO Institute in Washington, D.C. ... Rich, a wealthy real estate developer, lives in New York.  

“… [T]he entire Oregon state donation to the $156,497.25 term limits war chest has been $947.23 (or 0.00605 or 0.6% of the total for the campaign thus far).” 


Zoning Board Rejects South Berkeley Cell Phone Antennas

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday July 03, 2007

A group of South Berkeley residents won a close victory Thursday when the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) voted 5-4 to reject a use permit application by Verizon Wireless and Nextel Communication for 11 cell phone antennas atop the UC Storage building at 2721 Shattuck Ave., following a second remand from the City Council in May. 

The decision, which came close to midnight, stated that ZAB was “unable to make the necessary finding based on substantial evidence that the towers were necessary to provide personal wireless service in the coverage area, since service is currently being provided and since no evidence has been presented that existing service is not at an adequate level.” 

The proposal, which was first remanded to ZAB by the City Council on Sept. 26, 2006, had raised health concerns among the neighbors. 

Citing the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which prohibits local governments from rejecting wireless facilities based on health concerns as long as the stations conform to Federal Communication standards, the council had asked ZAB to make a decision based on third-party engineering review, parking concerns and illegal construction instead of health. 

ZAB voted 6-3 to deny the construction of 18 cell phone antennas at the Jan. 30 board meeting. Both Verizon and Nextel appealed to the City Council and a public hearing was held in May. 

City attorney Manuela Albuquerque sent ZAB a confidential memo before the hearing last Thursday which said that a rejection of the Verizon application would be a violation of state and federal law. 

Board member Terry Doran, who voted for the project, inadvertently disclosed the contents of the memorandum to the public while speaking about the application. 

Corey Alvin, applicant for Nextel Communications, and a former member of the Berkeley Planning Department, told the board that Nextel had been receiving complaints from its customers. 

“What bothers me is the placement of the towers,” said board member Sara Shumer. “How can you [speak about] the necessity of one area when there are other areas which have insufficient coverage?” 

“The way the service providers decide to build antennas on a particular site is through customer complaints,” Alvin said. “Alta Bates and the Berkeley Unified School district use our phones and call us about dropped calls and unclear reception. ... We need coverage in the commercial corridors of Shattuck Avenue. If we are not receiving complaints from people in the hills it’s because they are not using our service up there.” 

Board vice chair Rick Judd asked him why the antennas couldn’t be scattered on the roofs of schools and businesses that had poor reception. 

“That’s not the case at all,” Alvin replied. “There is lots of criteria for an appropriate site ... including adequate height and willingness of the landlord to rent out a place.” 

The UC Storage building is owned by Patrick Kennedy, one of Berkeley’s largest developers. 

“Money isn’t involved in this?” asked board member Jesse Anthony. 

“I am not sure I understand your question,” Alvin replied. 

Verizon also cited outreach done through postcards sent to Berkeley residents to be returned to demonstrate local support of the proposed towers. 

“We are trying to show that there are people in Berkeley who support this,” said Paul Albritton, counsel for Verizon Wireless. 

“There really is hard evidence which shows that down the line cell phone lines will not work when there is a congestion.” 

Michael Barglow, a South Berkeley resident, said he analyzed the data contained in the postcards that had been submitted as evidence for the need for cell phone antennas and came to a different conclusion. 

“Out of the 96 postcards, 50 percent complained about service in the Berkeley hills and North Berkeley,” he said. “40 percent listed no problem. Only ten postcards mentioned any part of South Berkeley. And these complaints could have come from multiple sources, not including cell phone antenna-related issues, for example, a need for a software upgrade or the need for a newer phone.” 

Laurie Baumgarten, another resident, said that community members would not be intimidated by the phone corporations or their lawyers. 

“It is obvious to most of the people I speak with that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is unconstitutional,” she said. “It makes it likely that a neighborhood will lose its legal case if it brings up health issues. If having to pretend and testify that the emperor is wearing clothes when he is really naked is not a muzzling of my free speech, then what is? We need Thurgood Marshalls in charge, not Manuela Albequerques.”  

“DDT has been around for a long time and it took us a long time to figure out what it did to us,” said ZAB member Anthony. “I cannot vote for this when is community living in the neighborhood are not fine with it.” 

Board member Bob Allen described the opposition to the towers as generational. 

“The city is behind other cities in the Bay Area,” he said. “The popularity of landlines has decreased since 2005. The number of cell phone users has gone up from 2.7 million to 3.1 million. The age group that is using the phones is moving very fast. The city is going through a major change and Berkeley is not keeping up with it.” 

“I don’t believe there is any need to watch dogs on skateboards from YouTube,” said area resident Tim McGovern, citing a recent iPhone ad. “Increased cell phone service is not at all necessary in our neighborhood.” 

If Verizon and Nextel appeal ZAB’s decision, the City Council will discuss the issue later this month and decide on a date for a public hearing in September. 

 

U-Haul violation 

ZAB found the U-Haul business at 2100 San Pablo Ave. in violation of its use permit and recommended to the City Council that the permit be revoked. 

U-Haul was granted a permit in 1975 to operate a truck and trailer rental business which allowed it to store 20 trucks and 30 trailers on the lot.  

According to the staff report, U-Haul has consistently violated its permit by storing more than 20 trucks on its lot and has also used on-street parking spaces to store its trucks. 

Complaints to ZAB from neighbors include parking violations, trashing and rash driving by U-Haul employees. 

U-Haul contends that the use permit does not limit it to storing 20 trucks on the site or prohibit it from using the public right of way to store the excess trucks.


The Declaration of Independence

Tuesday July 03, 2007

IN CONGRESS,  

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America 

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. 

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. 

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. 

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. 

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. 

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. 

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within. 

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands. 

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers. 

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. 

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. 

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. 

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power. 

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: 

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us: 

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States: 

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: 

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: 

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury: 

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences: 

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies 

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: 

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. 

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us. 

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. 

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation. 

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands. 

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. 

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. 

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends. 

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. 


MKThink to Hold First Community Workshop for People’s Park

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday July 03, 2007

A discussion and visioning workshop on the future programs and design of People’s Park will be held next week by MKThink, the San Francisco-based consultants hired by UC Berkeley to develop a plan to improve the park. 

The workshop is part of the “needs assessment” phase which follows the completion of the “discovery” phase. 

MKThink has been part of more than 40 meetings with individuals and groups which have included park founders, community gardeners, neighborhood organizations and UC Berkeley staff. 

A workshop held on Sunday will feature discussions of the people, programs, places and design concepts that will make the park safer, welcoming and more widely used by community members. 

“So far we have only had smaller group meetings and interviews,” said Irene Hegarty, director of community relations for UC Berkeley. “This is an effort to bring the community together to understand what they want. We will definitely have more workshops later if there is a demand for it.” 

Although some park users remain skeptical about the workshops, they are willing to attend them. 

“While paid architect consultants to the university can hardly be considered unbiased nor in the spirit of People’s Park, I believe it will be good for those of us who use and appreciate People’s Park to participate in these sessions,” said Berkeley naturalist Terri Compost in a e-mail to the Planet. 

Compost will be organizing a grassroots visioning day along with community members during the beginning of September. 

“That will be open to all without having to RSVP,” she said. “If anyone wants to help organize this event, please contact me.” 

Thursday’s workshop is scheduled to be held at the Berkeley YMCA (2600 Bancroft Way) from 7 to 9 p.m. The Sunday workshop be held from 1 to 3 p.m. at the First Church of Christ Scientist (2619 Dwight Way). It requires registration at MKThink, but community members can also sign up at People’s Park itself. 

“It’s on a first-come first-served basis,” Hegarty said. “We would ideally like to have groups of 20 to 25 people engage in some hands-on discussion. If more people want to attend, then we could try to sign them up as well. We want to hear about the changes people want. Some want more public performances and others want better facilities for children.” 

Hegarty added that most of the members from the People’s Park Advisory Committee had signed up. 

“We are not getting into anything specific at this time,” she said. “It’s only at a conceptual stage.” 

“For example, we will not be talking about putting a fountain in the middle of the park,” said committee co-chair John Selawsky who plans to attend the workshop. “What’s important is to get input from folks. To identify what people want to see or not see there. I know a lot of people want to see an increase in activities for children and students.” 

The entire process is scheduled to wind up by the end of October.  

“Even if the university decides to move forward at that point, more work would have to be done. We are not moving forward with any preconceived notions. It’s pretty open-ended.” 

Initial findings from the “Discovery” phase indicate a universal desire for the area to remain a public park as opposed to redevelopment of any kind, even in the public interest. MKThink’s project progress report states that community members are keen to preserve the park’s history and celebrate the more “unique spirit of human nature and expression.” 

According to Hegarty, the planning process has proceeded well so far. 

“People have participated in the meetings so far. There has been interest, but not wild interest,” she said. “Sometimes, we have had to seek out people. I guess it’s because it’s summer and a lot of people are away.”


The Comforts of Home at the Sutter Hotel

By Al Winslow
Friday June 29, 2007

You can find a Sutter Hotel in many cities. Go where the last wave of redevelopment has passed through and see what’s left standing. 

The hotel is seven stories high and 80 years old. A thousand scars have been endlessly painted over. The faucet handles in the room sinks often don’t match. But the rooms are clean and large and the walls are thick, built before the invention of fiberglass. 

It’s the toughest building on the block, tougher than the Oakland Federal Building that looms across the street. 

The hotel survived the big earthquake in 1989 that fatally damaged many residential hotels in downtown Oakland. 

Charlie, the hotel custodian and its institutional memory, said the old, thick walls also are filled with metal. Frank, who has lived at the hotel for 30 years, said there was a lot of alarming shaking that left a long crack across the front wall in the lobby. 

Police and firemen evacuated the hotel but let residents back in after a few hours, Frank said. “People in other hotels were moved to fancy places like the Holiday Inn and got expensive free meals. We got to come back here,” he said, not sounding too displeased. 

After the earthquake and much urban-renewing, operating residential hotels were reduced to 27 in downtown Oakland and along San Pablo Avenue where it runs into Emeryville, according to a 2004 report by the Oakland Community and Economic Development Agency. 

The hotels have 2,240 rooms to rent—not enough. From 85 percent to 95 percent of the rooms are rented out at any time. Hotel managers estimate that 20 percent of their tenants were “substance abusers,” but this is a pretty loose number. 

“Although ... hotel managers and police officers continue to complain of drug activity, prostitution and disruptive behavior ... police records confirm that disturbances of the peace are common at some hotels but do not support the complaints about drug activity and prostitution,” the report said. 

Regardless, many hotel operators are nervous about their customers. They hunker down in semi-darkness in lobby offices behind reinforced-looking glass. Sometimes there’s no light at all and you are talking to a voice coming out of pitch blackness. 

Mike, a resident and employee at the Sutter, said I missed an extreme case, a hotel where the front desk was defended by jail-type iron bars. 

Mike works for the Sutter as a driver of the hotel’s unusual elevator, which is at the heart of the hotel’s eccentric security system. 

The elevator is also very old, operated by a handle moved back and forth, requiring the operator to aim it at each stop to make it level with the floor. 

It used to have regular call buttons but they “disappeared in the mists of time,” according to Charlie. 

Users call the elevator by tapping their room keys on the glass front of the elevator shaft. Tim, who has driven the elevator for eight hours virtually every day for eight years, says he often can tell who is waiting by the style of the tapping. He has settled into a routine, reading almost a whole paperback novel on every shift, never raising his voice, and knowing most everything that goes on in the hotel. 

A crowd of tappers can collect and everybody piles into the elevator, which isn’t very large and is slowed by the weight. (Charlie says the elevator is expensive to maintain. Its parts must be specially milled by a company that mills parts for old elevators.) 

After a while, you have encountered almost everyone and after a longer while you know them and gradually become entangled in the community. 

I lived there for eight months. Shortly before I left, a tenant died from an illness in a nearby room. The guy apparently knew a lot of people. There was a sizable gathering outside his door—friends, relatives, children, staff people—awkwardly trying to be helpful. 

It wasn’t exactly a memorial service. But sort of.


Berkeley Lab Wins Federal Biofuel Grant

By Richard Brenneman
Friday June 29, 2007

Berkeley’s bid to become the biofuel research capital of academic and corporate America scored another major advance Tuesday, winning funds to start a second lab. 

U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman awarded $125 million to a coalition headed by the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) to create one of three national bioenergy research centers. 

Funds will target development of genetically modified plants and microbes to transform cellulose—the basic building block of plant walls—into fuels. 

The ultimate goal is to create energy independence, with the nation reaping its harvest of crops grown on American soil. 

While the project is separate from the $500 million Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) funded earlier this year by BP (the company once called British Petroleum), the newly funded Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) features many of the same scientific players—and both are headed by Jay Keasling, a chemical engineering professor and entrepreneur. 

The announcement was met by criticism from some researchers. “It is very disconcerting to see such an overwhelming concentration of research in the hands of scientists whose ideas are not only wrong but dangerous,” said Ignacio Chapela, a UC Berkeley plant microbial ecologist and a leading critic of the increasing ties between the corporate and academic worlds. 

 

Washington announcement 

Bodman made the formal announcement to reporters gathered at the National Press Club. LBNL’s Keasling stood alongside the Bush Administration cabinet officer as one of three winning project directors. 

All three centers will focus on genetic engineering as a way to create new crops along with new microbes and newly discovered enzymes to design a more efficient process for converting plants into fuels for cars, trucks and airplanes. 

Keasling say he hoped that the Joint BioEnergy Institute—or JBEI, “jay-bay as we call it”—would trigger the start of a new wave of green biotechnological industry in the Bay Area and across the country. 

The Berkeley scientist will lead a partnership headed by his lab in partnership with the Berkeley-affiliated Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories along with UC’s Berkeley and Davis campuses and Stanford University. 

While Bodman said he was barred from saying just how many applications he had received for the three slots, applicants were narrowed to a list numbering “in the teens,” with the winners picked by an international panel of scientists, technologists and figures from the corporate and non-profit realms. 

The Bioenergy Science Center is the name for the winning project for a lab to be led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Other partners are Georgia Institute of Technology; University of Georgia, Athens; University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. 

The third winner, the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, is headed by the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Other partners are: the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash.; University of Florida, Gainesville; Illinois State University, Normal; Iowa State University, Ames, and the only corporate partner among the winners, Lucigen Corporation of MIddleton, Wis. 

Each lab will receive up to $25 million annually for five years. 

“We don’t know exactly what will happen, but I’ve got great confidence,” said Bodman, that the intellectual prowess of the researchers “will lead to great things.” 

The result, he said, will be “a total change in the way we power our homes and our vehicles.” 

 

GMO linkage 

To make the linkage between the grants and genetics research explicit, DOE Under Secretary for Science Raymond Orbach told reporters that “seven years ago to this day,” the National Institutes of Health and the DOE announced sequencing of the human genome. 

“That gave us the technological expertise to bring genomics” into the search for new sources of biofuels, Orbach said, and his department “is using genomics to meet this critical need of this nation and our world.” 

Martin Keller of the Oak Ridge center said one of the goals of their research would be manipulating the genes in cellulose to make the tissue more degradable. “We really want to change how biofuels are made in the next five years,” he said. 

Timothy Donahue, director of the Wisconsin project, said researchers had been handed “the largest political, economic and scientific challenge of our time,” with his team located in the heart of the nation’s greatest source of biomass, the Great Lakes Basin. 

Donahue said his team “will have the lead in the way” wood chips and grasses are used to produce biofuels by harvesting microbial and chemical technologies.  

Keasling said JBEI will focus on: 

• Developing new “feedstock” (plants) to provide richer sources of biofuels; 

• Scavenging the environment for enzymes better capable of breaking down plant materials into sugars, the basic fermentation stock used in making fuels; 

• Developing organisms capable of producing higher levels of ethanol as well as “the next generation of biofuels” for uses ranging from diesels to jets, and  

• Developing and refining so-called “cross-cutting technologies,” processes that cut across the different phases and specialties involved in biofuel research and production with a goal of providing techniques for the emerging biofuel industry. 

Keasling said JBEI “will operate much like a start-up company with dynamic allocation of resources” to respond to developments as they arise. 

Chapela was far less optimistic. “I no longer hesitate to use the word fascism,” he said. “That is the idea that we have no difference between the state, the scientific establishment and the corporations. They have finally come into complete alignment, leaving no opportunity for diversity of thought and creativity.” 

Both EBI and JBEI were enthusiastically backed by local government, including Berkeley’s Mayor Tom Bates, as well as by UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. The JBEI proposal was aided by the San Francisco East Bay Economic Development Alliance for Business, a quiet but powerful alliance of corporations and local politicians. 

Chapela had been denied tenure after his outspoken critique of the Novartis agreement, an earlier UC Berkeley/corporate pact, and won his position only after filing a lawsuit. 

Starting next month, he will be gone from the Berkeley campus for a year, taking a sabattical with the Institute of Gene Ecology in Promso, Norway. “I will not lose track of what’s happening here,” he said. “I will remain engaged.” 

 

Geo-petro-politics 

One reporter asked the Energy Secretary about that morning’s announcement that ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips had broken off talks with the Venezuelan oil ministry over demands that the U.S.-based firms grant a majority share of revenues to the government. 

“It’s not a happy thing for Venezuela,” said Bodman, adding that American companies also have problems with Nigeria and Russia. 

He said the administration has “encouraged all countries with indigenous supplies to have laws that will encourage non-indigenous companies to participate in developing their resources.” 

Unmentioned was the fact that two companies with strong local ties—EBI-funder BP and Richmond refinery owner ChevronTexaco—have signed agreement with the Venezuelan ministry. 

 

A non-UC center 

While the largest share of the local biofuel funding pie has been sliced off for the UC labs, there’s another DOE recipient in Albany. 

Two other grants announced earlier this month went to research at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Western Research Center in Albany. 

Both projects were awarded $600,000 to study the genetics of grasses being considered as possible sources for biofuels derived from cellulose. 

One involves the creation of genetically modified varieties of a variety called Purple False Brome, while the second will provide a more detailed investigation of the genes of switchgrass. 

One project already underway in the lab is involved in a search for biofuel producing enzymes which can be engineered to create more efficient microbes for biofuel production.  

Two other Albany projects are aimed at using wheat as a source of biofuel, using the starches to produce ethanol, while another is looking at a whole range of biofuel issues through the lens of genomics. 

Another Albany project is concerned not with fuel but with finding new ways to engineer crops for domestic production of natural rubber.


Grand Jury Questions Library Practices

By Judith Scherr
Friday June 29, 2007

An Alameda County Grand Jury report released June 26 on a controversial three-year-old automated check-out system has raised questions about the library’s ability to manage its contracts effectively. 

“While the library is generally satisfied with the installation of the new Checkpoint system, its procurement and management of the Checkpoint contract raises concerns about the library’s lack of policies and procedures,” the report states. 

The report’s criticism of library management, however, was questioned by Councilmember Darryl Moore in an interview with the Daily Planet on Tuesday. Moore sits on the library board as a trustee. 

The checkout system, which uses radio frequency identification devices (RFID), in which chips are imbedded in library materials and scanned by a machine, was purchased from New Jersey-based Checkpoint Systems in 2004 for $643,000. The library paid up front for the system with $143,000 from library funds and a $500,000 loan, which is to be paid in full by next year. The loan will have cost about $57,000 in interest. 

The library has an annual $35,000 maintenance contract with the company and purchases chips at 77 cents each for books and magazines and $2.12 for CDs and DVDs. About 31,000 items were added to the collection in 2006-2007, Library Director Donna Corbeil told the Daily Planet in an interview last month.  

“During the term of the contract, the library did not hire or assign a person to oversee and manage the implementation of this contract nor did it request assistance from the City of Berkeley that has resources to manage and oversee a contract of this size and nature,” stated the report. “Additionally, the library’s financial manager was assigned to work at the City of Berkeley’s housing authority and therefore was unavailable to manage the contract. As a consequence, documentation and management of the project was woefully inadequate.” 

Moore said, however, “To say no one was managing the contract is ridiculous,” noting that the building project manager at the time, Elena Engel, was assigned to do just that. 

Moore also said that the temporary move of the library’s Finance Manager Berverli Marshall from the library to the housing authority took place “way after” the contract was put in place in 2004. Marshall was working at the city housing authority from Feb. 6 to July 30, 2006, according to Library Deputy Director Douglas Smith. 

The report states: “The library is not obligated nor has it historically asked for assistance from the city of Berkeley because it seems to value the independence granted to it by the Berkeley City Charter. “ 

It goes on to say that it’s just by luck that contract disputes did not develop with the vendor: “Use of proven policies and procedures exist to prevent contract compliance issues. Had the library managed this contract properly, it would have obtained assistance on (i) negotiating the terms of the contract, including the timing of payments, (ii) day-to-day management (particularly in a technology context), (iii) scheduling of delivery of services, equipment and training, (iv) contract compliance, and (v) adequate documentation, to name a few.  

“The Board of Library Trustees must realize that adopting proven procedures available through the City of Berkeley in the use of public funds gives the public the assurance that those funds are being managed properly. Its current laissezfaire approach to managing such large contracts is not in the public’s best interest.” 

Moore said that a Trustee subcommittee has been working on new regulations for contracts and procurement for eight months. “They’re looking at the requirements of the city” he said. 

Community members have expressed concerns about the possible intrusiveness into personal privacy that the RFID chips might present—an individual carrying a book being tracked or an individual’s reading habits monitored–and have brought performance issues to the Library Board of Trustees.  

However, the Grand Jury report did not look at the issue of privacy, but did indicate some concern with performance, saying the director “is working with members of her staff and with Checkpoint to improve the system.”  

It concluded, however, that the system “was generally working.” 

Library Director Donna Corbeil, named to the post in December, said on Wednesday that she thinks the system is working well, but noted that she is working with a staff team that is considering doing a survey of the public to see what they think of the system and making the system easier to use by installing signage. 

The library and other Alameda County Grand Jury reports are available at: www.acgov.org/grandjury/reports.htm 

 

Trustee search 

In other library news, the library board is looking for a new member to replace a trustee whose two four-year terms will end in August. The deadline for applications is Oct. 1, which is Sunday. The application on line at www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/library/default.htm and at the City Clerk’s office located at 2180 Milvia St.


Walters Leaves City College Top Post

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday June 29, 2007

Berkeley City College President Judy Walters, who presided over the transition of the downtown community college from its longtime rental quarters to a newly-built Center Street building, has left her position to take up a similar post at Diablo Valley Community College in Pleasant Hill. 

Her replacement as Interim BCC President is Dr. Wise Allen, a longtime Peralta Community College district employee who was selected to serve through December at a salary to be negotiated. 

No official reason for Walters’ departure from the district has been given, and Walters was not available for comment on Thursday. Walters was named BCC’s permanent president only last October. 

At going-away ceremonies at Tuesday night’s Peralta Board of Trustees meeting, Peralta Chancellor Elihu Harris praised Walters while describing her as “the sixth president of Diablo Valley, the last president of Vista Community College, and the first president of Berkeley City College.” 

Walters was named interim president of the old Vista Com-munity College in 2004, and kept that position when the college changed names and buildings last summer. Prior that, she served as Vice Chancellor For Educational Affairs at Peralta and in several positions in the State Chancellor’s Office of the California Com-munity Colleges.  

Harris praised Walters at Tuesday’s meeting, saying that while she was service as Vice Chancellor “she helped keep the district together when I came here after the sudden departure of my predecessor. She doesn’t back up, and she doesn’t back off.” To laughter from the audience, Harris added, “Probably that’s why she isn’t going to be here any more.” Harris said that the district would keep office space open for Walters, noting that “we offer you sanctuary, if you need it.” 

Peralta Academic Senate President Joseph Bielinski, who worked under Walters at Peralta, said his fondest memory of Walters was watching her during meetings with contractors and architects during the BCC construction. “You were the only woman in attendance,” Bielinski said, “and you constantly called them to task. That is an image I will never forget.” 

In her last report on Berkeley City College on Tuesday night, Walters said that the college had significantly jumped in enrollment and staffing over the past year as it moved into its new building, adding almost 600 in enrollment and 100 in staff during the regular school year while virtually doubling both enrollment and staff in the summer sessions between 2006 and 2007. 

Walters’ replacement at BCC, Wise Allen, has held several positions within the Peralta district, including sociology instructor, dean at the College of Alameda and Laney College, vice president at the College of Alameda, president at Merritt College, and vice chancellor of educational services for the Peralta Community College District, the position Walters later occupied. 


Local Safeways Plan to Revamp, Embrace Organics

By Richard Brenneman
Friday June 29, 2007

Though Safeway’s plans for adding housing to its Albany grocery store on Solano Avenue proved a flop with neighbors, the Pleasanton-based grocery chain is still pursuing its plans for a makeover. 

Reminiscent in scope of the days of the 1960s that ushered in the “ranch style” stores across the nation, the chain’s new makeover campaign is aimed as much at the insides as the outsides of their supermarkets. 

“We are remodeling all our stores across the entire company,” said Esperanza Greenwood, spokesperson for the chain’s Northern California division. 

And through the process, she said, Safeway will be meeting with neighbors—a wise move given the turn of events in Albany. 

Safeway is working on plans to demolish and rebuild three local stores: 

• The Berkeley store at 1444 Shattuck Ave.; 

• The Albany store at 1500 Solano Ave.; and  

• The Oakland store at 6310 College Ave. 

“All stores are being converted to a lifestyle format,” Greenwood said, adding that this means featuring a wider selection of organic products and larger floral departments. “Generally, we’re carrying a more extensive range of organic produce, more extensive fresh food including seafood and meats and a more extensive selection of natural products.” 

What happens with each store will depend on a variety of factors, including whether or not Safeway owns or leases the buildings. “We accommodate to the site,” Greenwood said. 

A proposal floated late in 2005 to demolish the Solano Avenue store and replace it with 40 condominiums behind a new store met with strong opposition and heated comments from neighbors and Solano merchants during meetings with a real estate officer from the chain. 

When Todd Paradis, the chain’s real estate manager, was asked during a community meeting of residents who live near the Shattuck Avenue store if Safeway had plans to building housing there, the response was clear: “It was not our plan.” 

He added than since housing at the Solano Avenue story had gone over “like a lead balloon, we reeled it back in.” 

Paradis had planned another Albany meeting last week, but plans were scrapped and no date for a new meeting has been set, Greenwood said.  

Robert Cheasty, former Albany mayor and president of the Solano Avenue Association, said his organization hasn’t been contacted by Safeway with any new plans. 

While the earlier proposal had drawn fire from association members, Cheasty said there was no fundamental opposition to a store that is locally owned, pays good wages to union workers and has embraced the organic foods that are popular with local residents. 

But for a new Solano store, he said, “we are looking for something that is compatible with our neighborhood and supports sustainability. If they do that, they should do well,” he said. 

Shattuck Avenue residents also praised the embrace of organics and said they liked buying at a union shop. 

A June 21 meeting was held for residents who live near the College Avenue store and a second store at 5130 Broadway in Oakland. 

Greenwood said the store has no firm timeline for completion of the overhauls. 

“We’re dealing with building permits and construction. We will get them all done, hopefully sooner than later,” she said.


Council Repeals Drug City Employee Drug Test Prohibitions

By Judith Scherr
Friday June 29, 2007

At its meeting Tuesday the Berkeley City Council repealed the ordinance that prohibits the city from drug testing employees, approved a $369,000 budget, adding back some social services that had been cut and heard from both citizens and the developer’s representative on the question of a proposed commercial development at College and Ashby avenues. 

The council voted 5-1-2 to rescind the ordinance that prohibits most city employees from being tested for drugs and alcohol. (Federal law allows employees working with heavy machinery to be tested.) While the ordinance that is repealed covers all city employees (except those exempted under federal law), it is aimed at police and firefighters, whose four-year contracts are in negotiation.  

Drug testing would take place only if the unions allow it. 

Human Resource Director David Hodg-kins assured the council that testing would be “under limited circumstances.” It would occur after accidents, use of force and when there was “reasonable suspicion” that an employee was using drugs. 

“We hire officers from the human race,” Chief Doug Hambleton told the council. “Officers have frailties like everyone else.” 

Both Councilmember Max Anderson, who expressed concern around “constitutional issues of privacy,” and Councilmember Darryl Moore abstained on the vote, saying the issue should have been vetted through the city’s Personnel Commission, where it could have a full hearing. And Councilmember Kriss Worthington voted in opposition, saying the discussion should start with the unions, rather than first repealing the law, then going to the unions. 

Jake Gelender from Copwatch asked councilmembers to wait to address the issue until they saw recommendations from a Police Review Commission subcommittee looking at writing new policies as a result of the theft of drugs from the police evidence vault by former police Sgt. Cary Kent, found guilty of three felonies last year. 

Councilmember Laurie Capitelli, who voted with the majority, reminded fellow councilmembers that if they didn’t repeal the law now, they would not be able to negotiate drug testing with police for four years. “We shouldn’t be sticking our head in the sand,” he said. 

In other council actions: 

• The council voted 8-1, with Councilmember Kriss Worthington in opposition, to approve the city’s $369 million budget, in which the mayor had restored a number of social services, following recommendations from the council last week.  

Among the services that did not get the city funding requested were Russell Street House, which houses mentally ill/formerly homeless persons; Sweatfree Berkeley, which wanted funds to support an ordinance in preparation—approved in concept by the council—that will determine which city purchases came from companies where sweatshops produce the goods; and the Telegraph Avenue World Music Festival.  

While Options for Recovery received $100,000 from the city for a counseling program, a second $100,000 was made a priority for funds available in February. 

• The council voted 8-0-1, with Councilmember Laurie Capitelli abstaining, to hold a public hearing on a home proposed to be built at 161 Panoramic Way, approved by the zoning board, but opposed by neighbors. 

• Worthington pulled his resolution formalizing rules to maximize comments from the public, when Mayor Tom Bates said he was going to formalize the rules with which he’s been experimenting. Bates said he would have the rules prepared for the July 17 council meeting, the last meeting before the council’s summer break. 

• The developer’s representative and one neighbor came to the council to speak in favor of the proposal to develop retail space at Ashby and College avenues and several dozen neighbors came to oppose it. The council vote on whether to remand the development to the zoning board failed: 4-2-1. Five votes were needed to remand the project. Councilmembers Gordon Wozniak, who wrote in favor of the project on the Kitchen Democracy website, recused himself from the vote as did Laurie Capitelli who has an interest in a nearby business. Councilmembers Betty Olds and Mayor Tom Bates voted in opposition and Councilmember Darryl Moore abstained. 

Neighbors honed in on the issue of whether it was appropriate for the zoning board to use the website Kitchen Democracy to help them make the determination that the neighbors favored the project. Neighbors and merchants are particularly concerned with the size of a proposed restaurant that could seat 200, a proposed bar as part of the restaurant and the lack of parking. 

Stuart Beattie of the Elmwood Neighborhood Association told the council the neighbors would picket the business. “The neighborhood association is determined that the bar will fail,” Beattie said.  

But neighbor Tom Spivey said the new business “would bring vibrancy to the neighborhood.” 

The Council will hear the matter again on July 7.


Sweden Detains Former Berkeley Resident

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday June 29, 2007

Ganna Dharmarajah, a former Berkeley resident whose mother still lives here, was arrested by Swedish authorities on Saturday while vacationing in Sweden. She is now being detained at a center for asylum seekers, even though she says she has never sought asylum and is not now doing so. 

Dharmarajah, 29, had traveled to Sweden in April from Sri Lanka, where she has been living since 2002. In a telephone interview with the Planet Thursday, Dharmarajah said that she didn’t understand why she was arrested and is still being detained. 

“The Swedish police officers came to arrest me from my friend’s house in Umea,” she said. “They did not give me any reason. I was told that the Swedish immigration had sent them a fax to pick me up and that they were following orders.” 

Dharmarajah was then taken to a detention center for asylum seekers. 

On Monday, she was taken to another detention center in Gävle, which is located two hours outside Stockholm, the country’s capital. She currently has access to email and telephone. 

Swedish authorities informed her that she was going to be deported to the United States, something she described as “illegal deportation.” 

“I told them that I came as a tourist under the visa waiver scheme, which permits U.S. citizens to stay in Sweden for three months,” she said. 

“I was planning to leave Sweden in June. I want to visit Japan next. I have a flight ticket to Japan. I am an American by birth. I have an American passport. I don’t want to be deported to the United States and I don’t want to be held in a detention center. I want to continue my plans to travel.” 

Dharmarajah contacted the American Citizen’s Services at the U.S. Embassy in Sweden on Wednesday.  

The Swedish government has paid for her lawyer Maria Guzman. Dharmarajah has also hired another lawyer from the American embassy’s list of legal counselors. 

“My lawyers have told me that they have filed all the papers for me to be released immediately,” she said. “My mother who lives in Berkeley has also contacted the office of Congresswoman Barbara Lee. The people at the detention center also agree that I should not be in here.” 

Dharmarajah’s lawyers could not be contacted Wednesday as it was late at night in Sweden.  

Born to Sri Lankan parents, Dharma-rajah specialized in interdisciplinary studies at UC Berkeley and moved to Sri Lanka five years ago to get married. She has been living there since. 

 

 


City Transportation Manager Leaves for Private Sector

By Judith Scherr
Friday June 29, 2007

In a letter addressed to City Manager Phil Kamlarz and emailed to Kamlarz and the press on June 20, five-plus-year transportation manager Peter Hillier tendered his resignation effective July 8. 

Hillier said he was leaving to assume a role as northern California representative for Delcan transportation consultants.  

“As management consultants, we advise top decision makers in the transportation sector on strategy, technology, program and project management, asset management, and finance and economics,” says the Delcan website. 

“My staff and I have made significant contributions to the City of Berkeley, which we should be proud of, yet the work is not complete. The City of Berkeley, and Mayor Bates in particular, have set a high standard for governance in a variety of ways,” Hillier says in his letter.  

Hillier extends gratitude to colleagues in general and in particular, he says: “Those who know me well can forgive me for expressing special appreciation to Weldon Rucker, the long-serving, now-retired Berkeleyan who, as city manager, took a risk and hired me as his assistant city manager for transportation. I am forever grateful to him personally and professionally.”


School Board Approves Measure BB Before Summer Break

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday June 29, 2007

The Berkeley Board of Education met for the last time Wednesday before breaking for summer. Board members will be back Aug. 22 for the new school year. 

Berkeley Unified School District superintendent Michele Lawrence thanked board members for their work in the 2006-07 school year and wished them a good summer vacation. Rio Bauce, who will be taking over from student director Mateo Aceves in the fall, was welcomed by board president Joaquin Rivera. 

The board continued the approval of the upgraded School Safety Site Plan to the next school board meeting. 

 

Measure BB approval 

Berkeley residents approved Measure BB to fund the district’s facilities department in 2000. The board approved the 2007-08 Measure BB plan Wednesday, which includes planned responsibilities and goals and provides a multi-year budget projection. 

The district currently has 26 sites and over 100 acres of land. Sixteen out of the 26 are K-12 schools and one is dedicated to the Adult School. A major portion of Berkeley’s public schools were built in the 1950s, but have gone through upgrades since then. Four schools were constructed over the last ten years with major new buildings added to Berkeley High School (BHS) and Longfellow. 

Board vice president John Selawsky noted at the meeting that accomplishments of the department included evaluation of the district’s heritage trees. 

The report also stated that trash and recycling expenditures were better organized and that more recycling was occurring. 

 

Small Schools Grant 

The board approved plans to apply for a renewal of the federal Smaller Learning Communities (SLC) grant that supports small schools at Berkeley High. 

The staff reports states that although the Berkeley High School small schools redesign has been successful since its inception, a lot of work still needs to be done. 

The SLC grant supports the development of the redesign at BHS. The small schools policy and comprehensive school site plan lays out a strong foundation for progress. Community members have also rallied behind the restructuring effort to close the persistent achievement gap at BHS. 

Small schools comprise one-third of the student body, but according to the Small Schools Guiding Principles half the students should be in small schools. Staff recommends the addition of at least one more small school to help lessen this shortcoming.  

According to the report, the racial achievement gap continues to persist at an unacceptable level. 

The last SLC grant along with resources from BayCES brought over $1.5 million to the district and BHS in support of the BHS redesign.  

 

Special education transportation 

The board approved partial implementation of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) recommendations on special education transportation. 

The team recommended that special education transportation management shift from the Special Education Department to the Transportation Department with regard to the operation of school buses. 

The team also recommended that the board “grant the staff the flexibility to utilize BUSD buses, publicly bid contracts, or a combination of both, to implement a revised special education transportation program sometime during the 2007-08 fiscal year.” 

This, the FCMAT said, could help reduce the district’s dependence on the number of taxi cabs being used to transport special education students. 

Other options to increase economic feasibility includes the purchase of additional buses, or entering into specific bids with district-approved external transportation vendors. 

 

Williams Case Settlement Report 

The Williams Case Settlement states that every district in California is publicly accountable to ensure that students have sufficient textbooks and instructional materials, safe school facilities and access to classes taught by credentialed teachers. 

Since Jan. 1, 2007, staff has received only one Williams case complaint about the lack of an evacuation plan from the second floor at King Middle School for two orthopedically impaired students. 

According to the report, “the risk management officer for the district has assessed the King facility and will complete an evacuation plan based on her findings.”


BUSD Responds to Supreme Court Decision on School Race Placement

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday June 29, 2007

Minutes after the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 Thursday to limit the consideration of race in school integration plans, Berkeley Unified School District superintendent Michele Lawrence said that she hoped Berkeley public schools would stand the test and become a model for other schools. 

The Court rejected diversity plans from Seattle and Louisville, Ky. because they had failed to justify “the extreme means they have chosen—discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments.” 

“It’s still a bit early for us to interpret the court’s ruling,” Lawrence told the Planet, “but on the surface we hope that the school district would stand the test of time.” 

“The ruling went against Seattle and Kentucky, but the assignment system in Berkeley is not based on their model. Our assignment system does not take into account an individual’s race but rather a category based on where they live. Therefore it is a blind system.” 

Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) sued Berkeley Unified on behalf of the American Civil Rights Foundation in October, charging it with violating California’s Proposition 209 by racially discriminating among students during placements at elementary schools and in programs at Berkeley High. 

The lawsuit alleged that BUSD “uses race as a factor to determine where students are assigned to public schools and to determine whether they gain access to special educational programs.” 

The district emerged victorious in the lawsuit when the Alameda County Superior Court ruled in favor of the school district in April. 

In his ruling, the judge stated that the student assignment system applied by BUSD’s elementary schools was legal and that its integration system was fair. 

The assignment system in BUSD lets parents register their first, second and third school choices, and then a computer lottery gives the final placement. The lottery takes into account factors such as race, ethnicity, student background and parental income and education.  

PLF said that they would appeal the decision. The case is still open. 

Reactions about Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling were positive for Berkeley Unified. 

“I don’t think the decision will jeopar-dize what Berkeley Unified has tried to do so far,” said Goodwin Liu, Professor at UC Berkeley's School of Law (Boalt Hall). 

“The controlling opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts leaves room for the type of approach Berkeley Unified is trying. It leaves open several avenues for race-conscious measures to achieve integration, including strategic-attendance zoning as well as magnet schools and special programs. The upshot is that the court has sent school districts literally back to the drawing board to devise creative assignment plans to integrate our public schools.” 

Liu added that it was remarkable that the Chief Justice of the United States cited the historic decision in Brown vs. Board of Education—which prohibits segregation in public schools—to defeat, not defend, school integration. 

Congresswoman Barbara Lee condemned the decision. 

“Today's shocking decision undermines the commitment to equality in education that was spelled out in the Brown vs. The Board of Education decision, and threatens to turn the clock back on half a century of advances in racial equality in education,” she said in a statement. 

 


Bateman Neighbors Say Crime Is on the Rise

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday June 29, 2007

Residents of Berkeley’s Bateman neighborhood are spending a lot of time looking over their shoulders these days. 

It’s not your average car theft they’re worried about. It’s armed robbery, and in broad daylight. Three robberies in the last two months—one armed—have sent shockwaves through the neighborhood. 

On June 11, at around 2 p.m., an area resident was walking her baby in a stroller when she was robbed at gunpoint on Woolsey at Bateman. Her husband, who did not want to be named, said she was approached from behind by man with a semi-automatic gun. 

“He demanded her purse,” he said. “He had dark skin, with a chipped front tooth, or some kind of a dental tissue in his front teeth, and was wearing a gray camouflage jacket. He spoke strangely, somewhat ‘robot like,’ perhaps with a strange accent.” 

Passers-by in the area chased the assailant but lost him when he jumped into a waiting car and escaped. 

“What’s propelling this?” asked a shaken Laurie Doyle who has lived on Bateman for 12 years. “This used to be a safe neighborhood, a walker-friendly one. These crimes are occurring in broad daylight. They are occurring to women who are walking with their babies or their friends. It’s a very disturbing development.” 

Bordered by College Avenue on the east, Telegraph Avenue on the west, Ashby Avenue on the north and Woolsey Street on the South, Bateman has never had a history of violent crime. 

“Crime has definitely gone up,” said Marcy McGaugh, neighborhood liaison to the Berkeley Police Department and former president of the Berkeley Safe Neighborhoods Committee, the umbrella group for Neighborhood Watch throughout the city. 

“The last time we had an armed robbery was in 1991. The most we get around here is car break-ins and car thefts. People bashing into windows. But armed robbery is different. I have stopped carrying a purse when I go out in the neighborhood.” 

McGaugh, with her degree in criminology and knowledge about the prison system (she served as a probation officer at once), organized the Bateman Neighborhood Watch Groups from 1986 to 1991. 

“Every block had at least one block captain, sometimes two co-captains,” she told the Planet in a phone interview Wednesday. 

“That system stayed in place until a few years ago. My job as coordinator of the Bateman Neighborhood Watch Coalition was to communicate with block captains’ information.” 

Alarmed by the June 11 attack, 80 area residents got together at neighbor Linda Foy’s house last week for a discussion with city officials. Safety tips were exchanged, emergency phone numbers were handed out and every one went to bed feeling safer. But not for long. 

On June 23 Sarita Berry and her friend Xanthe were walking on Woolsey at around 11 a.m. when they saw two women being robbed by two men. 

“We ran into a nearby house where Xanthe called 911 and told them what was going on,” Berry’s email to the community said. “By the time the police arrived, two other witnesses had chased the muggers and managed to hold one of them. The other got away.” 

Berkeley police officer Stephen Burcham, area coordinator for the Bateman neighborhood, said that the person arrested on Saturday could be responsible for the other robberies as well. 

“We haven’t connected the dots yet,” he said. “But we are working with the Oakland Police Department to close some arrests. Oakland police also arrested two people in Berkeley last week for a robbery. It’s been a while since an armed robbery happened in this part of the town. We are asking people to be more aware. It’s an unfortunate upturn but I don’t think it stands above other areas of the city.” 

Lt. Wesley Hester, Berkeley police spokesperson, said that drug usage was one of the main reasons for the current increase. 

“People need quick money for drugs,” he said. “The weather’s nice so they drive around and take advantage of people they see walking about.” 

Jim Hynes, assistant to the city manager said that the rise in crime in the Bateman neighborhood was probably seasonal. 

“School’s out and a lot of people are not focused on anything,” he said. “We generally see an up-spike at this time of the year. There is a lot of transient population in the 18 to 30 age group who throng Telegraph during the summer. The strategy is to work with the police department. It’s important to have adequate lighting in front of the house and clear overgrown vegetation so that perpetrators don’t have a place to hide. It’s really important that the neighbors are organized. Some years back Bateman was better organized.” 

Lt. Hester told the Planet that crime was up over the entire Bay Area.  

“It’s not just Bateman. It’s not just Berkeley,” he said. “It’s all over the country. We are hoping that the arrests made last week will stop the recent robberies in Bateman.” 

Foy said that she would continue to go to sleep with her porch light on. 

“I still don’t see a visible police presence in the area,” said Doyle. “We need increased police protection. We need cops on bicycles.”


Early Fire Season Brings Worry to Local Firefighters

By Richard Brenneman
Friday June 29, 2007

As California launches into a dry summer with wildfires raging in both northern and southern California, David Orth wonders if we’re not seeing the start of something far more ominous. 

“It’s possible the whole country could have a bad fire season,” said Orth, deputy chief of the Berkeley Fire Department. Even worse, it could last all year long. 

“Whether it’s just incidental to current conditions or something bigger that is tied to global warming is the question,” he said. 

And current thinking is that global warming may be ushering in an era where fires don’t simply appear in cycles in different regions of the country but become a constant menace for all parts of the country. 

Typically, Orth said, fires appear in different parts of the country according to a seasonal cycle, starting with California’s wildland and forest fires in summer and fall, then moving into Arizona and the states of the Southwest. 

“Texas had big range fires last winter,” he said, the season when heavy fires typically hit the region. 

The cycle then moves to the East Coast, where spring fires are the norm, and then begins to cycle back west, picking up Alaska along the way before the cycle begins anew. 

“All of that happened this year, but the thing is, they’re still happening. There are still significant fires in Florida and Georgia, and in the Southwest and farther north,” he said. 

Southern California is suffering a prolonged drought, one of the worst in recorded history, and while firefighters are battling blazes there, other crews have been struggling to contain the 3,100-acre Angora fire at Lake Tahoe which had consumed nearly 230 homes by Thursday morning. 

“The fact that there is a fire at Tahoe this time of year is really kind of ominous,” said Ken Blonski, chief of the East Bay Regional Park District Fire Department. 

The local fire season usually begins about the first of the month, but this year the start was announced in May, which Orth called a troubling indicator of possible things to come. 

Usually the California fire cycle begins with lowland grass fires, then move into grass/oak woodlands and only later moves up into the pine forest at the higher elevations,” Blonski said. “But this year the snow pack was very low and it’s already dry at the higher elevations. That we have a true forest fire this time of year is not a good omen.” 

Statewide, Orth said, “we can handle one or two major fires at the same time. It’s the three or four fires at once that hurt,” a worry that consumes the thoughts of California firefighters. 

“One of the problems is that when it’s bad here, it’s usually bad all over,” said Blonski. 

And when it is bad here, the conditions that make one fire possible usually result in a second blaze, he said. 

One possible sign of things to come is the 35-acre hillside blaze that forced the evacuation of homes in an upscale San Rafael neighborhood Wednesday night. 

“The bottom line is that it was cool, the moisture content was up and the fog was closing in, and there was only the typical prevailing wind. It wasn’t dry and it wasn’t real windy,” said Orth. 

“It’s important to remember that the fires don’t always happen on hot, dry windy days—and to go over 30 acres is very significant.” 

But windy days are the persistent nightmare everywhere along the California coast. 

“It’s when the east winds and north winds are blowing that you have the real problems,” said Blonski, when the gusts are blowing from off the heated landscape toward the cooler Pacific. 

“They call them Mono winds, Santa Ana winds, Devil winds, the offshore winds,” he said 

Typically their effects are worst in the autumn, when the landscape is full of dying and dead vegetation seared by the hot, dry winds. 

Blonski and Orth said that experience with past fires has produced a well-coordinated system for fighting fires in the Berkeley and Oakland hills. 

“The fire we had recently on the other side of the Caldecott Tunnel was a good example. All of the agencies jumped on it right away.” 

Local firefighting agencies just completed a two-day training exercise at Camp Parks, with over 200 pieces of firefighting equipment and their crews converging from around the bay. 

Meanwhile, the state Office of Emergency Services (OES) is maintaining its readiness, Blonski said. 

Through mutual-aid agreements and coordination of the OES, Blonski said, major outbreaks can be met with firefighting forces summoned from across the state. 

In addition to the possible effects of global warming, another and often more immediate concern is the intrusion of housing into areas that abut rich sources of fire fuel. 

“If you had a fire in the Berkeley and Oakland Hills a hundred years ago, you probably wouldn’t have more than a few fence posts destroyed. But not now. So to some extent the dangers come from the fact that more and more people are building where they wouldn’t have built in the past,” said Blonski. 

“While some people accept the danger and just hope they won’t get burned out in their lifetimes, others seem to be in denial,” he said. 

But if California history teaches anything, it’s that the fires will come.


County Medical Center Rejects Union Request to Avoid Layoffs

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday June 29, 2007

The Board of Trustees of the Alameda County Medical Center approved a $460 million budget on Tuesday, rejecting requests by union members for a no layoff pledge and to set aside $5 million from increased debt payments to Alameda County to fund staff development and training to help staff transition into new positions. 

Following the meeting, SEIU Local 1021 researcher Brad Cleveland, who had made an emotional appeal to trustees prior to the vote, said he was “disappointed” in the board’s decision to reject the set-aside and no layoff pledge. “SEIU would have worked with the board to help secure three votes on the County Board of Supervisors to approve reduction in the debt payment,” Cleveland said. “We just needed the trustees to step up, but they didn’t.”  

The ACMC budget, covering Highland Hospital and several clinics across the county, projects cutting 21 staff positions throughout the system, the bulk of them—twelve—at the sometimes-troubled John George Psychiatric Pavilion in San Leandro. 

In late 2003, a doctor was killed by a patient at John George only months after Cal/OSHA had urged the facility to beef up security following earlier patient assaults on staff. 

The budget projects a $1.4 million net operating income for the center, coming halfway to ACMC CEO Wright Lassiter’s three year goal of budgeting one percent operating income. Last year, trustees approved a break-even budget but actually achieved a .2 percent income; this year, operating income is budgeted at 0.5 percent. 

The loan payments from which SEIU wanted to siphon off the job training money comes from some $191 million in money that the county had “loaned” to the medical center over a period of months to meet its operating expenses. County supervisors had not asked for repayment of that money until the summer of 2004, shortly after the Measure A tax money began supplementing the medical center’s income. 

Last year, the medical center paid $10 million in principal payments and $7 million in interest payments to the county on the loan, but this year, county supervisors have called for a $5 million increase in payments. SEIU had asked the trustees vote to request supervisors to rescind the requested $5 million increase so that money could go for staff training. 

The loan payments themselves have been something of a controversy, with some county health care advocates charging that the county’s demand for the payments—coming immediately following the passage of Measure A—violated the provision in Measure A that the money be used to supplement existing health care dollars. 

Shortly before the board rejected the $5 million set-aside, trustee Ted Rose said that the issue of the loan repayment has been “simmering in the background” for several years, and called on the board to adopt a policy on the schedule of repayments. “We never have before,” Rose said. “We’ve always operated under the schedule of the Board of Supervisors.” 

He suggested that the trustees work on a new loan payment schedule “in collaboration with our partners on the board of supervisors. I’m not trying to be confrontational, unless its necessary. But it’s high time we addressed this.”  

Trustees did not act on Rose’s specific suggestion, which was not offered as a motion, but on a 2-6 vote (trustees Floyd Huen and Rose voting yes), they later rejected Huen’s motion to temporarily set aside the $5 million for staff development “while we explore whether or not the supervisors would agree to allow such a reduction.” Huen said he made the motion in part because “we have only had five months of positive fiscal activity. Holding off the loan increase for another year would make me more comfortable.” 

But trustee Valerie Lewis said “we need to pass the budget based upon the situation that is before us, not what we project it to be,” and Finance Committee Chair Stanley Schiffman said that cutting $5 million in payments on the loan principal would cost the medical center money by increasing the amount of the overall payment that would have to go to interest on the loan. 

Before the vote, Crystal Cox, a registered nurse with the county, told trustees that “I worked real hard on Measure A” (the 2004 half-cent transaction tax measure enacted to supplement health care in the county) “so we could maintain services, and I’ve lobbied in Washington for more health care funds. I didn’t do that so we could have layoffs and decreases in services. How can John George maintain quality care with a decrease in staff?” 

And SEIU field representative Wayne Templeton said that without the set-aside money for staff development, “the budget threatens the improvements that have been made under CEO Lassiter. My members have been embattled over the last five years. We are simply asking for equity, now.” 

 


Legislative Briefs

Friday June 29, 2007

SB67 Vehicle Speed Contests  

and Reckless Driving  

Senator Don Perata (D-Oakland) 

Renewal of the original 2002 legislation, aimed specifically at Oakland’s sideshows, which allowed cars to be towed and held for 30 days solely on a police officer’s word that the car was being used in “vehicle speed contests” (the legal definition of “spinning donuts” and other auto activity related to sideshows). 

Passed the Assembly Transportation Committee on Monday unanimously (13-0) with additions of what the committee legislative analyst calls “technical amendments.” Now moves to the Assembly Appropriations Committee as a formality, with no hearing scheduled, and will go immediately to the full Assembly. As an “urgency” measure, a two-thirds vote is needed. 

SB1019 Peace Officer Records;  

Confidentiality 

Senator Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), Co-Author Assemblymember Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) 

Dead, apparently, for the year. 

This bill would reopen civilian review board hearings to the public in cities across the state (including Oakland and Berkeley) that were closed following a recent ruling by the California State Supreme Court in Copley Press, Inc. v. The Superior Court of San Diego County. 

The bill was heard in the Assembly Public Safety Committee on Tuesday, but after testimony from both sides, committee members decided to hold the bill in committee without a vote, effectively killing the legislation for the year. State Senator Gloria Romero says the issue is not over, and she will reintroduce the bill next year.


Opinion

Editorials

Editorial: Remembering Revolution on the 4th

By Becky O’Malley
Tuesday July 03, 2007

Not in my own youth, but in the Victorian novels I read as a child, it was the custom for Americans at their Fourth of July picnics to read aloud the Declaration of Independence. In the mid and late 19th century the American revolution was still part of living memory. The older folks at the picnics were still able to summon up the tremendous excitement with which their grandparents and great-grandparents seized their destinies and started a new kind of country in a still-wild place.  

These days the 4th is for most Americans just one more holiday, one more reason to waste gasoline driving long distances to play. But for many of us daily conversations, not just on the 4th, now quickly turn to the parlous state of world and national affairs. There’s a perception that there’s a profound crisis in the American system of government, with the most recent disturbing example being Vice President Cheney’s clear desire to go it alone with no regard for law or Congress. In fact, what many people see these days might be described in the language of the Declaration: “.. repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.” Under the circumstances, reading the Declaration of Independence can be reassuring: It’s happened before, Americans dealt with it, and they can deal with it again, without a bloody war this time around, we hope.  

Many passages from the Declaration resonate in the present situation, especially the allegations against George III of England which are easily applicable to the current George and his buddy Dick Cheney: 

“He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” Health care reform, environmental protection ... many examples come to mind. 

“He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither...” e.g. the immigration bill stalemate. 

“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures....He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.” The national legislature isn’t blameless here, with their quick rubber-stamping of the Iraq invasion, but now they’re recanting, and the executive branch should follow their lead. 

“For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments...For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.” Sounds like Bush’s attempts to isolate himself from laws passed by Congress with his “signing statements,” or Cheney’s invocation of his own perverted interpretation of executive privilege, doesn’t it?  

So, in the words of Russian revolutionaries, what is to be done? Our Declaration advises that “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.. But when a long train of abuses and usurpation ....evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government....” Stirring words, attractive logic.  

Our e-mail these days is full of heartfelt pleas to jump on the impeachment bandwagon, and it’s tempting. All kinds of normally sensible people like Maxine Waters are now endorsing some kind of impeachment strategy. The best plan would seem to be Attorney General Alberto Gonzales first, then Cheney, saving Bush for last, since it would do no good to get rid of the president only to have the even worse vice president in his stead.  

If justice were the sole criterion, all three of these officials and more deserve to be thrown out of office, using the constitutional mechanism which the founders provided as a substitute for bloody revolution. But practical considerations point to more conventional remedies.  

There is, after all, an election coming up. Admittedly, the candidates now leading the pack in both parties seem tepid at best. Recent revelations of how John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson colluded with the worst excesses of the CIA during their presidencies make the Democrats look almost as bad as the Republicans from a historical perspective. But the current situation is the worst ever, without even any constitutional fig leaf thrown over the Bush-Cheney administration’s naked usurpation of power. On the other hand, no candidate in either major party, even Giuliani, even (god forbid) Lieberman as an independent, seems to be quite as villainous as the people now in office. And there really isn’t time to mount a three-impeachment prosecution before the next election. Even though all three villains and many of their cronies richly deserve to be punished by impeachment, prudence, in the words of the Declaration, seems to dictate at this point that we should ride out the next electoral cycle and hope that things will change.  

And if they don’t, of course, revolution is always an alternative. Just to keep in practice, why don’t we all revive the custom of organizing a stirring reading of the Declaration of Independence at our Fourth of July barbecues this year? A copy of the document, a genuine thriller, is provided in this issue for your convenience. 

 


Editorial: Taking the Pledge, One More Time

By Becky O’Malley
Friday June 29, 2007

The Saturday Farmers’ Market in Berkeley was awash with politicians, pressing the flesh and hawking their latest products. “Will you take the pledge?” one shouted at me, and I fled. I’ve got many historic associations with taking pledges, none of them good. 

In my childhood I discovered that when it was whispered about that So-and-So had “taken the pledge” it meant that he (it was always men) drank too much, and with the aid of some earnest priest he had promised in church to “go on the wagon” for a while—with dubious chances for long-term abstinence, however. (For the uninitiated, that’s the “water wagon,” as opposed perhaps to the club car on the train where the boozers hung out.) The hope was that prayer would save sinners from the demon rum, but it seldom lasted long. 

Another popular pledge has been promoted by the Christian right as the solution to the problem of sexually transmitted diseases. Pre-teens promise to refrain from sex at least until (we hope not after) marriage. Statistics, scanty at best, indicate that these abstinence pledges don’t make much difference either. 

A Google search turns up all kinds of pledges, from the unenforceable to the frankly commercial. There’s a “no-windows-boot” pledge bawked, not surprisingly, by the Apple Computer corporation. A Republican senator tried to goad Al Gore into signing some sort of environmental pledge. Gore, no fool he and an honest man to boot, politely declined.  

The pledge being pushed at the market on Saturday also seemed to have something to do with the environment. Making an educated guess, I checked the Berkeley mayor’s city-funded public relations page, and sure enough, there it was: 

 

I, _______________________, will address the climate crisis by taking responsibility for my greenhouse gas emissions. I pledge to reduce my greenhouse gas emissions by at least 10 percent within one year and 2 percent every year after that. 

 

Who could object to that, one might ask? Write a piece, if you dare, denoucing motherhood (population explosion, you know) or apple pie (the obesity epidemic!), but the prime candidate for Sacred Cow of the New Millenium is greenhouse gas emissions. How can anyone deny the need for reducing greenhouse gas emissions? 

Well, no sensible person denies the problem, but there’s a lot to object to in the quasi-religious way that true believers are promoting ineffective personal solutions to knotty global problems. Pledges such as this one are based on a lot of faith, even more hope, and very little science. Percentages, as any high-school math student will tell you, mean nothing unless you define “percent of what.”  

Accompanying the pledge was a table, coyly titled “My Very Own Climate Action Plan,” printed in that Word computer font which is supposed to look like hand-printing but fools no one. It profers dynamic suggestions like using a water-saving shower head and buying an Energy Star ™ refrigerator. Excuse me, but haven’t we been doing those things here in Berkeley since the drought of the mid-’70s at least? The problem with band-aid solutions like these is that they allow us to feel that we’re doing the right thing while large-scale serious environmental threats of all kinds continue to be tolerated. 

Even worse, when environmental protection is treated like a religion, like all religions it engenders the emergence of false prophets. Here in Berkeley we have false environmental prophecies in abundance prominently preached. Some examples: 

A major part of the University of California is being sold off to British Petroleum. Why? Scientifically suspect claims are made that biofuels will solve the energy crisis without causing deforestation in the Amazon for planting fuel crops. And even if the claims are right, a multinational BP will still have a near-monopoly on supply, a risky proposition. Some professors will get even richer, to boot. 

And AC Transit is promoting half-a-billion dollars worth of construction contracts for a hard-wired bus rapid transit scheme which threatens to sink locally-serving businesses along its route. Their EIR offers absolutely no concrete proof that BRT will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but it will certainly line a number of pockets with green. Berkeley people will be driving to malls to buy their books if Moe’s closes. 

The revised Berkeley landmarks ordinance, if not overturned by citizens in the upcoming referendum, is another anti-environmental boondoggle. It’s carefully calculated to make it even easier to demolish re-usable existing buildings. These will be replaced with the kind of new construction which consumes more energy and other resources than intelligent rehab—even if a few of the new buildings are built to often-lax LEED standards.  

But if we all believe, if we all take the pledge (and perhaps take some shorter showers and turn off some lights) we’ll be saved. Hallelujah. 

Berkeley should be embarrassed to allow itself to be fooled by faith-based greenwashed promotional schemes, particularly if they’re promulgated at government expense to promote political careers. Climate change, sometimes equated with global warming, is a serious threat which requires reality-based scientific world-wide solutions. Messianic zeal at the local level for ineffectual nostrums, with a dash of hippy capitalism thrown in to make us all entrepreneurs, cannot promise salvation, no matter how many pledges we take.


Public Comment

Letters to the Editor

Tuesday July 03, 2007

FIRE TRAIL 

Editors, Daily Planet 

I frequently hike on the Strawberry Canyon fire trail, and was recently dismayed to see a sign posted announcing the use of herbicides along the trail. It is particularly ironic because at the beginning of the trail is a prominent sign that says “Ecological Study Area.” It then lists the things that are forbidden, including firearms and bicycles, but makes no mention of herbicides. I guess that makes them OK. 

Carol David 

 

• 

POWERS THAT BE 

Editors, Daily Planet 

Professor Chapela is on track. There is an increasing number of serious scientists whose works are being dismissed or even ridiculed by the “mainstream” scientists in the academic-industry-government complex. We notice that burning biofuel does little to curb global CO2 emissions because it is, like gasoline, a hydrocarbon. Notice also that the only way to produce necessary levels of energy in an emission-free manner is to employ nuclear energy. However, the large energy-producing powers that be—petroleum, coal, and ethanol—are dead set against the expansion of nuclear energy use. This is because if we were to employ nuclear energy at the level that, say, France does, it would greatly curtail our need for these CO2-producing sources. In fact, the BP grant of $400 million to UC to study alternative fuels makes no money available for research and improvement in our nuclear energy production. This even though UC has one of the nation’s few nuclear engineering departments. 

Peter Fowler 

Oakland 

 

• 

EMPTY LOT 

Editors, Daily Planet 

My thanks to Carol Denney for her courteous and totally convincing account of the many problems that have beset the empty lot at Telegraph and Haste. I would, nonetheless, plead: “Tear down that fence, City Council!” 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

• 

RAISING AWARENESS 

Editors, Daily Planet 

I tend to agree with Becky O’Malley (“Taking the Pledge, One More Time,” June 29) that promising to abstain from sex until after marriage or not drink alcohol before age 21 is not the most effective way to develop a healthy attitude toward sex and substances. I took both pledges as a youth, good Catholic that I once was, and am pleased to admit that I failed at both—in part because by age 30, I was still not married. 

What puzzles me about the rest of Becky’s column is why she criticizes the city’s effort to raise local awareness of global warming and our individual contributions to it. What is the point exactly? The city and many others are engaged in an outreach campaign that is intended to educate and to engender in the population a sense that global warming can be addressed. How that happens takes a number of forms. The personal reduction pledge is one of many tools. For example, we’ve had a Measure G kick-off event to which everyone in the city was invited, a number of city commissions are hosting workshops on climate change to which the public is invited, the city is embarking on an effort to extend renewable energy into the residential and commercial sector funded in part by a grant from the Department of Energy, the mayor has already brought together 10 of the county’s 13 cities into an alliance to address climate change on a regional level, as a board member of the Bay Area Air Quality District the mayor has made climate change a top priority for that institution. The list really does go on. And from my view, it is all intended to get us closer to the level of greenhouse gas reductions that good science tells us we have to achieve in order to avoid irreversible harm to the planet. 

We’ve got a very long way to go to achieve an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and not a lot of time in which to do it. As we are challenged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions further, our individual and collective actions will have to go beyond light bulb replacements and Energy Star appliances. The Berkeley Daily Planet is a valuable community resource that could play a significant role in encouraging its readers to become more responsive to the problem and offering its own positive suggestions for how to reduce our impacts. The Planet could do its part by becoming the first newspaper in Alameda County to become a certified green business. That would demonstrate the positive, can-do approach that will give us a chance. 

Tom Kelly  

KyotoUSA 

 

• 

BUS RAPID TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet 

Some opponents of Bus Rapid Transit argue that it will duplicate BART. Not really. The two services would serve different sets of trips. BRT would more likely feed passengers to BART than bleed them off. 

The right question is not how close the routes are but how close the stations are. BART stations along the corridor are a mile to three miles apart (except for 12th to 19th Street in downtown Oakland, which is almost half a mile). The BRT stations, depending on the alternative, are much closer to one another. There are only 10 BART stations along the corridor versus 35 to 51 BRT stations. 

The routes themselves are quite far apart along much of the corridor. For example, it is a long half-mile from Ashby BART to Telegraph Avenue, the equivalent of almost nine football fields. Try hiking it on a hot summer day or during a winter storm. Alta Bates Medical Center, one block further east, will be convenient to BRT but not to BART. 

These differences are important. Most passengers do not walk far to transit. Consistent research over the decades has shown that fewer than half of rail transit passengers walk as much as 10 minutes (about half a mile). They walk less far to bus stops. We have no data yet on how far they will walk to BRT stations. 

BRT is intended to serve trips that BART does not. Cash customers whose origin and destination are both close to BART stations will probably choose BART. It will be faster and more comfortable, in some cases, cheaper. Those who have a 31-day ticket or a student pass may prefer BRT. BRT will offer some advantages. Stations will have no stairs or escalators, service will be more frequent, and the buses will be quieter inside than BART cars currently are. 

For the most part, BRT will serve one set of travelers and BART another. There will be some overlap but not much. 

Robert R. Piper 

 

• 

BRT JITNEY ALTERNATIVE 

Editors, Daily Planet 

I would like to suggest an alternative to Bus Rapid Transit by using local microbus or jitney services at each BART Station to supplement BART. But first, some background. 

Data on walking distances to transit locations is hard to find. Part of the confusion is that as the walking distance becomes greater, the collection area becomes greater with the square of the distance, but the probability of somebody willing to walk that greater distance decreases dramatically. According to information on Sierra Club’s website, 70 percent of walkers will walk 500 feet, and 40 percent will walk 1,000 feet, but only 10 percent will walk a half-mile to public transportation. 

BART is comfortable, sleek, modern, and fast, traveling on average close to 35 mph. BART was terribly expensive to install, but is now relatively cheap and cost-effective to operate. The problem is that the stations are located typically a mile or more apart in most of the East Bay. Normal city buses travel a poky 9-11 mph, but conveniently stop every couple of blocks. Bus frequency can be an issue, but the slow speed is not a significant factor if the trip is short. 

The proposed Bus Rapid Transit route essentially parallels BART at 2-3 blocks distance for most of its length. BRT will have stops every half mile or so, and will apparently travel only 30-40 percent faster than local buses. The disadvantage is that BRT will eliminate two lanes of traffic on very heavily used streets like Telegraph Avenue, and will eliminate significant amounts of parking for passenger loading platforms. Bus Rapid Transit will also cause major disruption at several busy intersections that apparently cannot be ameliorated. Although BRT will reduce particulates, the overall advantages for speed, fuel consumption, and global warming gases are relatively insignificant. 

I would like to suggest that the local cities and BART get together to consider a local microbus or jitney service that would pick and deliver people locally to each BART station. A jitney making pickup circles or figure eights at five or six blocks distance would theoretically increase the number of BART’s passengers by a factor of ten. Furthermore, since BRT path is so close to BART path, the jitney service would cover virtually the entire BRT path, providing most of BRT’s advantages, but without the disadvantages of lost traffic lanes, lost parking and $300 million investment. This may be worth considering. 

Ozzie Vincent 

 

• 

BRT ERRORS 

Editors, Daily Planet 

There are obvious errors in the June 29 op-ed about Bus Rapid Transit by Mary Oram and others. 

First, they claim that BRT will slow emergency vehicles. In reality, emergency response will be much faster when there are two dedicated center lanes just for buses and emergency vehicles. 

Second, they claim this plan will not work for traffic. In reality, AC Transit’s environmental impact report shows that all intersections on Telegraph will work. Automobile traffic will be a bit slower, because there will not be a fast lane and all drivers will have to travel at the speed of the safest drivers, but traffic will flow smoothly, according to the people who have analyzed the numbers. 

Third, they reveal their gasoholic bias by saying that Telegraph works well today, thinking only of how it works for cars. They should look at pedestrians hesitating at the cross-walks, afraid of the aggressive traffic, to see that this street does not work for everyone. BRT will make it easier to cross, and businesses will benefit when people shopping on one side of the street do not hesitate to walk across to the other side. 

Some shop owners seem to think that this plan will hurt their business. I don’t know why they believe that aggressive traffic and dangerous pedestrian crossings make a street a good place to do business. In reality, businesses will benefit when BRT makes Telegraph more pedestrian-friendly and brings more people. 

Charles Siegel 

 

• 

RACHEL CORRIE RESOLUTION 

Editors, Daily Planet 

I will not get into a point-by-point rebuttal to John Gertz’s rambling rant of June 29, but only point out that he again misrepresents the resolution passed by the City Council nearly four years ago, requesting a full independent investigation of Rachel Corrie’s death. Gertz says that the resolution ignored all Israeli casualties in the conflict, while in fact it said: “The City of Berkeley supports peace and justice and opposes the senseless killing of innocent Palestinians, Israelis and others.”  

The full text of the City Council resolution can be found at www.tomjoad.org (see “Response to Gertz”). There is also a full list of the 77 members of the House of Representatives (including Congresswoman Lee) that also supported a similar resolution in 2003.  

Mr. Gertz also states, without a shred of evidence, that Kriss Worthington regrets his support for this simple resolution. Kriss is a tireless supporter of peace and human rights for all, locally and globally, whether it be homeless youth, exploited garment industry workers, military resisters of the Iraq war, and all the victims of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. He has never said he regretted his vote on the Corrie resolution. This does not prevent Gertz from rewriting history. Gertz goes on to direct his wrath on Linda Maio and demonizes her, merely because she joined the majority on the city council (including current member Dona Spring and former members Maudelle Shirek and Margaret Breland), 77 members of the House of Representatives, Amnesty International and numerous other human rights organizations, in calling for an independent investigation into Corrie’s death.  

An independent investigation into the death of Tom Hurndall, a British activist killed while protecting children in Gaza just weeks after Corrie’s death, was demanded by the British government. That is why Israeli soldiers were eventually held accountable for Tom’s murder. Would a similar investigation result in similar conclusions in the case of Rachel Corrie? Thanks to obstructionists like Gertz, we may never know.  

Jim Harris  

 

• 

GUN CONTROL 

Editors, Daily Planet 

I was struck by the thoughtful letter from David Knauer on the subject of gun control. One sentence in particular caught my eye. It begins, “Those who own and carry guns usually have studied the gun laws quite thoroughly,” and goes on to paint a placid picture of sober, responsible citizens who have studied and trained with firearms before carrying them. David Knauer asks us to refrain from generalizing about the attitudes and habits of gun owners. Fair enough. 

I support gun control because it seems to work for other western nations that have fewer firearm fatalities per capita than we do. I do believe that most gun owners are law-abiding and responsible. I’m much less inclined to feel that way about gun dealers and firearm manufacturers. I have no wish to abolish our right to bear arms, and I really don’t mind if my neighbor owns a shotgun or a deer rifle. I do want the government to prevent her from owning a tank, rocket-launcher, flame thrower, or anti-personnel mines, and I have no objection to legal limits on type of gun, allowable ammunition, rate of fire, and magazine capacity. 

I have to say that while the idea of an armed citizenry acting as a deterrent to criminals has a certain “sounds good” appeal on the surface, the more I think about it the more scared I get. Our sober, responsible citizens all seem to think they can use a cell phone and drive at the same time... 

Paul Mackinney 

 

 

• 

THE NUMBERS 

Editors, Daily Planet 

Regarding Mr. Hourula’s response to Mr. Hardesty’s letter: These numbers are taken from the FBI Crime Statistics for the year 2005. (2006 is still preliminary.) These numbers are of course rounded. Murders and non-negligent manslaughter, 17,000. Forcible rape, 94,000. Robbery, 400,000. Property crime, 10 million. Burglary, 2.15 million. Larceny, 6.8 million. Motor vehicle theft, 1.23 million. So for the latest year completed, there were over 20 million crimes reported, or over 2,281 per hour.  

Suddenly, an additional 228 crimes stopped is put into a little better focus. With those numbers, and the fact that some crimes, especially rape, are under reported, I suspect that Las Vegas would probably back Mr. Hardesty over Mr. Hourula on Mr. Hourula’s bet.  

As for Ms. Snodgrass’ comments, my small 5’3” 90-pound daughter with a 9mm pistol is the equal of a 300-pound man with or without a gun. In last class I took, the two women attending both shot as well or better than the men. And that is a consistent finding by most instructors.  

Doug Hawkins 

 

• 

DETERRENT TO CRIME 

Editors, Daily Planet 

The fact is that millions of people use guns every year in this country as a deterrent to crime. The New American regularly publishes a column titled “Exercising The Right” which gives concrete examples of such deterrence. Organizations which support a citizen’s right to self-defense such as the National Rifle Association and the Second Amendment have also recorded a great many documented cases of self-defense over the years. We have over 300 million people in the U.S.A. and the estimate of several millions acting in self-defense is reasonable. Even a brainless lib can figure this out, most of the time if you deter a criminal with your gun, are you going to report to the cops ? In many jurisdictions you would be in more trouble than the would-be criminals, this one included. 

After reading Mr. Hourla’s figure of “billions” of false claims in the media, I defer to his obvious expertise in this area. 

Michael P. Hardesty 

Oakland 

 

• 

LISTENING TO CHILDREN 

Editors, Daily Planet 

My long career as a teacher tells me that we need to change our parenting styles. I know parents face challenges in their daily lives. But they need to learn how to offer open attention whenever their children need attention. Parents should learn how to focus on what their child is trying to say but cannot say clearly. Children need to feel they can try to express their inner feelings and be supported as they try. 

Romila Khanna 

Albany 

 

• 

CALL FOR IMPEACHMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet 

The office of the vice president, as well as that of the president, should not be above the law. The administration of justice, and application of law should be without regard to political partisanship, and should not be run with political bias, as it is now. 

John Schaeffer 

Richmond 

 

• 

DICTATOR IN CHIEF 

Editors, Daily Planet 

Fourth of July, freedom’s call, and yet George Bush just recently (May 9) issued a “presidential directive” that allows him to assume control of the federal government following a “catastrophic emergency.” 

Wait, it gets worse. The directive doesn’t specifically identify the types of “emergencies” that would qualify as catastrophic. In fact, the directive is so broad that it could include anything the public is led to believe might have a major impact on the country. 

This directive follows on the heels of a bill which gave the president the power to declare martial law. This couldn’t happen in America. Have you forgotten so quickly the takeover and power grab of the U.S. government orchestrated by Bush and the Republicans?  

How does George W. Bush, dictator-in-chief, sound? 

Ron Lowe  

Grass Valley 

 

• 

HAPPY FOURTH! 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Why was the great Dr. Kevorkian given eight years and called a killer by the system when the little turtle in the White House is allowed to maim and murder our troops at the toss of a coin? 

Dr. Kevorkian was a mercy doctor with great compassion for the terminally ill. The little turtle is a sick schizo, who is still allowed to practice his role as our president. Happy Fourth of July? I don’t think so! 

Alice Noriega 

• 

CALEXICO 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Your recent article, “Food Festival Spotlights West Berkeley’s Cultures,” says deli owner Luis Arango “came to California from Calexico 16 years ago...” 

Unless the border recently shifted northward, I believe Calexico is still very much a a part of Imperial County, California. 

Paul Slater 

 

• 

ASHAMED TO BE FROM BERKELEY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The poor, the homeless and the addicted came to the City Council meeting with hats in hand, begging for their programs to be funded at past rates, as all of them have been cut, a la Bush. This at the same time Mayor Bates is trying to push them out of town. 

On the other hand, Bates has recommended hiring a transportation planner for $225,000 for 18 months. With all the consultants Berkeley hires one would think we have no employees. It’s sort of like Bush hiring contractors to do the work of the regular army for five times their pay. 

Meanwhile services that help the poor, homeless and the addicted have had to reduce hours, reduce days and reduce staff. For shame. 

Rosemary Vimont 

 

• 

TRAFFIC DIVERTERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In response to Esten Sesto’s June 5 letter regarding traffic diverters, oh do we ever hate those things! It would take up the entire paper to list all the reasons, so we’ll just write about the diverter at Ninth Street and Delaware. 

First of all it sends all the cars to the 1800 block of Ninth Street. At commute time that block must have hundreds of cars whizzing by. But the 1700 block has its own woes. The diverter is evidently a challenge to those drivers aspiring to the Indianapolis speedway. Three times in recent memory two cars and a truck have gone at top speed and either careened around the corner and hit a parked car, or in the case of the truck, tried to go around the diverter using the sidewalk. (It hit a city tree.) When the police are called, they shrug their shoulders and go on their way.  

In our opinion, the roundabout at 10th Street and Delaware should have been placed at Ninth Street. Or better yet, omit the roundabout and install a four-way stop at Ninth and Delaware. We see cars using the sidewalk to avoid the diverter on a regular basis. 

Carol Beth and Kathleen McCarter 

 

• 

WORKING FOR THE CITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Your articles about the “fired” employees at the Berkeley Housing Authority (but wait, “we can’t fire them”) reminded me of when I worked at the City of Berkeley in the 1970s. There was a slice of the workforce which had little to do. I used to bring a library book with me to work because on some days there was nothing to do. Then, someone decided I needed two assistants. They didn’t have anything to do either. 

There was another slice of the workforce which was always “on leave,” “disabled” or “out sick.” Nobody cared. Then there were numerous well-known (among employees) of those so incompetent it was painful to watch. Nobody did anything about that either. The mayor at that time openly stated that one of the main aims of city government was to provide jobs for folks such as the above. 

It doesn’t sound like much has changed. And we can pat ourselves on the back by remembering that we will be paying pensions to these folks (and their spouses) for life, as well as lifetime medical care. 

Rob Snodgrass 

 

• 

GARBAGE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In mid-June there was a report on the BUSD and city discussing issues, one of which was garbage. Mayor Bates called people “slobs.” I resent that. I have tried for years to have more garbage cans around Berkeley. I was passed around various levels of highly paid bureaucracy to no avail. Other clean and busy towns have four cans at an intersection. This way you need not walk down a whole block or cross a busy street to deposit your garbage. Our garbage cans are often overfull. We need many more garbage cans as on Solano, Hopkins and Gilman, outside schools (public and private), near all bus stops, and many other areas. 

The stylish new cans with upper trays for recyclables get unrecyclable drink containers. People don’t understand what is recyclable since every city recycles different things. 

Today the garbage collectors left my neighbors’ diapers in the gutter as they collected things. Follow the trucks. This is common. 

I suspect that the homeless and less than mature young folks also deposit things on the street. Maybe our beloved neighbors do too or am I the only one to notice? Dismissing us all as slobs is short-sighted and disrespectful of the people who live here. 

I think we fail in our education about recycling. We also fail in handling the homeless problem. They could be picking up the garbage in exchange for a place to sleep. Instead we pay some far-off techy entrepreneur for sophisticated street sweepers that employ one person each and who wake everyone up. This is line with Bates’ vindictive and disparaging comment, however. 

I have spoken with a barely-speaking-English speaker on San Pablo Avenue for putting a drink can in the gutter. She insisted it was where it was supposed to go. I have witnessed six gardeners suited for protection dump garden toxins from back tanks on a bluff over the ocean (south of Stinson). Inquiries about both events were futile. 

The Alameda Clean Water Program and local and state waste “management” programs lack any effort to address the reality of our population. Flyers, pencils and other educational devices are almost exclusively in English. The parks in Marin passed the buck for so long that when someone finally checked out the area they found nothing. My photograph of the people and the truck with the license plate did not suffice. 

I’m tired of folks passing the buck. Carry a plastic bag and pick up the garbage when you go anywhere, folks, and stop blaming everyone else. If you have any influence, Tom Bates, get the waste agencies to educate the less than privileged hard-working folks, so that congenial outreach reaches them. Or is that just too inconceivable? 

Wendy Weikel 

 

• 

DISCRIMINATION AND BIAS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

An article appeared in your paper concerning a white male ex-cop who hit and killed an 82-year-old female pedestrian. According to the article he was also arrested on suspicion of drunken driving. The most amazing fact in the article was that his bail was set at just $30,000. 

I’m currently in the process of filing a citizen’s complaint with Supervisor John Gioia’s office, concerning the excessive bail levied against African Americans; other people of color; and, of course, poor people. Let me explain what I believe is disparate treatment. About two weeks ago, an African American mother of two small children got into a domestic dispute with her male companion. Her offense was that she accidentally scratched him while trying to wrest her keys from his fist. Her bail was set at $50,000. 

The facts are that she did not kill anyone and wasn’t arrested for a DUI, but she accidentally scratched someone. Something is terribly wrong with this scenario. In my view this incident reeks of bias and points to the two-tiered system of punishment that minorities and poor people face every day. This kind of bias is not acceptable in our communities.  

Nicole J. Williams 

Richmond 

 


Commentary: Civilization, Terror, And Real Security

By Americ Azevedo
Tuesday July 03, 2007

Today, the biggest “temples” are skyscrapers devoted to office work; no cathedrals at the center of town devoted to worship of a Higher Power. The true religion of world civilization is money. The attack upon of the World Trade Center in New York City was not just an “attack upon America” but an attack upon the current modes of world civilization. Terrorism challenges civilization, just like street crime challenges a local community. Crime is a symptom of a social sickness; terrorism is the surface symptom of systemic disorder in civilization. 

What’s wrong with civilization now? We must ask and dig into this question. This question has been asked since the beginning of the industrial revolution. And, needs to be asked even more now. The terrorism that we suffer now is happening as a tension between the oil producing and oil consuming parts of our civilized modern world. I have no answers, but ask that we just look at this tension in all its dimensions. 

Modern global civilization depends on freeways, cheap petroleum, making lots of stuff, shipping stuff here and there, extensive personal and business travel, telecommunications and computer networks. These are the wonders, and potential downfalls, of our age. 

Our money- and oil-based global civilization undermines the Earth itself. Without Life on earth, the notion of “economy” is meaningless. Our governments, businesses, and households assume “growth” as the prime measure of a healthy economy. Earth has finite resources. Humans are now hitting Earth’s walls. It’s time to renew our models of economic health to include the health of all life on the planet—not just humans. Economic growth alone is very dangerous at this time. 

Commuting in private cars to work is not an acceptable form of civilization. Freeways are the backbone of modern urban civilization. They encourage sprawl—commuting from one city to another. Freeways, in the morning are clogged with cars in both directions—going to work where you do not live sometimes one or two hours away. Pedestrian communities need to become the norm. Work, live and play within walking distance of your bedroom. 

The consumer economy with its advertising and marketing system, encourages spiritual bankruptcy to increase the making, selling and buying of “goods” to create satisfaction that never stays. So we must go on to consuming more. 

Security will come from little actions. Little actions change the world. Save a bit of a tree by NOT using the wood coffee stir stick to mix the half-and-half in. You know that the cream will swirl around by itself. Drive a little less, walk more. You’ll be healthier and have cleaner air. Don’t just air travel on a whim, even if you can afford it. Stay near home; become a tourist in your neighborhood. Find work near home. Life will become more relaxed. Share cars. Go for “growth in value,” not growth in consumption. A new kind of consumerism is needed: a consumerism of knowledge and wisdom rather than things. Place more value on time with friends and family rather than exchanging gifts. Remember that you buy your money with the time in your life—time that you could have used for real relationship with friends and family instead of buying things and experiences. 

This post-consumer world will not be so wealthy in material, but will be much wealthier in spirit—we’ll have more time for being and creativity. This could become the basis of a real security, of a world that does not breed terrorism. A world where the tension between oil production and oil consumption is not the fuel of politics, religious wars and hate campaigns. 

Civilization as we know it now will either collapse or transform. I vote for transformation; for the gradual changing of our ways of life until we get to a life positive form of civilization. This post-consumer world will also be a world without terror as we know it now. It will be a kinder place. 

 

Americ Azevedo is a Peace and Conflict Studies lecturer at UC Berkeley.


Commentary: A Better Life for Palestinians and Israelis

By Tracie de Angelis Salim
Tuesday July 03, 2007

Desperation and imagination. A total sense of hopelessness. Some of us can only imagine the depths we would go to have this hopelessness crack the sound barriers. 

Let’s take the city of Manhattan. Manhattan is the most densely populated county in the country; there are approximately 1, 537,195 people packed into a land area of 22.96 square miles. There is controversy over which area in the world is the most densely populated; Gaza is definitely in the top three. Gaza is a narrow coastal strip, 25 miles long, six miles wide and a population estimated at 1,482,405. John Gertz states in his June 29 commentary, “Gaza is about to descend into a very dark night of the soul.” Here is a perspective that may leave you wondering if life in Gaza isn’t already lurking in the shadows. A very dark night of the soul is a place where most Gazans dwell, indeed. 

Visualize life in Manhattan with no sewage systems, a place where the citizens don’t control the air space, water, taxes or electricity. Close your eyes and pretend you could only go in and out of Manhattan with permission each time from the United States Government and they could determine that you were not “enough of a U.S. citizen” to leave Manhattan to go to the Bronx. You are a foreigner in your own land. Imagine the ocean being within walking distance, yet you are not allowed to fish or swim because you don’t have control over the water or you don’t have the luxury of movement; the government controls this, but you are not part of that authority. It is further deemed that you have no control of your airspace, your airport is closed and used as a military base by an occupying power. You cannot fly anywhere. You are caged in; you cannot find work. In fact, envision what it would be like if most people in your city lived on less than $2 a day and there was a 70 percent unemployment rate.  

Gaza is just like the picture I have painted of a make-believe Manhattan. Gaza has been under some form of occupation since the 16th century. Eighty percent of the population is extremely poor, living on less than $2 a day and a majority depends on food aid from international donors. Seventy percent of Gaza’s potential workforce is out of work or without pay. The Gaza Strip is almost entirely sealed off from the outside world with virtually no way for Palestinians to get in or out. Exports have been reduced to a trickle; imports are limited to essential humanitarian supplies and even those are determined by an occupying force. 

The last occupying force, the Israeli military, disengaged from Gaza in 2005. The Palestinians now have self-determination, don’t they? Let’s delve deeper into this question. 

Following the disengagement in 2005 of the Israeli military from the Gaza strip, Israel continues to hold decisive control over central elements of life there. They continue to control the air space, water, who can enter and exit the area and the taxation system. This last example is important because this power enables Israel to punish the Palestinian Authority by stopping the transfer of the tax revenues, which impairs their ability to carry out basic functions of government such as paying salaries and providing humanitarian assistance. 

John Gertz says that Berkeley is complicit in a “Hamas takeover” in Gaza. He then spins that into several points. One can only surmise that his intent is an outright attempt to create distaste for all Palestinians, but specifically Muslim ones. He brings up issues of Female Genital Mutilation, honor killings, women being “required to take up the veil” and so forth. His rants expose his lack of knowledge of the region and unequivocally of the Muslim religion. If properly educated, he would learn that “forced genital mutilations” are strictly forbidden in Islam. Dr. Gamal Serour of Al-Azhar University in Egypt is considered the most authoritative voice on religion in the Islamic world, and recently issued a declaration against female genital mutilation. He states, “Female genital mutilation has no religious basis in either the Koran or the authentic Hadiths, the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed. It is therefore forbidden and should not be practiced by either traditional practitioners or paramedical staff.” 

Furthermore, when Mr. Gertz speaks about women “being required to take up the veil” he exposes his ignorance with regard to the hijab and further shows us that he considers his westernized beliefs superior to those of the Middle East. Additionally, he accuses only Palestinians of partaking in extreme behaviors. Both sides can be accused of this. One minor example is when Professor Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University studied 124 Israeli textbooks on grammar, Hebrew literature, history, geography and citizenship. He concluded that Israeli textbooks present the view that Jews are involved in a justified, even humanitarian, war against an Arab enemy. He states, “The early textbooks tended to describe acts of Arabs as hostile, deviant, cruel, immoral, unfair, with the intention to hurt Jews and to annihilate the State of Israel. Within this frame of reference, Arabs were de-legitimized by the use of such labels as ‘robbers,’ ‘bloodthirsty,’ and ‘killers,’” said Professor Bar-Tal, adding “there has been little positive revision in the Israeli curriculum over the years.” This is a minor example of extremism, yet a powerful comparison of Mr. Gertz’s accusation that most of the “equipped fighters in Hamas have been indoctrinated in jihad and hate since early childhood.” Mr. Gertz rattles off several examples of what he believes are extreme behaviors by Palestinians. One can go to the Israeli website, Btselem (www.btselem.org) and read about extreme behaviors such as house demolitions, road closures, checkpoints, curfews, settler violence and the illegal “security” wall perpetrated by the Israeli Occupation Forces. 

While Israeli bulldozers crush homes and dreams of Palestinians, extremists in Gaza of Arab descent also contribute to this cycle of violence. No one can refute that. 

If Mr. Gertz wants to talk about complicity in relation to this ancient conflict, he cannot forget the participation of the State of Israel. Surely, for there to be resolution, one has to look at an issue honestly from all sides. 

What is happening in Gaza is brutal. Hamas, Fatah, the IOF and both governments are complicit. One government is exponentially more powerful and this must be taken into account. Whether or not Berkeley is equally complicit is questionable. What cannot be denied is that when a human being becomes a shell of a person through repetitive violence and lack of self-determination, desperation replaces imagination. Beating hearts are replaced with stone, flowers are replaced with bullets and love is taken over with hatred. None of this happens without reason. No one is dehumanized through free will. People can only take so much before the humanity inside becomes that dark soul of the night. If Berkeley is complicit, so are we all. It is time to imagine a better life for Palestinians and Israelis. And with this imagination must come truth. And with this imagination, despair must be erased. Today is a good day for the war to end. 

 

Tracie de Angelis Salim is a Berkeley resident.


Commentary: The U.S. Sustain Green Exchange

By Willi Paul
Tuesday July 03, 2007

I was happy to have attended a chapter lunch meeting of BNI in San Francisco last week. About 20 professional people were there— passing business cards and working a vibrant prospect referral system. On their website BNI states that they are the largest business networking organization in the world that offers their members the opportunity to share ideas, contacts and business referrals—opportunities that the sustainability/green community needs more of and fast! 

Of course, there are other business groups in this town—including the Rotary and the Chamber of Commerce. But what are these groups doing to tackle sustainability and environmental justice issues? 

Plenty! The Berkeley Rotary Club, founded in 1916, is working on a series of community service projects (www.berkeleyrotary.org/projects.htm) while the local Berkeley Chamber (www.berkeleychamber.com) is now Certified Green and is working with Sustainable Berkeley (sustainableberkeley.org). 

Across the country, other business networking groups are popping up. I recently clicked-up a discussion on Coop America’s (www.coopamerica.org/cabn) listserv concerning a “Green Chamber of Commerce.” But this thread proved to be off the mark. 

What can we learn from other sustainable/green business networking groups? 

BALLE (www.livingeconomies.org) envisions a sustainable global economy made up of local living economies that build long-term economic empowerment and prosperity through local business ownership, economic justice, cultural diversity, and environmental stewardship. 

Sustainable Business Alliance (www.sustainablebiz.org) is an East Bay membership organization for companies who are committed to greater sustainability in their business policies and practices. 

Boulder Green Building Guild (www.bgbg.org) is an association of building professionals dedicated to promoting healthier, resource-efficient homes and work places. They strive to advance the craft of green building; support environmentally-responsibility; and provide effective volunteer opportunities. Their vision is to empower people to build healthy, resource-efficient communities. 

Chicago Sustainable Business Alliance (www.sustainablechicago.biz/about) is a network of enterprises and organizations dedicated to realizing the benefits of incorporating sustainability principles into their products, services, and practices. The Alliance provides the necessary resources, connections, and support for member companies to thrive. 

What we need is a hybrid organization—let’s call it the U.S. SustainGreen Exchange for now—that provides a green business networking/referral opportunity—not another educational lunch or activist shout. A business to business, member-driven vehicle to unite the old guard with the emerging sustainable business movement.  

Not a website/listerv e-mail thing but a face to face, “swap cards and referrals,” program that makes everybody money in the new economy. I am surely missing BNI’s old fashioned face time and relationship building as I sit in front of my monitor and wait for customer e-mail in the hills. 

The U.S. SustainGreen Exchange could be an incubator for mentors and trainees alike—a green egg chamber for the sustainability set. 

We are the new old green guard. Can I get your business card? 

 

Willi Paul is a Berkeley resident. 


Letters to the Editor

Friday June 29, 2007

EMPTY LOT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Dorothy Snodgrass would, I hope, be interested to know the history of the “blight” at the corner of Haste and Telegraph; a building which once served hundreds of low-income tenants was deliberately burned, so deliberately that the tenants in the affected wing were warned ahead of time. If the “moderate” majority on the City Council hadn’t prevailed, we would now have a low-income apartment building honoring Bob Sparks. The current council can’t seem to find a way to replicate the 77 units of affordable housing that once stood at that corner, and offered shelter to hundreds by the week or by the day, whatever they could afford. Even the word “affordable,” once a useful way to describe such housing, has been re-defined out of useful existence. Doing nothing about the crucial replacement of such housing is a clear statement of values, for which I hope people hold the council accountable. But we citizens, including Snodgrass, whose letters I thoroughly enjoy, need to learn and remember our local history, or we run the risk of replacing buildings which served a crucial need with market-rate housing that further exacerbates the housing crisis for the poor. 

Carol Denney 

 

• 

HILDEGARDE FLANNER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Phil McArdle’s article on Hildegarde Flanner sent me to my bookshelf to make sure I still had At the Gentle Mercy of Plants re-issued in 1986 shortly before Flanner’s death, by John Daniels, (Santa Barbara) publisher of many fine books. 

Immediately after I had enjoyed this book of poems and essays, including “Wildfire: Berkeley 1923,” I read that essay and a couple of poems on one of the regular readings I did at that time on KPFA. I loved the writing, but wasn’t really sure who Hildegarde Flanner was—I tended to confuse her with her sister Janet, who wrote more regularly for the New Yorker. 

A few years later, when the Oakland hills went up in flames, I called Susan Stone at KPFA, suggesting this might be a good time for a repeat reading of this exquisite piece, and brought her my copy, which she read on the air. (The Lake Tahoe fire reminds us again of our recurring catastrophes which Flanner took rather philosophically.) 

Still, I went on not knowing much about Hildegarde Flanner. I learned so much from the way Phil laid out so clearly the main facts about this wonderful writer, who wrote few pages, but made every word count. I was also delighted by the mention of Janet Lewis, another fine writer who made no big splash, but in terms of literature really counted. Maybe a piece on Lewis soon? to reassure older readers that good work is not forgotten, and to introduce young readers to good writers who get drowned out by noisy promotion of their more prolific and flashy inferiors. 

The articles by Phil McArdle are invaluable. Thank you. 

Dorothy Bryant 

 

• 

DOWNTOWN PLAN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Tuesday’s article on the draft historic preservation element of the emerging Downtown Plan (“Preservationists Win Round in Downtown Plan Debate”) may have set a new Daily Planet standard for relating the sizzle but ignoring the steak. The real and unreported story—obscured by the detailed recounting of trivial editing disagreements among DAPAC members—is about how much progress has been made in one of Berkeley’s longest-running arguments: the relationship between preservation and development in Berkeley. 

The actual historic preservation draft submitted to the DAPAC makes a solid case for preserving the historic character of our downtown, focusing especially on the “core” frontages on Shattuck from University to Durant as a potential formal historic district. But it is just as vigorous in supporting “sensitive” in-fill development in the downtown—even to the extent of proposing that we actively seek out opportunities to “intensify” some landmark buildings themselves with taller and denser adaptive re-uses. As the report stated, “Downtown should not be frozen in time. . . . We should not only (a) protect Downtown’s historic character but also (b) accommodate a substantial amount of sustainable new development. We can, we should, do both.” 

This basic both-and approach was gratefully embraced in principle by all DAPAC members who spoke—really making for a milestone in the history of the committee, who saw the report’s “generous and inclusive spirit” to be a model worthy of emulation for the entire final DAPAC report. Compared to that headline accomplishment—which the Planet reporter apparently failed to notice—the “disagreements” at the meeting were insignificant. They focused mainly on editorial concerns—for example, not whether “urban design” issues need to be included in the report, but simply if they’re best addressed in a separate chapter rather than in parts of multiple chapters. A few open policy issues do remain, but the principle has been established for maintaining downtown Berkeley as both an historic and a still-evolving district. 

Yes, the “preservationists” won a round—for which the city should be thankful. And they did so by recognizing that responsible preservation not only grudgingly accommodates change, but also embraces it. Thanks to this well-crafted document, more of us should proudly say that we are all preservationists now. 

Alan Tobey 

 

• 

FACTS AND OPINION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

What fun it is to mix facts and opinions! 

Writers can make any sort of claim in a letter to the editor without providing a shred of evidence and it will be printed right along side empirically verifiable fact. Example: In his letter to your publication of June 26, Michael P. Hardesty asserts, “The fact is that guns are used in self-defense millions of times every year in the United States.” That was million with an “s” at the end. By pluralizing million we’re talking about at least two of them. That comes out to an average of 5,479 incidents every day in which an American uses a gun in self defense. That’s 228 times an hour. Remember two million would be the minimum so these are conservative figures. 

Two can play at that game Mr. Hardesty. Here’s mine: There are literally billions of unverified claims made within printed letters to editors in America every day. 

I betchya mine’s closer to the truth. 

Richard Hourula 

 

• 

NET NEUTRALITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a U.S. citizen, as a student, as a teacher, as a voter, as a person concerned about small, independent, local, community websites: We need to stop the corporate take over of the Internet! This is not an issue in France, Germany, Japan, England, nor in Mexico, Argentina, Nigeria or South Africa. It is exclusive to Corporate America: AT&T, Comcast, etc., who want to charge high rates for website speeds! Right now, under net neutrality, all sites in America get the same speed. The Internet could soon look like expensive cable TV and be denied to millions of students who cannot afford skyrocketing rates. Everyone, stop the corporate takeover of our Internet. The Internet is the new space of enlightenment and global commerce that we need to maintain free, neutral, and independent of corporate greed. Net neutrality is essential to free speech, equal opportunity and economic innovation in America. Since the FCC removed this basic protection in 2005, the top executives of phone and cable companies have stated their intention to become the Internet’s gatekeepers and to discriminate against Web sites that do not pay their added tolls. 

This fundamental change would end the open Internet as we know it. It would damage my ability to connect with others, share information and participate in our 21st century democracy and economy. The FCC must ensure that broadband providers do not block, interfere with or discriminate against any lawful Internet traffic based on its ownership, source or destination. 

Adam Shellhorse 

 

• 

ELMWOOD DISTRICT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I became engrossed in the June 26 Berkeley City Council meeting, especially when residents and the Elmwood Merchants’ Association spoke against the Wright’s Garage project. Although I have commented in your pages about my position on the issue, I feel it is imperative to address one issue that arose during the testimonies, and to suggest an immediate solution to the probable confusion by the city attorney.  

The insistence by the city’s attorney that Kitchen Democracy’s survey was a valid barometer as evidence residents of District 8 support the project needs to be addressed. I appeal to the attorney, and especially to members of the council, to read the survey. It was a broad survey about the Elmwood in general, with no specific information about the Wright’s Garage project. The conclusion arrived at was the position of Councilmember Wozniak, an interpretation of the replies to the survey that is highly suspect. In fact, it appears that the elaborate setup was a scheme to win approval of the project from the start. The attorney’s continued insistence on its validity, even after Councilmember Worthington’s astute rebuff, is both egregious and curious; it begs the question as to whether a conflict of interest issue exists. Even after the merchants’ association and residents of the Elmwood spoke, unequivocally, against the project, the attorney continued to minimize their significant relevance. Perhaps the attorney was not aware that her comments actually misled council members. 

Therefore, it is clear that the council needs to be informed directly by residents of the Elmwood District, not through councilmembers who support the project, and not through an attorney who has difficulty with reality. At least one councilmember relied on the attorney’s answers for insight into the issue. The merchants’ association needs to submit its petition to the council directly, showing that the vast majority of merchants oppose the project. And citizens of the Elmwood need to get up their own petition, perhaps have the signing as an on-going activity through the week and on weekends at the four corners of Ashby and College. Volunteers could create the need for enlightenment.  

In an ideal world, councilmembers would give residents and merchants one more week to secure signatures for their petitions.  

Such overwhelming evidence should convince the council, and inform the city’s attorney, once and for all.  

R.J. Schwendinger 

 

• 

GUNS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In voicing my whole-hearted support of Andrew Ritchie’s demand that the Old West Gun Room in El Cerrito be permanently removed from our community, I run the risk of being labeled as someone with a mind “taken to its reductio ad absurdum.” (In the eloquent words of your reader, Michael P. Hardesty.) So be it, Mike. 

And I must not overlook Deborah Cloudwalker’s letter espousing her novel theory that carrying guns in self-defense is the only thing that can “equalize a small, weak woman against a large strong man.” She forgot to add the words “carrying a gun.” I would remind Deborah that not all small, weak women consider guns an appropriate means of defense—only women with small, weak minds! 

Please continue your campaign to shut down the Old West Gun Room, Mr. Ritchie. You have the support of all those angry and frustrated by the easy accessibility of guns. 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

 

• 

BE WELL INFORMED 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Whatever your position on gun issues, it is best to be well informed. Those who advocate gun control may not be aware that state and federal law already give everyone the right to use deadly force in defense against “grievous bodily injury.” However in states like ours, as Deborah pointed out, citizens are overwhelmingly prevented from carrying guns in public places, so that they usually cannot use these effective weapons outside their own home. In her editorial, Becky O’Malley argues that it could be dangerous if one reacts too quickly to perceived assault. Very true, and that is why, in every state where individuals are allowed to carry concealed weapons, they must go through a rigorous training program and obtain a permit to do so. Those who own and carry guns usually have studied the gun laws quite thoroughly, and they realize, as they are taught in concealed weapons classes as well as classes on combat use of handguns, that to make a mistake and squeeze the trigger too easily is to end up charged with murder. It is an extremely serious thing to use a gun in self-defense, something that should only be done “in the gravest extreme,” to quote the title of one book on the subject. As we have found in the many places where carrying a concealed gun is more readily permitted than here (and by the way, it is permitted here, but not very readily), citizens trained to carry guns can actually be trusted to do so.  

Finally, Becky misses the point that I believe Deborah was making it isn’t the carrying and use of guns for self-defense that deters criminals. Rather it is the fear of armed citizens that deters criminals. If laws provided everyone the right to carry guns in the streets, and in Oakland and Berkeley not a single citizen chose to enact that right, violent crime would still drop steeply, simply because of the fear that had now been introduced in criminal’s minds, “the person I hit on might have the means to kill me." That criminals tend to pick on those who look more vulnerable, demonstrates that they look to avoid danger to themselves in their commission of crime. Doubt it? Talk to criminals.  

To those who use the phrase “gun nut,” I’d suggest you meet some of those you caricature but don’t know. Go to a shooting range or gun shop and talk to people. Go to rural areas and meet those who’ve grown up with hunting and guns. Find out that some of those who own guns are doctors, social workers, schoolteachers, psychologists, nannies, dog walkers, and women who’ve been assaulted or raped. You’re free to form your own position on guns, but be well informed.  

David Knauer 

Oakland 

 

• 

SUMMER IN SOUTH BERKELEY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Around 11 a.m. this morning I received a call from a neighbor, alerting me that there had been a shooting event shortly before, on the 1600 block of Russell Street. It sounded like they came from around the parking lot of an apartment complex. I walked over to the Rosewood Apartments, the parking lot for which is directly west of the structure, and partially wraps around. There is a flight of stairs leading up to the first floor, with a wood fence behind it. There I counted three fresh bullet holes, lightly circled in crayon. There were two other, larger bullet holes in the fence, which appeared to be older. The cut-through left by those rounds had been painted over. Beyond the Rosewood parking lot is another apartment building and its backyard. There is a chain-link fence at the back, overlooking Lenora Moore’s residence of 1610 Oregon St. 

I took photos of the damaged wood fence, and a woman came up the entrance and greeted me. I asked her if she was the press, since she carried a substantial camera and what looked like a bag for gear. She answered “No, I’m a nurse. Are you Mary Lou?” That made it seem that she was entering an apartment to see to a tenant. I asked her if anyone was injured. She said no, she was really just there in more of a social worker capacity. So an apartment was shot into, it seemed. 

The backyard of the next-door apartment building was clear. No one hanging out; no bullet casings, had any been left from that location. I heard that shots were fired into a separate apartment residence around the 1614 Oregon address. It is at the back of the property. Bullets came through the walls of the bathroom and lodged in the walls of the closet. The family who lives there was home at the time, but no one was in the bathroom. Otherwise, I am told they could easily have been killed. Someone connected with the property told me that rounds retrieved were heavy-duty, jacketed bullets that are armor-piercing. Great. 

A sole officer was sitting in a Crime Scene BPD van out in front of 1612 Oregon. Officer (Detective?) Vargas told me that no one had been injured, no one apprehended. No one was willing to admit that they had seen anything. 

I guess that makes it now, officially, summer. 

Sam Herbert 

 

• 

BUS RAPID TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Roy Nakadegawa (letters, June 26) missed the whole point of my June 22 commentary about AC Transit’s misnamed Bus “Rapid” Transit (BRT) lane grab: 

AC Transit has already captured most of the speed enhancements realistically available to buses in the Telegraph Ave./BART corridor. Its new 1/1R “Rapid Bus” route, inaugurated on June 24, alternates fast express buses with local buses. 

It also allows buses to prolong green lights until they clear intersections. As with San Pablo Avenue’s successful 72/72R route, these benefits come with no negative impacts. 

But building the whole BRT package—which means seizing two lanes of Telegraph for bus-only use—would add only tiny further speed benefits. And those would be offset by larger detriments: snarling Telegraph’s remaining traffic, and diverting through-traffic into neighborhoods. 

If you want a bus faster than Rapid Bus, just add simple “proof-of-payment” boarding: Let riders buy tickets from retailers, board quickly, and cancel their own tickets onboard. No bus-only lanes, “stations,” or trouble-prone ticket vending machines (like BART’s) required. 

BRT apologists keep defending this $400 million boondoggle with theoretical, or system-wide, claims that are irrelevant to Berkeley. And indeed, while BRT is great technology where properly sited, there’s no defense for AC Transit’s proposed route. 

It would hug the BART tracks for its entire length. That’s idiotically redundant route planning, which would be allowed in no other city. 

Roy claims time savings that AC Transit has never predicted. They estimate more like five minutes on a long trip. 

And he cites theoretical figures about “mass transit” (presumably including electrified rail) producing less pollution and CO2 “per passenger mile” (an important detail) than cars. Yet as even he concedes, AC Transit’s own environmental study shows negligible energy or pollution savings from this project. 

Why? Because buses only save energy and pollution when they’re full. On Telegraph, AC Transit is evidently proposing to run mostly-empty buses most of the day, to collect federal and regional subsidies. 

That’s an absurd Rube Goldberg scheme that’s neutral for the environment, only marginally better for transit riders, bad for South Berkeley, and awful for taxpayers. Consider the real benefits that $400 million could buy on a better-patronized route, and it’s bad for everyone. 

Let this wasteful proposed Emperor’s New Bus stop here. 

Michael Katz 

 

• 

TOO EXPENSIVE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A cost-benefit analysis suggests that the AC Transit Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) proposal is far too expensive for the modest gains in travel time and passenger increase. 

AC Transit estimates that the total cost for Bus Rapid Transit will be between $310 million and $400 million. For this amount of money, we would see: 

• A reduction in peak-period travel time from downtown Oakland to downtown Berkeley of 5 to 7 minutes (from 26 minutes without BRT to 19 to 21 minutes with BRT). 

• A reduction in peak-period travel time from downtown Oakland to downtown San Leandro of 6 to 10 minutes (from 36 minutes without BRT to 26 to 30 minutes with BRT). 

In his recent letter to the Daily Planet arguing in favor of BRT, Roy Nakadegawa unfortunately compared the current travel times between the points listed above with the estimated travel times under BRT. It is more useful—and more accurate—to use the comparison times that AC Transit has provided with and without BRT on its website (as I’ve done above) because those times include the enhancements, such as traffic signal manipulation and fewer stops, that will be in place even if the full BRT project is not implemented.  

AC Transit also estimates that over an 18-year period to the year 2025, BRT would increase the average weekday riders by 12,000 to 21,180 passengers (from 28,050 riders without BRT to between 40,050 and 49,230 passengers with BRT).  

These seem like very modest gains for so much money—coupled with the extraordinary inconveniences and traffic delays caused by just a single lane in each direction for autos on Telegraph, the heavy increase of traffic likely on neighborhood streets, the loss of parking spaces on Telegraph, and what seems to be almost no net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.  

In addition, the University of California will open this fall a new 1,000 car parking facility on College Avenue between Channing Way and Haste that will feed huge numbers on cars onto College, which is already a severe bottleneck during rush hours, and onto Telegraph with its proposed single-lane-in-each-direction for cars. 

The costs of BRT clearly seem to outweigh its limited advantages. 

Bob Laird 

 

• 

LONELIER THAN EVER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

My childhood was spent on a dairy farm in Los Angeles County. Telephones were still luxuries. It was a big deal when we got a four-party line (yes! four households shared the same line). Phone bandwidth was expensive. Only the wealthy had private lines. On Sundays friends and neighbors would drop in on each other unannounced. In those days, existence had a more tangible personal feel to it. 

Phones became cheap; and the Internet made communication faster and even cheaper. Today we send messages everywhere on Earth at a moment’s notice. But, are we closer now than the neighbors who knocked at each other’s doors on Sunday for a visit? Are we getting more “free time” by flooding each other with more e-mail and cell phone messages? I don’t think so. In fact, I suspect that we are now lonelier and more confused. We think we’re more connected—but spend more time skimming massive quantities of messages and images coming to our computers screens, cell phones, iPod headsets, televisions, and radios everywhere. Less and less time do we spend face-to-face with each other. 

Americ Azevedo 

 

• 

PREJUDICE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

An anti-immigration rally took place in Jackson, Miss. to castigate Trent Lott for his moderate stance on the immigration debate. It seems the only people not assimilating in the current debate are the “whites only” crowd. How many Mexicans, blacks, Latinos and tolerant whites do you think were at this Mississippi social? The current debate is not about illegal immigrants, amnesty and speaking English, it is about prejudice and discrimination. 

Why are Americans so blind to this fact and why do they so easily feed into the hatred of a vocal and ignorant fringe element of society?  

Is today’s immigration frenzy any different than the racial unrest of the ’50s and early ’60s, except in that brown skin has been substituted for black skin. The ugly scourge of racism is still very much alive and well in America.  

Ron Lowe 

Grass Valley 

 

 


Commentary: Mayor Should Honor Pledge to Protect University Avenue Neighborhoods

By Regan Richardson
Friday June 29, 2007

In a Nov. 18, 2003 commentary, Mayor Bates and Councilmember Linda Maio made what appeared to be a heartfelt plea for immediate incorporation of the University Avenue Strategic Plan into the zoning ordinance. In light of developments such as the behemoth building proposed for 1950 MLK, affectionately known to some as the Trader Joe’s building, this public promise to champion the UASP principles of protecting Berkeley from inappropriately large development and to maintain the residential character of the neighborhoods definitely bears re-examination. 

The letter began with the sentence, “The future for University Avenue cannot be wall-to-wall five story buildings.” It goes on to assert, “New buildings in Berkeley need to respect adjacent homes and protect their sunlight and privacy—not loom above and overwhelm their neighbors” and “We pay attention…to blending with the neighborhood context, to the interface between commercial and residential, to how a building impacts the streetscape.” It concludes with the statement, “We should all realize that our major corridors are where new affordable housing can and should be built. But we must respect the context of the street and neighborhood and ensure that new buildings do not make a significant imposition on their neighbors.”  

As Mayor Bates lamented in 2003, the requirements of the State Density Bonus law often result in “…large, blocky buildings which are too big for the lot and overwhelming to neighbors and the street.” The state density bonus law has been used as a convenient scapegoat for ignoring the neighborhood protection principles of the UASP. The 1950 MLK project’s current promise of a ground-floor grocery and increased tax revenues is no excuse for abandoning the stated protection principles of the pre-existing UASP, which Mayor Bates clearly claimed to champion in 2003. I defy anyone to explain in public forum how this project fulfills the protection principles delineated in the UASP. Let’s take a look at those principles: 

• UASP, Strategic Plan Goal No. 3: “Protect and improve neighborhood quality of life,” including the following goals: “Protect Existing Local Business and Established Neighborhoods”; “Enhance the quality of life for current residents at all income levels; “Protect and improve neighborhood quality of life.”  

• UASP Strategic Plan Goal No. 5 includes the goal to “Respect the Character of the Local Neighborhoods.” 

• UASP Housing Policy UA-17 specifies that “The design of new and renovated housing along the University Avenue Corridor should contribute to its character, without negatively impacting residents of adjacent residential areas.”  

• UASP Transportation Policy UA-21 mandates “Implement improvements to tame traffic along University Avenue, but protect the adjacent neighborhoods from excessive traffic.”  

Nowhere in these clearly stated UASP requirements to protect the existing residential character of the neighborhoods, and nowhere in Mr. Bates’ and Ms. Maio’s letter to the editor of 2003, does it specify the caveat “unless there is a profitable reason not to uphold these principles.”  

The 1950 MLK project will reduce on-street parking along MLK for existing businesses. It confronts the neighborhood with a 4-5 story façade, looming 43-55 feet high on our one- to two-story residential block. It places a residential entrance for a 64-unit apartment building opposite a single-family Queen Anne cottage, effectively doubling the number of residents the street already houses. It proposes a retail parking entrance for a Trader Joe’s on our residential block. Without a full traffic barrier in place as requested by the neighborhood, that equates to a projected 2,200-plus extra cars driving down our street per day. Certainly none of these proposals enhance our quality of life. They increase traffic, air pollution, noise, density and reduce our safety significantly; this on a block where we are already a frequently-used and abused shortcut for cars evading the traffic light at MLK and University and a block where parking is already scarce. 

We, the Neighbors for A Livable Berkeley Way, are not and have never been NIMBYs. We are a diverse, predominantly low-to-middle-income community. We initiated a dialogue with the developers specifically to forge a productive template for development for all of Berkeley, not just our block, so other neighbors would not have to face this same fate, a template that would specifically include respecting the character of the existing neighborhood, clearly delineated in the UASP. The 1950 MLK project is a substitute design, and regardless of the state density bonus, it is entirely at the council’s discretion to make any modifications necessary to comply with UASP guidelines to maintain our “lovely” town, as Bates referred to Berkeley in his letter. 

According to Mr. Bates and Ms. Maio’s letter of 2003, they believed in and pledged publicly to uphold all the goals of the UASP, including the protection of existing neighborhoods, not to pick and choose whichever UASP principles might be convenient at the time. We call on you now to honor that pledge. 

 

Regan Richardson is a Berkeley resident. 


Commentary: Bus Rapid Transit Will Destroy Telegraph Avenue

By George Oram, Mary Oram, Arlene Giordano, Thomas Cooper, Carol Lipnick and
Friday June 29, 2007

AC Transit proposes to eliminate two auto lanes on Telegraph Avenue and have curbed, restricted, and exclusive fast bus lanes in the middle two lanes for the new BRT service. Their thinking and the environmental impact report do not address the problems this will cause. Telegraph today is attractive, clean, and traffic flows. 

Local bus and all auto and truck traffic would be confined to one lane in each direction. Emergency vehicles would run with the fast buses in the center lane, and be restricted by the buses and congestion. No one could pass other vehicles. Police and fire vehicles would be considerably hampered. Much, but not all parking would be eliminated. Local buses stopping and cars parallel parking would stop all traffic. Getting across Telegraph would be restricted. Left turns limited. People will leave rather than use businesses. 

Telegraph is the main route for entering and exiting South Berkeley especially. 

Entering: Berkeley events, theater, sports, UCB events, downtown, for giant trucks with food for Andronico’s and Whole Foods, and many trucks with supplies for stores and restaurants.  

Exiting: after events and games, after work, and in an emergency such as fire or earthquake. It is an important feeder for freeways and the Temescal Shopping Center at 51st Street. Some neighborhoods could be isolated. Stores would lose customers by the droves.  

Alternative routes are not readily available; they are jammed already. Both South Berkeley and North Oakland neighborhoods have many blocked streets; as it has been longtime policy to divert traffic to main streets. These mazes will become a traffic mess. 

At peak hours exits from the UC campus to Claremont and/or Route 13 are slowed to a stop. Claremont can handle more traffic, but it is very hard to get to it. Much traffic has been diverted over the years from neighborhoods and other routes to Telegraph Avenue. 

At most hours College Avenue is very slow, restricted by the light at Ashby. College cannot handle more autos and trucks. Ashby, our exit to east and west, has jammed traffic at many hours and can handle no more. Broadway can handle Oakland traffic but it does not solve the problem of getting to South Berkeley, including UC Berkeley or Alta Bates Hospital. Routes such as Martin Luther King are too far away and made hard to access by traffic restrictions. 

Telegraph Avenue functions extraordinarily well in 2007. It is clean. Neighborhoods are improving. Many new businesses are established from 20th Street in Oakland through Stuart Street in Berkeley. Temescal is reborn. Condos have been built. The buses work; trucks deliver vital food and merchandise. Auto traffic flows easily. All this will be brought to an end by the unnecessary construction of restricted lanes. Traffic not being able to sort itself out by passing will clog the avenue. There will be great pain and bankruptcies as a result of blocking Telegraph. The businesses will be killed by the congestion and lack of parking. Growing tax revenues for the cities will shrink. In any emergency there is the risk of lost lives when emergency vehicles cannot get through. Emergency vehicles will be blocked by traffic. 

The opinion survey on this development was only mailed to people within 300 feet of Telegraph. Very few people know what is happening. The meetings chaired by AC Transit were stacked with transit people with local people objecting. Berkeley’s own traffic commission is filing the most modest objection to the EIR, and not representing the motorists, most of the residents of the town. Does the City Council know what is happening here? Does Oakland know? Do fire, police, and ambulance operators know? 

Today, the big fast double buses are running on Telegraph, mixed with other traffic, and this, and restriping and cleaning up the avenue has resulted in less congestion and faster both bus and auto service. AC Transit should stand pat with what has already been accomplished and not go too far and destroy commerce and neighborhoods.  

This is an open letter to Berkeley residents, Berkeley government, Oakland government and above all the Board of AC Transit who are requested to not proceed on this project.  

We suggest that residents and business people call your Oakland or Berkeley Council person and AC Transit and write to newspapers and AC Transit Board, 1600 Franklin St, Oakland Ca., 94612 with your point of view. People pressure can avert this disaster. EIR comments are due by July 3. Google AC Transit EIR for much more information. Berkeley government may tend to favor this proposal as a way to invigorate downtown. Oakland hardly knows it is happening. 

 

Mary and George Oram are Hillegass Avenue residents; Arlene Giordano and Thomas Cooper own Le Bateau Ivre; Carol Lipnick and Ed Dougherty own Berkeley Hat Company on Telegraph Avenue.  


Commentary: Berkeley Complicit In Hamas Takeover

By John Gertz
Friday June 29, 2007

At last count, there were 43 separate militias in Gaza, including clan based militias, Fatah splinter groups, criminal gangs, and non-Hamas Islamic groups. It is unclear as of this writing how long it will take Hamas to consolidate its control, and eliminate all possible resistance. But they will. To subdue one clan, they took three female civilian clan members, one a young girl, and executed them summarily as an example. Summary execution has always greeted those accused (no trials necessary in Palestine) of collaboration with Israel. Now collaboration with Fatah has become a capital offense as well. Military control is but one aspect of the story. Gaza is about to descend into a very dark night of the soul. Hamas will gradually monopolize and Islamicize all aspects of life. There have already been innumerable attacks on normal expressions of modernity. Nightclubs and internet cafes have been torched, gays murdered, churches burned (Palestine, which, until recently, was 7 percent Christian Arab, is now only about 2 percent Christian). Women who commit adultery face death by stoning, if their own brothers and fathers do not kill them first. Hundreds of women have already been strangled by their own family members in so-called “honor killings.” Women also face forced genital mutilations, and, of course, they will be required to take up the veil. The education system will become Islamic. Already, Mickey Mouse broadcasts a message of hate on Hamas TV. “Kill the Jew and the crusader” (i.e., Christians), preaches Hamas’ Mickey Mouse, “for they are all pigs and apes.” But this has been going on for years. Hamas’ “summer camps” routinely taught children how to become martyred suicide bombers. Those children have grown up to become the shock troops which made short order of Fatah in Gaza, and may someday soon do the same in the West Bank. 

Hamas has at least 6,000 very well equipped fighters in Gaza, most of whom have been indoctrinated in jihad and hate since early childhood. Hamas has risen above the moniker of militia. It is now an army approximately equal in strength to Hizbollah in Lebanon, save only that their rockets are still cruder. Almost all of their weapons came through the honeycomb of tunnels dug under the town of Rafah, which straddles the Egypt-Palestine border. Egypt turned a blind eye to this smuggling. This was not so much a matter of Egyptian policy, but rather, Egypt’s poorly paid border patrol was simply bribed to look the other way. Israel, before it evacuated Gaza, tried to staunch the inflow of weapons by seeking and destroying those tunnels.  

Enter one Rachel Corrie. ISM, a group dedicated to the Palestinian cause, and which in its literature fully supports Palestinian terrorism, sent Rachel Corrie to Rafah. The idea was that she and her friends, in the name of “peace,” would throw their bodies in front of Israeli bulldozers as they tried to uproot the tunnels. One such bulldozer accidentally ran her down (no one has alleged murder, though driver negligence may have been a factor). This happened at the height of the second intifada, and at time when over a thousand Israelis were blown up by Palestinian suicide bombers. Israel has since built security fences which have greatly diminished the number of suicide bombings, though there has been barely a let-up of Palestinian attempts to infiltrate Israel with suicide bombers. Only now, very few actually get through to their targets.  

Berkeley is complicit in the takeover of Gaza by Hamas. City Council members Kriss Worthington and Linda Maio brought to the City Council a resolution effectively supporting Rachel Corrie, and pointedly ignoring all Israeli casualties. In effect, their resolution gave a vote of support for Hamas’ weapons smuggling. What were they thinking?  

By all accounts, Worthington realizes that he made an error, and has tried to make amends. If I am correct in this, then I say to Worthington, to err is human, so let’s move on. Maio, on the other hand, continues to defend her outlandish behavior. I hope that one day a viable candidate will choose to run against Maio in her district. Such a candidate would receive a great deal of support by a community that is sick of Berkeley politicians who insert themselves into complex foreign issues of which they are almost wholly ignorant. As for becoming mayor one day, I say to Maio, run for mayor in Gaza, but not in Berkeley. 


Columns

Wild Neighbors: The Wrong Fox and Other Reversals of Fortune

By Joe Eaton
Tuesday July 03, 2007

This is not strictly a Berkeley or Bay Area story, although it begins here with the introduced red fox (Vulpes vulpes regalis). You probably know the basics: eastern and Canadian foxes brought to the Central Valley during the 19th century by would-be fur farmers, some escaping and taking to the wild where they’ve become serious predators on a roster of endangered species.  

Red foxes were first sighted in the South Bay in 1986, about the time the California clapper rail population began to crash. The light-footed clapper rail of Southern California was similarly decimated. The foxes will also take western snowy plovers, California least terns, Caspian terns, gulls, shorebirds, and herons, and they prey on their smaller relative, the San Joaquin kit fox. 

Unlike most native mammalian predators, introduced red foxes don’t mind getting their feet wet. They’ll kill more than they can immediately eat and cache the surplus. What to do about foxes in the Bay’s tidal marshes has become a cause celebre between animal-rights types and genuine conservationists. 

But there’s another, less notorious fox that’s a California native: the Sierra Nevada red fox (Vulpes vulpes necator), shy, elusive, and vanishingly rare. Unlike the introduced type, this fox isn’t always red: it comes in “black,” “silver,” and “cross” color morphs. No one is really sure how many Sierran foxes are left: it’s possible the only survivors are in the Mount Lassen area. 

It used to be assumed that any red foxes below the 3000-foot line in the Sierra were part of the introduced population; above that, likely natives. That held up until Ben Sacks at UC Davis’s Veterinary Genetics Laboratory began looking closely at California’s red foxes. He was interested in patterns of gene flow between different fox sub-populations and whether they were self-sustaining. And he had occasion to look at a lot of museum specimens collected along the coast and up and down the Valley. 

Sacks found something unexpected: the foxes of the Sacramento Valley were more like the native necator than the introduced regalis. The frontier between those foxes and the aliens appears to lie along the Delta and the American River. He also found records of red foxes north of that line dating to before the fox-farming area.  

Were these Sierra Nevada foxes that had adapted to the hot, dry flatlands, or a distinct indigenous population? It appears to be too soon to tell, but Sacks is still looking for data. Anyone who spots a fox in the Sacramento Valley, dead or alive, is asked to report their findings at foxsurvey.ucdavis.edu. 

All this has interesting wildlife management implications. Animals once considered pests—threats to other wildlife—may now have to be treated as an endangered species, or at least a distinct population segment. But science can cut both ways. 

Consider the plight of the Guadeloupe raccoon. Mammalogists used to recognize three island-endemic species of raccoon in the West Indies: on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, Guadeloupe, and Barbados, the last now extinct. As the only presumed-native carnivores in the Caribbean, they were always something of a mystery. They looked more like the familiar North American raccoon than the South American crab-eating raccoon, which would have been the more probable parent species. And their bones never showed up in fossil deposits or pre-Columbian archeological sites. 

But they were considered natives in good standing, and the Bahama and Guadeloupe species were declared endangered. The Guadeloupe raccoon, in fact, became the flagship species of local conservation programs and the island’s national park system.  

Then in 1999 came a DNA study reporting no differences between the Guadeloupe raccoon and the North American stock. 

Four years later, Don Wilson of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and Kristofer Helgen of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology examined museum specimens of island and mainland raccoons, and concluded that what were supposed to be distinctive traits of the Bahama, Guadeloupe, and Barbados raccoons also occurred in Georgia and Florida populations. The island raccoons had apparently—who knows why?—been introduced, as had a whole Barbadian zoo of mongooses, green monkeys, and camels. 

Helgen and Wilson also pointed out the damage these critters could do by raiding the nests of endangered ground-dwelling birds and digging up the eggs of endangered sea turtles. I don’t know whether the raccoons’ own endangered status has been revoked, but it’s surely only a matter of time and bureaucratic process. 

A cautionary tale, in any case. In the harsh world of conservation biology, you’re only as good as your last genetic study.


Column: Undercurrents: Mincing Words About Oakland Development

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday June 29, 2007

An attentive and knowledgeable reader has pointed out that in my June 15 column on Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums (“Mayor Dellums Isn’t What’s Wrong With Oakland”), I incorrectly reported that at the new mayor’s direction, the city’s Community and Economic Development Agency (CEDA) has “put a moratorium on conversion of Oakland's dwindling industrial-zoned parcels to mixed-use.” Though close, that’s not what actually happened. 

In the column I used “moratorium” in the popular way, meaning to put a temporary halt to a certain activity. That’s what CEDA did, pulling its “Update To The Industrial Land Use Policy” report from consideration by the Planning Commission’s Zoning Update Committee on May 16, with plans to rethink it, possibly rewrite it, and resubmit it to the commission sometime in September. In effect, that temporarily halts the rezoning of currently-zoned industrial land to permit mixed use developments, a rezoning that some observers—including my attentive reader—feels would lead to the loss of Oakland’s valuable industrial land, land which we will need in the future on which to attract businesses that can provide needed jobs for Oakland residents. 

But “moratorium” has a specific legal meaning in the context of city planning that is different from the popular meaning, with specific actions and consequences such as temporarily halting consideration of developments altogether, and so I was in error in using the term, and I apologize. Sometimes, in our haste to get out information, we get out the wrong information, a hazard of the journalistic profession. 

That seems to be the case with a recent Wall Street Journal article on the Oakland Unified School District, getting out the wrong information, and I hope the Journal is as quick to recognize its errors, and correct them. 

The June 22 “Taste” article “Another School Dropout” by WSJ deputy “Taste” editor Naomi Schaeffer Riley (first called to our attention by Alex Gronké’s blog on the NovoMetro online Oakland newspaper—thanks, Alex), reports on the decision by OUSD Budget Director Barak Ben-Gal to leave the district to take a job as Yahoo.com’s Director of Corporate Finance. The article is what you would expect from the Journal, an advocacy for corporate control of public institutions. That’s the Journal’s position, bless their hearts, and they have the right to hold it. But as the saying goes, they ought not to alter the facts in order to make their point. 

“When Mr. Ben-Gal started his (Eli Broad Foundation) residency (at OUSD in 2004),” Ms. Riley writes, “the Oakland Unified School District was bankrupt. It had been placed under state control, and [Mr. Ben-Gal’s] first role was as the special assistant to the state administrator. In the subsequent two years he was the executive officer of financial services and then finally the budget director for the whole district. Today, thanks in some part to his efforts, the district is out of bankruptcy…” 

OUSD is out of bankruptcy? That seems odd, because we never knew it was in. 

Bankruptcy, in lay terms, is a situation in which an entity—person, company, and so forth—has gone so far into debt that it has become impossible to pay off their debtors with their available income and assets, and must file a petition with a “bankruptcy court” to declare himself, herself, or itself “bankrupt.” The result of this situation is that sometimes the bankruptcy court allows the entity to legally reorganize, paying off only a percentage of each of its debts with its available funds, and start over fresh. In some instances, the situation is so bad that the entity (if it is a company or other type of “thing”) has to be completely dissolved and its assets divided up between those it owes. 

That was never even remotely the case with the Oakland Unified School District. To paraphrase the Cowardly Lion in the movie The Wizard Of Oz, not never, not nohow. 

In the spring of 2003, the district discovered that it was not able to meet its final school year payroll and formally requested a loan from the State of California to pay its bills (some of the details of the why’s and how’s of the series of circumstances that led to the state loan have been recounted here and elsewhere; some have yet to be publicly revealed). In any event, a $1 million state line of credit for OUSD was established, and the state takeover resulted. The final spring, 2003 payroll was met in full, as were all of the other debts and obligations of the district since, including payments on the state loan itself. 

So if the actual definition of words have any weight here and in the Wall Street Journal, the Oakland Unified School District was never “bankrupt.” OUSD did not have enough money to pay its bills, so it got a loan from the state to do so. Getting a loan to meet your bills, in the corporate world, is commonly called “refinancing.” It is not called “bankruptcy.” 

But perhaps Ms. Riley was simply loose with the use of a popular word, as I was in the above-stated CEDA “moratorium” case, and what she really meant was that OUSD found itself not “bankrupt” but “without enough money to make a debt payment” in the spring of 2003, or, to describe it in the way most of us would, “seriously in debt.” If that is true, however, it leads to a problem in Ms. Riley’s initial assertion about the success of Mr. Ben-Gal’s tenure. If you substitute “seriously in debt” for “bankrupt” in the above-quoted passage, you come up with the following formation: “When Mr. Ben-Gal started his residency, the Oakland Unified School District was [seriously in debt]. … Today, thanks in some part to his efforts, the district is [no longer seriously in debt?] [less in debt?] [out of debt?]…” The fact is, none one of these suggested three final clauses are correct. At the time of the state takeover, the OUSD state administrator drew down $65 million of the $1 million state line of credit in order to meet the spring, 2003 payroll and subsequent operating expenses. Three years later, as his last official act leaving the district last year, OUSD State Administrator Randy Ward drew down the remaining $35 million of that credit line. As a consequence, OUSD is deeper in debt (my emphasis) now than the district was at the time of the state takeover and during the time of Mr. Ben-Gal’s tenure as OUSD budget director. 

Not that I’m blaming Mr. Ben-Gal for those problems. I simply don’t think he ought get credit for fixing something which is broker (if that’s a proper word) than when he started. 

But there are more problems with the factuality (if that’s a proper word, as well) of the Wall Street Journal article. 

Mr. Ben-Gal talks of the difficulties of getting competent help in the public sector (which he contrasts with the competence we are so used to seeing in the corporate sector—ha!), and then Ms. Riley continues “Even if you can assemble a team of competent people (and somehow hold on to them without offering merit raises), Mr. Ben-Gal notes that you are still constrained [in a public school district] in ways that would be unimaginable in the private sector. For instance, he [Mr. Ben-Gal] compares the operations of his local school board with the board of a corporation. ‘Corporate boards look at big-picture governance. They ask, “What are the major milestones our CEO should be achieving?” Board conversations are held behind closed doors because the board members are supposed to act as trusted advisers.’ By contrast, the Oakland board, like most school committees, has all of its meetings televised. Every contract, no matter how minuscule, must be put to a vote. And every financial decision has to be put on hold while waiting for a monthly board meeting. As for its members acting as trusted advisers, Mr. Ben-Gal assures me that thanks to the public nature of its meetings, ‘the school board typically knows less than what the staff knows.’” 

One wonders what school district, let alone what corporate board, Mr. Ben-Gal is talking about. 

During the two years that Mr. Ben-Gal worked at OUSD, the school board functioned as an advisory body only, powerless, with no ability to decide anything. No contracts were put to a vote, if, by vote, we mean the process by which the decision was made. If financial decisions were put off, for a month or for any other period of time, it was at the discretion of the state administrator who was free, under the terms of the state takeover, to make those decisions at any time, without waiting for a school board meeting or a school board opinion. 

But, of course, Mr. Ben-Gal’s description of school districts would not appear to apply, even where the school board retains power. Though there are glitches, and the system is far from perfect, the role of the school board in an independent school district is to set policy, and the role of the superintendent—or chancellor, in the case of a college district such as Peralta—is to implement that policy on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes school and trustee boards infringe on the territory of their administrators, and sometimes those administrators take on policy-setting roles that should properly be in the hands of the board. But that’s one of the dynamics and give-and-take of democracy, as these public bodies go about the public business, and because these operations are supposed to take place in full view of the public, the public often intervenes, and these things get themselves corrected. 

And that, in the end, seems to be Mr. Ben-Gal’s and Ms. Riley’s real problem here, not with anything specific Oakland Unified. It is not OUSD, but the public operation of the public schools, about which they appear to be complaining. If only the public schools were run in the corporate way—in fact, if only the corporations would be allowed to take them over—things would be done logically, efficiently, smoothly, etc., etc., and etc. That is the implication of the “Another School Dropout” story. 

I don’t mind Mr. Ben-Gal and Ms. Riley and the Wall Street Journal saying that. It is, after all, their right, in a democracy, to hold and advocate their own opinions. I learned that particular civics lesson at Highland Elementary, and then at Havenscourt Junior High, and then at Castlemont High School, during the years I attended the Oakland public schools. It wasn’t such a bad education, all things considered, and since I’ve never been to corporate school, I’m not in a position to judge whether corporate education might have been better. In this regard, perhaps Mr. Ben-Gal and Ms. Riley know more than I. If they do, I wish they’d use some actual facts to show me. 


East Bay Then and Now: Immigrants’ Sons Established Local Tanning Industry

By Daniella Thompson
Friday June 29, 2007

The history of Bay Area industry parallels that of immigration. In the East Bay, the economy was largely built by first- and second-generation immigrants who had settled in the West, bringing with them specialized skills from points east, often Europe. 

Such was the case in the founding of the Manasse-Block Tanning Company, which operated on Third and Fourth Streets between Camelia and Gilman from 1905 until 1985. 

On May 3, 1905, the Oakland Tribune announced a new business in West Berkeley that “will employ at the start some twenty-five or thirty men.” Manasse-Block, which had operated a large tannery in East Oakland since 1900, purchased the West Berkeley tannery previously owned by Frank E. Deach, who resided at 1618 Fifth St. 

Deach (possibly a corruption of Deitsch), born in California to German immigrants and married to a Mexican woman, first appeared in the Berkeley directory in 1900, when he was listed in the U.S. census as a tannery proprietor. His name wasn’t included in the property assessment rolls until 1903, at which time his ownership comprised Lots 36-39 in Block 28 of the Wentworth Tract. Immediately to his south, on Lots 27-34, the French immigrant Prudent Remond had been engaged in tanning and manufacturing of oak-tanned harness and skirting leather since at least 1894. 

Even earlier than Remond, the southwestern end of the block had been the site of another tannery, owned by the Nova Scotian immigrant Robert Stewart since 1892. The block being large, for a few years the three establishments overlapped, although by 1900 Stewart had switched from tanning to manufacturing coconut fibre. 

Remond, who came to the U.S. in 1871 with his French-Swiss wife and lived at 721 Camelia Street, constructed in 1898 a three-story building that the Berkeley Gazette promised would be “one of the largest currying establishments on the Coast. In this place leather will be received from the tanneries and prepared for the making of shoes, harness, etc.” 

Remond may have overextended himself, or perhaps he received an offer he couldn’t refuse. Either way, his tannery was taken over by the California Ink Company around the time that Deach’s plant became the Manasse-Block tannery. For several years afterwards, the two worked as tanners, possibly for Manasse-Block. By 1909, Remond had become a watchman for Cal Ink, while Deach, now living at 1732 San Pablo Avenue, was working as a dyer for William Reuter & Sons, located at 7th and Jones Streets. 

The businesses that followed Stewart, Remond, and Deach on Block 28 were far more successful. Both Manasse-Block and Cal Ink thrived for the better part of a century, and both were owned by German immigrants or their sons. The proprietor of Cal Ink was Ernest L. Hueter of San Francisco, German-born and owner of the Bass-Hueter Paint Company and the Pioneer Varnish and Glycerine Works. 

Both founders of the Manasse-Block Tanning Co. came from the Bay Area’s tight-knit German-Jewish community. The company’s first president, August Manasse (1875–1942) was born in Napa, where his father, Emanuel, originally from Frankfurt by way of San Francisco, was in charge of manufacturing at the B.F. Sawyer tannery, in operation from 1869 until 1990. Emanuel originated the Napa Patent Leather process and became a co-owner of the business, which his descendants continued to run. The Manasse Mansion in Napa, built in 1886 by architect-contractor William H. Corlett, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and operated as a tony bed & breakfast inn. 

August worked at the Sawyer tannery, but having three older brothers may have thwarted his ambitions. At the age of 25 he came to Oakland and entered into partnership with Roy Block (1879–1955), who was only 21 when he became secretary of the Manasse-Block Tanning Company. 

The Blocks had no tanning background, but they knew something about leather. Roy’s father, Harry Block, was born in Bohemia and emigrated in 1866 as a 17-year old. In the 1870s, he ran a jewelry store in Virginia City, Nevada, where Roy was born. After opening a jewelry store in San Francisco, Harry formed the H. & L. Block Co. with his younger brother Leopold. The company manufactured gloves. In 1900, before he entered the tanning business, Roy was a glove drummer, as traveling salesmen were called. 

Initially, Manasse and Block’s intention was to run the Berkeley facility as a branch of its main Oakland tannery. “The local branch will be enlarged and improved as the business increases, and promises within a few years to become one of Berkeley’s leading enterprises,” informed the Oakland Tribune in May 1905, concluding, “It is understood the tanning company will expend some $10,000 or $15,000 on improving its West Berkeley establishment.” 

The company did, in fact, leave Oakland, supposedly because the railroad was constrocted through its site at East 12th St. and 19th Avenue. In 1906, Manasse-Block was joined on Third St. by H. & L. Block’s Pacific Glove Works, which had lost its San Francisco facilities in the earthquake and fire. That catastrophe fresh in the principals’ minds, precautions were taken. On July 28 of that year, the Tribune reported, “In the belief that it will be impossible for the city to furnish them better fire protection at the present time, three of the largest factories in the West End, the California Ink Company, the Manasse-Block Tanning Company, and the Pacific Glove Works, located between Camelia and Gilman and Third and Fourth streets, combined in installing a pumping plant and an efficient fire brigade of their own. The directors believe that the cost of the undertaking will eventually be paid by a reduction in the insurance rates. […] The brigade will be at the service of the West Berkeleyans.” 

In February 1906, Manasse-Block made news for an altogether different reason. That month, two young men who declined to give their names but who said they were medical students called on August Manasse and asked him to prepare some human skin for commercial purposes. “With them,” reported the Tribune, “they had two pieces of cuticle, one about a foot square and the other a trifle smaller, which they admitted they had stripped from a body in a dissecting room. They said they intended making slippers of the skin.” 

“It is alleged,” continued the article, “that articles made from the skin of men and women have been carried from California to all portions of the Union. The skin is expensive, a piece six inches square being valued at $20. When tanned the skin of a man is worth in the neighborhood of $500. The skin is soft and pliable, resembling in many respects chamois. Of it belts, purses, slippers and many other small articles are manufactured.” 

Manasse declined the offer, and Town Marshal August Vollmer announced that he would take steps to put an end to the gruesome business. 

Newspaper notices published during the 1910s give an idea of the extent of Manasse-Block’s business. At different times in 1917 and ’18, the company shipped leather to Houston, Milwaukee, Salt Lake City, Denver, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Portland, OR. “The white tanned leather put out by this company enjoys the distinction of being in a class by itself,” touted one of the notices. 

By that time, August Manasse had exited the scene. Around 1914, Roy Block took over as president, and Manasse became a hide buyer. The company’s new secretary was Solomon Seeligsohn, another offspring of a San Francisco German-Jewish family. His older brother, Abraham (Abe) Seeligsohn, was editor of the Jewish Progress. Solomon, who may have died prematurely, was followed as Manasse-Block’s secretary by his younger brother Selig. 

Even after breaking up, Manasse and Block continued to live in proximity to each other. For many years, August Manasse and his wife Myra lived at 2837 Regent Street. Refugees from the San Francisco earthquake, Roy Block and his spouse Edna built a new house at 2920 Hillegass Ave. It is a handsome Arts & Crafts shingled structure with a rustically jagged clinker-brick chimney, sturdy porch posts, and zigzag window muntins. The house was designed by Alfred Dodge Coplin, whose distinctive residential creations from the same period may be seen at 2811 Benvenue Ave. and 2630 Piedmont Ave. 

In the mid-1920s, the Blocks moved to a larger house at 44 Montrose Road, in Thousand Oaks. Their old house changed hands many times and eventually became a rental property. By the early 1960s, a modern two-story, four-unit apartment building had been constructed in the back yard. Less than ten years ago, the house was empty and boarded up. Now, although still a rental, it is handsomely restored. 

The Block family continued to own the tannery for the rest of its productive life. The plant expanded steadily until 1956, its principal product being boot and shoe leather. As synthetics replaced leather and as shoe production moved overseas, the tanning business declined. After the tannery closed, the facilities were sold to the Athena Development Corporation, which created the Tannery project, preserving, rehabilitating, and reusing the abandoned 81,180 sq. ft. complex. Completed in 1990, the complex accommodates offices, retail, and live-work units. 

The old Cal Ink plant next door is now abandoned and awaiting its fate on the auction block. Can it be as creatively rehabilitated as the Manasse-Block tannery? 

 

Daniella Thompson publishes berkeleyheritage.com for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA). 

 

Photograph: Daniella Thompson  

Part of the Manasse-Block Tannery complex, 1307 Third St. originally housed H. & L. Block’s Pacific Glove Works. 

 

 

 


Garden Variety: Sales, Temptations and a Crisis of Conscience

By Ron Sullivan
Friday June 29, 2007

I see the inimitable Annie’s Annuals is having a sale. Some of the stuff the two Anni(e)s are offering are rarities in the plant trade, in the area, maybe anywhere. Once again I’ll have to wrestle with my conscience.  

Partly it’s about budgeting. As you might have heard, income possibilities for freelance writers are shrinking rapidly around here while prices the prices of gas and pretty much everything else are rising. Annie’s plants are certainly not overpriced but they aren’t cheap, and there’s always one more—well, two more, and shouldn’t I get some of those over there too?—temptation there that I’d counted on.  

I could take cash and my driver’s license and nothing else, I guess. I could wear a hairshirt and cilice too, but somehow I’m just not that kind of a girl.  

Partly it’s about space. Our garden is crowded, mostly shady, badly drained in spite of various stratagems against flat alluvial clay. How badly drained? Every winter a mysterious hole opens in the mud of the driveway. This hole swallows whatever we throw into it: chips, mats, gravel, pecks of rocks ranging up to breadloaf size.  

The hole, from the moment it appears, fills with water. That water and the mud for a few square yards around it stink of stagnation. It has risen from some unwholesome quarter of the bowels of Earth and it’s not going anywhere till Spring.  

So I’m gambling with the life of every poor plant I bring home. I end up adopting a lot of orphans, because, well, I’m cheap and they have nowhere better to go, and rarities rarely get orphaned. This contributes to a certain vernacular, even outsider-art atmosphere here at The Belfry.  

I’ve been a member of Native Seeds/SEARCH for years; they made a believer out of me when they brought some of their marvelous chili powder varieties to the Bioneers conference. They were the best thing there that year. 

But I buy only groceries and artifacts from them because the species and cultivars they preserve are desert-based, and I’m sure I’d be committing murder by planting them here. Their seeds are rare pretty much by definition, and if I’m going to perform vegetable sacrifices I’d prefer at least to leave a lot of survivors somewhere.  

One matter that does not rasp on my conscience when I succumb to Annie’s charms is that of provenance. That’s something you have to think about with rare plants and even some common ones, particularly bulbs.  

So obscenely disparate are global wages that some bulb distributors still find it cheaper to pay some poor Third World gatherer for bulbs dug from the wild than to grow their own plants and keep seeds from them to grow out for bulbs, or even propagate by bulblets or cuttings.  

There’s an ethical side to pretty much anything—maybe not crossword puzzles, but anything else—and gardeners who prize interesting plants do well to pay attention to it. 

More about that next week. 

 

 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet. 

 

Annie’s Annuals and Perennials 

740 Market Avenue, Richmond 

(510) 215-1671 

Directions at www.anniesannuals.com or call (don’t trust Mapquest or Google on this one.) 

Sale June 23 through July 8 at retail  

nursery ONLY. 

 

Native Seeds/SEARCH 

Retail store: 526 N. 4th Ave. 

Tucson, AZ 85705 

(520) 622-5561 

www.nativeseeds.org


About the House: How to Say ‘I Love You’

By Matt Cantor
Friday June 29, 2007

I was with a very charming couple today. He was French and she was American. They were very different and both very smart and we had a great time looking at an incredible place that needed … like … nothing. Well, not much. 

As usual I reeled out scenarios of earthquake and assorted disasters and related how this building might fare in each case. At one point, it occurred to me how absurd I am and I said “Just imagine what my dreams must be like.” Luckily … they laughed. It’s true, though. 

I do spend an inordinate amount of time running worse case scenarios of how various things might go wrong, in the pursuit of the best advice for my clients. But truly, I do not live in fear. It’s just interesting and a wonderful challenge. I’m a very lucky person to be doing what I do. 

Among the red flag danger signs I try to point out, I’m fairly certain that the most frequent and certainly the most hidden are those involving fire. The building code is busily at work with these as well. Fire is really our most serious threat when it comes to the places in which we live and it occupies a huge amount of what we’re addressing in the building codes and other building standards. It’s probably the central issue in the design of nearly every major component of our houses as well it should be. It’s the one thing we just don’t ever want to face. 

So I’d like to offer a little tour around the typical house and touch on just a few of the things it would be best to focus on to minimize this threat. 

While there are many things one can do to diminish the likelihood of a fire starting, I would suggest that we refocus of our attention (at least at first) and take a look at how we can be prepared to cope with fire once it occurs. The most important thing is to have many ways to escape from the house and of course, lots of smoke detectors to wake us or alert us to the need to escape. 

If in doubt, add more smoke detectors. Put them on ceilings and not on walls. If they’re old, replace them, and change the batteries every year when you change the clocks (you know- “Spring forward, Fall back”). While you’re buying the batteries, pick up a fire extinguisher and hang it by the kitchen entry. 

OK. Now you’re awake and the smoke alarm is going off. What next? You want to be able to get out of the house by any door or window in the house. So be sure that no exit is impeded in any way. Window bars are very dangerous in this regard and need to be owned with great awareness of their ability to cause death. Be sure you think they’re worth it. Operable window bars are better, but they prevent firefighters from entering the building (at least quickly and easily.) 

They can get through them if there’s time but in a fire, time is what we most lack). If you have operable window bars keep the mechanism clear of furnishings and test them regularly. Remember that when fires get going, people panic and forget how to do basic things. Also, smoke prevents vision and quickly disables occupants. 

Even a pane of glass in a paint-stuck window can be a tremendous impediment to escape. With panic and smoke, the simple act of breaking a window may be too much to ask. Make it easy. Get the windows unstuck. All of them. You don’t know where you’ll be when a fire breaks out. 

I can’t emphasize this last part about smoke and panic quite enough. Emergency situations can make the obvious action unimaginable and smoke makes everything very hard to manage. In a matter of seconds we can lose our ability to do all the things that we imagined we might in our heroic dream of action. It’s only human. It’s preparation that can make us more able to cope when the time comes. 

Modern codes say a lot about window size and height. I’ll give you some of the stats. A window should open to the following minimum size. 20” wide, 24” high and a total openable area of at least 5 square feet. That means that you’re really looking at something like 2’ wide and 30” high, but there’s room for variation. Many of the windows I see in older houses are smaller than this.  

You may not need code-approved size, but open the window and see if you can imagine climbing out. Can your family all do the same? Can the kids open the windows? By the way, make sure they know to get out of the house without looking for the adults. Agree on a meeting place like the front lawn so you know that everyone is safe. But the job is to get straight out without delay. 

Finishing the code thing with windows, the windowsill should be no more than 44” above the floor. This is to be sure that the firefighter can climb into the room without fear that they will fall through the collapsed floor. They want to touch the floor before committing. 

Another thing about windows is to be sure that no locking mechanism more complex than your basic twist lock is being used. If you have keyed locks on windows, please consider removing them. They could be deadly. 

If you have a second or third story without an extra outside set of stairs, consider rope or chain ladders for each bedroom (especially for the kiddies) so you don’t have to stand staring at those things at Orchard’s after something really, really bad has happened. They’re not that expensive. 

Make sure that no door requires a key in order to leave the dwelling. If you have a “double cylinder” lock, replace it with a single-cylinder lock that has a thumb turn on the inside. If burglars find this easier to steal your stuff, let ‘em have the TV and save your family from a premature terrestrial evacuation. 

It may sound severe but it’s really smart to plan for this stuff. Do a drill, even just once. You may discover something huge in the process. I recently had a client who was terribly concerned about her animals and wanted to be sure that there were escape exits for them to the exclusion of any interest in herself. Now, I’m as big an animal lover as any but, please, save yourself first.  

If you smoke, remember that you are very likely to cause the fire, so think about limiting your smoking to one place in the house and not in the bedroom. Falling asleep smoking has killed many a smoker as well as many non-smokers. 

If you manage to heat without using electric space heaters, you’ll further decrease your chances of a fire. Also, never use an extension cord with a space heater. These cause overheating in the wiring and spark blazes as we sleep. If you can heat the room prior to bed-time, you’ll be better off. 

We can’t cover all the things that might set your house ablaze but you can take the time to look at the escapes and make sure that you’ll be able to get outside in plenty of time to watch the house burn down. 

I heard a guy on the radio this morning as I was pulling on my argyles talking about how he just lost his house in a fire. He said, “Well, at least the family is safe and that’s the important thing.” Hail brother. Ain’t it the truth. Before I close today, I’d like to share one last thought. 

A few years ago I was speaking with John, a Berkeley firefighter during the inspection of his new home in Oakland and so, took advantage of the chance to ask a few questions about what firefighters do. I can’t remember exactly what I was asking, but it had something-or-other to do with getting inside to pull people out of fires. 

He stopped me, his face somewhat screwed-up and said “Oh … we don’t do that much anymore. Ever since people started using smoke detectors regularly, we’re just putting out fires. The people are already outside.” 

If the message isn’t clear, let me put it just a little more bluntly. Go buy the smoke detectors today. Put batteries in ‘em and put em up on the ceiling of every bedroom and out in the hall on each floor. Don’t wait. Don’t get gelato. Don’t order Netflix. Just get ‘em. That’s how I say “I love you.” 


Arts & Events

Arts Calendar

Tuesday July 03, 2007

TUESDAY, JULY 3 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Sambadá, Brasilia, funk, at 5 p.m. at Cerrito Vista Park, Moeser at Pomona St., El Cerrito.  

Tom Rigney & Flambeau, Cajun/Zydeco, at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Kutandara Marimba Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Dick Conte Quartet with Steve Heckman at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$10. 238-9200.  

WEDNESDAY, JULY 4 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Mariachi San José, Voco, On Taiko, ObeyJah and other world music performers from 10:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. at at Cerrito Vista Park, Moeser at Pomona St., El Cerrito. www.worldoneradio.org 

Whiskey Brothers at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473.  

Orquestra America, salsa, at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Mal Sharpe’s Big Money in Jazz with Faye Carol at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $5. 238-9200.  

THURSDAY, JULY 5 

EXHIBITIONS 

“A Lasting Impression” Group show of ceramic sculptures, and “Injuries, Improvised Paintings by Luke Riles” Artist reception at 6 p.m. at Estaban Sabar Gallery, 480 23rd St. at Telegraph, Oakland. Exhibition runs to July 30. 444-7411.  

THEATER 

Crowded Fire Theater “Anna Bella Eema” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun at 2 p.m. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. Tickets are $10-$20. 415-439-2456.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Forrest Hamer and Joseph Millar at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College Auditorium, 2050 Center St. 525-5476. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

United Capoeira Artists at noon at the downtown Berkeley BART station. info@downtownberkeley.org 

George Cotsirilos Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Damon and the Heathens, October Allied, Kemo Sabe at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. 

“Un Regalo para Garabato” Music and spoken word to celebrate the life of Carlos Carabato Gonzales at 7 p.m at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$50. 849-2568.  

Kevin Eubanks at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$22. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

FRIDAY, JULY 6 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre “Bosoms and Neglect” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., SUn. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through July 22. Tickets are $38. 843-4822.  

California Shakespeare Theater “Man and Superman” by George Bernard Shaw at the Bruns Ampitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., Orinda, through July 29. Tickets are $15-$60. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Central Works “Bird in the Hand” Thurs-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through July 29. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1381. 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Meet Me in St. Louis” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. in July at 951 Pomona Ave., at Moeser, El Cerrito, through Aug. 4. 524-9132. 

Crowded Fire Theater “Anna Bella Eema” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. through July 15. Tickets are $10-$20. 415-439-2456. www.crowdedfire.org 

Impact Theatre “Impact Briefs 8: Sinfully Delicious” Thurs.-Sat. through July 21 at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. 

Masquers Playhouse “Ring Round the Moon” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, through July 14. Tickets are $15. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

Virago Theatre Company “The Death of Ayn Rand” and “A Bed of My Own” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Rhythmix Cultural Works, 2513 Blanding Ave., Alameda to July 7. Tickets are $10-$17. 865-6237.  

EXHIBITIONS 

Paiul Lewin Solo Show Acrylic paintings and sketches. Opening reception at 7 p.m. at Eclectix, 7523 Fairmoount Ave., El Cerrito. 364-7261. www.eclectixgallery.com 

FILM 

International Working Class Film Festival with “Maquilapolis,” “My Bicycle,” “No Te Rajas,” and Estamos Aqui” at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Suggested donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net 

Estacio Libre and Collectiva Zapatista Ramona Film Fest at 7:30 p.m. at AK Press, 674-A 23rd St., Oakland. 208-1700. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Paul Ekman reads from “Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Bay Area Blues Society: Hayward-Russell City Blues Festival, Fri.-Sun. from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the Hayward City Hall Plaza, 777 B St., Hayward. Tickets are $10-$30. www.bayareabluessociety.net highsierratickets.com 

Craig Horton Blues Band at 5 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St., at 10th, Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. 

Les Percussions Malinke with drummer Bolokada Conde at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $13-$15. 849-2568.  

A Deep Breath featuring Raffi and Noah Garabedian, Daniel Lubin-Laden and David Michael-Ruddy at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Ed Johnson & Novo Tempo Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Stompy Jones, East Coast swing, lindy hop, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Dani Thomas and Dulce, Latin and Caribbean, at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Rebecca Riots at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Bob Harp and High Diving Horses at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Stephen Taylor-Ramirez, Misner and Smith, Drew Harrison at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Dave Stein’s Hub-Bub at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Niyorah, Abja & The Red Eye Band, Binghi Ghost, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $18-$20. 548-1159.  

Kevin Eubanks at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$22. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, JULY 7 

EXHIBITIONS 

“New Works by Margaret Chavigny and Sheila Metcalf Tobin” Reception at 6 p.m. at the Mercury 20 Gallery, 25 grand Ave. at Broadway, Oakland. Exhibition runs to July 29. 

THEATER 

Women’s Will “Romeo and Juliet” Sat. and Sun. at 1 p.m. in John Hinkle Park. 420-0813. www.womenswill.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Bay Area Poets Coalition holds an open reading from 3 to 5 p.m., at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St. Park on the street, not in Lodge parking lot. 527-9905. poetalk@aol.com 

Mike Young, Logan Ryan Smith and Elliot Harmon read their poetry at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Mahea Uchiyama “Dance in the Key of Life” Dance from India, Bali, Hawai’i, Tahiti and more at 8 p.m. at Regents Theater, Holy Names University, 3500 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $25. 925-798-1300.  

The Ariel Quartet performs Hayden, Dvork, Suprynowicz at 8 p.m. at 2692 Shasta. RSVP to bob@cowart.com 

Schwenke y Nilo Chilean Nueva Cancíon with Los Materos at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $20. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Frankye Kelly & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Zydeco Flames, Cajun/Zydeco at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Sotaque Baiano, Brazilian, at 8 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Dave Lionelli, Bhi Bhiman and Greg Cross at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Rebecca Riots at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Kaz George Quintet at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

On the One at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Ragwater Review, 5 Cent Coffee, Knees and Elbows at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Sarah Manning Trio at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

SUNDAY, JULY 8 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Sing More Songs” Photographs by Misako Akimoto about the Music Therapy Fund in Richmond. Artist talk at 2 p.m. at the Community Meeting Room, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6100. 

“David Goldblatt: Intersections” and “Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker” photographs from South Africa and Iran at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. 

“Paintings by Jared Roses” opens at 4 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“When Cities Unite” Spoken word and music from L.A. to the Bay at 7 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $7-$10. 849-2568.  

 

Liza Dalby introduces “East Wind Melts the Ice: A Memoir Through the Seasons” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Michael Fee describes “Cycling’s Greatest Misadventures” at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

“David Goldblatt: Intersections” Conversation with the photographer at 3:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Lineage Dance “Dancing Through the Ages” at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $25. 925-798-1300. 

Summer Jazz with Yancy Taylor at 3 p.m., The History of Jazz with Randy Moore at 4:30 p.m. at Open Jam Session at 5 p.m. at Oakland Public Library, Golden Gate Branch, 5606 San Pablo Ave., Oakland. 597-5023. 

Julian Pollack Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Axis Mundi, sacred trance and dance, at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Mariel Austin, trombone, at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Melanie O’Reilley at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

MONDAY, JULY 9 

CHILDREN 

“Get a Clue at Your Library” a musical by Gary Laplaw at 7 p.m. at the Oakland Library, Montclair Branch, 1687 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. 482-7810. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Arthur Weil reads from his poetry at 6 p.m. at the Oakland Public Library, Lakeview Branch, 550 El Embarcadero, Oakland. 238-7344. 

Lisa See reads from her new novel “Peony in Love” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

Michael McClure and Diana Di Prima at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Poetry Express with Mani Suri at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Orquestra La Moderna Tradicion at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 


Around the East Bay

Tuesday July 03, 2007

FOURTH OF JULY AT THE BERKELEY MARINA 

 

The City of Berkeley will hold its annual Fourth of July celebration from noon to 9:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Berkeley Marina. The alcohol-free event includes live entertainment, arts and crafts, fireworks, food, and activities for children. Admission is free. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us. 

 

‘MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS 

 

The Contra Costa Civic Theater will present the stage version of the beloved Hollywood musical Meet Me in St. Louis at 8 p.m. Saturdays and at 2 p.m. Sundays through Aug. 4. The story concerns a family looking forward to the arrival of the 1904 World’s Fair in their hometown as disconcerting news arrives that their father is being transferred to a job in New York, threatening to uproot the family. Originally starring Judy Garland, the show features such classic songs as “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “Skip to My Lou,” and “The Trolley Song.” $24 / $15. 981 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito.  

524-9132. www.ccct.org. 

 

ROBIN HOOD IN EL CERRITO 

 

A swashbuckling Errol Flynn robs from the rich and gives to the poor in the colorful crowd pleaser The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) at 6 p.m. Saturday and 5 p.m. Sunday as part of the Cerrito Theater’s classic film series. 10070 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 814-2400. www.picturepubpizza.com.


The Theater: Woman’s Will Stages ‘Romeo and Juliet’

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Tuesday July 03, 2007

Woman’s Will, the Oakland-based all-female Shakespeare company, is celebrating their tenth season—and tenth year of free Shakespeare in the parks—with Romeo and Juliet, beginning 1 p.m. this Saturday and Sunday, and the following weekend, July 14-15, at Berkeley’s John Hinkel Park.  

Other local performances will be July 21 at F. M. Smith Park and the 22nd Avenue Dimond Park, both in Oakland. Aug. 9-10 at 8 p.m. will see the play staged in a real mortuary, Chapel of the Chimes, the columbarium at the end of Piedmont Avenue, Oakland, in the Mountain View Cemetery. 

Director Erin Merritt commented on an all-female cast playing the most famous of love plays—and about how Woman’s Will approached one of the best-known of Shakespeare’s (or any playwright’s) plays. 

“People forget pretty early on that the cast’s all women,” said Merritt. “We emphasize the text and the acting—and understanding what’s going on. At rehearsals in the parks, kids get off the monkey bars and watch us, so response so far is pretty good! There are a few lines that comment on being a man that come off funny, like Romeo saying, ‘OJuliet, you have made me effeminate.’ But there’s a reason why in some ways, women come off better. These characters are really smart. Most productions either cast a guy who’s a young hunk, or one who’s smart, and neither is comfortable with the other side of the character. Women are used to having both sides open.” 

On the fame of Romeo and Juliet, Merritt remarked, “Everybody knows the plot, so we focus on how it happened, on how many times the story is headed for a happy ending, and how many bad choices make it a tragedy. If Romeo waited five minutes before killing himself, Juliet would be awake, not seemingly dead. After all, she finds his lips still warm!” 

Merritt finds the answer to why so many bad choices that lead to tragedy in the relationship of generations of the play’s characters. “We’re never told what the original problem is, and we don’t care. I saw a CalShakes production that emphasized Friar Laurence as the linchpin of the plot, and realized how important a reconciliation was to him, and what a tragedy its failure was. The oldest generation, the Friar and the other older characters, want peace, for life to be happy in their final years. The middle generation, the parents, are the combative ones, who blame somebody else for whatever gets in their way, and seek revenge. And the young generation, Romeo and Juliet’s, is a little bit of both. They want everything to be wonderful and beautiful, but they have no perspective. Influenced by their parents, when something goes wrong, they lash out and kill—or die.” 

The goal is to show the realization that “everybody is responsible for these deaths. When Romeo enters, and Tybalt’s ready to attack him, Capulet says, more or less, don’t kill him; I hear he’s a nice guy. What if he’d been advised to marry his daughter to the nice guy and gain a friend, not keep an enemy.” 

Merritt emphasizes Shakespeare’s humor. “People forget how much funny stuff there is. And it’s a bawdy play—nothing extra, just what’s in the text. There are three teenage guys who act out with each other, are suggestive with the way they handle swords ... but it’s really all in the spirit behind the action, nothing explicit.” 

There’s a study guide for young kids on the company’s website, with a comic book runthrough of the plot and discussion questions, as well as director’s notes and podcast interviews with the actors. 

The actors cast by Woman’s Will mostly fit the age ranges of the three generations. “The cast is terrific,” said Merritt. “Some are actors we’ve worked with before, but there are also new people, and it’s the enthusiasm that carries it, the infectious energy of youth.” 

 

ROMEO AND JULIET  

Presented by Woman’s Will at 1 p.m. Saturday and Sunday this weekend and next at John Hinkel Park in Berkeley. Performances will continue at other locations through August. Admission is free, with donation requested. For locations and directions see www.womanswill.org or call 420-0813.


Wild Neighbors: The Wrong Fox and Other Reversals of Fortune

By Joe Eaton
Tuesday July 03, 2007

This is not strictly a Berkeley or Bay Area story, although it begins here with the introduced red fox (Vulpes vulpes regalis). You probably know the basics: eastern and Canadian foxes brought to the Central Valley during the 19th century by would-be fur farmers, some escaping and taking to the wild where they’ve become serious predators on a roster of endangered species.  

Red foxes were first sighted in the South Bay in 1986, about the time the California clapper rail population began to crash. The light-footed clapper rail of Southern California was similarly decimated. The foxes will also take western snowy plovers, California least terns, Caspian terns, gulls, shorebirds, and herons, and they prey on their smaller relative, the San Joaquin kit fox. 

Unlike most native mammalian predators, introduced red foxes don’t mind getting their feet wet. They’ll kill more than they can immediately eat and cache the surplus. What to do about foxes in the Bay’s tidal marshes has become a cause celebre between animal-rights types and genuine conservationists. 

But there’s another, less notorious fox that’s a California native: the Sierra Nevada red fox (Vulpes vulpes necator), shy, elusive, and vanishingly rare. Unlike the introduced type, this fox isn’t always red: it comes in “black,” “silver,” and “cross” color morphs. No one is really sure how many Sierran foxes are left: it’s possible the only survivors are in the Mount Lassen area. 

It used to be assumed that any red foxes below the 3000-foot line in the Sierra were part of the introduced population; above that, likely natives. That held up until Ben Sacks at UC Davis’s Veterinary Genetics Laboratory began looking closely at California’s red foxes. He was interested in patterns of gene flow between different fox sub-populations and whether they were self-sustaining. And he had occasion to look at a lot of museum specimens collected along the coast and up and down the Valley. 

Sacks found something unexpected: the foxes of the Sacramento Valley were more like the native necator than the introduced regalis. The frontier between those foxes and the aliens appears to lie along the Delta and the American River. He also found records of red foxes north of that line dating to before the fox-farming area.  

Were these Sierra Nevada foxes that had adapted to the hot, dry flatlands, or a distinct indigenous population? It appears to be too soon to tell, but Sacks is still looking for data. Anyone who spots a fox in the Sacramento Valley, dead or alive, is asked to report their findings at foxsurvey.ucdavis.edu. 

All this has interesting wildlife management implications. Animals once considered pests—threats to other wildlife—may now have to be treated as an endangered species, or at least a distinct population segment. But science can cut both ways. 

Consider the plight of the Guadeloupe raccoon. Mammalogists used to recognize three island-endemic species of raccoon in the West Indies: on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, Guadeloupe, and Barbados, the last now extinct. As the only presumed-native carnivores in the Caribbean, they were always something of a mystery. They looked more like the familiar North American raccoon than the South American crab-eating raccoon, which would have been the more probable parent species. And their bones never showed up in fossil deposits or pre-Columbian archeological sites. 

But they were considered natives in good standing, and the Bahama and Guadeloupe species were declared endangered. The Guadeloupe raccoon, in fact, became the flagship species of local conservation programs and the island’s national park system.  

Then in 1999 came a DNA study reporting no differences between the Guadeloupe raccoon and the North American stock. 

Four years later, Don Wilson of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and Kristofer Helgen of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology examined museum specimens of island and mainland raccoons, and concluded that what were supposed to be distinctive traits of the Bahama, Guadeloupe, and Barbados raccoons also occurred in Georgia and Florida populations. The island raccoons had apparently—who knows why?—been introduced, as had a whole Barbadian zoo of mongooses, green monkeys, and camels. 

Helgen and Wilson also pointed out the damage these critters could do by raiding the nests of endangered ground-dwelling birds and digging up the eggs of endangered sea turtles. I don’t know whether the raccoons’ own endangered status has been revoked, but it’s surely only a matter of time and bureaucratic process. 

A cautionary tale, in any case. In the harsh world of conservation biology, you’re only as good as your last genetic study.


Berkeley This Week

Tuesday July 03, 2007

TUESDAY, JULY 3 

Alternative Fourth of July Celebration commemorating Frederick Douglass’ Independence Day Speech, at the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, 1852, with a concert and BBQ dinner at 6 p.m. at Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, 1616 Franklin St., downtown Oakland. Tickets are $20-$30. www.opcmusic.org 

Fourth of July Celebration with music by the Milt Bowerman Band at 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190. 

The Red Oak Victory Ship BBQ and Fireworks Viewing at 6 p.m. at 1337 Canal Blvd., off Hwy 580, in Richmond. Cost is $20. For information and reservations call 222-9200. 

Insect Discovery Lab See and touch live bugs as you learn more about them at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Tuesday Documentaries at 7 p.m. at the Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way. Donation of $5 benefits the Berkeley Food and Housing Project. 665-0305. 

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 1247 Marin Ave. 524-9122.  

Family Storytime for preschoolers and up at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704.  

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, JULY 4 

Fourth of July at the Berkeley Marina from noon to 9:30 p.m. with live entertainment, arts & crafts, food, and activities for children. Alcohol-free event. Free admission. Sponsored by the City of Berkeley. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us.  

Celebrate Inter-Dependence Day with a vegetarian potluck from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Laurel Picnic Area in Tilden Park. Bring a vegetarian dish to share. Dogs and musical instruments also welcome. Sponsored by The Network of Spiritual Progressives 644-1200. www.spiritualprogressives.org  

People’s World Barbeque “Que Viva Cuba!” with report-backs from recent visits, music, and Cuban and BBQ food, from 1 to 5 p.m. at 2232 Derby St. Cost is $10. 548-8764. 

Fireworks on the Bay Canoe Trip An easy paddle to see the wetlands before the fireworks show. All boating equipment and instruction is provided. Mimimum age is 10. Cost is $35-$45. For reservations call 452-9261, ext. 119. bayevents@saveSFbay.org  

Fourth of July on the USS Hornet with live music, games for all ages, and tours of the aircraft carrier, and firework viewing, from 10 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. at 707 W. Hornet Ave., Pier 3, Alameda. Tickets are $10-$25. 521-8448, ext. 282. www.hornetevents.com 

Walking Tour of Jack London Waterfront Meet at 10 a.m. at the corner of Broadway and Embarcadero. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

Free Sailboat Rides from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club, Berkeley Marina. Wear warm, waterproof clothing and bring a change of clothes in case you get wet. www.cal-sailing.org 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. 548-9840. 

THURSDAY, JULY 5 

People’s Park Community Workshop on the future design and programs for People’s Park, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley YWCA, 2600 Bancroft Way. Pre-registration required. RSVP to 415-288-3390. taylor@mkthink.com 

“From Gaza, With Love” with Palestinian physician and human rights activist, Dr. Mona El-Farra at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1606 Bonita at Cedar. 548-0542.  

California Telephone Access will display phone equipment for those with vision, hearing and mobility issues from 12:30 to 2 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190. 

Cope with Creativity shows the video “The Gifts of Grief” at 6:30 p.m. at 4401 Howe St., Oakland. To register call 888-755-7855, ext. 4241. 

El Sabor de Fruitvale Farmers’ market, salsa making, and live music with La Familia Son from 3 to 7 p.m. at Fruitvale Transit Village, 3411 East 12th St., Oakland. 535-6900. 

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755.  

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline at Alcatraz. Free, all are welcome. namaste@avatar.freetoasthost.info  

FRIDAY, JULY 6 

“Native Plants of Yosemite” A slide show and talk with Ranger Erik at 6:30 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St., at 10th, Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. 

“The Spirit of John Muir” A performance highlighting Muir’s adventures in the western wilderness at 7:30 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St., at 10th, Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. 

“Pint for a Pint” Blood Drive Blood donors will receive a coupon for a free pint of gelato from Gelato Classico. The blood drive will be in Conference Room A from noon to 6 p.m. at Alameda Hospital, 2070 Clinton Ave., Alameda. To schedule an appointment call Louise Nakada at 814-4362. 

“The Iron Wall” A documentary with interviews with prominent Israeli and Palestinian peace activists, farmers, soldiers and political analysts at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker, 1640 Addison. Free. Sponsored by The Fr. Bill O’Donnell Social Justice Committee. 499-0537. 

International Working Class Film Festival with “Maquilapolis,” “My Bicycle,” “No Te Rajas,” and Estamos Aqui” at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Suggested donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net 

Estacio Libre and Collectiva Zapatista Ramona Film Fest at 7:30 p.m. at AK Press, 674-A 23rd St., Oakland. 208-1700. 

Free Diabetes Screening Come find out if you might have diabetes with our free screening test and make sure not to eat or drink anything for 8 hours beforehand, from 8:45 to 1:30 a.m. at the Downtown Oakland Senior Center, 200 Grand Ave. 981-5332. 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

Circle Dancing, simple folk dancing with instruction at 7:30 p.m. at Finnish Brotherhood Hall, 1970 Chestnut St at University. Donation of $5 requested. 528-4253.  

SATURDAY, JULY 7 

Oakland Heritage Alliance Neighborhood Walking Tour of the F.M. “Borax” Smith Estate from 10 a.m. to noon. Meets at the redwood tree, corner of McKinley Ave. and Home Place East. Tickets are $10-$15. info@oaklandheritage.org 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234.  

Canyonero Hike A three-mile hike across habitats up to Wildcat Park, from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Led by Meg Platt, naturalist. For information and meeting place, call 525-2233. 

Bicycle Trip Along the Hayward Shoreline Meet at 8:30 p.m. at San Leandro Marina Park for a 14-mile round trip excursion, partly paved. Bicycle helmet required. Bring bicycle lock, lunch and liquids. For information email Kathy_Jarrett@yahoo.com, www.trasit.511.org 

“Ice Scone” Benefit for Save Berkeley Iceland, at the Cheese Board, 1504 Shattuck Ave. All proceeds from the sale of this special scone will go to saving the family-friendly community center for ice skating. 599-4591. www.SaveBerkeleyIceland.org 

Artists Funding the Arts Silent Auction to benefit the SF AIDS Foundation. Bidding begins at 10 a.m. at 4th St. Studio, 1717D 4th St. Bidding closes Sunday at 8 p.m. 527-0600. 

Kensington Police Department Program for ages 3 and up at 2 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

“Brainiacs” An interactive neural anatomy lesson, at 1 p.m. for ages 7 and under, 2:10 p.m. for 8 and older at Hall of Health, 2230 Shattuck Ave., Lower Level. Cost is $5, no one turned away. 705-8527. 

Community Festival at The Way Christian Center with music, health and college fairs, and activities for children, from noon to 4 p.m. at 1222 University Ave. Free. 848-2117. 

Preschool Storytime for 3 to 5-year-olds at 11 a.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720 ext. 17. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755.  

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

SUNDAY, JULY 8 

People’s Park Community Workshop on the future design and programs for People’s Park, at 1 p.m. at First Church of Christ Scientist, 2619 Dwight Way. Pre-registration required. RSVP to 415-288-3390. taylor@mkthink.com 

Oakland Heritage Alliance Neighborhood Walking Tour of the Mountain View Cemetary from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Meet at Chapel of the chimes, 4400 Piedmont Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. info@oaklandheritage.org 

Solo Sierrans Walk to Explore the Albany Bulb and discover the unique works of art here. Meet at 2:30 p.m. at the entrance of the Bulb at Buchanan St. and I-80. Optional dinner afterwards. RSVP to Therese at 841-5493. 

“Open Garden” Join the Little Farm gardener for composting, planting, watering and reaping the rewards of our work, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233.  

“Green Sunday” Upholding Our Rights to a Healthy Community A discussion on the California Healthy Communities Network and how its work affects our community, at 5 p.m. at the Niebyl-Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave. at 65th in North Oakland. 

Berry Tasting from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Kensington Farmers’ Market, 303 Arlington, behind ACE Hardware, Kensington.  

Family Day at the Magnes Museum, including tours of current exhibitions, at 11 a.m. at 2911 Russell St. 549-6950. 

Social Action Forum with Jacques Verduun on programs offered inside San Quentin Prison at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302. 

Free Hands-on Bicycle Clinic Learn how to keep your bike in excellent working condition through safety inspections, from 10 to 11 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Tibetan Buddhism with Betty Cook on “King Ashoka: An Ancient Model of Buddhist Social Responsibility” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, JULY 9 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the West Pauley Ballroom, MLK Student Union, UC Campus. To schedule an appointment go to www.BeADonor.com (Code: UCB). 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

Drop in Knitting Class at the Albany Library Work on your own project or make pet blankets and children’s hats to be donated to charity organizations. Yarn and needles provided for donated items. At 3:30 p.m. at 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Housing Advisory Commission meets Thurs., July 5, at 7:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5400.  

Landmarks Preservation Commission meets Thurs. July 5, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7419.


Open Call for Essays

Tuesday July 03, 2007

Healthy Living 

As part of an ongoing effort to print stories by East Bay residents, the Daily Planet invites readers to write about their experiences and perspectives on living healthy. Please e-mail your essays, no more than 800 words, to firstperson@berkeleydailyplanet.com. We will publish the best essays in upcoming issues. 

 

East Bay Guide 

The Daily Planet invites readers to contribute to a guide for newcomers to the area. Please e-mail your essays, no more than 800 words, describing a favorite or little-known aspect of East Bay life, to firstperson@berkeleydailyplanet.com. We will publish the best essays in upcoming issues.


Arts Calendar

Friday June 29, 2007

FRIDAY, JUNE 29 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre “Bosoms and Neglect” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., SUn. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through July 22. Tickets are $38. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Rep “Great Men of Genius” with Mike Daisey in four different monologues at 2025 Addison St. through June 30. Tickets are $30-$75. 647-2949. 

Black Repertory Group “Love Don’t Cost A Thang” written and directed by Danesha Simon Fri. and Sat. at 7 p.m. at 3201 Adeline St. Tickets are $25. 652-2120. 

Central Works “Bird in the Hand” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through July 29. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1381. 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Meet Me in St. Louis” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. in July at 951 Pomona Ave., at Moeser, El Cerrito, through Aug. 4. 524-9132. 

Impact Theatre “Impact Briefs 8: Sinfully Delicious” Thurs.-Sat. through July 21 at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. 

Masquers Playhouse “Ring Round the Moon” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, through July 14. Tickets are $15. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

“Prisons” by Shanique Scott Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Tickets are $15-$18. 849-2568. 

Virago Theatre Comapny “The Death of Ayn Rand” and “A Bed of My Own” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Rhythmix Cultural Works, 2513 Blanding Ave., Alameda to July 7. Tickets are $10-$17. 865-6237.  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Fairytales and Other Stories” Series of 21 photographs based on fairytales, classical paintings and film stills by Diania Elliott. Opens at 6 p.m. at ASUC Art Gallery, Lower Sproul Plaza, UC Campus. 642-3065. www.asucartstudio.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Julia Glass reads from “The Whole World Over” at 12:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Jeremey Adam Smith & Loren Rhoads, Benjamin Perez & Matt Rohrer read at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Bay Area Classical Harmonies “Some Enchanted Evening” Opera arias and art songs with Andrew Chung and Kate Howell at 7:30 p.m. at Pro Arts Gallery, 550 Second St., Oakland. Tickets are $10-$15. 868-0695. 

Indian Classical Music Concert with sitarist Srinivas Reddy and tabla player Michael Lewis at 7:30 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. Suggested donation $15. www.uucb.org 

Natasha Miller & her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

The Vowel Movement, beat box, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Free Peoples, jazz, at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

House Jacks at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Fred Odell and James Moore at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

That Man Fantastic, Suburban Slow Death at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

Terezodu, Sad Boy Sinister at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Raya Nova at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Slydini at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

SATURDAY, JUNE 30 

CHILDREN  

Animal Weekend with puppet shows and activities from 11 a.m. on at Children’s Fairyland, at 699 Bellvue Ave., Oakland. 452-2259. 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “A Dream Play” Sat. and Sun. at 3 p.m. on the lawn in front of Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. at Berryman, through July 1. 841-5580.  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Unicorns Puke Rainbows and the Packing Foam Swimming Pool” works by Michael Deane at 9 p.m. at the Living Room Gallery, 3230 Adeline St. www. 

myspace.com/livingroomcollective 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Margaret Ahnert discusses “The Knock at the Door: A Journey Through the Darkness of the Armenian Genocide” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Naomi Guttman and Robert Lipton read their poetry at 7:30 at Pegasus Bookstore, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Abhinaya Dance Company of San Jose “Poetic Splendor in Bharatanatyam” at 5 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. 408-983-0491. www.sulekha.com/bayarea  

Yancie Taylor Jazztet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Rankin Scroo, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $TBA. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Zion-I, Pigeon John at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $12-$15. 548-1159. 

Emily Kurn and Marianne Barlow at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Married Couple at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Local Women Musicians at noon at Cafe Zeste, 1250 Addison St. in the Strawberry Creek Park complex. 704-9378. 

House Jacks at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Kurt Ribak Jazz Group at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5. 843-2473.  

The Steve Deutsch Ensemble at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Mirthkon, Three Piece Combo, Inner Ear Bridge at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

The Freeze at 8 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146. w 

SUNDAY, JULY 1 

CHILDREN 

Abby & The Pipsqueaks at Ashkenaz at 3 p.m. Cost is $4-$6. 525-5054.  

THEATER 

The Herstories Project “Tapestries” at 6 p.m. at the JCC, 1414 Walnut St. Tickets are $10-$25. 207-6623. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Viewpoints” plein-air landscapes by Barbara Ward, many of Tilden Park, on display at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park, Tues.-Sun. from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. to Aug. 26. 525-2233. 

“Point Pinole: A Place Apart” An exhibition on the explosive and peaceful past of the Point Pinole Shoreline, at Contra Costa County Historical Society, 610 Main St., Martinez. Exhibit runs to Aug. 23. 925-229-1042. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Barbara Siesel “Flute Music from Around the World” at 2 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720 ext 17.  

The Lovell Sisters at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Falso Baiano Brasil at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Salvador Santana, Antioquia, new world grooves, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $8. 525-5054. 

Art Lande, Bruce Williamson, Alan Hall and Peter Barshay at 7 p.m. at The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. COst is $10-$15. 845-1350. 

Rebecca Mauleon, Jimmy Branly and Gary Brown “Piano y Ritmo” Clinic from 4 to 6 p.m., concert at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $15-$25. 849-2568.  

MONDAY, JULY 2 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Tsunami Affected Lives: Moving Beyond Disaster” Photographs by Adrienne Miller at La Peña, through Aug. 31. 849-2568. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Actors Reading Writers “It’s a Mystery,” stories by Lee Child, Agatha Christie and Donald Westlake at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. 932-0214.  

Readings from the Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Poetry Express with Marvin Ray at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Itals, Malika Madremana & The Greensphere Band, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15-$18. 525-5054.  

Fito Reinoso at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s. Cost is $10. 238-9200.  

TUESDAY, JULY 3 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Sambadá, Brasilia, funk, at 5 p.m. at Cerrito Vista Park, Moeser at Pomona St., El Cerrito.  

Tom Rigney & Flambeau, Cajun/Zydeco, at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Kutandara Marimba Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Dick Conte Quartet with Steve Heckman at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$10. 238-9200.  

WEDNESDAY, JULY 4 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Mariachi San José, Voco, On Taiko, ObeyJah and other world music performers from 10:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. at at Cerrito Vista Park, Moeser at Pomona St., El Cerrito. www.worldoneradio.org 

Whiskey Brothers at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473.  

Orquestra America, salsa, at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Mal Sharpe’s Big Money in Jazz with Faye Carol at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $5. 238-9200.  

THURSDAY, JULY 5 

EXHIBITIONS 

“A Lasting Impression” Group show of ceramic sculptures, and “Injuries, Improvised Paintings by Luke Riles” Artist reception at 6 p.m. at Estaban Sabar Gallery, 480 23rd St. at Telegraph, Oakland. Exhibition runs to July 30. 444-7411.  

THEATER 

Crowded Fire Theater “Anna Bella Eema” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun at 2 p.m. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. Tickets are $10-$20. 415-439-2456. www.crowdedfire.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

United Capoeira Artists at noon at the downtown Berkeley BART station. info@downtownberkeley.org 

George Cotsirilos Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Damon and the Heathens, October Allied, Kemo Sabe at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. 

“Un Regalo para Garabato” Music and spoken word to celebrate the life of Carlos Carabato Gonzales at 7 p.m at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$50. 849-2568.  

Kevin Eubanks at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$22. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

 


Around the East Bay

Friday June 29, 2007

FAIRYTALES AND OTHER STORIES 

 

Photographer Diana Elliott’s 21 color and black and white portraits, from three distinct series, are on display in “Fairytales and Other Stories,” opening today (Friday) and running through Aug. 3 at the UC Berkeley ASUC Art Studio Gallery, MLK, Lower Sproul Plaza, MLK Jr. Student Union Building. An opening reception will be held tonight 6-9 p.m. 

The first set of photos in the exhibit are images inspired by fairytales, the second on classical paintings, and the third series appears to be inspired by movie stills. Elliott, who is originally from New York, lives in Berkeley where she is a freelance photographer. For more information, see wwww.dianaephoto.com/asuc/ or call 642.3065. Art Studio Hours: Mon.-Fri., noon-10 p.m., Sat.-Sun., noon-5 p.m. 


Wang Gangfeng Photos of China at Alta Galleria

By Robert McDonald, Special to the Planet
Friday June 29, 2007

A dense and dazzling, vertically and horizontally rectilinear installation of color photographs by contemporary Chinese artist Wang Gangfeng awaits visitors at the entrance to Alta Galleria in Berkeley (2980 College, Suite #4, near Ashby Avenue). The show closes July 10. 

Additional color and random black-and-white photographs fill the other walls of the gallery. The self-taught artist escaped from a job at the Shanghai Net and Rope Factory, where he was expected to spend the remainder of his working life, in 1980, when his sister gave him a camera. He knew then that the camera would be his career and that the common people of China would be the focus of his interest. 

The images throughout the exhibition are as varied as the dishes of a Chinese banquet. Indeed, one of the most engaging is that of a group of young women gathered at a table to enjoy a meal together. Those of us who live here at the Portal to Asia may vicariously enjoy the flavors, fragrances, textures and colors that have the attention of the young women. 

Other subjects are farmers’ markets; village rooftops; a young woman carrying baskets on a yoke crossing her shoulders; a mass of bicycles moving to the viewers’ right except for one in the middle moving perversely to the left; a girl holding clumps of fiber; cityscapes; young Buddhist monks frolicking; and other subjects typical of China. Wang, who has exhibited internationally, has enjoyed great commercial success as well as critical acclaim. All of his photographs, which he prints himself, possess a grace and authenticity characteristic of a committed artist, as, for example, the sinuous, curvilinear forms of a rice paddy.  

The finest work of art in the exhibition (to my eye) is a black-and-white image of an urban scavenger bent double beneath an immense load of empty containers on his back, presumably destined for recycling. The subject and those passing him in the street seem indifferent to the noble poetry he conveys. A comparison to the great photographer of American distress Dorothea Lange comes easily to mind. 

At an opposite pole is Wang’s black-and-white image of two boys, about five years of age, sitting on the first of several ascending stone steps. Their grins from ear to ear are totally seductive. This is, incidentally, Wang’s most popular photograph in China. The artist did not come by the boys’ pose easily. One of the boys was recalcitrant until his father said, “If you smirk, you don’t have to go to school today.” 

The exhibition of photographs by Wang Gangfeng at Alta Galleria has had a long gestation period. When Alta Gerry visited Shanghai six years ago, it had not yet occurred to her that she might become the owner of an art gallery. Nevertheless, when she visited Wang’s studio, ironically named “The Gang of One” for China’s foremost freelance photographer, in contrast to the infamous “Gang of Four,” she was immediately seduced by his work, recently organizing this exhibition which continues through July 12. 

 

Photograph: Photographer Wang Gangfeng’s varied images of China, including “Weight,” above, and “Swamp,” below, are on display at the Alta Galleria.


Moving Pictures: Shifting Alliances and Realities in Von Trier’s ‘Boss of It All’

By Justin DeFreitas
Friday June 29, 2007

Lars von Trier’s The Boss of It All, opening this weekend at Shattuck Cinemas, is something of a departure for the Danish director. He has returned to Denmark and the Danish language to produce, for the first time, a comedy, and a rather light-hearted comedy at that. No politics, no commentary, no overarching cinematic code of ideals to weigh down his creation—just a clever idea, a witty script and a talented cast. 

An unemployed hack actor (Jens Albinus) is hired to impersonate a non-existent corporate boss in order to facilitate the sale of an information technology firm. Trouble is, the actor’s benefactor (Ravn, played by Peter Gantzler) is the true owner and has been masquerading as an employee for 10 years, manipulating his colleagues to his own ends while blaming his unpopular decisions on the never-seen CEO, a faceless entity named Kristoffer who has been running the company by email from the United States. 

When the hapless actor is brought in to sign away the company in a private meeting with an Icelandic buyer, a firestorm of nationalistic tensions interrupts the negotiation and spills out into a corridor where the company’s employees catch their first glimpse of the man they believe is “the boss of it all.” And thus begins a convoluted series of interactions in which “Kristoffer” is constantly forced to improvise, trying to match his performance to the various preconceptions of the employees, all of whom think they have developed some sort or relationship with the man via e-mail, though in fact all of those interactions were with puppetmaster Ravn. At times Kristoffer benefits from these situations, and at times he suffers; he finds himself sexually involved with one employee, romantically linked to another, and the source of anxiety and anger for several more. 

Ravn starts off allowing Kristoffer a great deal of leeway in shaping his character, but increasingly tries to usurp more and more control. The actor of course rebels as he gains confidence in the role, pompously delving deeper and deeper into his character’s motivation until, with the help of his ex-wife, who coincidentally works as an attorney for the Icelandic buyer, he finally taps into a few crucial insights that will allow him to alter the course of the intra-office melodrama. That said, he doesn’t necessarily glean much insight into himself, and one of the closing scenes features a hilarious episode in which the actor essentially holds up the plot’s resolution for an extended meditation on his character’s motivation, the obvious point of which is merely to draw attention to himself and his self-proclaimed mastery of his craft.  

It all makes for an entertaining film, a clever comedy that uses the familiar construct of mistaken identity to stage a more complicated self-reflexive commentary on film and theater, on acting, directing and filmmaking.  

Von Trier breaks the fourth wall in the first shot by introducing himself and the principal characters, following with a vow to dispense with artsiness for the duration of this “harmless” comedy. Yet this is a particularly artsy method of poking fun at all things artsy, and the director continues to emphasize the artifice of the film at crucial junctures, at one point taking center stage to announce that he has decided to add a new character to the mix just to further complicate the plot. Thus von Trier never lets us forget who is really the boss of it all. 

Von Trier uses many of the principles of the stripped-down Dogme school of film that he co-founded, but with a lighter, less didactic approach. He eschews artificial lighting, makeup and scoring, for instance, but employs a unique and decidedly un-Dogme-like technique for photographing the film called Automavision. Von Trier selected each camera setup, but then employed a computer to randomly select various parameters for the shot, tilting the camera, changing the focal length or shifiting the composition. The computer controlled a similar set of parameters for the sound recording. The result is a film that is constantly shifting, as though through a series of jump cuts, giving the impression that the scenes and dialogue were patched together in the editing process.  

But what we’re really seeing is a framing device that has removed the human element and replaced it with computerized randomness. Most viewers won’t notice the technique on a conscious level, conditioned as we’ve become over the years to hand-held cameras, jump cuts and disjointed editing. But thematically it works, as the constantly shifting perspectives mirror the shifting alliances and realities of the characters, adding to the confusion and chaos of a situation over which the principal players—and to some extent the director—have lost control. 

 

THE BOSS OF IT ALL 

Written and directed by Lars von Trier. Cinematography by Automavision. Starring Jens Albinus, Peter Gantzler, Thor Fridriksson, Benedikt Erlingsson, Iben Hjejle, Henrik Prip, Mia Lyhne, Casper Christensen, Louise Mieritz, Jean-Marc Barr, Anders Hove. 

99 minutes. Not rated. In Danish with English subtitles. Playing at Shattuck Cinemas. 

 

Photograph: Peter Gantzler and Jens Albinus negotiate a contract in The Boss of It All.


Guare’s ‘Bosoms and Neglect’ at Aurora

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Friday June 29, 2007

With a clap of thunder, a lightning fla sh illuminates an enormous shadowy figure, behind gauze, before a window. A man hastily enters, pulling away that curtain, revealing a much smaller female form standing in the window casement, with greenbacks safety-pinned to the lace curtain that frames the window. 

The man, Scooper (Cassidy Brown), insouciantly inquires of his mother Henny (Joan Mankin) what’s the matter. She, after muttering deliriously about staunching up the bleeding with Super-Kotex and waving a St. Jude over it, parts her robe ... her son yelps—and, as we later learn, she’s carted to the hospital for an emergency mastectomy. 

So much for the title of Bosoms and Neglect, John Guare’s screwy play of black New York Irish humor, now onstage at the Aurora. The title’s easily explained. But “the matter”—that is, the dialogue and action, and the story material that zig-zags, relentlessly back and forth—constitutes another question, or bunch of questions, altogether. 

John Guare’s plays—and this one dates from the late ’70s—have been called “semi-absurd,” like a pair of oddly polished saddleshoes, which Scooper seems to be wearing. Guare has talked about his “war with the kitchen sink,” though in his burlesqued domestic dramas, the sink seems to be stopped up—or something’s crawling out of it. 

In this case the creature is ostensibly Henny, though it may really be her son, considering the narrative he pours out to Deirdre (Beth Wilmurt), a kind of comfort station and book-bombardier for famous authors (if her own story makes any sense), in her apartment, above and across the street from her and Scooper’s adored psychiatrist, where she can watch the comings and goings.  

Actually, though the psych’s waiting room should have provided the stage for their meeting (and Deirdre avers she spent much time and anguish trying to attract Scooter’s attention), it’s just that morning they’ve collided for real, outside a mutually favored bookstore, where Scooper’s picked her up—or thinks he has—for a bit of chat and solace on the day he’s been planning to run away with his friend and business partner’s wife to Haiti, a steamy tropical retreat from New York, itself steaming into August. 

What gradually erupts—the dialogue and action are jerky and self-contradictory—is a frenetic mating dance, played out across a couple of sofa-daybeds, syncopated with a kind of demented literary or psychiatric coitus interruptus, one-upmanship with the names of authors or syndromes to send off as teasers. 

It all ends in mayhem, with Scooper joining Henny in the hospital for a filial chat, though no repose, soon to be joined by Deirdre, who joins forces with the man she lacerates in yet another quest for a Freudian slip, while blind Henny, unaware she’s alone, tells the true tale of Scooper’s recurring primal scene and the secret of his real name. 

Black humor is a tough thing to flesh out onstage, continually pushing the envelope until even the postman bursts out in laughter at the overload. And Guare’s special, regional branch of it (something related can be seen in Philip Kaufman’s hilarious parody of juvenile delinquent movies and postwar nostalgia in general, The Wanderers, set in The Bronx) demands a kind of careless exactitude, an off-the-cuff delivery of true gravity, with the fingers crossed on both hands folded behind the back. 

Joy Carlin is a fine director of actors, and Cassidy Brown and—especially—Beth Wilmurth contribute what’s easily for both of them among their finer characterizations. 

But it doesn’t quite come off. Brown’s whimsical, palatized accent begins to drone, and the cavorting he and Wilmurth do is nutty and amusing, but the play demands a little more than demonstrable eccentricity or today’s common coin in humor, quotidian silliness. The zaniness throws off Guare’s strange rhythms, and the dialogue and story take on the consistency of pudding, with these crazy borough Irish characters relegated to merely surveying the linguistic bog they caper on. 

Only Joan Mankin, at start and finish, provides the bass line that makes it a fugue, indeed. Her characterization is clearly reflected in the funhouse mirror of Henny’s crabbed consciousness—and conscience. It’s right in the heart of that true form of Pirandellian humor that apprehends “what’s there instead of what’s supposed to be there” versus the conflating of deliberate, self-serving illusion with reality, only to come back around and drive the obtuse point home. 

 

BOSOMS AND NEGLECT 

8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday and at 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays through July 22 at Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addision St. $38. 843-4822. www.aurotatheatre.org.


East Bay Then and Now: Immigrants’ Sons Established Local Tanning Industry

By Daniella Thompson
Friday June 29, 2007

The history of Bay Area industry parallels that of immigration. In the East Bay, the economy was largely built by first- and second-generation immigrants who had settled in the West, bringing with them specialized skills from points east, often Europe. 

Such was the case in the founding of the Manasse-Block Tanning Company, which operated on Third and Fourth Streets between Camelia and Gilman from 1905 until 1985. 

On May 3, 1905, the Oakland Tribune announced a new business in West Berkeley that “will employ at the start some twenty-five or thirty men.” Manasse-Block, which had operated a large tannery in East Oakland since 1900, purchased the West Berkeley tannery previously owned by Frank E. Deach, who resided at 1618 Fifth St. 

Deach (possibly a corruption of Deitsch), born in California to German immigrants and married to a Mexican woman, first appeared in the Berkeley directory in 1900, when he was listed in the U.S. census as a tannery proprietor. His name wasn’t included in the property assessment rolls until 1903, at which time his ownership comprised Lots 36-39 in Block 28 of the Wentworth Tract. Immediately to his south, on Lots 27-34, the French immigrant Prudent Remond had been engaged in tanning and manufacturing of oak-tanned harness and skirting leather since at least 1894. 

Even earlier than Remond, the southwestern end of the block had been the site of another tannery, owned by the Nova Scotian immigrant Robert Stewart since 1892. The block being large, for a few years the three establishments overlapped, although by 1900 Stewart had switched from tanning to manufacturing coconut fibre. 

Remond, who came to the U.S. in 1871 with his French-Swiss wife and lived at 721 Camelia Street, constructed in 1898 a three-story building that the Berkeley Gazette promised would be “one of the largest currying establishments on the Coast. In this place leather will be received from the tanneries and prepared for the making of shoes, harness, etc.” 

Remond may have overextended himself, or perhaps he received an offer he couldn’t refuse. Either way, his tannery was taken over by the California Ink Company around the time that Deach’s plant became the Manasse-Block tannery. For several years afterwards, the two worked as tanners, possibly for Manasse-Block. By 1909, Remond had become a watchman for Cal Ink, while Deach, now living at 1732 San Pablo Avenue, was working as a dyer for William Reuter & Sons, located at 7th and Jones Streets. 

The businesses that followed Stewart, Remond, and Deach on Block 28 were far more successful. Both Manasse-Block and Cal Ink thrived for the better part of a century, and both were owned by German immigrants or their sons. The proprietor of Cal Ink was Ernest L. Hueter of San Francisco, German-born and owner of the Bass-Hueter Paint Company and the Pioneer Varnish and Glycerine Works. 

Both founders of the Manasse-Block Tanning Co. came from the Bay Area’s tight-knit German-Jewish community. The company’s first president, August Manasse (1875–1942) was born in Napa, where his father, Emanuel, originally from Frankfurt by way of San Francisco, was in charge of manufacturing at the B.F. Sawyer tannery, in operation from 1869 until 1990. Emanuel originated the Napa Patent Leather process and became a co-owner of the business, which his descendants continued to run. The Manasse Mansion in Napa, built in 1886 by architect-contractor William H. Corlett, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and operated as a tony bed & breakfast inn. 

August worked at the Sawyer tannery, but having three older brothers may have thwarted his ambitions. At the age of 25 he came to Oakland and entered into partnership with Roy Block (1879–1955), who was only 21 when he became secretary of the Manasse-Block Tanning Company. 

The Blocks had no tanning background, but they knew something about leather. Roy’s father, Harry Block, was born in Bohemia and emigrated in 1866 as a 17-year old. In the 1870s, he ran a jewelry store in Virginia City, Nevada, where Roy was born. After opening a jewelry store in San Francisco, Harry formed the H. & L. Block Co. with his younger brother Leopold. The company manufactured gloves. In 1900, before he entered the tanning business, Roy was a glove drummer, as traveling salesmen were called. 

Initially, Manasse and Block’s intention was to run the Berkeley facility as a branch of its main Oakland tannery. “The local branch will be enlarged and improved as the business increases, and promises within a few years to become one of Berkeley’s leading enterprises,” informed the Oakland Tribune in May 1905, concluding, “It is understood the tanning company will expend some $10,000 or $15,000 on improving its West Berkeley establishment.” 

The company did, in fact, leave Oakland, supposedly because the railroad was constrocted through its site at East 12th St. and 19th Avenue. In 1906, Manasse-Block was joined on Third St. by H. & L. Block’s Pacific Glove Works, which had lost its San Francisco facilities in the earthquake and fire. That catastrophe fresh in the principals’ minds, precautions were taken. On July 28 of that year, the Tribune reported, “In the belief that it will be impossible for the city to furnish them better fire protection at the present time, three of the largest factories in the West End, the California Ink Company, the Manasse-Block Tanning Company, and the Pacific Glove Works, located between Camelia and Gilman and Third and Fourth streets, combined in installing a pumping plant and an efficient fire brigade of their own. The directors believe that the cost of the undertaking will eventually be paid by a reduction in the insurance rates. […] The brigade will be at the service of the West Berkeleyans.” 

In February 1906, Manasse-Block made news for an altogether different reason. That month, two young men who declined to give their names but who said they were medical students called on August Manasse and asked him to prepare some human skin for commercial purposes. “With them,” reported the Tribune, “they had two pieces of cuticle, one about a foot square and the other a trifle smaller, which they admitted they had stripped from a body in a dissecting room. They said they intended making slippers of the skin.” 

“It is alleged,” continued the article, “that articles made from the skin of men and women have been carried from California to all portions of the Union. The skin is expensive, a piece six inches square being valued at $20. When tanned the skin of a man is worth in the neighborhood of $500. The skin is soft and pliable, resembling in many respects chamois. Of it belts, purses, slippers and many other small articles are manufactured.” 

Manasse declined the offer, and Town Marshal August Vollmer announced that he would take steps to put an end to the gruesome business. 

Newspaper notices published during the 1910s give an idea of the extent of Manasse-Block’s business. At different times in 1917 and ’18, the company shipped leather to Houston, Milwaukee, Salt Lake City, Denver, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Portland, OR. “The white tanned leather put out by this company enjoys the distinction of being in a class by itself,” touted one of the notices. 

By that time, August Manasse had exited the scene. Around 1914, Roy Block took over as president, and Manasse became a hide buyer. The company’s new secretary was Solomon Seeligsohn, another offspring of a San Francisco German-Jewish family. His older brother, Abraham (Abe) Seeligsohn, was editor of the Jewish Progress. Solomon, who may have died prematurely, was followed as Manasse-Block’s secretary by his younger brother Selig. 

Even after breaking up, Manasse and Block continued to live in proximity to each other. For many years, August Manasse and his wife Myra lived at 2837 Regent Street. Refugees from the San Francisco earthquake, Roy Block and his spouse Edna built a new house at 2920 Hillegass Ave. It is a handsome Arts & Crafts shingled structure with a rustically jagged clinker-brick chimney, sturdy porch posts, and zigzag window muntins. The house was designed by Alfred Dodge Coplin, whose distinctive residential creations from the same period may be seen at 2811 Benvenue Ave. and 2630 Piedmont Ave. 

In the mid-1920s, the Blocks moved to a larger house at 44 Montrose Road, in Thousand Oaks. Their old house changed hands many times and eventually became a rental property. By the early 1960s, a modern two-story, four-unit apartment building had been constructed in the back yard. Less than ten years ago, the house was empty and boarded up. Now, although still a rental, it is handsomely restored. 

The Block family continued to own the tannery for the rest of its productive life. The plant expanded steadily until 1956, its principal product being boot and shoe leather. As synthetics replaced leather and as shoe production moved overseas, the tanning business declined. After the tannery closed, the facilities were sold to the Athena Development Corporation, which created the Tannery project, preserving, rehabilitating, and reusing the abandoned 81,180 sq. ft. complex. Completed in 1990, the complex accommodates offices, retail, and live-work units. 

The old Cal Ink plant next door is now abandoned and awaiting its fate on the auction block. Can it be as creatively rehabilitated as the Manasse-Block tannery? 

 

Daniella Thompson publishes berkeleyheritage.com for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA). 

 

Photograph: Daniella Thompson  

Part of the Manasse-Block Tannery complex, 1307 Third St. originally housed H. & L. Block’s Pacific Glove Works. 

 

 

 


Garden Variety: Sales, Temptations and a Crisis of Conscience

By Ron Sullivan
Friday June 29, 2007

I see the inimitable Annie’s Annuals is having a sale. Some of the stuff the two Anni(e)s are offering are rarities in the plant trade, in the area, maybe anywhere. Once again I’ll have to wrestle with my conscience.  

Partly it’s about budgeting. As you might have heard, income possibilities for freelance writers are shrinking rapidly around here while prices the prices of gas and pretty much everything else are rising. Annie’s plants are certainly not overpriced but they aren’t cheap, and there’s always one more—well, two more, and shouldn’t I get some of those over there too?—temptation there that I’d counted on.  

I could take cash and my driver’s license and nothing else, I guess. I could wear a hairshirt and cilice too, but somehow I’m just not that kind of a girl.  

Partly it’s about space. Our garden is crowded, mostly shady, badly drained in spite of various stratagems against flat alluvial clay. How badly drained? Every winter a mysterious hole opens in the mud of the driveway. This hole swallows whatever we throw into it: chips, mats, gravel, pecks of rocks ranging up to breadloaf size.  

The hole, from the moment it appears, fills with water. That water and the mud for a few square yards around it stink of stagnation. It has risen from some unwholesome quarter of the bowels of Earth and it’s not going anywhere till Spring.  

So I’m gambling with the life of every poor plant I bring home. I end up adopting a lot of orphans, because, well, I’m cheap and they have nowhere better to go, and rarities rarely get orphaned. This contributes to a certain vernacular, even outsider-art atmosphere here at The Belfry.  

I’ve been a member of Native Seeds/SEARCH for years; they made a believer out of me when they brought some of their marvelous chili powder varieties to the Bioneers conference. They were the best thing there that year. 

But I buy only groceries and artifacts from them because the species and cultivars they preserve are desert-based, and I’m sure I’d be committing murder by planting them here. Their seeds are rare pretty much by definition, and if I’m going to perform vegetable sacrifices I’d prefer at least to leave a lot of survivors somewhere.  

One matter that does not rasp on my conscience when I succumb to Annie’s charms is that of provenance. That’s something you have to think about with rare plants and even some common ones, particularly bulbs.  

So obscenely disparate are global wages that some bulb distributors still find it cheaper to pay some poor Third World gatherer for bulbs dug from the wild than to grow their own plants and keep seeds from them to grow out for bulbs, or even propagate by bulblets or cuttings.  

There’s an ethical side to pretty much anything—maybe not crossword puzzles, but anything else—and gardeners who prize interesting plants do well to pay attention to it. 

More about that next week. 

 

 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet. 

 

Annie’s Annuals and Perennials 

740 Market Avenue, Richmond 

(510) 215-1671 

Directions at www.anniesannuals.com or call (don’t trust Mapquest or Google on this one.) 

Sale June 23 through July 8 at retail  

nursery ONLY. 

 

Native Seeds/SEARCH 

Retail store: 526 N. 4th Ave. 

Tucson, AZ 85705 

(520) 622-5561 

www.nativeseeds.org


About the House: How to Say ‘I Love You’

By Matt Cantor
Friday June 29, 2007

I was with a very charming couple today. He was French and she was American. They were very different and both very smart and we had a great time looking at an incredible place that needed … like … nothing. Well, not much. 

As usual I reeled out scenarios of earthquake and assorted disasters and related how this building might fare in each case. At one point, it occurred to me how absurd I am and I said “Just imagine what my dreams must be like.” Luckily … they laughed. It’s true, though. 

I do spend an inordinate amount of time running worse case scenarios of how various things might go wrong, in the pursuit of the best advice for my clients. But truly, I do not live in fear. It’s just interesting and a wonderful challenge. I’m a very lucky person to be doing what I do. 

Among the red flag danger signs I try to point out, I’m fairly certain that the most frequent and certainly the most hidden are those involving fire. The building code is busily at work with these as well. Fire is really our most serious threat when it comes to the places in which we live and it occupies a huge amount of what we’re addressing in the building codes and other building standards. It’s probably the central issue in the design of nearly every major component of our houses as well it should be. It’s the one thing we just don’t ever want to face. 

So I’d like to offer a little tour around the typical house and touch on just a few of the things it would be best to focus on to minimize this threat. 

While there are many things one can do to diminish the likelihood of a fire starting, I would suggest that we refocus of our attention (at least at first) and take a look at how we can be prepared to cope with fire once it occurs. The most important thing is to have many ways to escape from the house and of course, lots of smoke detectors to wake us or alert us to the need to escape. 

If in doubt, add more smoke detectors. Put them on ceilings and not on walls. If they’re old, replace them, and change the batteries every year when you change the clocks (you know- “Spring forward, Fall back”). While you’re buying the batteries, pick up a fire extinguisher and hang it by the kitchen entry. 

OK. Now you’re awake and the smoke alarm is going off. What next? You want to be able to get out of the house by any door or window in the house. So be sure that no exit is impeded in any way. Window bars are very dangerous in this regard and need to be owned with great awareness of their ability to cause death. Be sure you think they’re worth it. Operable window bars are better, but they prevent firefighters from entering the building (at least quickly and easily.) 

They can get through them if there’s time but in a fire, time is what we most lack). If you have operable window bars keep the mechanism clear of furnishings and test them regularly. Remember that when fires get going, people panic and forget how to do basic things. Also, smoke prevents vision and quickly disables occupants. 

Even a pane of glass in a paint-stuck window can be a tremendous impediment to escape. With panic and smoke, the simple act of breaking a window may be too much to ask. Make it easy. Get the windows unstuck. All of them. You don’t know where you’ll be when a fire breaks out. 

I can’t emphasize this last part about smoke and panic quite enough. Emergency situations can make the obvious action unimaginable and smoke makes everything very hard to manage. In a matter of seconds we can lose our ability to do all the things that we imagined we might in our heroic dream of action. It’s only human. It’s preparation that can make us more able to cope when the time comes. 

Modern codes say a lot about window size and height. I’ll give you some of the stats. A window should open to the following minimum size. 20” wide, 24” high and a total openable area of at least 5 square feet. That means that you’re really looking at something like 2’ wide and 30” high, but there’s room for variation. Many of the windows I see in older houses are smaller than this.  

You may not need code-approved size, but open the window and see if you can imagine climbing out. Can your family all do the same? Can the kids open the windows? By the way, make sure they know to get out of the house without looking for the adults. Agree on a meeting place like the front lawn so you know that everyone is safe. But the job is to get straight out without delay. 

Finishing the code thing with windows, the windowsill should be no more than 44” above the floor. This is to be sure that the firefighter can climb into the room without fear that they will fall through the collapsed floor. They want to touch the floor before committing. 

Another thing about windows is to be sure that no locking mechanism more complex than your basic twist lock is being used. If you have keyed locks on windows, please consider removing them. They could be deadly. 

If you have a second or third story without an extra outside set of stairs, consider rope or chain ladders for each bedroom (especially for the kiddies) so you don’t have to stand staring at those things at Orchard’s after something really, really bad has happened. They’re not that expensive. 

Make sure that no door requires a key in order to leave the dwelling. If you have a “double cylinder” lock, replace it with a single-cylinder lock that has a thumb turn on the inside. If burglars find this easier to steal your stuff, let ‘em have the TV and save your family from a premature terrestrial evacuation. 

It may sound severe but it’s really smart to plan for this stuff. Do a drill, even just once. You may discover something huge in the process. I recently had a client who was terribly concerned about her animals and wanted to be sure that there were escape exits for them to the exclusion of any interest in herself. Now, I’m as big an animal lover as any but, please, save yourself first.  

If you smoke, remember that you are very likely to cause the fire, so think about limiting your smoking to one place in the house and not in the bedroom. Falling asleep smoking has killed many a smoker as well as many non-smokers. 

If you manage to heat without using electric space heaters, you’ll further decrease your chances of a fire. Also, never use an extension cord with a space heater. These cause overheating in the wiring and spark blazes as we sleep. If you can heat the room prior to bed-time, you’ll be better off. 

We can’t cover all the things that might set your house ablaze but you can take the time to look at the escapes and make sure that you’ll be able to get outside in plenty of time to watch the house burn down. 

I heard a guy on the radio this morning as I was pulling on my argyles talking about how he just lost his house in a fire. He said, “Well, at least the family is safe and that’s the important thing.” Hail brother. Ain’t it the truth. Before I close today, I’d like to share one last thought. 

A few years ago I was speaking with John, a Berkeley firefighter during the inspection of his new home in Oakland and so, took advantage of the chance to ask a few questions about what firefighters do. I can’t remember exactly what I was asking, but it had something-or-other to do with getting inside to pull people out of fires. 

He stopped me, his face somewhat screwed-up and said “Oh … we don’t do that much anymore. Ever since people started using smoke detectors regularly, we’re just putting out fires. The people are already outside.” 

If the message isn’t clear, let me put it just a little more bluntly. Go buy the smoke detectors today. Put batteries in ‘em and put em up on the ceiling of every bedroom and out in the hall on each floor. Don’t wait. Don’t get gelato. Don’t order Netflix. Just get ‘em. That’s how I say “I love you.” 


Berkeley This Week

Friday June 29, 2007

FRIDAY, JUNE 29 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Mayor Tom Bates on “State of the City” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925.  

“Indigenous Permaculture Progam in El Salvador” A slide show on rural community development and sustainable communities, and a Mayan cultural presentation, at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Donation $10-$35. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Free Compost for Berkeley Residents Self-serve for the general public from 11:45 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. at Berkeley Marina Maintenance Yard, 201 University Ave., next to Adventure Playground, Berkeley. 644-6566. 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

Free Diabetes Screening Come find out if you might have diabetes with our free screening test and make sure not to eat or drink anything for 8 hours beforehand, from 9 to 11 a.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center, 2939 Ellis St. at Ashby. 981-5332. 

Circle Dancing, simple folk dancing with instruction. Potluck supper at 7 p.m., dancing at 8 p.m. at Hillside Community Church, 1422 Navellier St., El Cerrito. Donation of $5 requested. 528-4253.  

0 to 100 Watts in 4 Days A workshop to build an FM broadcast transmitter, sponsored by Free Radio Berkeley. With an emphasis on hands-on learning, you will learn how to solder, identify electronic components, assemble a 40 watt transmitter from a kit of parts, build and tune an antenna, properly setup and test broadcast equipment, and more. From 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day, at 2311 Adeline, Unit P, Oakland. Cost is $200-$250 sliding scale. 625-0314. www.freeradio.org 

SATURDAY, JUNE 30 

Drip Irrigation A workshop on landscape watering that utilizes low-flow and conservation principles from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sponsored by the Alameda County Cleanwater Program and EBMUD. Call to register and for location. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

“Restore Wetlands in Oakland” A volunteer opportunity with Save the Bay on a wetland restoration project near the Oakland Airport. From 9 a.m. to noon. RSVP to 452-9261 ext. 109. 

Walking Tour of Oakland Chinatown Meet at 10 a.m. at the courtyard fountain in the Pacific Renaissance Plaza at 388 Ninth St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. For reservations call 238-3234.  

Full Moon Walk at John Muir National Historic Site Join a Park Ranger for a walk under a full moon to see noctunal animal life. Reservations required. Call for details. 925-228-8860. 

Canned Food Collection for the Alameda County Food Bank at the film showing of “Ratatouille” at the Berkeley 7 Theater, 2274 Shattuck Ave. Bring 2-8 cans from 1 to 5 p.m. 635-3663, ext. 358. 

Origami for All Ages Learn to fold five different origami shapes from 2 to 4 p.m. at 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720 ext 17. 

Hopalong Animal Rescue Come meet your furry new best cat friend from noon to 3 p.m. at 2940 College Ave. 267-1915, ext. 500.  

Preschool Storytime for 3 to 5-year-olds at 11 a.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720 ext. 17. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

SUNDAY, JULY 1 

Habitat Hunters A hike for the whole family to discover what makes a habitat, at 10:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233.  

Solo Sierrans Waterfront Bike Trip from the Emeryville Marina to Berkeley. Meet at 3 p.m. in front of the Watergate Clipper Club, 5 Captain Dr. for a leisurly five mile round trip ride. 923-1094. 

“Open Garden” Join the Little Farm gardener for composting, planting, watering and reaping the rewards of our work, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233.  

EcoHouse Tour Visit the the Ecology Center’s environmentally friendly demonstration home and garden from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 1305 Hopkins St., entrance on Peralta. Cost $10, sliding scale. 548-2220 ext. 242. 

Insect Hunt A capture and release program for the whole family at 2 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Social Action Forum with Eric Mills on animal rights at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302. 

Peach Tasting from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Kensington Farmers’ Market, 303 Arlington, behind ACE Hardware, Kensington.  

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Tibetan Buddhism with Jack Petranker on “Learning to Be” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

MONDAY, JULY 2 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. 548-0425. 

Drop in Knitting Class at the Albany Library Work on your own project or make pet blankets and children’s hats to be donated to charity organizations. Yarn and needles provided for donated items. At 3:30 p.m. at 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

TUESDAY, JULY 3 

Alternative Fourth of July Celebration commemorating Frederick Douglass’ Independence Day Speech, at the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, 1852, with a concert and BBQ dinner at 6 p.m. at Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, 1616 Franklin St., downtown Oakland. Tickets are $20-$30. www.opcmusic.org 

Fourth of July Celebration with music by the Milt Bowerman Band at 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190. 

The Red Oak Victory Ship BBQ and Fireworks Viewing at 6 p.m. at 1337 Canal Blvd., off Hwy 580, in Richmond. Cost is $20. For information and reservations call 222-9200. 

Insect Discovery Lab See and touch live bugs as you learn more about them at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Tuesday Documentaries at 7 p.m. at the Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way. Donation of $5 benefits the Berkeley Food and Housing Project. 665-0305. 

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 1247 Marin Ave. 524-9122.  

Family Storytime for preschoolers and up at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704.  

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, JULY 4 

Fourth of July at the Berkeley Marina from noon to 9:30 p.m. with live entertainment, arts & crafts, food, and activities for children. Alcohol-free event. Free admission. Sponsored by the City of Berkeley. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us.  

Celebrate Inter-Dependence Day with a vegetarian potluck from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Laurel Picnic Area in Tilden Park. Bring a vegetarian dish to share. Dogs and musical instruments also welcome. Sponsored by The Network of Spiritual Progressives 644-1200. www.spiritualprogressives.org  

People’s World Barbeque “Que Viva Cuba!” with report-backs from recent visits, music, and Cuban and BBQ food, from 1 to 5 p.m. at 2232 Derby St. Cost is $10. 548-8764. 

Fireworks on the Bay Canoe Trip An easy paddle to see the welands before the fireworks show. All boating equipment and instruction is provided. Mimimum age is 10. Cost is $35-$45. For reservations call 452-9261, ext. 119. bayevents@saveSFbay.org  

Fourth of July on the USS Hornet with live music, games for all ages, and tours of the aircraft carrier, and firework viewing, from 10 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. at 707 W. Hornet Ave., Pier 3, Alameda. Tickets are $10-$25. 521-8448, ext. 282. www.hornetevents.com 

Walking Tour of Jack London Waterfront Meet at 10 a.m. at the corner of Broadway and Embarcadero. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

Free Sailboat Rides from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club, Berkeley Marina. Wear warm, waterproof clothing and bring a change of clothes in case you get wet. www.cal-sailing.org 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. 548-9840. 

THURSDAY, JULY 5 

“From Gaza, With Love” with Palestinian physician and human rights activist, Dr. Mona El-Farra at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1606 Bonita at Cedar. 548-0542.  

California Telephone Access will display phone equiipment for those with vision, hearing and mobility issues from 12:30 to 2 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190. 

Cope with Creativity shows the video “The Gifts of Grief” at 6:30 p.m. at 4401 Howe St., Oakland. To register call 888-755-7855, ext. 4241. 

El Sabor de Fruitvale Farmers’ market, salsa making, and live music with La Familia Son afrom 3 to 7 p.m. at Fruitvale Transit Village, 3411 East 12th St., Oakland. 535-6900. 

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755.  

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline at Alcatraz. Free, all are welcome. namaste@avatar.freetoasthost.info  

CITY MEETINGS 

Housing Advisory Commission meets Thurs., July 5, at 7:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5400.  

Landmarks Preservation Commission meets Thurs. July 5, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7419.