Features

DAPAC Pace Quickens With Deadline Nearing

By Richard Brenneman
Friday July 13, 2007

DAPAC members, with less than five months to finish their work on a downtown plan, are picking up the pace—scheduling two meetings in the coming week. 

The first session of the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee starts at 7 p.m. Monday, opening with a recap of the group’s second public workshop, held June 16. 

Members will then tackle the nuts-and-bolts issue of drafting the individual chapters of the document, which was mandated in the settlement of a city lawsuit challenging the university’s plans for development through 2020. 

In a joint memo to committee members, Chair Will Travis, and Planning Director Mark Rhoades, Matt Taecker, the planner hired to help draft the new plan, wrote that the committee will offer neither specific implementation strategies nor detailed background statements; those will come later, under direction of the Planning Commission. 

The memo lists proposed committees for six chapters, chosen from volunteers, along with proposed dates for the two meetings slated for the preparation of the chapters. 

Following their discussion of the mechanics of drafting, members will then move on to discuss two central issues of any plan: streets and open space and land-use policies and alternatives. 

Wednesday night’s meeting begins at the same time and continues the discussion of land-use policies, along with any of the other chapters that members want to discuss. 

Both meetings will be held in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

Next up on DAPAC’s agenda will be a meeting of its Transportation Subcommittee on Monday, July 23, at the same time and place. 

That agenda includes four primary topics: the role of the panel in drafting the plan’s accessibility chapter, recommendations for transportation policies, with separate discussions on bicycle policies and a possible extension of the Ohlone Greenway to the UC Berkeley campus.