Editorials

This week’s editorial is in a more traditional vein than most, and is much shorter than usual. That’s because the message to be conveyed is short and sweet: For those who care about what kind of Berkeley we’ll be passing along to those who come after us, there’s a meeting you’ve really got to attend this Saturday. It’s the last public forum of DAPAC, the Downtown Plan Advisory Committee, which is the slightly illegitimate offspring of the city’s settlement of its lawsuit challenging the environmental impact report on one segment of the University of California’s enormous expansion plans for the next decades.  

Why “slightly illegimate”? Well, there’s no good reason that the city should have invited UC’s planners into its tent at all. There are those who would make the argument that it’s safer for the city to let the university participate in a planning process which in non-UC cities would belong to the residents alone, since according to the state constitution the University of California, like the proverbial 2000-pound gorilla, can sleep anywhere it chooses. 

The only problem with this analysis is that UC has carefully reserved the right to disregard the outcome of the DAPAC proceedings if it feels like it. A further problem is that DAPAC’s recommendations have to pass both the Planning Commission, which has been shamelessly stacked with pro-development advocates by Mayor Tom Bates and his allies, and the City Council (a faint-hearted bunch, with a couple of exceptions) even before UC has its chance to ignore the results. 

The commentary section today devotes more space than usual to an excellent analysis of what DAPAC’s done until now, written by Rob Wrenn, one of DAPAC’s resident policy wonks. Wrenn was chair of the citizen-dominated Planning Commission which drafted our general plan, the one that UC plans to ignore as it feeds its edifice complex.  

And on Thursday morning, as this was being written, DAPAC members were receiving a 3,000-plus word missive from committee chair Will Travis. He says he’s expressing his own personal ideas, but his views might be taken as representing some sort of official position, since he was appointed as chair by Bates, contrary to Berkeley’s usual practice of letting commissioners elect their own chairs. Space does not permit us to reprint his opinion today, but he sums it all up in an early paragraph: “we should be calling for as many tall buildings as possible to be built.” 

Whether you agree or disagree with that conclusion, you should show up to weigh in if you care at all. Details: Saturday, Oct. 20, 10 a.m.-1 p.m., Public Workshop, Berkeley High School Library (Allston and Milvia). Be there.