Opinion

The “Emily” in the very successful Emily’s List fundraising organization is not a person but an acronym. It stands for the old political slogan Early Money Is Like Yeast, which means that a dollar given early in a campaign is worth many more dollars for the would-be candidate than one contributed at the end. Early dollars can be used to do fundraising for additional funds, and to reach out to undecided voters in time to recruit them as campaign volunteers. -more-

“Downtown Berkeley is at present a pretty desolate and unattractive place, one that many citizens avoid if at all possible.” -more-

DOWNTOWN BUILDING HEIGHTS -more-

EDITOR’S NOTE: This letter was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle. -more-

Daily Planet columnist J. Douglas Allen-Taylor has been an un-abashed apologist for Mayor Dellums for too long. In a petty feud with Chip Johnson of the San Francisco Chronicle, he uses his recent column to belabor the non-issue that Chip has been treating Mayor Dellums more harshly than former Mayor Brown. In the process, Allen-Taylor sadly misses the real story. Crime in Oakland is out of control and Mayor Dellums has failed to articulate a detailed action plan to address it. I for one applaud Chip Johnson’s tenacity in reporting the issue of crime. The Reader’s Platform in the San Francisco Chronicle relates the growing frustration residents face day after day with ever increasing crime and unresponsive and overworked police. Admittedly, Mayor Dellums did not create Oakland’s crime problem, but he has a responsibility to address it. -more-

I am not a member of the “Concerned Listeners”; nonetheless I am a ”concerned” listener. -more-

For the average KPFA listener, it’s not easy to understand what—if anything—is really at stake in elections for the Local Station Board, nor how to select and rank candidates. They’re divided into myriad slates and factions, all passionately denouncing one another, but they’re all experienced progressives, and at a glance their platforms and platitudes sound pretty similar. And beyond the official election pamphlet, the station itself isn’t doing much to help voters understand the issues: There’s been only one, poorly publicized in-person candidate forum, and as of this writing, more than three weeks after the ballots were mailed, KPFA had yet to begin airing the recorded pitches candidates were asked to make weeks ago. -more-

Although our City Council on Tuesday, Nov. 7 surprised many of us naïve citizens by reversing its position made two weeks earlier in support of South Berkeley residents, it was less surprising if one examines the council’s history. On many occasions, the council had led Berkeley citizens to believe that it was truly sympathetic to neighborhood concerns over RF radiation from cell phone antennas. They cite for their reason federal law as promulgated in the 1996 Tele-Commun-ications Act which pre-empts the city from being able to defend its citizen on the basis of health concerns. -more-

WILL DAPAC HAVE BEEN WORTH IT? -more-

When I interviewed with Councilmember Kriss Worth-ington two years ago regarding my interest in serving on the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC), the first thing that I said was that I felt that the existing Downtown Plan was generally fine and that there really was no need for a new plan. When I was later appointed to the DAPAC, I entered the process with a lot of skepticism, hoping that something positive would come out of the process. Two long and exhausting years later, I am still not only skeptical but also concerned about the direction of the DAPAC. -more-

Having lived in Berkeley and other parts of the Bay Area for a number of years (yes, I am one of those dreaded “true believers” indoctrinated at UC Berkeley’s Department of City and Regional Planning), I occasionally read the Daily Planet online from across the country—mostly for entertainment, it must be said. I’ve watched the debate over tall buildings in downtown Berkeley with some interest and have to say that, despite my “true believer” status and my tendency to agree with the “pro-development lobby group” Livable Berkeley, I find myself in this case sharing the skepticism about the wisdom of filling up downtown Berkeley with buildings of 14 stories and more. But opposition to that kind of height should not translate into support for the anti-growth position so often espoused by the Daily Planet. -more-

Over the past 24-plus years, I have directly participated, either as a volunteer or a paid landscape architecture/urban design consultant, in approximately 15 separate projects that have been actually constructed in Berkeley’s downtown. -more-

Winston Smith was sitting in his cubicle in the Ministry of Truth. It was his job to collect all of the information about the problems with high-rise buildings and high-density development and place it in the tube to be sent down the Memory Hole so that it would be forgotten forever. It had been a busy day; many records had been changed to prove that high-rise “Smart Growth” worked perfectly everywhere it had been tried. He was exhausted. -more-

Tonight (Tuesday), Bruce Kelley, a local developer, will ask the City Council to approve his plans to build a house at 161 Panoramic Way. The lot Kelley plans to build on sits between two blind curves on the narrowest section of this substandard road. While California Fire Code requires roads to be 20 feet wide, Panoramic Way is only 11 feet, 8 inches wide adjacent to the north side of Kelley’s lot. Panoramic Way was designed for 1920s cars and has hardly been upgraded since then. The road is treacherous because of its narrowness, its many blind curves, and the absence of shoulders and sidewalks. Walkers and joggers are forced to the edge of the road to dodge passing cars and delivery trucks. -more-

In 1992, the Earth First conference in Rio de Janeiro brought together people from all over the world, from all disciplines and walks of life, to address the issue of sustainability, especially in relation to the earth’s diversity of species—its living systems. Among other topics, Rio ’92 addressed polices of the rich countries that drove poor people who live off the land to adopt certain “slash and burn” practices detrimental to the environment. Out of Rio ‘92 flowed the United Nations Biodiversity Convention which the United States was one of the last countries to ratify. A similar stance was taken over the Kyoto Protocol that addresses the emission of greenhouse gases that are not sustainable to the earth’s environment. -more-

Evelyn Giardina said in a recent letter to the editor, “And good riddance to you, Manuela. You built a career by telling the city manager and City Council what they wanted to hear, which is not the same as providing good legal counsel. Take your golden parachute and just go.” -more-