Public Comment

Here for your amusement and horror is a map showing area residents who did not receive their notice (mailed April 14th) of Trader Joe's application for their liquor license as required by law. I polled almost every single residence within the notification area to collect signatures from everyone willing to state that they did for certain not receive any such notice. Only a third of people were home and only half of those who answered could state for certain whether they had or hadn't received the notice, and not all of those who knew they didn't get the notice were willing to sign the poll. And yet I managed to collect 28 signatures. In fact, I did not find anyone who said they had gotten the notice in their mail. 

The locations of people who signed my list as stating for a fact that they did not receive the notice are shown in red. The notification area as defined by law is shown in green. The cyan circle is the outer boundary of the area 500 feet from "just the front door" of the premises, still containing a majority of those who did not receive notices, showing that even if Trader Joe's pretends that they "misunderstood the legal definition of the notification area", they apparently made no particular effort to inform anyone. 

I received one of the only two notices known to have been received by anyone (apparently due to a mistake on Trader Joes's part!) Had I not received the notice, there was an extreme likelihood that nobody would ever have known that Trader Joe's had ignored and aborted their legal requirements to obtain their liquor license -- including the posting of a public notice, which is posted (unlawfully) where you can read it if you're willing to stand in an active traffic lane to do so! 

The lesson? We need Citizens to return to the "perpetual vigilance" through which we protect our democracy and society lest the careless, the heedless and the lawless catch us napping. 

Eric Dynamic
Berkeley