Editorials

Berkeley and beyond: Take Two

Becky O'Malley
Friday February 27, 2015 - 04:41:00 PM

Today’s issue contains two free-will-offerings from local writers which relate to a couple of topics which have been on my mind lately.

First, there’s Judy Shelton’s piece on discrepancies she’s uncovered between what promoters of the “Residences at Berkeley Plaza” 18-story monstrosity have told Berkeley’s Zoning Adjustment Board about the intentions of Landmark Cinemas and observable reality.

Members of the Committee to Save the Landmark Shattuck Cinemas contacted me a while back with their suspicion that something was amiss in the presentations which had been made to ZAB about the fate of the 10-screen movie palace now in the building which would have to be demolished. They asked if I could assign an investigative reporter to figure it out.

Alas, those days are over. You can find out what happened in Berkeley’s arcane planning process in the past in the Planet archives (mostly under Richard Brenneman’s illustrious byline) but there are no longer any staff reporters: No one home over here but us chickens, and I’m not getting any younger.

What I told them is what I told my kids as they grew up: if something needs to be done, but no one seems to be in charge, you are. I suggested that they just ask Landmark’s management what’s up, and guess what?

They did, and quelle surprise! Landmark Cinemas is alive and well, thriving in Berkeley. 

Top Landmark execs were more than happy to talk to committee members Donald Goldmacher (himself a documentary film producer) and Judy Shelton, by phone and email. They affirmed their belief in the Berkeley market. (I can confirm that, having tried to get into “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry” recently, only to learn that it was sold out.) 

Here’s the lesson, which both the ZAB and the Berkeley City Council must keep firmly in mind as they contemplate allocating variances for the small number of high-rises allowed by the Downtown Plan: Don’t believe everything you’re told. None of the “testimony” presented to you is under oath. No cross-examination is allowed, and in fact the custom is to allow promoters extra time to make their pitch without interruption. 

Yes, Virginia, sometimes some people lie under such circumstances. And sometimes the city mothers and fathers play Santa and give favored developers whatever they ask for, no proof needed, few questions asked. 

Sometimes credulous news reporters even believe that developers’ promises will come true. Yeah, sure. 

I remember the glowing pictures which Patrick Kennedy painted of the Gaia feminist bookstore which was supposed to be the anchor tenant of the Gaia building. I was on the city of Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (no relation to the theater company) when he described the new Fine Arts theater which would replace the obsolete current model. 

For those of you who aren’t paying attention, neither of those ever materialized, and there have been more similar instances. 

I’m reluctant to use that loaded word “lie”, but sometimes people do lie, don’t they? 

Do I remember correctly, was Mark Rhoades (now fronting for the company that wants to destroy the Shattuck Cinemas) the secretary of the LPC at that time? He had that job for several years when he worked for the city. If so, one worries that he might have learned at the LPC that deception pays off, and that he’s now calibrating his promises accordingly. 

Rhoades is quoted in the current San Francisco Business Times thus: "My specialty is understanding the confluence of policy development and actual implementation as a planner and as a developer." 

In normal English, that means he was paid by the city of Berkeley to write planning documents and now he exploits what he learned for private profit. Not a bad gig if you can get it. 

Variances allowing builders to add extra stories to proposed buildings add millions of dollars in value to a given square footage of downtown land. The intention of the Downtown Plan was supposed to be to recoup that unearned bonus by getting developers to provide substantial public benefits in return. 

But the decision-makers (ZAB and the City Council) too often put themselves at the mercy of the shaky (maybe even sleazy) financial information supplied by eager promoters. Former Planning Commission Chair Rob Wrenn has consistently requested that both of the mega-projects now in the works for Downtown Berkeley (the other one is the hotel/condo building at Center and Shattuck) be supported by professional-quality pro formas reporting on financial projections, not just vague general promises, but so far that hasn’t happened. 

Let’s hope that Lincoln’s famous aphorism (that you can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time) will protect Berkeley from the truthiness of would-be scammers in this booming development environment. Berkeleyans owe a lot to resourceful fellow-citizens like Judy and Don and Rob who are diligent in the pursuit of genuine truth in a climate of hype. 


P.S. And now for something completely different. 

This issue also contains James MacBean’s laudatory review of last weekend’s production of Jake Hegge’s Dead Man Walking, the opera based on Sister Helen Préjean’s book about her experience counseling people who were later executed by the state. I can confirm his opinion, having gone myself on Sunday afternoon. 

It was one of the most remarkable theatrical experiences I’ve ever had. We sat in the balcony, and in the final scenes all the people around us, not only women but grown men, even middle-aged conservatively dressed white men, were sobbing audibly. Seeing the reality of capital punishment as we did that day was profoundly moving. I went to the San Francisco Opera production at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House 15 years ago, but I don’t remember people being so strongly affected. The Opera Parallèle version, in the much smaller Yerba Buena center, put the viewer inside the penitentiary, complicit in the execution process. 

The Chronicle and now the New York Times in the past couple of weeks have been full of news about all and sundry excoriating Roman Catholic Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone for his strident advocacy of a new manual for teachers in Catholic schools which seems to require their adherence to church teaching on topics like gay marriage both in public and in their private life. The archbishop seems not to have noticed advice from pragmatic new Pope Francis to tone it down, for God’s sake. 

Dead Man Walking reminded me of another aspect of contemporary Catholic thinking: opposition to capital punishment, now standard for at least 25 years. I was prepared to light into the archbishop for focusing on sex stuff, claiming to be pro-life but endorsing state killing, etc., but luckily I googled and discovered that he had indeed gone public with his opposition to capital punishment a couple of years ago. Nothing much has been said about it recently, however—but it would be a much better crusade for him to take up if he were living in the real world. 

For starters, Governor Jerry Brown, once a Jesuit seminarian like Pope Francis, seems to still be some kind of a Catholic when it suits him. He “lived in sin” with Anne Gust for years, but eventually married her in a Catholic church. To his credit he’s on record as being against capital punishment, but he hasn’t done much to support that belief in his political career. 

I missed my own Cal graduation (1961) because the speaker was Governor Pat Brown, Jerry’s father, who had just allowed author Caryl Chessman to be executed. Some of us skipped the ceremony altogether because of that, while others picketed in caps and gowns, but 50 years later the law allowing capital punishment in California is still on the books. 

Here’s an idea: Why doesn’t the archbishop put some pressure on Jerry and other Catholics in state government to get that law repealed, instead of wasting his time obsessing over the sex life of teachers? It would be oh-so-much better for his P.R. image, and might actually accomplish something good. 

Just a thought.