Editorials

As Daniel Departs
Berkeley Falls Apart

Becky O'Malley
Thursday June 11, 2015 - 02:02:00 PM

“When the going gets tough, the tough get going” is a colloquial proverb most memorably attributed to John N. Mitchell, director of President Richard Nixon’s re-election committee and former U. S. attorney general, during the congressional investigation of the Watergate caper.

While there’s no reason to suspect any actually illegal activities, this aphorism would also seem to describe the recent exodus of Berkeley’s city government staff. The latest to go was top banana City Manager Christine Daniel, who’s leaving soon to become one of several second bananas in Oakland’s city government. Her decision isn’t surprising: it offers equivalent compensation, a path to promotion, and significantly less nail-biting personal responsibility.

Her resignation is one of a recent list which includes Deputy City Manager William Rogers, Finance Director Robert Hicks, Police Captain Erik Upson , Jane Micallef, director of the Health, Housing & Community Services Department and others.

Anyone who doubts that Daniel is leaving a stressful position should watch the videos of recent Berkeley City Council meetings, especially the one which took place on Tuesday of this week. Loony Tunes, start to finish.

And the next act in this on-going farce starts on June 25 at 5pm. As Berkeleyans get more and more outraged by the way the city is being abused, they show up in larger and larger crowds, necessitating moving the Council meetings to Longfellow School at least until the summer recess. 

It gets harder and harder for Council watchers to figure out Who’s on First or What’s on Second as Mayor-for-Life Tom Bates plays havoc with the Council’s Rules of Order (much more arcane than Roberts’) in his desire to control the process at any cost. Poor Manager Daniel tries to play referee, but the tension this responsibility causes increasingly shows in her grim facial expression during the meetings. 

She’s reputed to be very loyal to Bates, even to the extent of driving him home from City Council meetings (he’s publically eschewed car ownership, but is not above taking rides.) Berkeley’s charter theoretically provides for a strong city manager and a weak mayor, but because of Daniel’s deferential personality and a spineless Council majority Bates has managed to seize the reins and make a major mess in a number of important areas. It’s not surprising that Daniel wants to Get Out of Dodge before the—axe falls, chickens come home to roost, excrement hits the fan--? Choose your doomsday metaphor, but it looks grim, so the tough are getting going. 

In no particular order: 

1. What Is the Downtown Plan? There enough murkiness in this department to keep an army of lawyers busy for years sorting it out. Measure R 1.0, the 2010 version passed by a vote of the people, says that we should have “2 residential buildings and 1 hotel no higher than our existing 180 foot buildings.” But what’s now being proposed is one residential building which clocks in at about 194 feet plus a hotel/condo combo that might be even taller. And by the way, the tallest building currently in downtown Berkeley is only 178 feet. 

And what looks bad, very bad, to the outside observer, is that these sought-after projects both fall under the Berkeley version of the Cynic’s Golden Rule. The most frequently quoted formulation of this rule is that “he who has the gold makes the rules”—easily observed by calculating dollars-per-vote for the two Measures R. The first one, which passed, was bought by bigtime property owners, including Sam Zell’s Equity Residential. The second one, an ill-conceived attempt to clarify and improve the first one, was defeated by developer expenditures which outspent proponents by a 10-1 ratio. 

Even worse, however, is the Berkeley Corollary to the Cynic’s Golden Rule: He Who Makes the Rules Gets the Gold. That would apply to the two lead spokesmodels for the two proposed projects, Mark Rhoades and Matt Taecker, who often tag-team for each other in appearances before the city’s quasi-judicial land-use decision-making bodies. 

Rhoades, as readers have learned in this space ad nauseam, was the city of Berkeley’s Current Planning Director around and about the time Measure R 1.0 was cooked up. Taecker was hired by the city to staff the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee, an effort which was supposed to produce a new Downtown Plan. Both of them have been in and out of the revolving door at the city of Berkeley’s planning department on so many occasions it’s pointless to try to enumerate them. 

Doubtless with collaboration from Rhoades/Taecker, the city’s downtown plan and the zoning ordinance to support it were amended by the council in 2012 (disregarding the DAPAC recommendations for the most part, with Taecker’s collaboration) to authorize a finite number of tall buildings downtown which would provide “significant community benefits, either directly or by providing funding for such benefits to the satisfaction of the City, beyond what would otherwise be required of the City.” 

But, and here’s the weaselly part, no standard for evaluating such claimed benefits was specified—creating, of course, a giant loophole which Rhoades and Taecker are happily driving their moneyman clients through. 

Responding to citizen outrage, the Zoning Adjustment Board has tried to kick the decision on what benefits should qualify up to the City Council. Mayor Bates and his presumed heir, Councilmember Laurie Capitelli, have offered a handy formula that would provide a cheap payout to get the would-be developers off the hook. 

Ironically, the seductive promises of the 2010 Measure R ballot measure offered a “Green Pathway” which was supposed to give development a way of countering climate change. It turns out that Bates and Capitelli are offering instead another kind of “Green” pathway—allowing developers to buy their way out of Berkeley’s default height limits with trivial sums of folding cash. It’s sort of like the medieval practice of selling indulgences, isn’t it? 

No wonder Daniel wants to get out of the way before the public figures out what’s happening. But she might not need to worry, in a city which seems to care more about kids being corrupted by soda pop than about the whole city planning process being corrupted by developers’ cash. At best, it’s a mess. 

2. Managing the Police. If the downtown plan wasn’t enough to worry about, as of this week the city staff is finally getting around to the police department’s "post-incident review of events of December 2014” at the Police Review Commission. The BPD has been widely accused of over-reacting to the “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations with tear gas and rubber bullets—and the buck really should stop on the city manager’s desk. Now she won’t have to be around as the finger-pointing proceeds—and it will. 

3. Street behavior. And then there’s the renewed attempt to criminalize what the ACLU in a letter to city officials calls “innocuous behavior” by street people, some of them homeless. This is being spearheaded by the Downtown Berkeley Association, which is partly taxpayer-funded but dominated by the big property owners. It’s safe to assume that the ACLU’s letter is the opening salvo in a contest which will soon heat up if the city continues on this path. And just about the time the annoying street people are being pushed out of downtown into South Berkeley, funding for services which might deal with their problems is being cut. It’s another tussle which Daniel must be happy to opt out of. 

4. The Affordable Housing Deficit. Steve Martinot in the last issue ably dissected Berkeley’s perennial housing crisis, which is exacerbated by the murky Downtown Plan but is much broader and more critical. Suffice it to say that all the buildings under construction visible all over Berkeley will alter the city’s traditional demographic balance toward the well-off, and eventually someone might notice and blame the city management. 

5. Culture? In Berkeley? At last week’s Landmark Preservation Commission, Commissioner Paul Schwartz enunciated one point of view which is bound to be controversial. He said that he planned to vote for a permit which would allow demolition of part of the historic property on the site of the Shattuck hotel to build luxury apartments fronting on Harold Way. Why? Because bringing in more rich residents would finally bring culture to Berkeley, he said. Evidently in his book the 10-screen Landmark Shattuck Cinemas now there doesn’t count as culture. 

It’s just movies, after all, and they’re on the way out, right? He and other LPC commissioners who announced that they plan to support the demolition permit intimated as much. 

This is an opinion not widely shared among my own Berkeley contacts, who already enjoy a lot of what looks like culture to them, including films, but it’s one that seems to be winning in the city’s current land use decisions. That faction on the LPC, those commissioners appointed by the city council members who have already said they're committed to allowing the demolition to take place (what Russians would call the nekulturny faction) seems to be in the majority. 

I’m not sure Daniel, who lives in Oakland after all, cares whether Berkeley has culture or not. 

Her resignation will be effective July 24, when the council’s long recess is supposed to start. It’s possible that all the unravelling loose ends will be knitted back up before she goes, but don’t count on it. 

There’s an unprecedented marathon evening scheduled for June 25 which seems to be a panicky attempt to fulfill any and all obligations to Rhoades/Taecker clients before the recess. 

At 5:30 the City Council will address the significant community benefits calculation, most likely by passing the Bates/Capitelli proposal, which requires no third party evaluation of developers’ claims, a move estimated by opponents to leave many millions of dollars on the table. Then, once that’s been passed, the Zoning Adjustment Board is expected to use this formula to approve at least the EIR for 2211 Harold Way, and possibly the whole project at the same time. 

This will require some of Mayor Bates’ trademark mumble-mumble sleight of hand to accomplish. If you’d like to see how he does it, watch the video of the discussion of the 1% for art levy which took place at last night’s City Council meeting, but don’t blink, or you’ll miss it. 

There were at least 10 people in the audience who wanted to speak on the topic, but he hustled right past the Brown Act’s required public comment so fast that they had no idea what hit them. It was a notably bizarre performance by an increasing irascible mayor who is no longer able to treat citizens with respect. 

Doesn’t he have any friends who could suggest that it might be time to move on? Daniel doesn’t seem to want that job, and who could blame her? 

The dire predictions for the June 25 meetings come from naysayers, who hope to be proved wrong, of course. But if the script as it currently is proposed is followed, it’s a good bet that some legal challenge will ensue. 

Luckily for Christine Daniel, she won’t have to be around to pick up the pieces. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

h