Editorials

It might be time to give up on Berkeley. Last night’s meeting of the Landmark Preservation Commission was profoundly depressing, a graphic demonstration of how the city is slipping into the clutches of the corporate capital which is now taking cities around the world away from their citizens.

Just to get the bad news out of the way quickly: the Landmarks Preservation commission voted 6-3 to rubberstamp the recommendations of the City of Berkeley’s hired planning staff, the very same department that was trained and managed by Mark Rhoades, who’s now stepped through the revolving door to promote RatBP (The Residences at Berkeley Plaza, aka 2211 Harold Way). And so it goes. Cynics among you can stop reading here.

There were two things remarkable about last night’s meeting. First, the number and quality of the citizens who spoke in opposition to demolishing the structures on the landmarked site, which was the putative principal decision before the commission. Large, and impressive.

Second, the number and quality of the project's supporters, including and especially the commissioners who supplied the needed votes in lockstep with their City Council appointers. Let’s just say minimal and I wasn’t impressed. 

Two of the commissioners who voted yes last night seemed never to have been to an LPC meeting before. Their nameplates, if they had them, were not visible to me from my seat toward the back of a standing room only crowd of opponents. My own newly elected District 8 councilmember, Lori Droste, appointed lawyer Steven Murphy, who also just happens to be District 5 Councilmember Laurie Capitelli’s appointee to the Planning Commission. I don’t know about other District 8 residents, but he certainly didn’t represent my family when he voted the Bates/Capitelli position. 

Rumor around town is that (now keep your eye on the ball and take a deep breath) Murphy’s house was gerrymandered into Capitelli’s district so that when Mayor Tom Bates resigns as expected in December, Capitelli can take his place in order to run for Mayor as an incumbent in 2016 and Murphy can run for the District 5 seat, also as an incumbent. Is this true? Only time will tell. 

In the meantime, four of the commissioners who were present and voting, including Murphy, could have been robots. They appeared to be deaf to the pleas of the several dozen citizens who spoke to them, and dumb, unable to utter a word to justify their decision. And I do mean literally, not a word. R2D2 at least said eep eep as I remember. 

When I was on the LPC newly seated commissioners were required to state that they’d read all the materials and listened to all the tapes of previous meetings concerning a matter on which they proposed to vote. The two new commissioners, Murphy and Darryl Moore’s guy, were asked by members of the public (though not by commission or staff) if they’d done that, but I couldn’t hear any response from them. Oh, yes, by the way, the sound system was lousy too, as it usually is at LPC meetings. Keeps the rabble guessing about what’s going on, doesn’t it? 

Darryl Moore’s appointee might have the first name of Kiran, but I couldn’t get his last name. Murphy and “Kiran” might have been temps, or not. They were asked that too, and again their response was sotto voce, so who knows? 

Public commenters asked Commissioners for a show of hands if they’d read the Environmental Impact Report which was supposed to be the basis for their decisions. Only two raised their hands, Austene Hall (Arreguin) and Carrie Olson (Worthington), two of the three no votes. 

The third was architect Christopher Linvill, the new commission chair, appointed by Max Anderson. He gave a thoughtful account of his analysis about whether changes to site, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, met the Secretary of Interior's Standards, the regs which govern alterations. 

None of the commissioners appointed by the Council Majority said they’d read the EIR. Why should they bother , when they already had their marching orders? 

Commissioner Paul Schwartz, no robot he, delivered a long explanation of his yes vote, mostly about how much he likes the design for the replacement buildings which would go on the landmarked site, including one 18-story tower and two shorter but still massive buildings which together would fill the city block surrounding the Shattuck Hotel. He also said he likes Manhattan and Los Angeles. He said he'd "considered" the EIR, but not that he'd read it. 

In my opinion, Schwartz is wrong on just about everything, but at least he’s demonstrably eccentric in the Berkeley tradition. He did make a quixotic effort to add an amendment to the resolutions which would have made rebuilding the Shattuck Cinema movie screens, scheduled to be demolished, a condition of the permits for the new building, but it was summarily voted down by the People in Charge. His council appointer is Susan Wengraf, whose house is the only place I’ve ever seen four Oscars on one shelf (her husband is a famous film sound man) and I imagine she’d like to see the theaters rebuilt. 

Tom Biel, appointed by Laurie Capitelli from District 5, said nothing, but voted yes, presumably as instructed. Kim Smith, who was appointed to replace Rose Marie Pietras, who was fired for disagreeing with Mayor Tom Bates, also said nothing, but she was at least brave enough to second Schwartz’s doomed amendment, not that it did any good. Otherwise she too voted as instructed. Both of these looked exceedingly uncomfortable—I’d bet that they know better. 

The citizen commenters were brilliant, again not that it did any good. They included a remarkable number of distinguished professionals: engineers both structural and civic, architects, environmental attorneys, physicians, even a retired diplomat…. And an amazing number of past officeholders who had previously been on opposite sides of the aisle spoke against the project: former Mayor Shirley Dean, former City Councilmember Ying Lee, former LPC commissioners Finacom, Emmington Jones, Pietras and others, including me. 

Even more impressive was the number of self-described newbies who spoke, many if not most movie fans, who had backed into this fight because they wanted to save the Shattuck Cinemas, and who are shocked to discover the ugly underbelly of civic—do we call it corruption, or just negligence? In all, with about 100 attendees, 60+ spoke for their two minutes against the granting of the permits. 

Who were they? My favorite was Emunah Hauser, a thirtyish woman who is on the Board of Directors of Livable Berkeley, the Smart Growth lobbying organization, whose web page says she is the Founding Director of Sunday Streets Berkeley, a joint venture of the Downtown Berkeley Association and the City of Berkeley, which provides the money for the big street fair. 

Last night, positioning herself as the spokesperson for youth, she inexplicably devoted her two minutes to an exegesis of how—excuse my French—crappy she thinks downtown Berkeley is now, and how much better it will be when Manhattanized with lots of towers filled with fancy units. Otherwise there didn’t seem to be anyone there from the BARF lobbying group(Bay Area Renters Federation) and no one else from the Downtown Berkeley Association except the executive director, John Caner. Both groups had emailed invitations to attend this meeting to long lists, but only seven people in all spoke in support of the project, most of them paid employees or consultants. It's hard to understand how trashing the downtown serves the interests of the DBA members. 

Joseph Penner, spokesperson for the Los Angeles-based corporation which owns most of the block, including the retail spaces on the ground floor of the Shattuck Hotel, gave a short speech in which he repeatedly claimed that Berkeley needs his building because our population is increasing. Of course that’s not true, as many knowledgable members of the audience informed him, but he was undeterred. He used the old lying-with-statistics trick of averaging the number of units built all the way back to 1970, a meaningless span which seems to have fooled at least one newsie. 

The really serious problem with the proposed building complex emerged in bits and pieces since the citizens were limited to two minutes each, a very short time in which to explain a structural engineering threat. That was the latest version of how Rhoades (frequently accused of being a prevaricator) plans to bring back the movies. Even last night there were two different claims on the table. The resolution drafted by staff and presumably passed by the commission referenced six screens, while Rhoades in his oral presentation claimed that there would be ten. 

Here's the structural threat: In order to bring the count up to ten, there’s now a proposal to burrow deep under the landmarked Shattuck Hotel for three more screens. As various speakers pointed out, that scheme is fraught with peril. Last night they told the commissioners that the hotel, built at the turn of the 20^th Century,sits atop the former bed of Strawberry Creek, and has a very questionable clay tile foundation. Yet the Final Environmental Impact Report, which was prematurely certified by the Zoning Adjustment Board and will surely be appealed to the City Council, does not include or require an impartial evaluation of the developer’s latest proposal by a qualified structural engineer before permits are granted. 

If we think that the Library Gardens tragedy, which has been irrevocably linked with the name of Berkeley in Ireland and the rest of Europe, was a disaster, just imagine the collapse of the Shattuck Hotel, with theaters below and hotel rooms above all filled with people. Commissioner Carrie Olson was on the Design Review Commission which approved Library Gardens. Last night she said she voted to approve it because she trusted the City to watch out for problems in construction, which turns out to have been a mistake. Now she’s leading the charge to halt all permitting for the RatBP project until the actual final plans for the excavation under the hotel can be approved by an impartial qualified outside structural engineering firm. But she was voted down last night on her motion to postpone the LPC decision, again 6-3. 

The next discussion of the progress of this behemoth through the belly of the beast will be at the August 27 Zoning Adjustment Board meeting. It has formerly been believed in Berkeley that appointed commissions and the city council pay attention to the voices of citizens who write letters and come to meetings, but I’m just not sure I believe that any more. It’s possible that the responsive Berkeley we’ve believed in for a couple of decades is over, but come to the ZAB meeting and judge for yourself. 

If, as expected, this project is already in the bag with the support of Mayor Bates’ captive Council Majority and their commission appointees, it might be necessary for citizens to sue on the inadequacy of the EIR, at least in order to make sure that the crazy plan to undermine the hotel is fully vetted before construction begins. And the ultimate remedy could be at the ballot box in 2016, when the elderly Mayor-for-Life might reasonably be expected to step down. 

But all that takes money, doesn’t it? Better start saving your pennies now.