Public Comment

The Case Against Continuing to Pay for the Downtown Berkeley Association

Carol Denney
Monday October 08, 2018 - 12:31:00 PM

Dr. Phil, the affable problem-solving TV host, has a catch phrase he uses when defensive participants exhaust themselves telling him and the TV audience why they do things the way they do. He listens patiently. And then he says, "how's that working for you?"

It's time for Berkeley, and any city with a "business improvement district" or BID, to ask the same question. How's that working for you? Getting anything out of the special tax you're paying to, for instance, the Downtown Berkeley Association to improve your business or community?

Because a recent report from the UC School of Law report examining 189 BIDs suggests that not only is the answer "no", it raises the possibility that BIDs are counterproductive. And it uses the City of Berkeley and more specifically the Downtown Berkeley Association (DBA) more than once as a case in point.

From their inception, the local business improvement districts have lobbied locally and state-wide for anti-panhandling, anti-sitting, and anti-belongings laws and sidewalk restrictions which primarily target the poor. The most recent Berkeley City Council agenda featured just such a new set of "enforcement priorities" from the Mayor for the renovated BART Plaza which was, at least temporarily, withdrawn due to the 9th Circuit's Martin vs. Boise decision and its implications regarding such laws' constitutionality. 

The early United States went to excruciating lengths to allow only property owners to vote and participate politically excluding women and people of color. A property-based business improvement district does the same thing but is not even a pure democracy within those boundaries, since it is board-run and has no discernable oversight in a town like Berkeley, where "ambassadors" aren't fired for assaulting homeless people until public outcry. Election campaign malfeasance and repeated First Amendment and civil rights violations are yawned away by the Downtown Berkeley Association's director and the City Manager overseeing their contract, which continues to focus on counter-productive anti-homeless ordinances and practices. 

Ignorance about homelessness might have been forgiven in the earliest iterations of the business district programs, which grew out of the Main Street revitalization programs funded by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the late 1970s. The focus was on historic preservation of small towns' main streets, which suffered in competition with malls. 

But Berkeley now knows - and publically acknowledges - that housing is the answer to homelessness. Many of our local unsheltered population work in town, have kids in school, and are stuck on a waiting list for honestly low-income housing, especially since "affordable" housing isn't affordable. 

The irony is that the developers and real estate moguls who profited from the planning atrocities that replaced once-affordable housing with developer profit-at-any-human-cost schemes sit without oversight on the board of the Downtown Berkeley Association or are among the larger circle of previous board members watching happily as self-defined business interests not only come first for the DBA, but come first for a Berkeley City Council swayed by the 501(c)(6) organization's huge $1.2 million budget - all accumulated from fees which downtown businesses and taxpayers who technically own public buildings included in the footprint are obligated to pay

There is provision for a little bit of oversight, such as Section 19; 

(1) If the city council finds there has been misappropriation of funds, malfeasance, or a violation of law in connection with the management of the district, it shall notice a hearing on disestablishment.- Assembly Bill No. 1381, Chapter 871, 1994 

but nobody has seen that legally mandated public hearing on malfeasance yet, even after the DBA's ambassadors' assault, the Measure S campaign financial corruption, and the open bragging about destroying thousands of legally placed community fliers - in the colorful brochure which your tax dollars paid for. 

501(c)(6) organizations can engage in unlimited lobbying. Even political campaign activities are permitted - as long as they are not the organization's primary activity. And nobody is evaluating the DBA. They write their own annual report. They hold an annual meeting. When they blow off your Public Records Act request nobody cares. 

In this way corporate interests - as opposed to small business interests - are not just well-represented in front of the Berkeley City Council and the City Manager - they're in the back rooms where policy is made. Good luck asking such policy to visit the commissions where policy suggestions are supposed to be examined and vetted by interested citizens. I've been asking for years. 

It's time. It's time to recognize that the unaccountable, out-of-control business lobbies enabled by the 1994 legislation which reduced then-inadequate oversight to nothing are pursuing a private agenda. BIDs no longer represent but rather violate community interests. We have no idea what our town would look like, or even vote like, if it hadn't had to weather decades of disinformation about poverty and housing from the publicly funded business improvement districts. Their distortions, their promotions of their own narrow interests at the expense of our shared values is hard to quantify. 

Let's use Section 19 to respectfully request that corporate interests, disguised as small business interests, are well equipped to pay for their own stamps and stationary. And then join with local business interests, community arts groups, and nonprofits to honestly and creatively address community issues together.