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The mayor’s Task Force on Permitting and Development has been meeting every two weeks since Feb. 28 to “investigate options for improving and rationalizing the permitting process, while continuing to guarantee appropriate public input.” Although many task force members are much more interested in shortening the process than in “improving” either the process or the resulting developments, and are even contemptuous of “public input,” a persistent audience of citizen observers reminds them that the public cannot be wholly ignored. I am pleased to report that the task force’s early NIMBY-bashing has gradually dissipated, and an excellent discussion of public input occurred, for the first time, on June 6. 

The task force has 14 members. Eight are planners, developers, builders or architects, all of whom have some personal, philosophical or professional interest in making things easy for developers and commercial interests. Only two or three members (notably Bart Seldon of West Berkeley) effectively represent the interests of citizens affected by development projects. Victor Herbert, a mediator of neighbor-to-neighbor development conflicts, also realizes that there are at least two sides to every issue, although even he seems to have a very limited definition of the stakeholders in the development process; for example, he told me that he does not believe that the process needs to protect the rights of future Berkeleyans to a good urban environment. I disagree.  

The mayor did not appoint Berkeley’s most active neighborhood supporters to the task force, ostensibly because the city attorney felt it necessary to prohibit discussion of current projects. I find this argument unconvincing: Ex parte rules in Berkeley certainly make any intelligent discussion of planning problems difficult, but many neighborhood representatives outside this forum are making useful contributions to the development discussion despite Berkeley’s unique and onerous gag rule. On the task force as elsewhere, the primary effect of the gag rule is not to protect fair process, but to prevent exposure of the rampant misbehavior in the Planning Department and city attorney’s office.  

On the other hand, the task force contains many active developers, supposedly because they can draw on past experiences unrelated to current projects. But since the chair of the task force is also the sitting chair of the Zoning Adjustments Board, and since mayoral staff also attend the task force, even though these are all good and ethical people, socializing on the task force itself facilitates relationships between these developers and city staff and decision makers.  

Like me, about 50 percent of Berkeleyans are renters. As a group, renters are at the most risk of being negatively impacted by poor developments, both as neighbors and inhabitants of poorly designed rental projects. Renters in Berkeley greatly outnumber developers and even potential single-family project applicants, and have every legal and moral right to protect their neighborhoods and quality of life. Nonetheless, all members of the task force are homeowners, which accounts for one of its main obsessions: grumpy neighbors. 

Grumpy neighbors—in fact, almost all neighbors—are nitpicking troublemakers who have the temerity to try to defend their own property, neighborhoods and quality-of-life by keeping always-considerate, reasonable landowners from doing exactly what they want with their own property. Some task force members, especially ex-Councilmembers Polly Armstrong and Nancy Skinner, have expressed the opinion that groups of grumpy neighbors—no matter how large and united—are vocal minorities standing in opposition to some hypothetical “silent majority.” Since this assumption is irreconcilable with any democratic process, let’s hope our current councilmembers don’t believe this. 

The task force divided development issues into three categories: single-family residential (neighbor-to-neighbor) issues; commercial use permits, and new large-scale developments. Although it was wise to start with residential developments because they are the least complex, it understandably took time for the task force to find its sea legs, and now there are only two meetings left to discuss large developments. It will be interesting to see what they can do in this time.  

I believe the task force should have spent its first meetings laying the philosophical foundations for their process recommendations—in particular, deciding who the stakeholders are and how they should be represented—which could then have been applied to all three types of developments. They did not. The consequence of this omission, as well as lack of time, has so far been a piecemeal orientation aimed at rectifying superficial zoning quirks and inconveniences encountered by various task force members and people they know. But, as member Seldon pointed out: “Anecdotes do not make good policy.” Although task force discussions have revealed major underlying factors that make development problems inevitable (such as planning staff and budget problems, ubiquitous lack of parking and dispute over Berkeley’s urban environmental vision), the task force is not empowered or able to grapple with most of these issues, which are at the very heart of Berkeley’s development conflicts. Even the most brilliant task force could not make these problems go away, so resolving them is still up to the citizens of Berkeley.  

Sharon Hudson is a resident of Berkeley.