Public Comment

Our ballots should start arriving this coming week and since we do not live in a city or state with heavy voter suppression, we can take a little longer and drop them in the ballot collection box by city hall. I still intend to get mine in early but not until after the BNC (Berkeley Neighborhood Council) Mayor forum[1] on Saturday, October 10, at 10 am to 12 noon. There is a lot to evaluate. I have done a complete turn in my position on Berkeley Ballot Measure JJ – Charter Amendment: Mayor and Council Compensation (majority vote).[2] 

The presentation of the Civic Center Plan after 11 pm and a vote at 12:10 am has left me with a very bad taste for our elected officials. It was the final straw. Tracking the public city meetings as I do and have done for 5 years ten and one-half months, I am no longer feeling so generous toward the city ballot measures and for supporting our Council and Mayor with pay increases. The Ballot Measure JJ is premature and the arguments both for and against miss the mark, the framework of our city government structure. 

The Charter for the City of Berkeley is a strong city manager structure. The Mayor and City Council give direction. If it helps, think of the City of Berkeley as a publicly held corporation, the city manager as the CEO and the City Council as the Board of Directors. If you are unhappy with the state of our streets and sidewalks, then know it is the responsibility of the Mayor and Council to direct the city manager that repair of the streets and sidewalks is a priority. If the city manager sets different priorities then the Mayor and City Council are responsible for evaluating that conflict, resolving it, giving regular feedback and performing regular formal evaluations of the City manager. The first evaluation is now in process behind closed doors. The City manager was hired in 2015. Five years with no formal performance evaluation is inexcusable. This failure of oversight and feedback falls straight into the lap of Mayor Arreguin. 

If we are going to change the compensation of the Mayor and City Council, the discussion needs to involve two key questions: 1) do we want to maintain a strong city manager form of governing the city or do we want a strong elected officials form of governing the city with a full time mayor and council members; 2) should there be term limits, in particular if there is an increase in compensation should that be partnered with term limits? 

The City of Berkeley had a robust public engagement process through boards and commissions. While as an attendee of many of these meetings, I know there is room for improvement, the commissions have essentially been squashed except for those that support developers. The work that should have been done over the last three years to bring zoning and building codes up to current needs has instead been $300,000[3] to consultants to rewrite current zoning ordinances into a new format, limiting any changes to resolve conflict with state or federal law. When the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) members say they would like to enforce standards on sustainability, loading areas, design, etc. they can only “suggest” because the needed new standards don’t exist. If putting old documents into a new format took 3 years (phase 1), how many years will it take to write updated new standards (phase 2)? 

Under the leadership of Mayor Arreguin, the City Council voted on December 11, 2018 to create six Council Policy Committees. Only Councilmember Davila raised her doubts about this restructuring and requested an evaluation of the process after one year. The written statement on the policy committees from the city manager is that there would be no direct fiscal impact. This ignores the additional staff time from the city clerk’s office to support these committees, with the department managers and deputy managers leaving other work to be in attendance. Some policy committees are attended by the city attorney or deputy attorneys. It cannot be said that these committees improve the efficiency of city government, but it is clear they certainly increase the cost to the city and pull city administration into yet another layer of meetings filling out the work week. 

There is one meeting I didn’t mention in the Worth Noting section of the October 4 – 11 Activist’s calendar and that should be of interest to the readers of the Daily Planet, it is the Homeless Services Panel of Experts on Wednesday evening. They need to be commended for recognizing they do not have representation from the homeless who need the services. The problem, of course, is always top down. The privileged know better what the poor need than the poor and so the “Panel of Experts” was created. From reading the notes the “experts” haven’t grasped they were appointed to skirt and limit input from the homeless. If the plan was to engage with the homeless this could have started with the Homeless Commission and the appointment of homeless persons to the Panel of Experts. Cheryl Davila, who has been laser focused on the needs of the unhoused with continued outreach and meetings, could have been appointed as the Council liaison. Cheryl pulled together a town hall (long before the pandemic) where the unhoused were the panelists and they talked about their most basic desperate needs. It was heart wrenching. 

The Homeless Services Panel of Experts is the body for oversight of the 2018 Berkeley Ballot Measure P[4] which increased the real property transfer tax. The argument against Measure P was that Measure P was not a Special Tax dedicated to specific funding. I still remember the City manager budget comments back in 2019 to the City Council Budget and Finance Committee how some of the Measure P funds could be shifted (through some gyrations) to cover department budget shortfalls. 

This is enough to consider for one sitting. Look over those ballots carefully. I know I will and after writing this note to all of you, I am reminded that for me too I need to read through every Ballot Measure carefully and look thoroughly at every vote. How we vote really does matter. 

Kelly Hammargren