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An Activist's Diary, Week ending June 2

Kelly Hammagren
Tuesday June 15, 2021 - 04:10:00 PM

Writing about city events reminds me of when my husband and I joined a plein air painting group led by Anthony Holdsworth. We would be out all day and the direction and shape of the shadows would continue to change as the day wore on. Anthony would tell us to pick a point to plant the shadows and paint. The news keeps moving, changing as I write.  

At the June 14 budget meeting, Interim Berkeley Police Chief Lewis requested $400,000 for two data analysts. Edward Opton, JD, PhD who is a member of the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force responded during public comment with this:  

“I want to comment on two aspects of the morning agenda. One is the location of additional data analysts within the police department; this would be a mistake. A ground principle of social science research is that when you are doing research that will have an effect or could have an effect on employment and budgeting of a department, you do not locate the analyst within that department. I have never seen an analysis of a business or a government from an analyst that was located within a department produce recommendations or data which would justify reducing employment or the budget of that department. The analyst needs to be independent of the department or departments on which he or she is working. 

The other thing I want to address is the overtime pay for police who deal with people who are homeless. This is contrary to what I thought was going to be dealt with more by mental health workers. Police who are visiting people who are homeless have the power to arrest them, send them to Santa Rita, put them in mental hospitals. If you are a homeless person, you are going to be very wary of accepting any assistance from the police or giving them any information. That is not true if you are a mental health worker, so adding more police to deal with the homeless is a mistake and quite contrary to the plan of reimagining.”  

The mayor has declared his support in the FY2022 budget for an SCU, a ‘Special Care Unit” for meeting the needs of the mentally ill with skilled mental health workers instead of police, but this isn’t the end of the kind of change that is desired and defined by the Fair and Impartial Policing Task Force and is now the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force.  

It looks like Reimagining Public Safety is hitting a wall. The last meeting was five hours. Attendance and participation are dropping. To me, the presentation last Thursday evening of the New and Emerging Models Final Report from the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR) was a big nothing. I got more out of the Criminal Injustice podcast #136 Police Reform from a Rare Perspective, an interview with Karol V. Mason and the attached report on The Future of Public Safety from John Jay College of Criminal Justice than anything I have heard from NICJR. That is interesting since NICJR participated as a resource for the Future of Public Safety report. http://www.criminalinjusticepodcast.com/blog/2021/05/11/136-police-reform-rare-perspective 

It seems like the outcome for the Task Force has already been decided and the direction of the meetings is being orchestrated to meet the predetermined timeframe and outcome with “quick fixes” like reorganizing and show performances like town halls. 

This was a worry of task force members from the beginning. At the 2nd meeting on March 11, Edward Opton called the task force “Public Relations Window Dressing.” You can read more in the March 14 Activist Diary, but the real question is, is it possible for city management and council to listen? https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2021-03-14/article/49062?headline=An-Activist-s-Diary-Week-Ending-3-14--Kelly-Hammargren 

The Town Hall Monday evening June 14 with Kate Harrison on RHNA (Regional Housing Needs Assessment) got into the details of how the State of California arrived at needing 441,176 new housing units over the next 8 ½ years. There weren’t any solutions about how to undo estimates of a greatly expanding population when population is shrinking, or how to correct computing errors in estimating housing needs. It did help to piece together how Berkeley was assigned 8,934 housing units. Some cities are appealing, but that is unlikely to happen in Berkeley when our mayor is President of ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments).  

Other questions were answered. Is existing city density considered in housing allocations? Answer: No. 

Is open space, green space, (nature) considered in allocations? Answer: No. 

The perspective is only the number of housing units. The environment is not part of the picture.  

While Dr. Gab Layton was giving her presentation, I was busy taking notes and didn’t see what was happening in the “chat” until after it was shut down. 

What I saw is that Trump is sidelined for the present, but the kind of nastiness and bullying he unleashed hasn’t left, and it invaded the Town Hall RHNA chat. Followers of the California YIMBY ideology are beginning to seem more like a cult.  

The Town Hall was the perfect companion for the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council June 12th meeting on RHNA with panelists Mayor and President of ABAG Jesse Arreguin, Brad Paul, ABAG Deputy Director, and Steven Buckley, City of Berkeley’s Land Use Planning Manager. There were no answers from the panel in how we are going to add 8,934 housing units with the current infrastructure, impending water shortages from drought or how housing gets spread around the city with the hills being a high risk fire zone. 

The non-answers were on the order of “we’ll have to look at that”. Developing San Pablo Avenue was mentioned a number of times, as was developing objective standards which would settle if developments blocking sun to solar units are prohibited.  

When Brad Paul from ABAG was asked about the forecast for population growth when the early census report shows California in actual population decline, he first countered that it was mostly people leaving San Francisco and Silicon Valley for places that were less expensive in the East Bay and Sacramento with open space and parks for young families. 

 

He avoided saying the forbidden word, “yards.” Houses with yards is the real space desired by young families of all races and ethnicities. That is the thing, houses with yards, that is being taken away by the bills now up for votes in the State Legislature like SB 8, 9, 10, 478 and 1322, supported by Berkeley’s State Senator Nancy Skinner and Assemblymember Buffy Wicks. Rumor has it that the mayor and some of the council members have crawled in bed with the “demolish and cover the ground with buildings” movement and will be voting against item 35 at this evening’s 6 pm City Council meeting, instead of aligning with Councilmembers Wengraf, Harrison and Hahn to oppose SB 9. That sounds backwards, but item 35 is a resolution in opposition to SB 9.  

When pressed further on population, Brad Paul excused the projections as a 30 year forecast. He emphasized that housing needs are reassessed every eight years. Note, that opportunity for correction is too late for the damage in the near term.  

With continued pressure on population decline, he expressed the expectation that growth will come from immigration. At least that was an honest answer. As the planet continues to heat, more and more areas are going to become unlivable. We could be part of that. The Bay Area and much of California is classified as D4, “exceptional drought”, which is the most serious category. For reference, D2 is “”severe” drought and D3 is “extreme” drought. The west has a water problem. https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/  

Then Brad Paul spoke about the great appearance of an artificial lawn, which was my entrance into making space for nature and the importance of native plants and urban habitat. Steven Buckley’s statement about the city being attentive to native plants was a display of ignorance. Projects typically come to Planning, ZAB and DRC with landscape plans filled with ornamental non-native plants. Berkeley is filling the flats with non-native trees. New young Gingko trees are everywhere.  

Next time you look at a Ginkgo tree keep this in mind: filling the city with Ginkgos is for birds, butterflies, pollinators the same as setting the table for your children with a meal of gasoline. There are resources to do better, but it seems ignorance is easier. https://calscape.org/ 

The brightest spot of the entire last week was the virtual Green Home Tour. In the final Q&A, the panelists recommended the place to start electrification is with your water heater. If you have a gas water heater that is close to 10 years old, you are definitely in need of checking out the green home tour and electrification. https://www.cityofberkeley.info/electrification/ 

In closing, my latest read is Where Law Ends Inside the Mueller Investigation by Andrew Weisman. I was glued to it from the beginning. The fact that I listened to the entire Mueller report in one-hour bites with my underwater audio while swimming laps at the Y may have something to do with it. Weisman gave detail to the internal workings of the investigations and finished with the gaps in what was left undone. Mueller made choices and because of his choices we were left with many unanswered questions. 

“…Although there may have been consequences to his decision to do so, Mueller was in fact free to conduct a financial investigation of the president; free to make a finding of obstruction; and free to subpoena the president. And when Mueller was authorized to testify before Congress, he was free to provide critique of the Barr ‘summary’ and to use that opportunity to educate the public as to his findings regarding the conduct of the president – as he chose to do with respect to Russian interference.” 

I remember the letdown I felt when the Mueller Report was released. Because of Mueller’s failures to do a complete investigation as Weisman disclosed, we were left with a lawless white house, an unrestrained president and a cult of Trump followers.  

Was Trump the aberration and Biden the future, or is Biden the aberration and authoritarianism the future That is the question the Europeans are asking themselves and so must we. So far Merrick Garland does not look to be the Attorney General we need to lead this country through a house cleaning, but we will see.