Public Comment

Last Monday night June 28, I tuned into the interview by Chris Hayes with Governor Jay Insleefrom the State of Washington and heard Inslee say, in regard to the heat wave in the Northwest and the drought: “This is the beginning of a permanent emergency.”

I know the permafrost is thawing, releasing methane, the melting of glaciers is accelerating, Siberia has heat waves, the warnings of a heating planet come with increasing intensity… and yet, despite all this the fact that a little town in Canada, far to our north, could be hotter than Palm Springs in the California desert is still a shock. That is exactly what happened when Lytton, Canada hit 121.3°F on Tuesday before it burned to the ground on Wednesday. The cause of that fire is still unknown.

The big event of City Council for the week was passing the budget on Tuesday evening for FY2022 (July 1, 2021 – June 30, 2022). It was weeks of budget meetings that felt like they went nowhere with endless piles of documents and presentations to weed through, including the 484 page budget booklet. In the end, thanks to the unrelenting work of Councilmember Harrison, climate finally got a seat at the table. Without Harrison’s persistence at the budget meetings in the morning and at council Tuesday evening, the funding requested by Public Works to begin EV (electric vehicle) charging station infrastructure work would not have been allocated. The final was $300,000 now with the remaining $850,000 to be allocated in November. 

One has to wonder where our City Manager, Dee Williams-Ridley is on responding to climate. For a city that claimed to care about climate with the declaration of a climate emergency in June 2018 and a goal to transition from fossil fuel vehicles to an electric fleet by 2030, it didn’t feel like there was recognition of a climate emergency when the initial allocation to climate in the budget presented by the City Manager started as $20,000 for BESO (Building Energy Saving Ordinance https://www.cityofberkeley.info/BESO/). Everything else was deferred. 

The transition of the Berkeley city fleet from fossil fuels to an EV fleet can’t happen without the infrastructure of charging stations to support it. San Diego looks to be way ahead of Berkeley with transitioning to an electric fleet. San Diego purchased an EV Streetsweeper last year, according to the Parade magazine that comes with the Sunday paper. I’m not sure if this is the brand, but the Globalsweeper https://globalsweeper.com/ looks pretty impressive. 

There’s another piece to Public Works that I started noticing. I’ve been reviewing the council agendas for more than six years, and what I see in requests from Liam Garland, the new Director of Public Works, looks like a lot of “catch up.” All of us experience the poor condition of our streets, and that raises another question of just what was the practice of maintaining the infrastructure of the city, including the city buildings, prior to July 13, 2020, when Garland was hired. I would suggest we look up the chain of responsibility to see how the city is managed. 

The effort to cut the budget allocation to policing by transferring responsibilities to other services like the Special Care Unit (SCU - Mental Health – Crisis Intervention) and BerkDOT (Berkeley Department of Transportation) ended up more as a holding pattern. Both of these programs are still in the development stage. The argument advanced for maintaining the same police budget is that reimagining public safety is still in transition. 

The main event at the Wednesday evening Reimagining Public Safety Task Force meeting was the Police Department Overview. There was information that was new, at least to me, like that the probationary period for a new hire is two years, and that training by the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office Basic Police Academy is accepted for new hires by the Berkeley Police Department. Task Force member and former Oakland City Manager Dan Lindheim noted that the City of Oakland does not hire from the Alameda County Sheriff’s Academy. I was hoping for more detail in what training was provided in the two year probationary period, especially after reading Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City by Rosa Brooks. What we got was the presentation posted on the Task F website. https://www.cityofberkeley.info/RIPST.aspx 

I can’t think about Alameda County Sheriff Ahern without associating him with the photos I saw of the Oathkeepers booth with an Alameda County Sheriff’s Office canopy over it at the Urban Shield exercises [terrorist response training] https://www.facebook.com/StopUrbanShield/. 

I was part of the community that asked council to end Berkeley Police participation in Urban Shield. We lost 5 to 4 on July 24, 2018 with the mayor holding the deciding vote, along with councilmembers Maio, Hahn, Droste, and Wengraf, in favor of Urban Shield. Councilmembers Bartlett, Davila, Harrison, and Worthington voted in opposition. The Alameda County Supervisors ended Urban Shield in 2019, but the memory still lingers, especially after the Oathkeepers’ role in the January 6 insurrection. 

The point is, there was a divide on policing long before the killing of George Floyd, the formation of the Fair and Impartial Policing Task Force and now the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force. And trust is not likely to form when Deputy City Manager David White says, as he did at the Wednesday task force meeting, that the City Manager, a Deputy City Manager, the City Attorney, the Fire Chief, and the Health, Housing & Community Services (HHCS) Director have been meeting every week about the proposed Special Care Unit. 

When I was allowed to speak on Wednesday as a member of the public, I said I thought this kind of planning was supposed to come from the Task Force. Why then was there an administrative group meeting separately? White replied that these meetings were just coordination planning. 

But the Task Force meetings always feel orchestrated to a predetermined end. 

In closing, even before reading Dry Spring by Chris Wood I added the drought map https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/ to my Thursday task list. The book, the map and the news are all pretty grim when it comes to water. Dry Spring was published in 2008 and Chris Wood was far more optimistic about the future response to drought than what has actually happened. We still use clean drinkable water to flush our toilets. 

Bill Maher asked in his New Rules monologue if we are asking coal miners to stop mining coal, why are we not asking almond farmers to stop growing almonds? 81% of the world’s almonds are grown in California. To grow one almond requires 1.1 gallons of water and to grow a pound takes 1,900 gallons of water. a