Editorials

Oh goody! UC Berkeley will more than double what it pays the city under new settlement agreement

That’s the triumphal headline on a story posted this week on a local news site.

Well, yes, it’s double, but bupkes x 2 still equals: bupkes.

If you missed out on learning Yiddish, bupkes (also transliterated bobkes, bubkes, bopkes) is a term of art glossed in a comprehensive and entertaining online etymology discussion which you can read here.

Bupkes is less than nothing. Sometimes it’s translated as “beans”, or as Spanish nada, but the really erudite think it might mean “goat turds”, which do look something like beans.

One scholar, Evan Morris, opines on the site that “when you say you got bupkes from a deal you brokered, for example, it really means you got nothing when you should have gotten at least something if there were any justice at all in this world.”

That’s a great description of the agreement announced with great fanfare last week by Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin and University of California at Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ. Here the term of art bupkes applies to the piddling amount graciously granted by UCB to the City of Berkeley coffers, up to maybe $4 million annually to compensate for the university’s use of essential city services like roads and fire fighting, conservatively estimated as being worth $20 million a year. 

And what else did UCB acquire for bupkes? Well, the biggest prize seems to be People’s Park. Even though the park is a designated City of Berkeley landmark, and even though it was originally preserved by militant students at enormous cost including one life, the Berkeley City Council now appears to have promised to let it be expropriated by UCB as a building site for a high-rise dormitory. This is despite the fact that the city has just won a CEQA lawsuit against the university challenging its enormously expanded enrollment without regard for environmental consequences. 

By abandoning that cause of action, Berkeley has left citizen organization co-plaintiffs high and dry. At least we think that’s what happened, but what do we know about the terms of the deal? Again, bupkes. And again, bupkes is still nothing. 

Attorney David Axelrod wrote a letter last week to the Berkeley City Council on behalf of the committee working to establish a People’s Park Historic District and the cluster of other civic organizations which hope to preserve it as open space. The letter said that he was engaged “to request transparency and compliance with open meeting laws, on behalf of People's Park Council (PPC), Make U.C. a Good Neighbor, People's Park Historic District Advocacy Group (PPHDAG) and Save Berkeley's Neighborhoods (SBN).” All of these groups were co-plaintiffs with the City of Berkeley in CEQA lawsuits seeking environmental review of UCB’s plans for dramatic increases in the number of students admitted and concomitant building projects such increases would entail. 

His letter claimed that “any decision on approval or disapproval of a specific settlement agreement intending to resolve or dispose of the City's currently-pending litigation with the University of California would need to be undertaken in an open public session of the Berkeley City Council. “ 

His claim is based California’s Brown Act, which requires the public’s business to be done in public, except for a small number of clear exemptions. The penalty for a Brown Act violation is to void decisions made in secret by governmental bodies. That might apply to what appears to be the COB’s originally undisclosed agreement not to go forward with its lawsuit against UCB, even though the city won on appeal. 

Decisions made in closed session are supposed to be reported at the next open session, according to the Act. One exemption: allowing non-public discussion of pending litigation. But was the discussion on Tuesday afternoon about “pending” litigation or settled litigation? We the public have a right to know. 

Yet when I asked Councilmember Kate Harrison what had happened at Council on Tuesday afternoon, she said she couldn’t tell me, per advice from the Berkeley city attorney. The Berkeley City Council members were told on Tuesday that they were legally barred from revealing anything that had happened during the afternoon’s closed session. And then Arreguin himself—he’s a voting member of the Council besides being mayor—announced at the evening’s open council session that “no reportable action” had been taken, and therefore nothing was reported. 

So exactly how was Jesse Arreguin authorized to not only reveal the terms of the agreement on Wednesday in a detailed press release, but to create a smarmy video with Mrs. Christ lauding himself for doing so? Did my tax dollars pay for that ham-handed production? 

Click here to see them sealing the deal.  

The citizen groups are pretty exercised by the whole performance, especially because some of them thought they were partners with the city in the CEQA suit right up until they were left hanging out to dry. 

Now Axelrod has filed a court action asking on behalf of two of the non-profit civic groups, Make UC A Good Neighbor and People’s Park Historic District Advocacy Group (PPHDAG), asserting that “the Berkeley City Council, Mayor Jesse Arreguin, and the City of Berkeley … violated the Ralph M. Brown Act…by deciding to approve a settlement agreement in closed session, a decision that could only be lawfully adopted in open session, then failing to ratify or report the decision in open session, and failing to lawfully disclose the actual content of the purported settlement agreement.” 

One basis of the lawsuit is that the Mayor referenced “the Agreement about which they shamelessly boast in the Press Release” after previously saying there was none. Additional charges are that the settlement might contravene requirements of Berkeley’s initiative-passed Measure L to preserve parks and open space. 

And therefore “The petitioners ask the court to strike down the putative Agreement selectively touted in the Respondents’ Press Release as unlawful, null, void, nugatory, and without force or effect.” Take that, COB! 

The vote the council took last Tuesday, whatever its terms were, functions effectively as an offer to the Regents of UC to make a deal, and to do it for bupkes, but if these petitioners have their way that meager offer will come off the table, for the moment at least. 

It should be an interesting week in court.