Public Comment

This feels like a week to pour a glass of wine, pick up a mindless book and eat chocolate. That is as long as there is water left to grow the grapes and the crop doesn’t cook in a heat dome and the tiny chocolate midge insects survive to pollinate the cocoa plant. The drought map https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/ looks worse each week and unless we can learn to appreciate the critical importance of insects and their host plants a lot more is at risk than just chocolate. Summer has barely started. The West is burning and so is Siberia. The flood waters in Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium are starting to recede and we are supposed to be on watch for lightening. As for mindless books, there is no shortage, but I can’t seem to pull my head out of the books on politics and the environment.

Philip Rucker and Carol Leonig just published a new book I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year. Their other book A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America was loaned to me by a friend pre-pandemic. I guess it’s time to get past page 53 in A Very Stable Genius so I can pick up their newest work. While I am into finishing projects started, I need to put the pictures of the Trump family and their enablers into my artwork, “an American Icon The Real Welfare Queens Found.”

The talk all week in my usual string of podcasts has been how close we were to a successful coup and how we should think of January 6^th as a warm up, a beginning and not an end. I agree with that analysis. I felt differently back in 1983 when I met my future husband and we would get into political discussions. He warned over and over that the US democracy was headed in the direction of collapse. Over the years, I always disagreed, but that was then and this is now. With what is happening on the voting rights front, I am beginning to wonder whether our country will hold together as democracy or even hold together as a union of states for the long term.  

In the midst of all the depressing headlines, the Civic Arts Commission had some good news. The onsite public art for the Logan Park building, the new mixed-use project under construction at 2352 Shattuck, will be a poem by Amanda Gorman. Amanda Gorman is the young poet who captured our attention at the inauguration. It will be another work, not “The Hill We Climb” which she read at President Biden’s Inauguration.  

With the City of Berkeley winning in Superior Court, as announced on July 9, the relationship between the UC Regents and our City Council led by Mayor Arreguin is feeling less like collaboration, and instead that the eight votes for an agreement with UC came from collaborators. The court win put the City of Berkeley in a prime position of leverage to seek real mitigation to addressing the impacts of UC’s boundless expansion of student enrollment. From all appearances that leverage was tossed for what appears to be a settlement that will impress the uninformed, especially those who keep their noses in national politics and ignore that local politics has more impact on daily life.  

We will not know the content of the full agreement until after the Regents’ meeting this coming week, but two facts make me uneasy: 1) Arreguin anxiously put out a press release Wednesday morning after he declared at council Tuesday evening that no action had been taken during closed session. This felt very much like trying to get out a story line before a misdeed was discovered. 2) Councilmember Harrison was reported to have voted against it. Harrison, the only councilmember with actual backbone, knows a bad deal when she sees it. Harrison also cares more about housing and climate than to give up on those issues for an enticing dangle of money.  

If you have not read the July 9, 2021 order from Judge Brad Seligman here it is:  

“SBN’s [Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods] petition for writ of mandate is GRANTED. The City of Berkeley’s petition for writ of mandate is GRANTED. SBN and Berkeley shall meet and confer to draft a proposed judgement and form of writ consistent with this Order and shall jointly file the proposed judgement and form of writ within 10 court days of service of notice of entry of this order.”  

The City and SBN won on three points, really four points, because Judge Seligman wrote that UC could not study the impact of enrollment by using an “Updated Baseline.” In plain language, UC used the actual “unbounded” excess enrollment which was approximately 7500 more students than the commitment UC made to the City of Berkeley in the previous 2005 agreement that student enrollment would stabilize at 33,450 students. The number of students enrolled at UC over and above what was planned has impacted housing through displacement, gentrification and homelessness and increased the cost to the city to provide services like policing, fire and emergency medical services and public health.  

The Court response to increased noise to residential neighborhoods was: “The Court cannot find substantial evidence in the record supporting FSEIR’s conclusion [UC conclusion in the final supplemental environmental impact report] that a further marginal increase in student enrollment would not exacerbate noise issues or have a cumulative impacts.”  

As for impact of the Upper Hearst Development on nearby historical resources, the Court determined, “…There is no evidence that the addition of a new building would have a material impact on the historical significance of the nearby historical structures…”  

The whole purpose of redoing the EIR (Environmental Impact Report) is to identify impacts and then establish a plan to mitigate/address the impacts. The City of Berkeley, under the direction of Mayor Arreguin with seven councilmembers, agreed to drop the lawsuits and not to engage in a future lawsuit over the new UC Long Range Development Plan. The city thereby gave up when it had the most leverage.  

Money greases the wheels. The more students that are enrolled, the more students there will be to pack into apartments to meet the rents and push out existing tenants. With the news that UC plans to increase tuition, that packing might just be a little tighter.  

For those not tracking city operations, the settlement of $82.6 million over 16 years will sound like a fantastic deal, which is what I expect the mayor is counting on. For the rest of us, the impact on our environment, local climate, housing and our pocket book as we pay out more for services and to put a roof over our head will be felt for a long time. 

The council summer recess can’t come soon enough. 

You might ask, “did I read anything this last week?” The answer is yes, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon. This is the book Rosa Brooks finished writing before joining the DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). The DC MPD culminated in her latest book, Tangled Up in Blue Policing the American City. Brooks covers a lot of thought-provoking ground in How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything including the use of drones, the blurring of what is war and what is peace in the war on terror and another book Duck! Rabbit!.