Public Comment

The media says all the Democrats will hold together to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson, but I’ll breathe easier after the full Senate vote is over. The Republicans stooped to a new level of ugliness this week with lots of grandstanding which has been described as a test for which issues(really attacks and outrage) will work best at getting out their base to vote.

At the bottom of much of this is race: racism and resentment that a Black woman could be superbly qualified, obviously better qualified than the pathetic show of Republican inquisitors vying for soundbites. But what is the cost of this ginned-up outrage, not just to Ketanji Brown Jackson, but to the country?

Barbara F. Walter, in her book How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, tells us generating outrage is not benign and social media is an accelerant in creating instability. She notes the global shift away from democracy has tracked with the expansion of the internet and social media. Social media platforms have opened up unmitigated, unregulated pathways to spread misinformation (erroneous), disinformation (deliberately misleading), conspiracy theories, trolls, bots, and demagogues, and to give anti-democratic agents a place to gain traction.

The social media platforms’ business model to make money is to keep people engaged, and what gets the most likes and engagement is fear over calm, falsehood over truth, outrage over empathy and the more incendiary the more traction. 

The top article on the Sunday print edition of the Chronicle was “Foreign spammers fuel U.S. discord”. It was about how fake Facebook accounts sell gear (merchandise, or “merch”) which leads followers to believe they are in a larger movement. Social media not only draws people down into outlandish disinformation silos through recommendation engines, it connects them, reinforcing beliefs in conspiracies and fanatical ideologies. QAnon continues, and now we’re learning Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, believes in this stuff. 

Anocracy was a word I had never heard before I picked up Walter’s book. She has been studying civil wars since 1990 and joined the Political Instability Task Force (founded in 1994) in 2017. 

An anocracy is a country that is neither a full democracy or a full autocracy. It is anocracies that are at risk of civil war. 

It was recognizing the risks in her own country, our country, the United States, that we are an anocracy that is the driver of the book. It isn’t just the slide from full democracy, i.e. voter suppression, gerrymandering, expansion of executive power, and corruption, that tips the scale; add factionalism. Factionalism happens when groups organize around race, ethnicity or religion. The most dangerous factions are once dominant groups that are facing decline in status and super factions, groups organized around race or ethnicity and religion. 

Walter draws from research the actions that pull countries away from sliding into civil war. She ends the book with recommendations including taking away the social media bullhorn through regulation. 

There are some of her recommendations that stalled and sank in the Senate: voting rights, election integrity, ending gerrymandering, improving public services and government effectiveness. She favors getting rid of the electoral college and demonstrating good government through expanding social services, investing in safety nets, affordable housing, public schools, parks, recreation, the arts and health care. Improving living conditions takes away grievances that give extremists air to grow and expand their reach, as does equal and impartial application of the rule of law. 

All this brings framing and reflection to the week. I suggest reading the entire book. The recommendations of how to stop civil wars from happening lose importance and impact without understanding and seeing the warning signs along the way, and that is what starting at the beginning of the book and reading it all the way through will give you. 

**************** 

In Berkeley this week there is concern that Councilmember Taplin’s City Council agenda item, Community Policing: Flex Team for Problem-Oriented Policing Under the Scanning, Analysis, Response and Assessment (SARA) Model and other applicable community engagement models, will turn into the old drug war crime suppression unit, saturation policing. Stop-and-frisk was determined to violate the 4^th Amendment to the Constitution in 2013, but the association with those tactics seems to be a better description of concerns over SARA. 

This coupled with the Auditor’s Report on police overtime, the City Manager’s intention to expand the police force to 181 officers, the police chief saying illegally parked cars in fire zones can’t be ticketed without expanding the parking enforcement budget and Edward Opton’s comments to the Mental Health Commission on Thursday evening leave much to question regarding the direction Berkeley is headed. 

Edward Opton noted in his report to the Mental Health Commission as a member of the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force that the Berkeley Police were well represented (the attendees we couldn’t see on zoom) at every meeting. And there was never any expression of a desire or willingness or need for change from the Berkeley Police Department. 

In follow-up to the presentations on March 10^th from the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force and the National Institute of Criminal Justice Reform, city staff are coming back with their analysis and proposals on April 14^th according to Lisa Warhuus, Director of Health, Housing and Community Services. She will be presenting al plan for a Special Care Unit that evening. 

It is spring and that means budgets. Where will the money be allocated for the next budget cycle? Will it go to more policing or to services? The recent shootings in District 2 would lead the vote for policing. Reimagining Public Safety Task Force has made recommendations for services, and so would I. 

The March 22^nd City Council 4 pm special meeting was on the Implementation of the Redistricting Plan for City Council District Boundaries. While partisan gerrymandering is alive and well in other parts of the country, California uses independent redistricting commissions. Carol Marasavic chose to draw attention to the comment from the Independent Redistricting Commission Chair Elisabeth Watson, “…we did not rely on consultants to review public input or provide guidance…” and Carol followed with “…we don’t need to pay costly consultants all the time to go into a protracted process in order to achieve results…” 

We do have a lot of talent in Berkeley and not everything should result in another contract with consultants, but Ben Bartlett’s $350,000 budget referral which passed on consent for a consultant to Facilitate a Community Process to Design and implement a Local Reparations Plan does need expertise. Leadership matters and recent consultant choices would suggest there needs to be a better selection process. 

A presentation on Neighborhood Electrification & Gas Pruning (identifying small neighborhood blocks to electrify and prune/remove the gas line) prompted Thomas Lord to comment at the Energy Commission. 

Of all the things that were said this week, it was his words summarizing the challenge before us to cut our dependence on fossil fuels that keeps coming back to me. 

He said quite simply that if we are going to get off fossil fuels in our buildings by 2045 (the goal set by the California Public Utilities Commission and Governor Newsom), we need to electrify 4 to 5 units every single workday starting right now. He based his calculations for the number of units to electrify daily in Berkeley on 30,000 (rough estimate from PG&E and Councilmember Kate Harrison’s office) and a six-day work week. 

While the task before Berkeley sounds insurmountable, Ithaca, New York, with about a quarter of the population of Berkeley, voted on November 3, 2021 to decarbonize (electrify) every single building in their city by 2030. Their count is 6000 buildings. 

There was a lot of bloviating at the March 15^th Council meeting about how we don’t need to protect rooftop solar because Berkeley is getting 100% renewable energy from EBCE. Ben Paulos, Chair of the Energy Commission, followed up this week as he (proudly) told the commissioners of his comments at City Council on rooftop solar being of marginal benefit, saying it is much more important to build housing. Thatl prompted my comment that for the very first time I was glad to see the merging of the Community Environmental Advisory Commission (CEAC) and the Energy Commission into the Climate and Energy Commission. 

There was another conversation this week that stuck with me. On Friday at demonstration supporting Ukraine in Civic Center Park, I ran into Kathy Dervin, Co-Chair of 350 Bay Area Legislative Committee. We spoke briefly about the state of affairs in Berkeley, really the sad state. The word she used that stuck, what the city should be and isn’t, is “transformative”. 

Transformative is what doesn’t fit in with what Ben Paulos and Matthew Lewis (the YIMBY Matthew Lewis) and others have claimed: that rooftop solar and building housing are incompatible. That 100% renewable has to come from somewhere. I challenge the dogma that the only way to have solar is to cover open space with solar farms, acres of solar panels at some distant location collecting energy to be distributed into the grid. 

We are already covering what feels like every foot of space in Berkeley with buildings. Why are we not wrapping those very same buildings with solar cells? 

Transformative are the developers who are doing just that. There is a 15-story net-zero energy high-rise under construction in Seattle with rainwater capture, reclaimed graywater and 27 out of 112 units affordable. Solar energy isn’t new. What is old is not being able to see how to incorporate solar energy into new construction so we can cover open space with forests and habitat and all the other things we need for survival of the planet. There is a lot that can be done if we look beyond city borders for innovation. https://www.greenbuildermedia.com/blog/seattle-breaks-ground-on-net-zero-high-rise 

The Disaster and Fire Safety Commission discussion of removal of eucalyptus on 98 private properties using public FF Funds continued this week without resolution. 

Saturday was the dedication of Brickyard Cove at McLaughlin Eastshore Park. The sun was shining and the views of the bay were spectacular. Former Mayor Shirley Dean was in the audience, my historian of choice. Did the speakers (Elizabeth Echols – elected member to East Bay Regional Park District Board of Directors, State Senator Nancy Skinner, Mayor and former Assemblyman Tom Bates, Loni Hancock former Mayor and State Senator, Mayor Arreguin) get the history of the shoreline parks movement right? Partly was the answer! When Tom Bates was in the State Assembly he did secure the funding to purchase the land, but two people who pursued with vigor the movement for shoreline parks and founded Urban Care were never mentioned, Rosalind and Albert Lapawsky. 

It is because of unrelenting activism to save the bay from being filled and the shoreline covered with a shopping center, we are able to feel the bay breezes, walk the new trails and watch the meadow larks flutter over open space. Brickyard Cove is the land that was once a Berkeley City dump. Norman La Force captures the history in “Creating the Eastshore State Park an Activist History”. https://eastshorepark.org/dev/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/CESP_history.pdf 

The last speaker Robert Cheasty, Executive Director for Citizens for East Shore Parks (CESP) wasn’t staying close enough to the microphone, so I lost about half of what he said, though I know as a Board Member of CESP it included adding Point Molate to the shoreline parks. 

The media says all the Democrats will hold together to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson, but I’ll breathe easier after the full Senate vote is over. The Republicans stooped to a new level of ugliness this week with lots of grandstanding which has been described as a test for which issues(really attacks and outrage) will work best at getting out their base to vote. 

At the bottom of much of this is race: racism and resentment that a Black woman could be superbly qualified, obviously better qualified than the pathetic show of Republican inquisitors vying for soundbites. But what is the cost of this ginned-up outrage, not just to Ketanji Brown Jackson, but to the country? 

Barbara F. Walter, in her book How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, tells us generating outrage is not benign and social media is an accelerant in creating instability. She notes the global shift away from democracy has tracked with the expansion of the internet and social media. Social media platforms have opened up unmitigated, unregulated pathways to spread misinformation (erroneous), disinformation (deliberately misleading), conspiracy theories, trolls, bots, and demagogues, and to give anti-democratic agents a place to gain traction. 

The social media platforms’ business model to make money is to keep people engaged, and what gets the most likes and engagement is fear over calm, falsehood over truth, outrage over empathy and the more incendiary the more traction. 

The top article on the Sunday print edition of the Chronicle was “Foreign spammers fuel U.S. discord”. It was about how fake Facebook accounts sell gear (merchandise, or “merch”) which leads followers to believe they are in a larger movement. Social media not only draws people down into outlandish disinformation silos through recommendation engines, it connects them, reinforcing beliefs in conspiracies and fanatical ideologies. QAnon continues, and now we’re learning Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, believes in this stuff. 

Anocracy was a word I had never heard before I picked up Walter’s book. She has been studying civil wars since 1990 and joined the Political Instability Task Force (founded in 1994) in 2017. 

An anocracy is a country that is neither a full democracy or a full autocracy. It is anocracies that are at risk of civil war. 

It was recognizing the risks in her own country, our country, the United States, that we are an anocracy that is the driver of the book. It isn’t just the slide from full democracy, i.e. voter suppression, gerrymandering, expansion of executive power, and corruption, that tips the scale; add factionalism. Factionalism happens when groups organize around race, ethnicity or religion. The most dangerous factions are once dominant groups that are facing decline in status and super factions, groups organized around race or ethnicity and religion. 

Walter draws from research the actions that pull countries away from sliding into civil war. She ends the book with recommendations including taking away the social media bullhorn through regulation. 

There are some of her recommendations that stalled and sank in the Senate: voting rights, election integrity, ending gerrymandering, improving public services and government effectiveness. She favors getting rid of the electoral college and demonstrating good government through expanding social services, investing in safety nets, affordable housing, public schools, parks, recreation, the arts and health care. Improving living conditions takes away grievances that give extremists air to grow and expand their reach, as does equal and impartial application of the rule of law. 

All this brings framing and reflection to the week. I suggest reading the entire book. The recommendations of how to stop civil wars from happening lose importance and impact without understanding and seeing the warning signs along the way, and that is what starting at the beginning of the book and reading it all the way through will give you. 

**************** 

In Berkeley this week there is concern that Councilmember Taplin’s City Council agenda item, Community Policing: Flex Team for Problem-Oriented Policing Under the Scanning, Analysis, Response and Assessment (SARA) Model and other applicable community engagement models, will turn into the old drug war crime suppression unit, saturation policing. Stop-and-frisk was determined to violate the 4^th Amendment to the Constitution in 2013, but the association with those tactics seems to be a better description of concerns over SARA. 

This coupled with the Auditor’s Report on police overtime, the City Manager’s intention to expand the police force to 181 officers, the police chief saying illegally parked cars in fire zones can’t be ticketed without expanding the parking enforcement budget and Edward Opton’s comments to the Mental Health Commission on Thursday evening leave much to question regarding the direction Berkeley is headed. 

Edward Opton noted in his report to the Mental Health Commission as a member of the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force that the Berkeley Police were well represented (the attendees we couldn’t see on zoom) at every meeting. And there was never any expression of a desire or willingness or need for change from the Berkeley Police Department. 

In follow-up to the presentations on March 10^th from the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force and the National Institute of Criminal Justice Reform, city staff are coming back with their analysis and proposals on April 14^th according to Lisa Warhuus, Director of Health, Housing and Community Services. She will be presenting al plan for a Special Care Unit that evening. 

It is spring and that means budgets. Where will the money be allocated for the next budget cycle? Will it go to more policing or to services? The recent shootings in District 2 would lead the vote for policing. Reimagining Public Safety Task Force has made recommendations for services, and so would I. 

The March 22^nd City Council 4 pm special meeting was on the Implementation of the Redistricting Plan for City Council District Boundaries. While partisan gerrymandering is alive and well in other parts of the country, California uses independent redistricting commissions. Carol Marasavic chose to draw attention to the comment from the Independent Redistricting Commission Chair Elisabeth Watson, “…we did not rely on consultants to review public input or provide guidance…” and Carol followed with “…we don’t need to pay costly consultants all the time to go into a protracted process in order to achieve results…” 

We do have a lot of talent in Berkeley and not everything should result in another contract with consultants, but Ben Bartlett’s $350,000 budget referral which passed on consent for a consultant to Facilitate a Community Process to Design and implement a Local Reparations Plan does need expertise. Leadership matters and recent consultant choices would suggest there needs to be a better selection process. 

A presentation on Neighborhood Electrification & Gas Pruning (identifying small neighborhood blocks to electrify and prune/remove the gas line) prompted Thomas Lord to comment at the Energy Commission. 

Of all the things that were said this week, it was his words summarizing the challenge before us to cut our dependence on fossil fuels that keeps coming back to me. 

He said quite simply that if we are going to get off fossil fuels in our buildings by 2045 (the goal set by the California Public Utilities Commission and Governor Newsom), we need to electrify 4 to 5 units every single workday starting right now. He based his calculations for the number of units to electrify daily in Berkeley on 30,000 (rough estimate from PG&E and Councilmember Kate Harrison’s office) and a six-day work week. 

While the task before Berkeley sounds insurmountable, Ithaca, New York, with about a quarter of the population of Berkeley, voted on November 3, 2021 to decarbonize (electrify) every single building in their city by 2030. Their count is 6000 buildings. 

There was a lot of bloviating at the March 15^th Council meeting about how we don’t need to protect rooftop solar because Berkeley is getting 100% renewable energy from EBCE. Ben Paulos, Chair of the Energy Commission, followed up this week as he (proudly) told the commissioners of his comments at City Council on rooftop solar being of marginal benefit, saying it is much more important to build housing. Thatl prompted my comment that for the very first time I was glad to see the merging of the Community Environmental Advisory Commission (CEAC) and the Energy Commission into the Climate and Energy Commission. 

There was another conversation this week that stuck with me. On Friday at demonstration supporting Ukraine in Civic Center Park, I ran into Kathy Dervin, Co-Chair of 350 Bay Area Legislative Committee. We spoke briefly about the state of affairs in Berkeley, really the sad state. The word she used that stuck, what the city should be and isn’t, is “transformative”. 

Transformative is what doesn’t fit in with what Ben Paulos and Matthew Lewis (the YIMBY Matthew Lewis) and others have claimed: that rooftop solar and building housing are incompatible. That 100% renewable has to come from somewhere. I challenge the dogma that the only way to have solar is to cover open space with solar farms, acres of solar panels at some distant location collecting energy to be distributed into the grid. 

We are already covering what feels like every foot of space in Berkeley with buildings. Why are we not wrapping those very same buildings with solar cells? 

Transformative are the developers who are doing just that. There is a 15-story net-zero energy high-rise under construction in Seattle with rainwater capture, reclaimed graywater and 27 out of 112 units affordable. Solar energy isn’t new. What is old is not being able to see how to incorporate solar energy into new construction so we can cover open space with forests and habitat and all the other things we need for survival of the planet. There is a lot that can be done if we look beyond city borders for innovation. https://www.greenbuildermedia.com/blog/seattle-breaks-ground-on-net-zero-high-rise 

The Disaster and Fire Safety Commission discussion of removal of eucalyptus on 98 private properties using public FF Funds continued this week without resolution. 

Saturday was the dedication of Brickyard Cove at McLaughlin Eastshore Park. The sun was shining and the views of the bay were spectacular. Former Mayor Shirley Dean was in the audience, my historian of choice. Did the speakers (Elizabeth Echols – elected member to East Bay Regional Park District Board of Directors, State Senator Nancy Skinner, Mayor and former Assemblyman Tom Bates, Loni Hancock former Mayor and State Senator, Mayor Arreguin) get the history of the shoreline parks movement right? Partly was the answer! When Tom Bates was in the State Assembly he did secure the funding to purchase the land, but two people who pursued with vigor the movement for shoreline parks and founded Urban Care were never mentioned, Rosalind and Albert Lapawsky. 

It is because of unrelenting activism to save the bay from being filled and the shoreline covered with a shopping center, we are able to feel the bay breezes, walk the new trails and watch the meadow larks flutter over open space. Brickyard Cove is the land that was once a Berkeley City dump. Norman La Force captures the history in “Creating the Eastshore State Park an Activist History”. https://eastshorepark.org/dev/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/CESP_history.pdf 

The last speaker Robert Cheasty, Executive Director for Citizens for East Shore Parks (CESP) wasn’t staying close enough to the microphone, so I lost about half of what he said, though I know as a Board Member of CESP it included adding Point Molate to the shoreline parks. 

The media says all the Democrats will hold together to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson, but I’ll breathe easier after the full Senate vote is over. The Republicans stooped to a new level of ugliness this week with lots of grandstanding which has been described as a test for which issues(really attacks and outrage) will work best at getting out their base to vote. 

At the bottom of much of this is race: racism and resentment that a Black woman could be superbly qualified, obviously better qualified than the pathetic show of Republican inquisitors vying for soundbites. But what is the cost of this ginned-up outrage, not just to Ketanji Brown Jackson, but to the country? 

Barbara F. Walter, in her book How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, tells us generating outrage is not benign and social media is an accelerant in creating instability. She notes the global shift away from democracy has tracked with the expansion of the internet and social media. Social media platforms have opened up unmitigated, unregulated pathways to spread misinformation (erroneous), disinformation (deliberately misleading), conspiracy theories, trolls, bots, and demagogues, and to give anti-democratic agents a place to gain traction. 

The social media platforms’ business model to make money is to keep people engaged, and what gets the most likes and engagement is fear over calm, falsehood over truth, outrage over empathy and the more incendiary the more traction. 

The top article on the Sunday print edition of the Chronicle was “Foreign spammers fuel U.S. discord”. It was about how fake Facebook accounts sell gear (merchandise, or “merch”) which leads followers to believe they are in a larger movement. Social media not only draws people down into outlandish disinformation silos through recommendation engines, it connects them, reinforcing beliefs in conspiracies and fanatical ideologies. QAnon continues, and now we’re learning Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, believes in this stuff. 

Anocracy was a word I had never heard before I picked up Walter’s book. She has been studying civil wars since 1990 and joined the Political Instability Task Force (founded in 1994) in 2017. 

An anocracy is a country that is neither a full democracy or a full autocracy. It is anocracies that are at risk of civil war. 

It was recognizing the risks in her own country, our country, the United States, that we are an anocracy that is the driver of the book. It isn’t just the slide from full democracy, i.e. voter suppression, gerrymandering, expansion of executive power, and corruption, that tips the scale; add factionalism. Factionalism happens when groups organize around race, ethnicity or religion. The most dangerous factions are once dominant groups that are facing decline in status and super factions, groups organized around race or ethnicity and religion. 

Walter draws from research the actions that pull countries away from sliding into civil war. She ends the book with recommendations including taking away the social media bullhorn through regulation. 

There are some of her recommendations that stalled and sank in the Senate: voting rights, election integrity, ending gerrymandering, improving public services and government effectiveness. She favors getting rid of the electoral college and demonstrating good government through expanding social services, investing in safety nets, affordable housing, public schools, parks, recreation, the arts and health care. Improving living conditions takes away grievances that give extremists air to grow and expand their reach, as does equal and impartial application of the rule of law. 

All this brings framing and reflection to the week. I suggest reading the entire book. The recommendations of how to stop civil wars from happening lose importance and impact without understanding and seeing the warning signs along the way, and that is what starting at the beginning of the book and reading it all the way through will give you. 

**************** 

In Berkeley this week there is concern that Councilmember Taplin’s City Council agenda item, Community Policing: Flex Team for Problem-Oriented Policing Under the Scanning, Analysis, Response and Assessment (SARA) Model and other applicable community engagement models, will turn into the old drug war crime suppression unit, saturation policing. Stop-and-frisk was determined to violate the 4^th Amendment to the Constitution in 2013, but the association with those tactics seems to be a better description of concerns over SARA. 

This coupled with the Auditor’s Report on police overtime, the City Manager’s intention to expand the police force to 181 officers, the police chief saying illegally parked cars in fire zones can’t be ticketed without expanding the parking enforcement budget and Edward Opton’s comments to the Mental Health Commission on Thursday evening leave much to question regarding the direction Berkeley is headed. 

Edward Opton noted in his report to the Mental Health Commission as a member of the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force that the Berkeley Police were well represented (the attendees we couldn’t see on zoom) at every meeting. And there was never any expression of a desire or willingness or need for change from the Berkeley Police Department. 

In follow-up to the presentations on March 10^th from the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force and the National Institute of Criminal Justice Reform, city staff are coming back with their analysis and proposals on April 14^th according to Lisa Warhuus, Director of Health, Housing and Community Services. She will be presenting al plan for a Special Care Unit that evening. 

It is spring and that means budgets. Where will the money be allocated for the next budget cycle? Will it go to more policing or to services? The recent shootings in District 2 would lead the vote for policing. Reimagining Public Safety Task Force has made recommendations for services, and so would I. 

The March 22^nd City Council 4 pm special meeting was on the Implementation of the Redistricting Plan for City Council District Boundaries. While partisan gerrymandering is alive and well in other parts of the country, California uses independent redistricting commissions. Carol Marasavic chose to draw attention to the comment from the Independent Redistricting Commission Chair Elisabeth Watson, “…we did not rely on consultants to review public input or provide guidance…” and Carol followed with “…we don’t need to pay costly consultants all the time to go into a protracted process in order to achieve results…” 

We do have a lot of talent in Berkeley and not everything should result in another contract with consultants, but Ben Bartlett’s $350,000 budget referral which passed on consent for a consultant to Facilitate a Community Process to Design and implement a Local Reparations Plan does need expertise. Leadership matters and recent consultant choices would suggest there needs to be a better selection process. 

A presentation on Neighborhood Electrification & Gas Pruning (identifying small neighborhood blocks to electrify and prune/remove the gas line) prompted Thomas Lord to comment at the Energy Commission. 

Of all the things that were said this week, it was his words summarizing the challenge before us to cut our dependence on fossil fuels that keeps coming back to me. 

He said quite simply that if we are going to get off fossil fuels in our buildings by 2045 (the goal set by the California Public Utilities Commission and Governor Newsom), we need to electrify 4 to 5 units every single workday starting right now. He based his calculations for the number of units to electrify daily in Berkeley on 30,000 (rough estimate from PG&E and Councilmember Kate Harrison’s office) and a six-day work week. 

While the task before Berkeley sounds insurmountable, Ithaca, New York, with about a quarter of the population of Berkeley, voted on November 3, 2021 to decarbonize (electrify) every single building in their city by 2030. Their count is 6000 buildings. 

There was a lot of bloviating at the March 15^th Council meeting about how we don’t need to protect rooftop solar because Berkeley is getting 100% renewable energy from EBCE. Ben Paulos, Chair of the Energy Commission, followed up this week as he (proudly) told the commissioners of his comments at City Council on rooftop solar being of marginal benefit, saying it is much more important to build housing. Thatl prompted my comment that for the very first time I was glad to see the merging of the Community Environmental Advisory Commission (CEAC) and the Energy Commission into the Climate and Energy Commission. 

There was another conversation this week that stuck with me. On Friday at demonstration supporting Ukraine in Civic Center Park, I ran into Kathy Dervin, Co-Chair of 350 Bay Area Legislative Committee. We spoke briefly about the state of affairs in Berkeley, really the sad state. The word she used that stuck, what the city should be and isn’t, is “transformative”. 

Transformative is what doesn’t fit in with what Ben Paulos and Matthew Lewis (the YIMBY Matthew Lewis) and others have claimed: that rooftop solar and building housing are incompatible. That 100% renewable has to come from somewhere. I challenge the dogma that the only way to have solar is to cover open space with solar farms, acres of solar panels at some distant location collecting energy to be distributed into the grid. 

We are already covering what feels like every foot of space in Berkeley with buildings. Why are we not wrapping those very same buildings with solar cells? 

Transformative are the developers who are doing just that. There is a 15-story net-zero energy high-rise under construction in Seattle with rainwater capture, reclaimed graywater and 27 out of 112 units affordable. Solar energy isn’t new. What is old is not being able to see how to incorporate solar energy into new construction so we can cover open space with forests and habitat and all the other things we need for survival of the planet. There is a lot that can be done if we look beyond city borders for innovation. https://www.greenbuildermedia.com/blog/seattle-breaks-ground-on-net-zero-high-rise 

The Disaster and Fire Safety Commission discussion of removal of eucalyptus on 98 private properties using public FF Funds continued this week without resolution. 

Saturday was the dedication of Brickyard Cove at McLaughlin Eastshore Park. The sun was shining and the views of the bay were spectacular. Former Mayor Shirley Dean was in the audience, my historian of choice. Did the speakers (Elizabeth Echols – elected member to East Bay Regional Park District Board of Directors, State Senator Nancy Skinner, Mayor and former Assemblyman Tom Bates, Loni Hancock former Mayor and State Senator, Mayor Arreguin) get the history of the shoreline parks movement right? Partly was the answer! When Tom Bates was in the State Assembly he did secure the funding to purchase the land, but two people who pursued with vigor the movement for shoreline parks and founded Urban Care were never mentioned, Rosalind and Albert Lapawsky. 

It is because of unrelenting activism to save the bay from being filled and the shoreline covered with a shopping center, we are able to feel the bay breezes, walk the new trails and watch the meadow larks flutter over open space. Brickyard Cove is the land that was once a Berkeley City dump. Norman La Force captures the history in “Creating the Eastshore State Park an Activist History”. https://eastshorepark.org/dev/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/CESP_history.pdf 

The last speaker Robert Cheasty, Executive Director for Citizens for East Shore Parks (CESP) wasn’t staying close enough to the microphone, so I lost about half of what he said, though I know as a Board Member of CESP it included adding Point Molate to the shoreline parks.