Columns

When I picked up my iPhone this morning checking the news banners, NPR caught my attention, saying that birds in North America are in trouble. The article reminds us that if birds are in decline, the ecosystems are in decline and our own health is tied to this shared environment.

NPR lists eight actions:

1. reduce habitat loss and degradation, grow native plants (calscape.org will help you choose)
2. reduce pesticide use (better yet eliminate pesticides, birds need those bugs for food and buy plants that are not pretreated with neonicotinoids)
3. purchase bird friendly products (like bird friendly coffee)
4. advocate for bird-friendly environmental policies and expect the same from elected and appointed officials
5. reduce bird deaths, keep your cat indoors
6. make windows more visible to birds (install bird safe glass, or add window film with dots or lines https://abcbirds.org/glass-collisions/products-database/, use exterior screens)
7. turn off lights you are not using especially at night,
8. if you have a bird feeder clean it regularly to prevent spread of disease.

Bill Shrader, part of the Austin Group, introduced his apartment project at 2440 Shattuck, “The Lair”, to the City of Berkeley’s Design Review Committee and proudly showed off the planned green wall of plants on the exterior and interior at the lobby entry. Erin Diehm pointed out that the interior plants will attract birds who will crash into the wall of glass, and asked if bird safe glass will be used. Shrader answered that bird safe glass is new and he will check into it. He said he doesn’t want dead birds by the entrance to his building.

Bird safe glass is not new. San Francisco has had an ordinance in place for over a decade. It is just Berkeley that can’t get it together and has left the Bird Safe Ordinance languishing at the Planning Commission. 

When Shrader was asked about the statement that he wants to seek exception to the prohibition of natural gas (the all-electric building ordinance) he said that the Office of Economic Development was advising this action. I have long had questions about the integrity of voices within the Office of Economic Development and as well as in the Planning Department. This advice only adds more confirmation to what I have already observed. 

As for number two in the list, to save birds reduce pesticides, a friend who will remain unnamed confessed to me that when she saw black spots on the milkweed she planted to save Monarch butterflies, she sprayed the plants with bug killer, killing the hatching baby monarch caterpillars. Sometime later she said she was going to use herbicide to kill the plants growing between the cracks in the driveway. I asked her how it is that, if she cares so much about her little two year old grandnephew, how she could use these toxic chemicals if she wants to leave a world in which that precious toddler could survive? 

We need to reorient how we view the world and how our actions foster health or speed extinction. 

Tuesday was a heavy council day, starting with a morning budget meeting in which the Budget Manager didn’t include the $1.5 million for the Building Electrification and Just Transition Program on the AAO budget sheet. A surprise, but no surprise. The Budget Manager is new, and responding to climate and the environment is always at the bottom (if it is mentioned at all) of anything trickling down from the City Manager’s office. 

One hundred fifty attended the evening Council work session, which lasted until 11:45 pm, on Fire Department Standards and Community Risk Assessment Study and the Ashby and North Berkeley Housing Projects. 

The Fire Department study was presented in easy to view charts and graphs and closed with recommendations which could be viewed in a couple of minutes. Recommendations: 911 dispatch times must shorten to best practices, the city needs six full-time ambulances, the city needs to implement a non-fire unit alternative response team for non-acute, non-911 medical calls, and mental health patients need their own appropriate clinical response. https://www.cityofberkeley.info/Clerk/City_Council/2022/04_Apr/City_Council__04-19-2022_-_Special_(WS)_Meeting_Agenda.aspx. 

The mayor delivered his introduction to the BART housing projects, with a statement that the Planning Commission voted (5 to 4) for the 12-story and above project design (against staff and Community Advisory Group recommendations.) Fifty-seven people commented verbally, and there is a very very long list of letters with the usual divide between mid-size 7-story supporters and the tall 12-story and more advocates. There were lots of questions from councilmembers which were left unanswered about the state density bonus, including how funding for affordable housing and affordable unit credits might end up benefitting for-profit developers while reducing their share of required affordable units. There was also the question of density bonuses and height. There will be a follow-up meeting on May 31 with a council vote. 

The City Manager’s response to the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force and the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform recommendations finally did come to pass on Thursday evening. The public meeting announcement and associated documents didn’t go up online until 5 pm on Tuesday, two days before the special council meeting, not even making the 72-hour posting window required for non-emergency meetings. The document dump of over 600 pages with sufficient repetition, historical notices, council actions, previous studies but no analysis puts off even the most robust reader. 

As far as “reimagine” there was little, but the evening and documents were filled with buzz words. The response included add more police, hire more consultants with some to analyze beats and staffing, move school crossing guards into BerkDOT (a new Berkeley Department of Transportation with a new added deputy director) and a repetition of the standing request to have a 24/7 mobile crisis unit. 

No action was taken and the Mayor didn’t sound happy with the direction, saying he would be bringing back a response. 

The City Manager is asking for $12,452,169 in additional funding and even that looks like fuzzy accounting. Voting for fattening the police budget comes with smiling pictures of uniformed officers and whoever is running for election, plus all those Berkeley Police Association (police union) mailers arriving in our mailboxes come election time. Or, what might be called the “be afraid of crime” mailers, aimed at anyone who dares to question all that financing. 

One lingering question for me is why school crossing guards are even in the police department in the first place, instead of part of the Berkeley Unified School District. 

What is proven to reduce crime is investing in community services. While a mobile crisis team is desperately needed, so too is a safe place to take people. Berkeley could have a crisis stabilization program with a center if actual reimagining was on the table. There are functioning crisis stabilization centers that Berkeley can use as a model, including the Deschutes Stabilization Center in Bend, Oregon. 

The budget meetings arrive with intensity this coming week on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. That will tell us a lot more about what direction Berkeley is headed in. 

When I moved to Berkeley, the selection of theaters for viewing independent and foreign film felt endless. Soon all that will be left is the theater at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. There is the Regal United Artists, of course, but that seems more like a collection of shows for teenage boys. 

There is something very special about watching film on the big screen in a theater which a handheld device or even a 65” TV if you have one (mine is 22”) can’t replace. Time has moved on and the pandemic speeded up the process. The California on Kittredge is closed. The Shattuck Cinemas will be torn down for an 8-story student housing project at 2065 Kittredge. It was the last project reviewed Thursday evening by the Design Review Committee. 

Even the making of film is threatened. This coming week the Zoning Adjustment Board will consider and likely approve changing four existing media tenant spaces to research and development. It looks like Chris Barlow of Wareham Development, owner of 2600 Tenth Street, is finally getting his way. From what I’ve read and heard, raising rents and the City’s heavy hand over the years are setting the stage for yet another cultural and talent loss.  

There is more money to be made in research and development, so we can expect the artisans to be pushed out of West Berkeley, with the developers and City leaders cheering the change while they fill the air with their hollow rhetoric of how much they care. 

Monday was tax day. Rutger Bregman was someone I had never heard of until I picked up the book Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World by Peter Goodman. Bregman was invited to speak at Davos in January 2019 and never invited back and this is why, he said: 

“This is my first time at Davos and I find it quite a bewildering experience to be honest. I mean 1500 private jets have flown in here to hear Sir David Attenborough speak about how we’re wrecking the planet. I hear people talking the language of participation and justice and equality and transparency, but then almost no one raises the real issue of tax avoidance, right? And, of the rich just not paying their fair share. It feels as if I’m at a fire fighters conference and no one is allowed to speak about water. This is not rocket science. We can talk for a very long time about all these stupid philanthropy schemes…but come on, we’ve got to be talking about taxes. That’s it, taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit in my opinion…10 years ago, the World Economic Forum asked the question what must industry do to prevent a broad social backlash? The answer is very simple, Just stop talking about philanthropy and start talking about taxes…just two days ago there was a billionaire in here, Michael Dell. And he asked a question like, name me one country where a top marginal tax rate of 70% has actually worked? And, you know, I’m a historian, the United States, that’s where it has actually worked, in the 1950s during Republican President Eisenhower, the war veteran. The top marginal tax rate in the U.S. was 91% for people like Michael Dell…the top estate tax for people like Michael Dell was more than 70%” 

Goodman writes, Davos Man has looted the treasury leaving other strategies to secure votes such as demonizing immigrants. We can add creating fear with critical race theory, book censorship, demonizing supporters of the LBGTQ community and designating parents of transgender youth as child abusers. Then there are the pedophile conspiracy claims too. 

If you pick up Davos name you will see familiar names like Marc Benioff – Salesforce, Jeff Bezos – Amazon, Stephen Schwarzman – Blackstone, Larry Fink – BlackRock, Jamie Dimon – JPChase. Goodman reminds us Americans have stared down Robber Barons before. It is time to do it again. We wouldn’t be struggling over affordable housing if BlackStone and BlackRock weren’t gobbling up housing and turning it into rentals and billionaires weren’t escaping paying their fair share of taxes. 

There is a waitlist for Davos Man at the San Francisco and Contra Costa libraries.