Columns

Heather Cox Richardson in her Letters from an American June 19, 2022 edition gives a full description of Juneteenth including General Order No. 3 in full. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-19-2022?utm_source=email

When I think back on all the things I never learned in school or even college and how much I’ve learned through the political book club Barbara Ruffner and I formed over coffee at the “sanity café” in 2014, I wish I had that set of encyclopedias my father bought for my sister and me. I’d like to go back and look through them with fresh eyes for how much of our history was left out to paint a different kind of picture of this country.

Jeffery Robinson, former ACLU Deputy Legal Director, in the documentary, “This Is Who We Are” describes the same kind of revelation in the opening of the film. He describes himself as having had one of the best educations in America, and that even as a Black man there is so much he didn’t learn, until suddenly he became the parent of his 13 year old nephew, struggling what to tell his Black son about racism in America.

The City of Berkeley offices were closed on Monday in observation of the Juneteenth holiday, though the celebrations really did start on Sunday. AB 1655, to officially recognize Juneteenth as a State of California, holiday is still pending.

When I was writing the description of Juneteenth for the Activist’s Calendar, I found on June 17, 2021, the same day President Biden signed into law Juneteenth as a national holiday, Governor Carney of Delaware signed House Bill 198, mandating teaching Black history, the significance of enslavement, the contributions of Black people to American life, the impact of racial trauma and the responsibilities of all citizens to combat racism.

Some weeks later, on August 6, 2021, Governor Newsom signed the requirement for California high schoolers to complete a semester course of Ethnic Studies, beginning with the 2025-2026 academic year, to earn a high school diploma. That puts Delaware ahead with a 2022-2023 implementation and tighter definition of content.

It isn’t just the South where parents are showing up at school boards declaring critical race theory must be banned and books removed from school libraries. California is not immune to White Supremacy and white parents pushing back on what can be taught about racism. In one of the articles I found it mentions Ramona Unified in San Diego County adopting a course that promotes patriotism while tightly restricting what can be taught about racism. We have a long way to go. 

Just Saturday, the Republican Party of Texas adopted a platform that should give all of us chills. Heather Cox Richardson covers it well in her June 18, 2022 Edition. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-18-2022?utm_source=email 

The week started with the staged reading of ROE on Sunday and a repeat on Thursday. I was glued in full attention curious to see how closely ROE would parallel the life of Norma McCorvey as it was covered in Joshua Prager’s book The Family Roe: An American Story. The play was written in 2017 and the book was published in 2021. A 2 ½ play can’t possibly cover a lifetime, but playwright Lisa Loomer captured McCorvey’s true character and closely paralleled the book. The friends I sat with thought McCorvey was overplayed, but reading the book showed the Actors Ensemble of Berkeley under the direction of Susannah Wood really got it right. Carole Marasovich did an amazing job of pulling this together in just three months. If you missed ROE and see another reading grab a ticket. 

The City Council meeting Tuesday evening got a little testy as the voting approached on Councilmember Kate Harrison’s proposed ballot initiative, the Empty Homes Tax, aka the “Vacancy Tax.” Harrison said that we tell homeowners to pay for city expenses, but we never tell developers or out of town owners to pay. 

Susan Wengraf responded: “…if you said this was an item that referred to ten units or more then you would be targeting larger landlords…”  

Which raises the question of what Wengraf reads. Single-family homes are being gobbled up by investment firms. Blackstone Group Inc. struck a $6 billion deal last year on a single-family home rental strategy. Big investment companies are moving into smaller properties. Setting a limit at ten-unit properties misses what is happening in the market with big investors. 

Mayor Jesse Arreguin voiced his concern that putting the Vacancy Tax on the ballot would impact “our ability to pass both our streets parcel tax and our housing and infrastructure bond.” He has it all backwards if he thinks the vacancy tax is going to hurt his November ballot initiatives for an infrastructure bond and parcel tax. If anything, a vacancy tax will help, as it makes the developers and the out of town property owners pay their share. That makes a bond and parcel tax more palatable for local homeowners. 

We know there are buildings not being rented and can see the homeless on the street. These investor owners shouldn’t escape by keeping empty units off the market. Even if a vacancy tax were break even, just getting existing housing back on the market and rented would be a success. 

From Harrison’s presentation, the Empty Homes Tax ballot initiative has a dual benefit. It brings units back on the market, and for those landlords that withhold housing the tax collected will expand the Housing Trust Fund for acquisitions and construction. I read the proposed Empty Homes ordinance in full and it is well written with limited exemptions and very specific uses for the tax collected. 

If Arreguin’s bond and parcel tax ballot measures fail this November to garner enough votes, it won’t be because an empty homes tax is on the ballot with it. It will be because the City Manager attempted to use ballot Measure GG funds for fire prevention to pay for carpet. It will be because a city staff member told the chair of the Homeless Commission that Measure P funds for homelessness were needed to balance the budget. 

It will be because after years of work on the Adeline Corridor Plan it was thrown out by the mayor in a final vote. 

It will be because Berkeley is contributing $53 million to get 35% affordable housing at the North Berkeley and Ashby BART Stations while El Cerrito is getting 49% with no contributions. 

It will be because of the kind of foolishness that makes the Berkeley City Manager the 4th highest paid manager of 13 bay area cities surveyed. Berkeley was the smallest city of the 13 in square miles (10.5 square miles, 17.7 if water is included) and 11th in population. At $386,160, Berkeley pays its city manager more than the city manager of San Jose with a population of over 1 million and a physical size of 179.9 square miles. 

If the bond ballot measure loses it will be because of broken trust and because the language is too squishy, allowing funds to be shifted to cover pet projects and departments.  

At the Agenda Committee, Councilmember Taplin’s measure to set a parking maximum in manufacturing districts, eliminating the current parking minimum, was moved to the consent calendar for the June 28th council meeting. It will arrive too late for the neighbors of the project at 2213 Fourth Street and 747 (787) Bancroft Way with its 4 ½ story 412 parking space garage being reviewed this Thursday, June 23 at the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB). It is too late for 742 Grayson with 325 parking spaces spread over 7 stories, reviewed at the Design Review Committee (DRC) last Thursday. It is way too late for 600 Addison which was approved for 943 parking spaces months ago. 

Like seemingly all of Taplin’s measures of substance, they are a referral to the City Manager. Taplin can tell his constituents he is working for them and yet we can expect nothing to happen. It seems anything that would put a crimp in any developer’s dream projects ends up being captured in the Planning Commission bottleneck. 

To be fair I am told changes in ordinances have to go through the Planning Commission. However, it appears that only items that eliminate development restrictions bubble up through staff for action. The rest recirculate or languish and die, making referrals the kiss of death. 

I’d like to ask what happened to the days when the Planning Commission met twice a month. It certainly felt like things got done. Maybe it was no better since I wasn’t tracking as closely, but the way it looks now Berkeley is bogged down in process on top of more process ad nauseum. I can’t see that the City Manager’s generous raise of $84,732 brought any efficiency with it, unless the efficiency is to make work and squash measures which the public wants but the electeds and city administrations don’t. 

The Fair Work Week ordinance effort which started in 2018 with a referral by Councilmember Harrison to the Labor Commission ran up against a wall. It was on the April 12, 2022, regular council agenda under action for the first reading. Lisa Warhuus, Director of Health, Housing and Community Services, entered a companion report for the City Manager requesting further study. The supplemental submission from Harrison was an objection to delay, but in the end, Harrison agreed to send the Fair Work Week ordinance to the Council Health, Life, Enrichment, Equity & Community Committee to save it. 

The Fair Work Week ordinance was discussed in committee on Monday. No action was taken. Councilmember Hahn voiced her concern for low paid workers. 

We might want to ask how many years ordinances must be studied before they move forward. And, whatever happened to Tenants Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) from the mayor? 

All this makes Councilmember Harrison’s July 16, 2019 ordinance banning natural gas in new construction with the implementation date of January 1, 2020 all the more amazing. Of course, there are still chef’s and cooks who insist they can’t possibly learn to use induction stovetops and restaurants insisting not having natural gas would ruin their food as was indicated by the architect for 2439 Durant. He said at the DRC meeting on Thursday that KIPS restaurant would be asking for an exception to the natural gas ban for the kitchen in the new to-be-constructed 2439 Durant. 

This strikes me as someone who learned to drive a car with a clutch insisting they couldn’t possibly drive a car with an automatic shift, or the handful of medical personnel who resisted the transition to digital imaging insisting film x-rays with all the chemical developing were just as good. I had to deal with a veterinarian in that camp.  

Calling out the luddites of cooking brings us to climate and budget. Will Mayor Arreguin walk the talk and include the Public Works request for $1,000,000 for EV charging stations at the corporation yard? We’ll see Thursday morning when he reveals his proposed biennial budget for 2023 & 2024. The City of Berkeley can’t do its part to transition the City’s vehicles to electric without the charging station infrastructure. 

The election of the Sheriff is over. Yesenia Sanchez is the winner for the Alameda County Sheriff with 52% of the vote and Gregory J. Ahern conceded, the man I can’t think of without picturing the Oath Keepers sharing the Sheriff’s booth in the Urban Shield photos. 

When I first heard of the Oath Keepers I understood them as a White Supremacist organization. Now with the insurrection, failed coup and the January 6th hearings, I know so much more. 

Trump laid the framework for staying in office months in advance of the election. None of us should underestimate Trump or the lust for power and money. 

Trump is a con man and a lifelong criminal (still waiting on my order of the book The Criminology on Trump). If you pick up the book I just finished, Putin’s People: How the KGB took Back Russia and Then Took On the West , by Catherine Belton, and just want to read about Trump’s hand in money laundering, corruption and connections with Russia go to chapter 15. If this is your first big dive into reading about Putin, I would suggest keeping a note pad to write the names, scandals and connections to keep it all straight. My big take away is how much the Mueller investigation missed or more likely chose not to explore. 

There is a waiting list at the library. 

Heather Cox Richardson in her Letters from an American June 19, 2022 edition gives a full description of Juneteenth including General Order No. 3 in full. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-19-2022?utm_source=email 

When I think back on all the things I never learned in school or even college and how much I’ve learned through the political book club Barbara Ruffner and I formed over coffee at the “sanity café” in 2014, I wish I had that set of encyclopedias my father bought for my sister and me. I’d like to go back and look through them with fresh eyes for how much of our history was left out to paint a different kind of picture of this country. 

Jeffery Robinson, former ACLU Deputy Legal Director, in the documentary, “This Is Who We Are” describes the same kind of revelation in the opening of the film. He describes himself as having had one of the best educations in America, and that even as a Black man there is so much he didn’t learn, until suddenly he became the parent of his 13 year old nephew, struggling what to tell his Black son about racism in America. 

The City of Berkeley offices were closed on Monday in observation of the Juneteenth holiday, though the celebrations really did start on Sunday. AB 1655, to officially recognize Juneteenth as a State of California, holiday is still pending. 

When I was writing the description of Juneteenth for the Activist’s Calendar, I found on June 17, 2021, the same day President Biden signed into law Juneteenth as a national holiday, Governor Carney of Delaware signed House Bill 198, mandating teaching Black history, the significance of enslavement, the contributions of Black people to American life, the impact of racial trauma and the responsibilities of all citizens to combat racism.  

Some weeks later, on August 6, 2021, Governor Newsom signed the requirement for California high schoolers to complete a semester course of Ethnic Studies, beginning with the 2025-2026 academic year, to earn a high school diploma. That puts Delaware ahead with a 2022-2023 implementation and tighter definition of content. 

It isn’t just the South where parents are showing up at school boards declaring critical race theory must be banned and books removed from school libraries. California is not immune to White Supremacy and white parents pushing back on what can be taught about racism. In one of the articles I found it mentions Ramona Unified in San Diego County adopting a course that promotes patriotism while tightly restricting what can be taught about racism. We have a long way to go. 

Just Saturday, the Republican Party of Texas adopted a platform that should give all of us chills. Heather Cox Richardson covers it well in her June 18, 2022 Edition. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-18-2022?utm_source=email 

The week started with the staged reading of ROE on Sunday and a repeat on Thursday. I was glued in full attention curious to see how closely ROE would parallel the life of Norma McCorvey as it was covered in Joshua Prager’s book The Family Roe: An American Story. The play was written in 2017 and the book was published in 2021. A 2 ½ play can’t possibly cover a lifetime, but playwright Lisa Loomer captured McCorvey’s true character and closely paralleled the book. The friends I sat with thought McCorvey was overplayed, but reading the book showed the Actors Ensemble of Berkeley under the direction of Susannah Wood really got it right. Carole Marasovich did an amazing job of pulling this together in just three months. If you missed ROE and see another reading grab a ticket. 

The City Council meeting Tuesday evening got a little testy as the voting approached on Councilmember Kate Harrison’s proposed ballot initiative, the Empty Homes Tax, aka the “Vacancy Tax.” Harrison said that we tell homeowners to pay for city expenses, but we never tell developers or out of town owners to pay. 

Susan Wengraf responded: “…if you said this was an item that referred to ten units or more then you would be targeting larger landlords…”  

Which raises the question of what Wengraf reads. Single-family homes are being gobbled up by investment firms. Blackstone Group Inc. struck a $6 billion deal last year on a single-family home rental strategy. Big investment companies are moving into smaller properties. Setting a limit at ten-unit properties misses what is happening in the market with big investors. 

Mayor Jesse Arreguin voiced his concern that putting the Vacancy Tax on the ballot would impact “our ability to pass both our streets parcel tax and our housing and infrastructure bond.” He has it all backwards if he thinks the vacancy tax is going to hurt his November ballot initiatives for an infrastructure bond and parcel tax. If anything, a vacancy tax will help, as it makes the developers and the out of town property owners pay their share. That makes a bond and parcel tax more palatable for local homeowners. 

We know there are buildings not being rented and can see the homeless on the street. These investor owners shouldn’t escape by keeping empty units off the market. Even if a vacancy tax were break even, just getting existing housing back on the market and rented would be a success. 

From Harrison’s presentation, the Empty Homes Tax ballot initiative has a dual benefit. It brings units back on the market, and for those landlords that withhold housing the tax collected will expand the Housing Trust Fund for acquisitions and construction. I read the proposed Empty Homes ordinance in full and it is well written with limited exemptions and very specific uses for the tax collected. 

If Arreguin’s bond and parcel tax ballot measures fail this November to garner enough votes, it won’t be because an empty homes tax is on the ballot with it. It will be because the City Manager attempted to use ballot Measure GG funds for fire prevention to pay for carpet. It will be because a city staff member told the chair of the Homeless Commission that Measure P funds for homelessness were needed to balance the budget. 

It will be because after years of work on the Adeline Corridor Plan it was thrown out by the mayor in a final vote. 

It will be because Berkeley is contributing $53 million to get 35% affordable housing at the North Berkeley and Ashby BART Stations while El Cerrito is getting 49% with no contributions. 

It will be because of the kind of foolishness that makes the Berkeley City Manager the 4th highest paid manager of 13 bay area cities surveyed. Berkeley was the smallest city of the 13 in square miles (10.5 square miles, 17.7 if water is included) and 11th in population. At $386,160, Berkeley pays its city manager more than the city manager of San Jose with a population of over 1 million and a physical size of 179.9 square miles. 

If the bond ballot measure loses it will be because of broken trust and because the language is too squishy, allowing funds to be shifted to cover pet projects and departments.  

At the Agenda Committee, Councilmember Taplin’s measure to set a parking maximum in manufacturing districts, eliminating the current parking minimum, was moved to the consent calendar for the June 28th council meeting. It will arrive too late for the neighbors of the project at 2213 Fourth Street and 747 (787) Bancroft Way with its 4 ½ story 412 parking space garage being reviewed this Thursday, June 23 at the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB). It is too late for 742 Grayson with 325 parking spaces spread over 7 stories, reviewed at the Design Review Committee (DRC) last Thursday. It is way too late for 600 Addison which was approved for 943 parking spaces months ago. 

Like seemingly all of Taplin’s measures of substance, they are a referral to the City Manager. Taplin can tell his constituents he is working for them and yet we can expect nothing to happen. It seems anything that would put a crimp in any developer’s dream projects ends up being captured in the Planning Commission bottleneck. 

To be fair I am told changes in ordinances have to go through the Planning Commission. However, it appears that only items that eliminate development restrictions bubble up through staff for action. The rest recirculate or languish and die, making referrals the kiss of death. 

I’d like to ask what happened to the days when the Planning Commission met twice a month. It certainly felt like things got done. Maybe it was no better since I wasn’t tracking as closely, but the way it looks now Berkeley is bogged down in process on top of more process ad nauseum. I can’t see that the City Manager’s generous raise of $84,732 brought any efficiency with it, unless the efficiency is to make work and squash measures which the public wants but the electeds and city administrations don’t. 

The Fair Work Week ordinance effort which started in 2018 with a referral by Councilmember Harrison to the Labor Commission ran up against a wall. It was on the April 12, 2022, regular council agenda under action for the first reading. Lisa Warhuus, Director of Health, Housing and Community Services, entered a companion report for the City Manager requesting further study. The supplemental submission from Harrison was an objection to delay, but in the end, Harrison agreed to send the Fair Work Week ordinance to the Council Health, Life, Enrichment, Equity & Community Committee to save it. 

The Fair Work Week ordinance was discussed in committee on Monday. No action was taken. Councilmember Hahn voiced her concern for low paid workers. 

We might want to ask how many years ordinances must be studied before they move forward. And, whatever happened to Tenants Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) from the mayor? 

All this makes Councilmember Harrison’s July 16, 2019 ordinance banning natural gas in new construction with the implementation date of January 1, 2020 all the more amazing. Of course, there are still chef’s and cooks who insist they can’t possibly learn to use induction stovetops and restaurants insisting not having natural gas would ruin their food as was indicated by the architect for 2439 Durant. He said at the DRC meeting on Thursday that KIPS restaurant would be asking for an exception to the natural gas ban for the kitchen in the new to-be-constructed 2439 Durant. 

This strikes me as someone who learned to drive a car with a clutch insisting they couldn’t possibly drive a car with an automatic shift, or the handful of medical personnel who resisted the transition to digital imaging insisting film x-rays with all the chemical developing were just as good. I had to deal with a veterinarian in that camp.  

Calling out the luddites of cooking brings us to climate and budget. Will Mayor Arreguin walk the talk and include the Public Works request for $1,000,000 for EV charging stations at the corporation yard? We’ll see Thursday morning when he reveals his proposed biennial budget for 2023 & 2024. The City of Berkeley can’t do its part to transition the City’s vehicles to electric without the charging station infrastructure. 

The election of the Sheriff is over. Yesenia Sanchez is the winner for the Alameda County Sheriff with 52% of the vote and Gregory J. Ahern conceded, the man I can’t think of without picturing the Oath Keepers sharing the Sheriff’s booth in the Urban Shield photos. 

When I first heard of the Oath Keepers I understood them as a White Supremacist organization. Now with the insurrection, failed coup and the January 6th hearings, I know so much more. 

Trump laid the framework for staying in office months in advance of the election. None of us should underestimate Trump or the lust for power and money. 

Trump is a con man and a lifelong criminal (still waiting on my order of the book The Criminology on Trump). If you pick up the book I just finished, Putin’s People: How the KGB took Back Russia and Then Took On the West , by Catherine Belton, and just want to read about Trump’s hand in money laundering, corruption and connections with Russia go to chapter 15. If this is your first big dive into reading about Putin, I would suggest keeping a note pad to write the names, scandals and connections to keep it all straight. My big take away is how much the Mueller investigation missed or more likely chose not to explore. 

There is a waiting list at the library. 

Heather Cox Richardson in her Letters from an American June 19, 2022 edition gives a full description of Juneteenth including General Order No. 3 in full. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-19-2022?utm_source=email 

When I think back on all the things I never learned in school or even college and how much I’ve learned through the political book club Barbara Ruffner and I formed over coffee at the “sanity café” in 2014, I wish I had that set of encyclopedias my father bought for my sister and me. I’d like to go back and look through them with fresh eyes for how much of our history was left out to paint a different kind of picture of this country. 

Jeffery Robinson, former ACLU Deputy Legal Director, in the documentary, “This Is Who We Are” describes the same kind of revelation in the opening of the film. He describes himself as having had one of the best educations in America, and that even as a Black man there is so much he didn’t learn, until suddenly he became the parent of his 13 year old nephew, struggling what to tell his Black son about racism in America. 

The City of Berkeley offices were closed on Monday in observation of the Juneteenth holiday, though the celebrations really did start on Sunday. AB 1655, to officially recognize Juneteenth as a State of California, holiday is still pending. 

When I was writing the description of Juneteenth for the Activist’s Calendar, I found on June 17, 2021, the same day President Biden signed into law Juneteenth as a national holiday, Governor Carney of Delaware signed House Bill 198, mandating teaching Black history, the significance of enslavement, the contributions of Black people to American life, the impact of racial trauma and the responsibilities of all citizens to combat racism.  

Some weeks later, on August 6, 2021, Governor Newsom signed the requirement for California high schoolers to complete a semester course of Ethnic Studies, beginning with the 2025-2026 academic year, to earn a high school diploma. That puts Delaware ahead with a 2022-2023 implementation and tighter definition of content. 

It isn’t just the South where parents are showing up at school boards declaring critical race theory must be banned and books removed from school libraries. California is not immune to White Supremacy and white parents pushing back on what can be taught about racism. In one of the articles I found it mentions Ramona Unified in San Diego County adopting a course that promotes patriotism while tightly restricting what can be taught about racism. We have a long way to go. 

Just Saturday, the Republican Party of Texas adopted a platform that should give all of us chills. Heather Cox Richardson covers it well in her June 18, 2022 Edition. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-18-2022?utm_source=email 

The week started with the staged reading of ROE on Sunday and a repeat on Thursday. I was glued in full attention curious to see how closely ROE would parallel the life of Norma McCorvey as it was covered in Joshua Prager’s book The Family Roe: An American Story. The play was written in 2017 and the book was published in 2021. A 2 ½ play can’t possibly cover a lifetime, but playwright Lisa Loomer captured McCorvey’s true character and closely paralleled the book. The friends I sat with thought McCorvey was overplayed, but reading the book showed the Actors Ensemble of Berkeley under the direction of Susannah Wood really got it right. Carole Marasovich did an amazing job of pulling this together in just three months. If you missed ROE and see another reading grab a ticket. 

The City Council meeting Tuesday evening got a little testy as the voting approached on Councilmember Kate Harrison’s proposed ballot initiative, the Empty Homes Tax, aka the “Vacancy Tax.” Harrison said that we tell homeowners to pay for city expenses, but we never tell developers or out of town owners to pay. 

Susan Wengraf responded: “…if you said this was an item that referred to ten units or more then you would be targeting larger landlords…”  

Which raises the question of what Wengraf reads. Single-family homes are being gobbled up by investment firms. Blackstone Group Inc. struck a $6 billion deal last year on a single-family home rental strategy. Big investment companies are moving into smaller properties. Setting a limit at ten-unit properties misses what is happening in the market with big investors. 

Mayor Jesse Arreguin voiced his concern that putting the Vacancy Tax on the ballot would impact “our ability to pass both our streets parcel tax and our housing and infrastructure bond.” He has it all backwards if he thinks the vacancy tax is going to hurt his November ballot initiatives for an infrastructure bond and parcel tax. If anything, a vacancy tax will help, as it makes the developers and the out of town property owners pay their share. That makes a bond and parcel tax more palatable for local homeowners. 

We know there are buildings not being rented and can see the homeless on the street. These investor owners shouldn’t escape by keeping empty units off the market. Even if a vacancy tax were break even, just getting existing housing back on the market and rented would be a success. 

From Harrison’s presentation, the Empty Homes Tax ballot initiative has a dual benefit. It brings units back on the market, and for those landlords that withhold housing the tax collected will expand the Housing Trust Fund for acquisitions and construction. I read the proposed Empty Homes ordinance in full and it is well written with limited exemptions and very specific uses for the tax collected. 

If Arreguin’s bond and parcel tax ballot measures fail this November to garner enough votes, it won’t be because an empty homes tax is on the ballot with it. It will be because the City Manager attempted to use ballot Measure GG funds for fire prevention to pay for carpet. It will be because a city staff member told the chair of the Homeless Commission that Measure P funds for homelessness were needed to balance the budget. 

It will be because after years of work on the Adeline Corridor Plan it was thrown out by the mayor in a final vote. 

It will be because Berkeley is contributing $53 million to get 35% affordable housing at the North Berkeley and Ashby BART Stations while El Cerrito is getting 49% with no contributions. 

It will be because of the kind of foolishness that makes the Berkeley City Manager the 4th highest paid manager of 13 bay area cities surveyed. Berkeley was the smallest city of the 13 in square miles (10.5 square miles, 17.7 if water is included) and 11th in population. At $386,160, Berkeley pays its city manager more than the city manager of San Jose with a population of over 1 million and a physical size of 179.9 square miles. 

If the bond ballot measure loses it will be because of broken trust and because the language is too squishy, allowing funds to be shifted to cover pet projects and departments.  

At the Agenda Committee, Councilmember Taplin’s measure to set a parking maximum in manufacturing districts, eliminating the current parking minimum, was moved to the consent calendar for the June 28th council meeting. It will arrive too late for the neighbors of the project at 2213 Fourth Street and 747 (787) Bancroft Way with its 4 ½ story 412 parking space garage being reviewed this Thursday, June 23 at the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB). It is too late for 742 Grayson with 325 parking spaces spread over 7 stories, reviewed at the Design Review Committee (DRC) last Thursday. It is way too late for 600 Addison which was approved for 943 parking spaces months ago. 

Like seemingly all of Taplin’s measures of substance, they are a referral to the City Manager. Taplin can tell his constituents he is working for them and yet we can expect nothing to happen. It seems anything that would put a crimp in any developer’s dream projects ends up being captured in the Planning Commission bottleneck. 

To be fair I am told changes in ordinances have to go through the Planning Commission. However, it appears that only items that eliminate development restrictions bubble up through staff for action. The rest recirculate or languish and die, making referrals the kiss of death. 

I’d like to ask what happened to the days when the Planning Commission met twice a month. It certainly felt like things got done. Maybe it was no better since I wasn’t tracking as closely, but the way it looks now Berkeley is bogged down in process on top of more process ad nauseum. I can’t see that the City Manager’s generous raise of $84,732 brought any efficiency with it, unless the efficiency is to make work and squash measures which the public wants but the electeds and city administrations don’t. 

The Fair Work Week ordinance effort which started in 2018 with a referral by Councilmember Harrison to the Labor Commission ran up against a wall. It was on the April 12, 2022, regular council agenda under action for the first reading. Lisa Warhuus, Director of Health, Housing and Community Services, entered a companion report for the City Manager requesting further study. The supplemental submission from Harrison was an objection to delay, but in the end, Harrison agreed to send the Fair Work Week ordinance to the Council Health, Life, Enrichment, Equity & Community Committee to save it. 

The Fair Work Week ordinance was discussed in committee on Monday. No action was taken. Councilmember Hahn voiced her concern for low paid workers. 

We might want to ask how many years ordinances must be studied before they move forward. And, whatever happened to Tenants Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) from the mayor? 

All this makes Councilmember Harrison’s July 16, 2019 ordinance banning natural gas in new construction with the implementation date of January 1, 2020 all the more amazing. Of course, there are still chef’s and cooks who insist they can’t possibly learn to use induction stovetops and restaurants insisting not having natural gas would ruin their food as was indicated by the architect for 2439 Durant. He said at the DRC meeting on Thursday that KIPS restaurant would be asking for an exception to the natural gas ban for the kitchen in the new to-be-constructed 2439 Durant. 

This strikes me as someone who learned to drive a car with a clutch insisting they couldn’t possibly drive a car with an automatic shift, or the handful of medical personnel who resisted the transition to digital imaging insisting film x-rays with all the chemical developing were just as good. I had to deal with a veterinarian in that camp.  

Calling out the luddites of cooking brings us to climate and budget. Will Mayor Arreguin walk the talk and include the Public Works request for $1,000,000 for EV charging stations at the corporation yard? We’ll see Thursday morning when he reveals his proposed biennial budget for 2023 & 2024. The City of Berkeley can’t do its part to transition the City’s vehicles to electric without the charging station infrastructure. 

The election of the Sheriff is over. Yesenia Sanchez is the winner for the Alameda County Sheriff with 52% of the vote and Gregory J. Ahern conceded, the man I can’t think of without picturing the Oath Keepers sharing the Sheriff’s booth in the Urban Shield photos. 

When I first heard of the Oath Keepers I understood them as a White Supremacist organization. Now with the insurrection, failed coup and the January 6th hearings, I know so much more. 

Trump laid the framework for staying in office months in advance of the election. None of us should underestimate Trump or the lust for power and money. 

Trump is a con man and a lifelong criminal (still waiting on my order of the book The Criminology on Trump). If you pick up the book I just finished, Putin’s People: How the KGB took Back Russia and Then Took On the West , by Catherine Belton, and just want to read about Trump’s hand in money laundering, corruption and connections with Russia go to chapter 15. If this is your first big dive into reading about Putin, I would suggest keeping a note pad to write the names, scandals and connections to keep it all straight. My big take away is how much the Mueller investigation missed or more likely chose not to explore. 

There is a waiting list at the library.