Public Comment
A Berkeley Activist's Diary, Week ending October 30
This may seem out of order, starting out my Activist’s Diary with a book review, but as you keep reading you will see how it all pulls together with this last week’s meetings.
Our book club choice for October/November was A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds, by Scott Weidensaul, published in 2021.
Even though I have been pleading for many months for dark skies, bird safe glass and native plants at the Design Review Committee and the Zoning Adjustment Board, and for the Planning Commission to approve the Bird Safe ordinance with the latest science, my appreciation of the importance of these actions is so much deeper after reading A World on the Wing.
In the chapter entitled Big Data, we learn how miniature GPS tracking devices, so tiny they can be put on the backs of even little songbirds, have changed what we know about migration, habitat stopovers, winter and nesting locations and how many miles birds travel without stopping. Because of one of those GPS devices on the back of a juvenile (5-month old) bar-tailed godwit, known only by its satellite tag 234684, there is a new record flight. This little bird, around 10 ounces, flew without stopping from Alaska to north-east Tasmania, 8,435 miles in 11 days and one hour.
Migratory feats that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years feel like nothing less than a miracle.
As mentioned in previous Diaries, nearly 3 billion birds, 30% of the birds in North America, have disappeared since 1970. It is not just North America. Just published in September 2022 in the fifth edition of BirdLife’s “State of the World’s Birds,” nearly half of all bird species are in decline worldwide, with one in eight at risk of extinction. https://www.birdlife.org/papers-reports/state-of-the-worlds-birds-2022/ This includes common birds like sparrows. An exception are wild geese like those invading Lake Merritt. This species is expanding. Maybe cities and meat-eating readers ought to consider a wild goose for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner instead of turkey. It would save farmland.
The scientific report about loss of birds published September 19, 2019, would not have been possible without decades of data of annual bird counts. There are two online programs that add to our knowledge of bird migration, habitat, stopovers and survival: eBird https://ebird.org/about managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology which collects data/information submitted by citizen birders on birds seen and heard worldwide and birdcast https://birdcast.info/migration-tools/local-migration-alerts/ which uses radar to track bird migration live.
In the chapter on climate, Weidensaul calls it climate weirding, as some locations in migration are heating up faster and others have unexpected cold. Climate change puts the timing of the migration of thousands of miles to arrive, mate, nest and when baby birds hatch out of sync with when insects (caterpillars, their primary source of food) emerge.
Climate change does much more than change the timing of the arrival seasons. Sea level rise washes away coastal habitat and drought dries up inland wetlands. Even the global wind patterns which migrating birds use to ease their flight are weirding. Take a look at the path of the polar jet stream from the Sunday Chronicle weather map.
Through new study made possible by those tiny GPS devices, ornithologists are able to track the impact of deterioration in wintering habitat, carrying over into birds unable to build the fat stores and muscle to survive migration, reduced clutches in nesting habitat and poorer chick survival. Douglas Tallamy in his study of resident birds (birds that do not migrate) found that areas that have replaced native trees and plants with non-native plant species (ornamental plants and trees) have smaller chicks and poorer chick survival.
Even though the negative impact of urban light was noted in the 1800s, it was those miniature GPS devices that demonstrated how artificial night light lures birds away from higher quality habitat to cities where urban parks are overrun with exotic invasive plants of limited value to birds. Young birds in their first migration are especially vulnerable to light pollution, and are drawn to urban areas to rest and refuel, only to find useless ornamental plants devoid of insects. A lesson here from A World on the Wing is that restoring habitat in a fairly small urban park may be more important than a larger tract of land in some more distant location.
The authors of Berkeley’s Housing Element Update Draft Environmental Impact Report (HEU DEIR) that closed for comment on October 17, 2022 reasoned that the abundance of ornamental, exotic and invasive non-native plants and non-native trees in Berkeley that are unsuitable habitat would make further development, adding 19,098 units with 47,433 new residents, insignificant. In other words, since we have already destroyed so much of the landscape, further destruction from developments carries little impact.
The conclusion from the HEU DEIR is the opposite to the thinking and planning that I heard from Dr. Ann Riley in her presentation to the Community for a Cultural Civic Center group. I listed Riley, expert in urban creek restoration, daylighting urban creeks, as my “go to meeting” of the week. And, she did not disappoint.
Riley spoke about how daylighting creeks has proven over and over to be a significant economic benefit to business and city centers, as people are drawn to open streams, nature and wildlife habitat.
If you have never heard the term “daylighting creeks”, this is the process for restoring a creek to its natural state, above ground, open to daytime light, hence the term daylighting. That is, instead of diverting creeks into underground culverts. When undergrounded creek culverts fail, disintegrate and collapse, that can result in sink holes and flooding.
Riley showed picture after picture of the transformation from undergrounded culverted creeks to open streams and parks. Strawberry Creek, in Strawberry Creek Park, was one of the first projects of taking down a culvert and restoring a creek to daylight.
Most amazing is that there are grants to daylight creeks, and the Coastal Conservancy has money available for projects like daylighting Strawberry Creek in Civic Center Park.
Daylighting urban creeks really got its start in 1983 in the California Assembly when Tom Bates authored the urban creeks legislation (Bates was a representative to the California Assembly before becoming Berkeley mayor). The first attempt failed when Governor Deukmejian (R) vetoed it. The bill was brought back in 1984 with the Republican legislator Eric Seastrand as the author and Bates as co-author.
Riley describes it this way in her book:
“The Urban Creeks Restoration and Flood Control Act of 1984 acquired political legs because it recognized that restoration projects were a new, multi-objective strategy to address common urban stream erosion and flood hazards with practical but environmentally friendly solutions.”
It was also got legs because the revived bill placed a Republican name prominently in the author list. That got it by the Republican governor. The grants from the Urban Creeks Act continue to be awarded to this day.
The idea of daylighting the creek is not in the plan from the the consultants the City of Berkeley hired. The Gehl firm was tasked to create a plan for the Civic Center to restore and stabilize the Maudelle Shirek (Old City Hall) and Veterans Buildings and redo the Civic Center Park. Their concept was a promenade across the center of the park either north to south between the Veterans Building and Berkeley High or east to west from city offices at 2180 Milvia to the Maudelle Shirek Building. The Gehl park plan for Berkeley is a smaller version of the San Francisco City Hall park, a park with lots of gravel which seems to be more of an attraction for the homeless and protests than a place to go to relax and refresh.
The Gehl plan, from the time I first saw it, conjured up a vision of councilmembers and city administrators parading across the park marking their importance on the promenade.
Contrast that with Strawberry Creek Park. The Strawberry Creek Park is just lovely, a well-used treasure that neighbors in large numbers spoke about at the redistricting meetings last spring.
I was open to the idea of daylighting Strawberry Creek in Civic Center Park before hearing Riley’s presentation. Now that I have a better understanding of the importance of restoring habitat in cities and urban parks and how daylighting creeks benefits the well-being of all of us including nature and local businesses, daylighting Strawberry Creek in the Civic Center Park has moved up to the top of the list of important actions.
This presentation would never have happened without the work of Erin Diehm, who put this program together. It is because of Diehm and her depth of knowledge of ecosystems and habitat that we are even having this discussion. Diehm’s work gave us pollinator gardens in our parks.
Diehm also sent the link to Birdcast last Fall so we could track how many migrating birds were flying over Berkeley. Berkeley is on the Pacific Flyway, the flight path birds take from northern nesting areas to wintering sites in Central and South America.
When I hear about turning parks into entertainment centers, I wonder why we aren’t taking a broader look at our city center. We close down Shattuck for events. Why are we not looking at making better use of the BART Plaza and the Shattuck street scape?
And why are we not looking at corridors connecting habitat across the city? Is cement and lot line to lot line building the only answer for the future, which is the picture painted in the Revised Housing Element Update (RHEU)? Even the old 2012 Downtown Area Plan includes environmental sustainability “nature in the city” (pdf page 45) and that was written before the recent research covered in The World on a Wing which tells us parks with native plant habitat are important to bird survival.
The Revised Housing Element Update (RHEU) stand, that since we have already destroyed so much landscape, we should just finish it off, isn’t the only misstep. The authors of the RHEU, in their declaration that utilities are adequate for the projected growth, seem to have missed Berkeley Architectural Heritage President Leila Moncharsh’s review of infrastructure, that Berkeley still has hollowed out redwood tree trunks in parts of the city as sewer lines. Leave it to the historians to know what lies in the ground below.
Wastewater processing for the projected growth was also declared to be adequate. That ignores the 2014 consent decree with the EPA and the violations of sewage release of waste overflow in 2017 and, the harmful algae bloom of Heterosigma akashiwo in August 2022 with a huge die-off of thousands of fish in the Bay and Lake Merritt. The algae bloom of Heterosigma akashiwo was possible through the confluence of warming bay water and nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) released from water processing plants. EBMUD was one of the top two named culprits in the October 24, 2022 webinar by Baykeeper and Speaking Up for Point Molate on the algae bloom and causes. Water processing plants need upgrading now to prevent another similar algae bloom in the future.
There is another section in the RHEU that Moncharsh did not cover in her October 26, 2022, letter posted in the Berkeley Daily Planet: Water!
What caught my attention was the Infrastructure Constraints 4.2.1 on document pages 89 & 90 (pdf pages 90 & 91):
“EBMUD’s water supplies are estimated to be sufficient during the planning period (2010-2040) in normal and single dry years.”
Which raises this question: Is no one aware that we are in a multiple year drought? And, has no one looked at the drought map? It is pretty bleak. https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/ The RHEU provided the simple answer, during multi-year drough water will be rationed.
If we really think that the Housing Element is a planning tool instead of just an exercise to fulfill a state mandate, and we really think that significant population growth is in our future, then we need to step back and consider what that means. How do we need to change to absorb 47,433 more people? One question might be, when do we stop flushing our toilets with drinkable water? Is the answer when the faucet goes dry? Or, do we change how we construct new buildings and remodel old?
As for new construction and remodeling, updating the fire code will be on the City Council November 15, 2022 agenda. The last time when legislation requiring sprinkler systems in new construction and remodels of over $100,000 in the high fire hazard zones came before the Berkeleu City Council, the building and real estate industry ran to the podium to protest and got their way in defeating it. I’ll be watching to see what happens this time with a new Fire Department Chief.
I missed the Zero Waste Commission, opting instead to attend Speaking Up for Point Molate on the algae bloom. This was the week that the New York Times reported that only 5% of plastic is actually recycled.
I did attend the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission. Two issues came up that have been repeated in multiple meetings: Why are commissioners not notified when commission items finally reach the council agenda? (This problem is common to nearly all the commissions) And, why are reports not part of the minutes? Kim Chin said the City Clerk’s office notified him that minutes should be action only. Chin said that minutes are saved by the city, but staff reports and agendas are kept for only eight years.
Discarding reports and agendas after eight years erases history that that used to be at our fingertips with the old website. This makes one more loss for transparency.
The redesign for Telegraph Avenue Dwight to Woolsey from one side to the other is: curb – bike lane – parking – traffic lane – traffic lane – parking – bike lane - curb. The questions are what to do about right turns and left turns.
Remember Cooper (the birder) versus Cooper (the dog owner) in Central Park? Christian Cooper, the birder, wrote the book review for A World on the Wing for the New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/books/review/a-world-on-the-wing-scott-weidensaul.html A World on the Wing is available in print, ebook and audiobook from our local library.
