Public Comment

A Berkeley Activist's Diary, Week Ending November 6, 2022

Kelly Hammargren
Monday November 07, 2022 - 01:37:00 PM

I play Wordle in the New York Times every day. It is a word game with six chances to guess the five letter word of the day. By my second try I had four of the five letters R-E-A-D. The answer was DREAM which I got on my fourth try. My third try was DREAD which tells you everything you need to know about how I feel about the election. I am worried.

The big news of the week is the filibuster by Councilmembers Wengraf and Droste with help from Councilmembers Taplin and Kesarwani and the maneuver by LaTanya Bellow, Deputy City Manager and Dee Williams-Ridley, City Manager to block passing the Fair Work Week Ordinance. 

The City Council discussion of the Fair Work Week Ordinance started at 8:43 pm Thursday evening (council was on Thursday instead of the usual Tuesday) with Labor Commissioner Andy Katz describing the labor protections in the ordinance, saying that the protections are for low wage workers. After Katz, the floor was turned over to Vice Mayor Kate Harrison who added detail and described the process of developing the Fair Work Week Ordinance, which started on May 15, 2018. 

The four key features of the Fair Work Week Ordinance, designed to provide more stability to low wage workers, are: 1) At least 14 days advance notice of work schedules in writing, 2) Predictability Pay (Cancellation pay): if a shift is changed, reduced or cancelled with 24 hour notice or greater the predictability pay would be one hour of pay. If the reduced hours or cancellation notice is less than 24 hours prior the predictability pay would be 4 hours of pay or the scheduled hours of work whichever is less 3) Additional hours would be offered to existing qualified workers before hiring new employees or using staffing agencies, and 4) Right to rest, the right to decline work hours that occur less than 11 hours after the end of the previous shift.  

Mayor Arreguin was quite wound up when he took the floor emphasizing that he was voting for the Fair Work Week and wanted to see it passed, saying “I believe this is really essential to show respect and to provide more rights to our essential workers in Berkeley” and then went through grammatical and clarifying corrections, one of which exempted Life Long Medical Care. 

It was then turned over to Councilmember Wengraf who wanted “an analysis of the fiscal impacts on the City of Berkeley of implementing this ordinance and I don’t see a report.” And this is where the filibuster started, with this batting back and forth, with Wengraf and Droste about not knowing the cost to the City of Berkeley and they couldn’t possibly vote for it without knowing the cost, and City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley saying she didn’t know that number, and LaTanya Bellow stating she needed more time for that data. 

(Williams-Ridley and Bellow had already been given an extension on October 11, 2022 to collect this data.) 

This went on without public comment even starting until 10:36 pm, when Hahn made a motion to extend the meeting until midnight and then backed off midnight and made the motion for 11:45 pm. The vote to extend was unanimous. 

Hahn was the last to speak before public comment and pointed out the contrast: When raises were given the to the City’s highest paid employees, the impact on the budget was never questioned and there was never the kind of “handwringing” that was going on over the cost of benefits to the lowest paid City of Berkeley workers. 

Public speakers emphasized the bias, the number of years this had been in process and the workers needing protection. Swati Rayasam asked that the exemption for Life Long Medical be removed and spoke movingly about the undue burden on healthcare workers and the oppression of the lowest paid workers. 

The most recent salary post I could find for LaTanya Bellow is $310,150 and for Dee Williams-Ridley $386,160. Williams-Ridley was awarded a 28% raise of $84,732 additional in November 2021. Keep that in mind when considering the Thursday evening action’s impact on City of Berkeley employees and other workers in Berkeley earning less than twice the minimum wage. 

Using the current Berkeley minimum wage of $16.99, the Fair Work Week Ordinance would benefit workers earning under $33.98 per hour or $70,684.40 per year. That is less money than the generous $84,732 raise for Williams-Ridley, which made her salary greater than that of the City Manager of San Jose, a city of nearly 180 square miles and over 1 million people. 

(Berkeley is 10.5 square miles with a population of 124,000). 

The salary survey completed for that $84,732 raise actually demonstrated that the Berkeley city manager’s then existing salary of $301,428 was in line or possibly just a little bit high when compared to bay area cities of similar population and size. 

Debate continued with the main motion to pass the Fair Work Week Ordinance with the final amendments and Life Long Medical back in. At about 11:43 Arreguin asked the clerk if the extension was to 11:45 pm or midnight. The clerk stated 11:45. Arreguin called for a vote to extend the meeting. Taplin, Droste, Wengraf and Kesarwani all voted No. The vote to extend failed. Six yes votes were needed. Arreguin called for a vote on the Fair Work Work ordinance, but the clock had ticked past 11:45 pm and the meeting was declared over by the clerk, the parliamentarian. 

The Fair Work Week ordinance died. 

Kesarwani stated earlier in the evening that she would vote for the Fair Work Week Ordinance, but by joining with Droste, Wengraf, and Taplin to vote against extending the meeting for a vote on the ordinance, she killed the Fair Work Week Ordinance. Harrison was in shock, saying, “I’ve been gobsmacked.” 

Sitting on the sidelines watching, I called it a filibuster. In my public comment at 11:15 pm. I also stated that as a former shift employee and a manager responsible for scheduling, this was not an impossible task. If the vote had been called in time before 11:45 pm, I counted five (Arreguin, Bartlett, Harrison, Hahn, Robinson) to pass it. 

Nothing earth shattering happened at the Monday Agenda committee. City Council will return to hybrid meetings December 6. The Boards and Commissions will return to in person. The City does not have enough equipment to conduct the board and commission meetings as hybrid, so those will return to in-person-only, after the COVID emergency ends on February 28th. 

I received a number of emails this week asking why items in the draft agenda from the City Manager (and city department directors, city manager deputies, etc.) are listed with “See Report” and then the page in the packet for the report states, “No Material Available for this Item.” My answer was it is always this way. City Administration reports are not available until the Council agenda is finalized and published ten days before the meeting. Access to financial reports for the Council Budget Committee is even worse. Early access to financial reports seems to be the day before and the usual practice is too often a posting on the morning of the meeting. 

All this is annoying, but certainly not as critical as the disastrous new city website which Wyndy J Hella KnoxCarrRuud described this way, “I absolutely agree about the new City of Berkeley website. The thing is absolutely opaque, "simplified" to the point of idiocy, with archival and other search options completely absent, unlinked to documentation and/or unusable. Dead ends everywhere, putting walls of cheery-looking nothing up in front of the public and our active participation in civic life. SO disappointing! Techno-privatization at its worst. Ugh. What more can I say?” KnoxCarrRudd has a Master of Library, Archives and Information Studies and certainly knows more than a thing or two about the importance of historical archives. 

The November 2, 2022 Planning Commission held discussion on zoning changes for the Southside Area and a local density bonus to compete with the state density bonus. No vote was held. This is all to create student housing and will come back for a hearing. There is a lot to absorb. 

f you have any thoughts either for or against increasing building height, lot coverage, reducing setbacks and removing building separations, the time to get involved is now. You can read the proposals and see the maps with this link. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/legislative-body-meeting-agendas/2022-11-02_PC%20Agenda%20Packet.pdf (starts on page 9) 

The density bonus suggestion is that since determining true student income status is so difficult to determine, shouldn’t there be an alternative to onsite affordable housing units so projects can qualify for a density bonus without being required to provide affordable housing units within the project? 

https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/legislative-body-meeting-agendas/2022-11-02_PC%20Agenda%20Packet.pdf (starts on page 669) 

It appears that the decision has been made: The Southside, the blocks south of UC Berkeley, is to be developed for student housing with six to twelve story residential buildings. And, as UC continues to increase student admissions will there be zoning “creep?” 

The Planning Commission vote on the Bird Safe Ordinance is now postponed to February or March 2023. The two ad hoc subcommittee members Christina Oates and Alfred Twu, along with Glenn Philips from Golden Gate Audubon, Erin Diehm and myself met with City staff Justin Horner on Friday. Juli Dickey, a birder, joined and listened to the discussion on the Bird Safe ordinance. I don’t know how this will turn out. Oates, Twu and Horner agreed that when the Bird Safe Ordinance comes back to the Planning Commission it should be in the final form ready for a vote. 

It doesn’t look like their will be another ad hoc committee meeting and this was our last chance for real discussion. Diehm and I gave our best pleas to keep Dark Skies as part of the ordinance. In talking about requirements or phasing in for small remodels or limited installation of replacement windows, Glenn Philips put the order of preference to bird safe glass the optimal choice with the alternative of bug screens as second and film on the outside of windows third. Any glass that is greater than 2” high and 4” wide is a hazard for birds, but of course the greater the amount of glass on a building and the size of the panes multiplies the danger. 

In the morning before the meeting, I was out walking with a friend talking about the bird safe ordinance, when I saw a house across the street from us in a major remodel. It had been raised to two stories and every single window was new. It probably had 40 to 50 new windows. I took my friend across the street as I talked about the bird safe features that could have been applied. The owner came out saying how they had followed all the building codes. I responded of course you did. It is not your fault. It is the city that failed to act. 

The Water Emergency Transportation Authority plans to add ferry service in Berkeley in 2027. The Board is optimistic ridership will return even though since the onset of the pandemic commuters have really never shown up as anything more than a small blip on the charts. Now that summer is over, total ridership is showing a downward slope. 

A few weeks ago, I wrote a brief review of Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice by David Enrich published this year in September. Enrich covered the Jones Days Law Firm and the revolving door with the Trump administration and stacking the courts. That lead me to his 2020 book Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump and an Epic Trail of Destruction

I was really hoping for an inside scoop on the relationship between Donald Trump and Justin Kennedy, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s son. The author did not furnish much in that answer only that the Trump Administration courted Justice Kennedy the Supreme Court swing vote to retire making an opening for Brett Kavanaugh the expected reliable pro-business, pro-Trump, culturally conservative vote. What the book does cover in great detail is the sordid story of how the insatiable hunger for ever bigger profits led to money laundering for Russian oligarchs, the rise of Rosemary Vrablic in the private banking division who arranged hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to Trump even after Trump sued Deutsche Bank to squeeze out of the loan repayment over the Chicago Trump Tower and the sad account of Val Broeksmit the son of Willian Broeksmit, Deutsche Bank executive who committed suicide in 2014. 

In Val’s journey to uncover why his father committed suicide, Val accessed his father’s email account and shared his late father’s internal bank documents with federal authorities and the media. 

Val was found dead at age 46 in Los Angeles April 25, 2022 (19 months after the publication of Dark Towers). No cause of death is listed for Val and conspiracies abound. Reported in the book, Val had a long history of drug abuse and addiction which frequently led to the media and federal authorities dismissing the treasure trove of Deutsche Bank documents in his possession through his father’s emails. Even Adam Schiff is described as being put off by Val’s appearance and ushering him out of his office without grasping the boatload of information Val was trying to offer.