Public Comment

I watched a nearly empty San Francisco bound train go by before boarding Lake Merritt BART at 8:01 Monday to report for jury duty. According to BART reports ridership has increased (incrementally), but comparing the present to pre-pandemic ridership, it has basically fallen off a cliff. Even on the best day of the week, Tuesday, ridership reaches a high of 40% of pre-pandemic. Monday is the lowest at 35%.

This was only my second time on BART since COVID hit our shores and the first ride during commute hours.

The Water Emergency Transportation Authority (WETA) board meets this week, and as with every monthly meeting there are charts comparing WETA ridership with CalTrain and BART, showing where each is in recovering to pre-pandemic levels. WETA is doing the best at near 80%, but looking deeper into utilization, systemwide at the very best hour of the morning, at 80% recovery the highest ridership is 31% of capacity. In the evening it is 36%. All of this means that most of the time the 307,603 gallons of fuel (October 2022 usage) is used to take near-empty ferries back and forth across the bay. (ridership reports are on pages 17 – 20 https://weta.sanfranciscobayferry.com/sites/default/files/weta-public/currentmeeting/b120822aFULL.pdf )

You may ask why does this matter? It is because the City of Berkeley contracted with consultants for $1,100,000 for a plan for the Berkeley Marina to make the Marina a booming income generating enterprise zone with a new pier and ferry. And all this is based on a thriving utilization of ferries to and from San Francisco, bolstered by morning and evening commuters.

When the pandemic hit and everyone who could work from home was sent home, the initial reaction was something like “What? you expect me to work from home? I can’t possibly work from home!” And then once adjustment set in, it is, “What, you want me to return to the office? I can’t possibly go back to the office, at least not every day.” Commuter car traffic still seems to be pretty heavy, but on the few days, I’ve actually had to drive in it, it is not as bad as it used to be.

I think it is time to rearrange our thinking on expecting offices full of workers. Scanning business articles, a 50% return to the office seems to be the national average. This has wide ranging implications.  

I am all for a smaller footprint, a smaller impact on the environment and climate, and working remotely can certainly help. The next four to six months should be very telling on how much we need to rearrange our thinking. Whatever changes do or don’t appear, we need to plan for a different future than just expecting to replicate how we lived prior to March 2020. 

As for jury duty, we were given a screening questionnaire for a criminal case. I got the call Friday that I didn’t need to return. No surprise. I had so many “yes” answers and explanations to complete on the questionnaire, I was the last one out of the room. 

At Monday’s Berkeley City Council Agenda Committee meeting, Councilmember Ben Bartlett’s item on regulating miniature bottles of alcohol was forwarded to the Health Commission, and his item on creating a Berkeley song and flag was forwarded to the Civic Arts Commission. Councilmember Terry Taplin’s item on hiring consultants for creating a plan for dedicated bus lanes and elevated platforms on University Avenue was referred to the Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment and Sustainability (FITES) Committee. I asked that all of these road diets and modifications on emergencby access and evacuation routes be looked at in total, not one street at a time.  

My walk partner and I were in the last mile of our 5 mile walk when a fire truck came screaming down Monterey and turned onto Hopkins. She reminded us that Hopkins is one of those emergency routes about to be narrowed.  

At the City Council meeting on Tuesday Jim O’Fell (spelling from captioner’s record) commented on the lack of engagement by City staff with the public on plans for the Hopkins corridor. There has been no response to questions regarding whether the plan had been reviewed by the Fire Department and Department of Emergency Services. Also, people on Talbot, blocks away from Hopkins, were asked about parking, but not neighbors on Alvina, a half block from Hopkins, that would bear the brunt of the removal of parking.  

Berkeley has a new Fire Chief, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on a fire chief standing up to a team of consultants, the council, city planners and bicycle activists bent on road diets, turning emergency access and evacuation routes into single lane roads as is the current fashion. But while we’re waiting, we might want to watch this video about the impacts of road diets on public safety, and possibly Chief Sprague could use it in showing what happens with road diets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PamppHOHTs 

Council returns to hybrid meetings with the option to attend in-person or virtually via zoom on December 6. This is just as RSV, Flu and COVID are surging in California. Do not follow the announcement Friday evening on KRON 10 pm news that surgical masks are just as effective as N95 (or KN95). Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm ripped that study to shreds in his Thursday podcast. He said surgical masks offer little protection and it is fine to reuse your N95 until it is visibly dirty or no longer holds a seal (men with beards cannot maintain a seal). Osterholm also said get your vaccines and boosters, and if you contract COVID do your best to get access to Paxlovid ASAP. Per Johns Hopkins data 12/3/2022 in the U.S. the daily average of deaths from COVID is 305. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/podcasts-webinars/episode-119 

The last item on the council agenda was the reconfiguration of Adeline at BART and Ed Roberts Campus. Machai Freeman, Mary-Lee Smith and others spoke to the problems of access for persons with disabilities, with road diets and street reconfigurations on Milvia as an example of the worst design for disabled persons in wheelchairs.  

The reconfiguration of Milvia with its bicycle lanes and curbs is often touted as a huge success. A picture of Farid Javandel, Transportation Division Manager, on his bicycle riding down Milvia even made a frontpage splash on the local print paper. 

Parking didn’t get much attention except in relation to disabled persons at the Ed Roberts campus. It did not come up for how the flea market vendors will get their goods to the locations on the plaza. I guess the assumption has been made that this topic is covered, but I am not sure how it all will work.  

Councilmember Hahn was full of ideas for the plaza, like chess boards as seen at Washington Square in Manhattan and bocchi ball like in Spain, France and Portugal. No one needs to go to Manhattan to see people playing chess outside. A trip to the front of the old Cody’s bookstore on Telegraph will do the same.  

An actual plan for the housing project at Ashby BART is several years away. A statement was added to the motion by Councilmember Harrison to “developing preliminary engineering concepts ensuring universal design and access for the public.” The council voted for configuration 2 with a 60 foot wide plaza that will extend to the retail frontage. (page 9 https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2022-11-29%20Item%2015%20Adeline%20Street%20at%20Ashby%20BART.pdf)  

The presentations and discussion of lighting and restroom improvements at Ohlone Park were refreshing. The plan is not yet finalized, with public comment open until January 2, 2023 You can send your comments to echan@cityofBerkeley.info and srutherford@cityofberkeley.info. When you go to the city webpage, scroll to past events and pick the 3rd document in the list, the presentation. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/our-work/capital-projects/ohlone-park-restroom-and-lighting-improvements 

The Romtec restroom received the most votes by attendees and A and D were the top restroom site choices, but that was before we heard from the neighbor at site D. There were requests for night lighting on the volleyball court and multiple attendees requested directed, shielded down lighting below tree canopy for pathways. Concerns were raised about the impact of night light.  

It was an ugly Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) meeting on Thursday evening and it may well be repeated on Wednesday, December 7, at the Civic Arts Commission at 6 pm.  

It is now 30 years since Berkeley renamed Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day and when the idea of changing the defunct Civic Center Fountain into a space for dedication to the indigenous people of this area, the Lisjan/Ohlone. 

Lee Sprague and Marlene Watson, both of whom are indigenous people, were the original design team in 1992. The project stalled for over two decades when a community group of supporters and local indigenous people came together around 2018 picking it back up, raising money and developing a design that would fit within the confines of the existing fountain structures, incorporating the bronze turtles created for the project which are now in City Hall and the eight indigenous peoples’ medallions. https://turtleislandfountain.org/ 

City staff stepped in this year, tracked down Lee Sprague and Marelene Watson, hired PGA as consultants, threw out previous designs including the most recent and started over and this is where the evening at LPC began its descent.  

After the new design was presented, I asked where the representatives of the Lisjan/Ohlone we are accustomed to seeing and hearing from were. Scott Ferris Director of Parks, Recreation and Waterfront said “we chose not to bring them, ” implying that it would be too chaotic. Lee Sprague and Marlene Watson (neither of whom are Lisjan/Ohlone), while the original designers, are not local, and we have been hearing how the local indigenous people have been shut out of meetings in creating the public art to honor their history.  

Beyond the questions and comments from the Landmarks Preservation Commissioners requesting a water feature, expressing the difficulty as an outsider of determining who is representative of the indigenous community and being asked to be a juror and not a commissioner, the design itself appears to be fraught with problems. And that is beside the fact that the newest Sprague and Watson design would conflict with the historical designation. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2022-12-01_LPC_Item%205_Turtle%20Island.pdf 

The new design comes with no budget estimate. It features a 12 foot snapping turtle on top of a circular slab of polished granite that sits on top of the fountain (top level of the fountain removed) and glass tile work at the base to simulate water. To me it did not appear that this design would actually work especially the large slap of granite.  

I found an online calculator https://stoneyard.com/calculators/stone-slab-weight/ just to get a gross estimate of what a slap of granite would weigh to sit on top of the fountain with a 12 foot bronze turtle on top. A circular slab of granite 14 feet in diameter and two feet thick would weigh 64,680 lbs or 32.34 tons. Slimming it down to 13 feet by 1 foot thick would be 27,885 lbs or 13.9425 tons. I heard today at CCCC there is not solid ground under the fountain so weight is even more of a problem. 

One additional problem (I am sure there are others) Snapping Turtles are not native to California, are illegal in California and the California Fish & Game regulations specifically forbid possession or release of any genus or species of snapping turtle. So, the centerpiece, the snapping turtle is a predator of local wildlife. Maybe Sprague, Watson, PGA and the City have an explanation as to why they chose an invasive predatory species to honor the Ohlone. Is there another message here, maybe the genocide of the indigenous people and the theft of their land or am I reading too much into the symbolism? 

If we are really going to honor the Lisjan/Ohlone a more meaningful action than land acknowledgements recited at City meetings would be giving our indigenous people prominent space in the Maudelle Shirek Building instead of building new offices for city council and staff. 

I skipped the Monday Sugar Sweetened Beverage subcommittee meeting and Tuesday morning Civic Arts Commission Policy Subcommittee meeting. I couldn’t attend the Zero Waste Commission and Community Health Commission meetings as they ran the same time as City Council. I attended the 4 x 4 Joint Task Force Committee on Housing only long enough to raise the concern that minutes were not posted in a timely manner. I attended the Environment and Climate Commission long enough to learn that the subcommittee on Native Plants and Pesticide Reduction had not met, but I was encouraged by the remarks on native plants from Shannon Allen who has left City of Berkeley employment. The Thursday morning Land Use Committee meeting was cancelled.  

I can’t say exactly where I heard of Kelly Weill’s book Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture and Why People Believe Anything, but it seemed like a perfect selection for these times when conspiracies appear to have consumed seemingly well-educated people we thought to be normal and most days it feels like half the country, at least half of those who voted, live in a different universe.  

Weill, a journalist for the Daily Beast, wrote she started looking at the Flat Earth website in 2017 whenever the days news felt too crazy, and checking in on the Flat Earth movement gave a sense of normalcy.  

2017 was, of course, at the beginning of Trump’s presidency, before COVID and the U.S. and the world slid into embracing bizarre conspiracies, fortified by social media: before we were surrounded by anti-vaxxers claiming COVID vaccines were injecting micro-chips to track us (a smart phone and google do that).  

Pizzagate started in 2016 with the hacking of John Podesta’s email account and the claim that Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria pizza orders in the emails were really code for human trafficking and a child sex ring. This conspiracy was merged into QAnon, and we saw those believers joining the Oathkeepers and Proud Boys in the attempted coup on January 6th, 2021. Weill reported that 97 QAnon supporters ran for Congress in 2020.  

After hearing that over one hundred legislators that voted to overturn the election of President Biden in the evening after the January 6 attack on the capital were re-elected in November 2022, I looked for an article that gave the actual results. When I couldn’t find one, I pulled up the list and went through them one by one. Of the eight senators, only John Neely Kennedy from Louisiana was up for re-election. He won with 61.6% of the vote against twelve other candidates. The other seven senators are up for re-election in 2024 and 2026.  

In the House of Representatives, one hundred thirty-nine voted against certifying the election of President Biden. Only two of the 139 were defeated by Democrats. Yvette Herrell lost to Gabriel Vasquez in New Mexico and Steve Chabot lost to Greg Landsman in Ohio. Of the remaining 137, five ran for other offices, four were defeated in the primary, four did not run for re-election and three died, leaving 121 who voted to overturn the election and were re-elected in November 2022. Of that 121 eight ran unopposed.  

If you are feeling at all secure that there was no Republican sweep, we still lost the House and are barely hanging on to the Senate. We have work ahead if we want to maintain a democracy, and we would do well to understand how people are sucked into conspiracies. Kelly Weill found many fell into flat earth through YouTube algorithms. And the more they were questioned, rejected, unfriended, the more they with dug in reaching for reinforcement within in their group. (Sound familiar?). And one more thing, the deeper the flat earthers were into one conspiracy, the easier it became to reach to other conspiracies.