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A BERKELEY ACTIVIST'S DIARY, Week Ending 2/26

Kelly Hammargren
Monday February 27, 2023 - 07:03:00 PM

It seems like every time I sit down to finish my Activist’s Diary something new drops.

Now I find myself two weeks behind with public participation in city meetings on the chopping block, and the most important action for the coming week to make public voices loud enough that council backs off voting to limit public comment in city meetings. I don’t know how this vote will go.

If a council majority votes for the Droste proposal ( “Reforms to Public Comment Procedures at meetings of the Berkeley City Council”) or a council majority votes for the Robinson Supplemental (alternative) co-sponsored by Councilmember Wengraf, then we need to get serious about recalls.

Until then, email council@cityofberkeley.info and cc clerk@cityofberkeley.info with “Do not put public comment and public participation on the chopping block. Vote no on Item 19 February 28 on the Droste and Robinson Supplemental.” And turn on your computer/device to track the meeting if you don’t wish to attend at the BUSD Board Room in person. (see The Activist’s Calendar for links) 

The Robinson-Wengraf alternative lets members of the public comment twice, once at the beginning of the Consent Calendar and once at the beginning of the Action Calendar. The Droste measure plan allows comments just once for the entire meeting, and it proposes exploring limiting the number of people who can speak at all. Robinson offers a third time to comment, which is meaningless as it is just before council adjourns, after all the business of the evening is done and all the votes are taken. 

There are three exceptions in the Robinson-Wengraf proposal recognizing when the public is required to be allowed to speak on individual items: public hearings, appeals and quasi-judicial (court like) proceedings. 

What Robinson misses in his promotional statements is how we got to action items being discussed by council before asking for public comment, and then following public comment with completing council discussion, forming motions and voting. 

It wasn’t always this way. The public pushed to have comment after council discussion of each action item, so comments were appropriate to what was being considered, which quite often diverges from what was published in the agenda prior to the meeting. Commenting on Action Items once at the beginning, or even once before discussion has started, means that public comment is frequently off the mark of what is being considered. 

Robinson avoids addressing the problem of council itself by blaming the public. 

The public is not the culprit when it comes to windy pontificating statements. Each member of the public is restricted to two minutes to comment except when a bunch of us show up for items of great public interest Then the time for each speaker is cut to one minute. 

It is not the public who chooses to put controversial items at the bottom of the agenda so the mayor and council could do a back-and-forth council ping-pong with endless chatter to run out the evening and drive members of the public away so they aren’t present when that last hotly contested vote comes to the floor. 

It is not the public who puts together too many complicated items on the agenda and then waits until late in the evening to start rescheduling. It is not the public who schedules ceremonial matters during what is really a city business meeting instead of setting a separate time for them as many cities do. 

The second most important action is supporting the 100 -100 -100 model bird safe ordinance. The model ordinance is 100% of new buildings, 100% bird-friendly materials in the first 100 feet from the ground up. https://abcbirds.org/glass-collisions/bird-friendly-legislation/ 

Glen Philips, Director of the San Francisco Audubon Society will speak Monday night, February 27 at the Sierra Club on Zoom on the Berkeley Bird Safe Ordinance, and Wednesday is the public hearing on the Bird Safe Ordinance at the Planning Commission at the South Berkeley Senior Center. This is the commission’s first in-person-only meeting since the pandemic shutdown in March 2020. 

Sierra Club Agenda and Zoom Link https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q0qzddOp6nZA0MCnYep0tOJi8gX9Fzum/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=115206363740255337859&rtpof=true&sd=true 

This is a big deal. Developers do not implement bird safe glass and bird-friendly design without public pressure and strong ordinances. A strong ordinance from Berkeley using the latest science has enormous reach. Berkeley was the first city to implement the natural gas ban in new construction, and that initial action is spreading across the country. We can do the same if we chose science and not the watered-down staff proposal for the Bird Safe Ordinance. The Audubon bumper sticker is “Protect Birds & We Protect the Earth” and from this corner “Protect the Birds and We Protect Ourselves and Future Generations.” 

On Wednesday as I walked up Shattuck toward the former entrance to the Shattuck Cinemas, someone had chalked “devil-elopers.” I’m not sure how long it had been there. It was starting to fade, but as I noted in the February 5 Activist’s Diary, the appeal of the 2065 Kittredge (demolishes the Shattuck Cinemas) mixed-use project centered on safe working conditions, health care coverage, apprenticeships programs, hiring local and union workers and the protections of the Hard Hat Ordinance. 

The Mayor passed over the worker issues in his amendment to the project approval, to require only an affidavit (report) when the project is completed as to how many union and local workers within ten miles worked at the job site. The “devil-elopers” would be assumed to be Bill Schrader and CA Student Living Berkeley, LLC, now the property owner, which is Student Living – CA Ventures, an international investor, but named underneath “devil-elopers” were City Council members. 

Understanding naming the city electeds in the chalking may be a little better understood by watching Mayor Arreguin promoting the Hard Hat Ordinance as a fait accompli in the Facebook post saying “we have your back.” Arreguin stated at the end that the ordinance was to be passed “this month” (September 2022). https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=800724751065220 

The only problem was that the Hard Hat Ordinance was not actually passed as a city law on September 20, 2022. It was instead a referral to the City Attorney and City Manager to develop an ordinance where it has languished for five months and counting. 

There is another Droste proposal lurking in the draft council agenda for March 14. That is the proposal to limit legislation to one item per councilmember and two items for the mayor. It is called “Bureaucratic Effectiveness and Referral Improvement and Prioritization Effort (BE RIPE).” At the last Agenda Committee, Hahn told Arreguin and Wengraf she was working on an alternate proposal with the City Manager and she just needed a little more time. Hahn suggested that Droste’s measure be forwarded to the full council and then referred back to the Agenda Committee. 

Limiting the number of pieces of legislation is done under the umbrella of lightening the load of the City Manager and staff. As a close observer of city meetings, the real way to lighten the load is not to send half-baked ideas to the city manager as a referral in the first place. 

I truly appreciate how my councilmember Harrison works. She reaches out to the community, industries, unions, experts as she develops legislation. She seeks input from committees and commissions and works with the city attorney. Sometimes it takes months, sometimes it takes years, but when it finally comes for a council vote (and even that can be a major endeavor to get it passed) it is ready. That’s how we got the natural gas ban, that’s how we got the Fair Work Week. 

That is how to lighten the load, unless the motive for all those referrals is to look like you’re addressing many important issues, when all that is really accomplished is dropping another item on someone’s to-do list. 

As an aside on that natural gas ban, there is another natural gas hike coming. It was all that community organizing work that resulted in an electrification fair and the reason why my PG&E bill isn’t skyrocketing. I took it all to heart, went all electric and got rid of the natural gas. 

We might consider ourselves lucky looking at the October 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake with its 4000 landslides and collapsed buildings, freeway and Bay Bridge, in comparison to what is unfolding in Turkey and Syria with the M7.8 earthquake followed with an aftershock that was bigger than our M6.9. 

It is hard to grasp the force of an earthquake that was over thirty times stronger than the Loma Prieta. Looking at the chasm that opened up wide enough to hold a football field and deep enough to absorb a thirteen-story building is quite a shock and that is exactly what was shown on the Thursday, February 16, 2023 on the PBS Newshour. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/turkeys-president-faces-scrutiny-after-earthquake-for-construction-standards 

Why is climate, the environment, earthquakes and housing even worth mentioning when it comes to local government, City of Berkeley actions and that race for state senate? 

We are going to be dealing with the fallout of Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) of adding 8,934 new housing units for a very long time. When all but a pittance of those new developments include affordable housing units, Berkeley will miss the affordability thresholds and roll into Builders Remedy. That gives the developers a lot of free rein (or free reign, as in “sway of a ruler”). The student housing developers with international and national investors have set up camp to pave over Berkeley with mid and large size towers for students, and UC Berkeley feeds the industry with a reliable captive audience of expanding numbers of students. 

One would think that a state-rejected Housing Element would not be used as the basis for justifying a giveaway to developers and real estate investors, but that is exactly what happened at the February 14 City Council meeting and will be confirmed Tuesday evening with the second reading (ordinances require a second reading/vote). Kesarwani claimed that since the state-rejected housing element contained a sliding scale discount for developers it couldn’t be changed. 

I wrote on February 12 that this would be the first important vote by Arreguin after we learned that he filed his intent to run for California State Senate. Arreguin started off looking like he might do the right thing, and then as soon as Councilmember Kesarwani said she couldn’t vote for his motion supporting the Harrison Supplemental, Arreguin caved to Kesarwani and fell in line with a sliding scale discount for buildings with less that 12,000 square feet of residential living space (the calculation uses just the interior of the units). 12,000 square feet is a lot of units. 

Nothing happens in a hurry. Item-2 in the February 21, 2023 City Council worksession agenda titled “Referral Response: Affordable Housing Preference Policy for Rental Housing Created Through the Below Market Rate and Housing Trust Fund Programs” started with Councilmembers Davila and Bartlett on April 30, 2019. It was“Refer to the Planning Commission and Housing Advisory Commission to Research and Recommend Policies to Prevent Displacement and Gentrification of Berkeley Residents of Color and African Americans.” 

This is about establishing a policy for which households receive preference in the bid for the scarce affordable housing units. I can’t say after attending the February 21 City Council meeting that I have a clear picture of what will come back for a vote in the summer of 2023. We’ll just have to wait and of course those displaced families will have months to wait too. It is one more way Berkeley turns into a different kind of city with a different action, not what is seen to be espoused by council members pontificating about their great concerns for displaced families and loss of diversity in the city. 

All that concern didn’t result in higher in-lieu mitigation fees from the national and international investors. The action should have put more money in the housing trust fund for affordable units. Nor has all that concern resulted in the use of the Palmer fix state legislation to require inclusionary affordable housing. 

The Harrison Supplemental lost. Kesarwani won as did the national and international investors on the backs of Arreguin, Hahn, Taplin, Humbert, Kesarwani, Robinson, and Wengraf. 

Harrison voted no and Councilmember Bartlett abstained. 

In March 2020 as I walked with my swim partner for our last hour in the lap pool before the COVID shutdown, I had done some calculations and said we could see as many as 1.2 million people die from COVID. It sounded crazy at the time, but it looks like I underestimated. Sadly, we’ve reached 1,119,544 deaths from COVID-19. 

Governor Newsom has declared the COVID emergency ends February 28. President Biden set the date as May 11. 

On March 1, 2023, with the declared California COVID-19 over, city commission meetings will return to in-person. City Council will continue as hybrid, giving a choice to attendees of in-person or ZOOM. 

As for COVID, it is not over for anyone with underlying health risks, long COVID or older than 65. 

I will not be giving up my N95 mask when going inside businesses and city meetings or in crowded outdoor spaces.