Public Comment

After sitting through the November 28, 2023 City Council meeting on ZOOM from 6 pm until 11:55 pm and reading the string of emails complaining about Hopkins not being included in the 5-year paving plan, I drove the entire length of Hopkins before starting to write this December 3, 2023 Activist’s Diary. 

The five-year paving plan through FY 2028 (present to June 30, 2028) was the only agenda action item until Councilmember Harrison’s budget referral item 16 on deconstruction was moved from consent to action.  

The calls for a cease-fire in Israel/Palestine kicked off the meeting and once again the Council left the Berkeley Unified School District Boardroom to escape the disruption and moved into a conference room without the pubic in attendance and continued on Zoom. There were so many attendees who signed on to Zoom and wrapped their cease-fire comments onto the two police funding items and the equitable Black Families grant that the discussion on the paving plan didn’t start until 9:22 pm. Due to the lateness of the evening Harrison’s item was moved to December 5 at her request.  

It’s Monday December 4 and I should have finished this yesterday morning. While I’ve been working on my December 3 summary, Councilmembers Wengraf and Hahn sent email blasts. They are distressed over the disruptive demonstrations at Council, do not support a resolution and include Mayor Arreguin’s full statement. Arreguin is clear he does not support a resolution with, “[T]hese resolutions will not end the violence abroad, but they do fan the flames of hatred here at home. That’s a threat I cannot ignore.”  

Harrison’s position for a ceasefire was posted on her KateHarrisonD4 Facebook page on October 20, 2023. https://www.facebook.com/KateHarrisonD4/  

In order to get a ceasefire resolution before Council it has to be approved by the Agenda Committee, whose members are Arreguin, Hahn and Wengraf, or be accepted by 2/3 of the councilmembers (six Yes votes) as an emergency item to be considered for a vote.  

As stated in previous Diaries, I can’t count five votes on this Council to call for a ceasefire.  

It’s quite amazing that Arreguin, whose first campaign for mayor in 2016 highlighted himself as a progressive leader citing his own activism, and referenced the fight against apartheid in South Africa as inspiration for his activism, h now opposes a resolution on a ceasefire as doing nothing but fanning the flames of hate.  

I disagree with Arreguin that resolutions have no impact. They do.  

It will take a groundswell to move a White House that started with President Biden’s embrace of Netanyahu captured in photos seen around the world.  

The Guardian listed 30 unions calling for a ceasefire on Friday starting with the United Auto Workers representing 980,000 retired and current workers, the American Postal Workers Union, the California Nurses Association. That list doesn’t include local Bay Area unions, the cities Richmond and Oakland and doesn’t even touch the many other organizations calling for a ceasefire. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/01/uaw-ceasefire-gaza 

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My mornings normally start with two podcasts, Democracy Now followed with Joe Scarborough. Scarborough is as far right as I can go these days, except that I did watch the DeSantis Newsom debate on Sean Hannity until ZAB started at 7 pm. Other than a couple of Newsom zingers and a lot of Newsom and DeSantis talking over each other, Hannity and DeSantis took Newsom and California apart.  

Even I was shocked when Hannity put a chart on the screen of total crime (everything lumped together) that pictured California as having twice the crime rate as the national average and Florida as below the national average. Newsom should know better than to go on Fox.  

Democracy Now started with Palestinian journalist Akram al-Satarri in Gaza. The death toll in Gaza is over 15,500. al-Satarri stated in the last 24 hours 1,760 people were killed. There is no safe place. The 1.8 million people that were asked to leave their homes in the northern Gaza strip and move south find themselves being bombed in the very places that were supposed to be safe.  

Last night I listened to Mehdii Hasan. Between October 7 and November 28, 232 Palestinians including 61 children were killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem where Hamas has never ruled. In Hasan’s interview with Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, Barghouti described the terrorism in the West Bank, perpetrated by Israeli settlers and Israel’s army. Palestinians are being killed, evicted and villages are being bulldozed.  

You can watch the show with the video of the destruction in the West Bank at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BaA3htpNzo  

If you would rather read the text put the YouTube link into https://youtubetranscript.com/  

Hasan pointed out on Sunday, that on September 22, 2023 Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) using a map of “The New Middle East” that eliminated Palestinians. The picture of Netanyahu at the UNGA is 18 minutes into the YouTube video.  

I didn’t find any reports of Netanyahu’s September speech in the NY Times, Washington Post or other mainstream press. The poorly attended Netanyahu address was reported in Common Dreams and the international press. https://www.commondreams.org/news/netanyahu-map  

Hasan, who gives hard hitting interviews, announced Sunday that his one-hour show is ending this month. That will leave two weekend shows with Muslim anchors, Ayman Mohyeldin and Ali Velshi. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/04/msnbc-bring-back-mehdi-hasan-show/  

Hasan will still appear from time to time as a commenter for MSNBC, but that new role will put an end to interviews like the one of Mark Regev, senior advisor to Netanyahu, who declared to Hasan that Israel had not killed any Palestinian children. The interview has been watched over 6 million times on X [bex-Twitter]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPz2aCo7W-c  

When the mother of Hisham Awartani (one of the three Palestinian college students shot in Vermont) spoke over the weekend, she sad that her son is paralyzed from the chest down, and pointed to the hateful toxic rhetoric against Palestinians. That hateful toxic warmongering rhetoric is well exampled by what spewed out of Joe Scarborough’s mouth in the first minutes of the December 1, 2023 Scarborough podcast.  

I listen to the Scarborough podcast at 1.25 speed not the entire 4 hours, but I have yet to hear anything about the conditions in Gaza. There is nothing about the steady carpet bombing of Gaza, the cutting off of power, the blockade of food and fuel or the collective punishment and suffering of the people of Gaza except to blame them for the actions of Hamas on October 7.  

In my memory, the Scarborough early morning show is how mainstream reporting on Israel has always been. This time the horror in Gaza can’t be contained. That is what we are seeing in the heartbreak of the people filling the council chambers. Jews, Palestinians and their allies are showing up week after week calling for a ceasefire resolution from the Berkeley City Council.  

Our book club the choice for January 2024 is The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi. November 2, 1917 is when Britain declared support for the establishment of a Jewish state within Palestine in the Balfour Declaration. At the time the Jewish people were only 6% of the country’s inhabitants. The Balfour Declaration grew out of Theodor Herzl’s foundational text of political Zionism, Der Judenstaat (the Jews’ State) written in 1896.  

The Hundred Years War on Palestine is listed as one of the ten best books for understanding the Israel-Hamas War. Another is A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall which I read and recommended previously. Both are available through local libraries, but expect a wait.  

On to the City.  

The 5-year paving plan is reviewed every two years, but if feels like the 5-year paving plan is in continuous review. After the enormous kerfuffle over the Hopkins Corridor Plan, Hopkins repaving was put on hold in the 2024-2025 budget so other projects like the African American Holistic Center could move forward.  

For an in-depth review of all the issues and questionable City actions read “What Has Happened with Hopkins and Why”. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-04-09/article/50248?headline=What-Has-Happened-with-Hopkins-and-Why--Kelly-Hammargren  

Hopkins is no worse than the street I live on (I am not complaining) and is in far better condition than McGee and Roosevelt near the high school and many other streets that are not included in the 5-year paving plan.  

Councilmembers Hahn and Wengraf submitted a Supplemental and made a substitute motion to put Hopkins from Alameda to Gilman into the 5-year paving plan on the list for paving in 2025. Their motion failed. The final motion from Humbert and Robinson accepted the staff recommendations and added Milvia from Hearst to Rose, the recommendation from the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission, and to complete Hopkins Street segments by FY 2027.  

The “Hopkins Street segments” phrase in the motion recorded in the annotated agenda is worrisome as one of the many issues in the Hopkins Corridor Plan was the rush to secure final City Council approval and award the Hopkins Corridor Project before July 1, 2023. Beating that date was to avoid complying with the new San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board stormwater treatment and green infrastructure regulations.  

At the Tuesday meeting Karen Parolek, Chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure in her statement to Council said, “[W]e also have been advocating for practices to combine projects including safety enhancement and repaving. Pulling the Hopkins project apart into multiple projects is counter to the fiscal responsibility we’ve been encouraging…”  

Ron Nevels, Manager of Engineering, Public Works said the City might not need to do the stormwater treatment.  

The worry here is of the City of Berkeley breaking Hopkins into smaller “segments” to escape having to comply with regulations requiring stormwater treatment and green infrastructure.  

Harrison asked if there was money in the Hahn and Wengraf plan to cover the infrastructure. The answer was no. At different times during the evening Hahn insisted there was funding and at other times stated that a source of funding for the infrastructure could not be identified.  

The problem with repaving without the stormwater infrastructure means that with so many of Berkeley’s streets being in poor condition, the likelihood of going back to Hopkins for infrastructure after repaving is close to zero. Hopkins at Monterey is the location where the foam from putting out a garbage truck fire drained into Cordornices Creek wiping out nearly the entire population of threatened steelhead trout.  

I’m on the side of requiring the green infrastructure. Rough roads slow down traffic.  

The Harrison budget referral with the very long title, “Refer to City Manager to Enhance the City’s Deconstruction and Construction Materials Management Enforcement and Regulations and Refer to AAO#1 Budget Process $250,000 for Social Cost of Carbon Nexus Fee Study for Berkeley Origin Construction and Demolition Debris” is a big deal.  

There is nothing “green” about razing existing buildings, sending the debris to landfill and all the extraction, mining, and deforestation that is involved in the materials that will be used to build the new building to take its place. Deconstruction is the process to remove salvageable materials for reuse in new construction and renovation.  

Here is a wonderful short video on deconstruction called “Unbuild Better: A case study in deconstruction” from Cornell University explaining the case for deconstruction over demolition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ejjd6E_7SsQ  

The complaints about deconstruction taking too long makes me think of all the projects that are pushed through the Design Review Committee and the Zoning Adjustment Board and approved, only to sit for years before anything is built. In fact, at one Design Review Committee meeting, a committee member asked the developer for NX Ventures if they ever intended to build since the NX projects approved never seem to transition from approval to construction. 

The Environment and Climate Commission met Wednesday. Billi Romain, Manager of Energy and Sustainable Development for the City of Berkeley announced her retirement. 

I’m still not sure how the Curbside Management Plan landed in the Environment and Climate Commission. The motion to refer to the City Manager and the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission had many good points like adequate loading zones, short term parking (pick up and drop off), disabled parking, AB 413, the bill to prevent parking within 20 feet of an intersection (daylighting), emergency access in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones (VHFHSZ), additional parking meters and bicycle parking. 

There are not enough loading zones and removing so much of parking in the City makes short term parking for quick trips near impossible. Restricting parking in the VHFHSZ comes with hand wringing and little to no visible action every year, which I hear has been the same response for decades. But why the Commission on Disability wasn’t included for input on disabled parking in the final motion looks like an unacceptable oversight. 

The Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) was the last city meeting of the week. East Bay for Everyone and other YIMBY-inspired speakers told their stories of the difficulty of finding housing and how the project at 2127 – 2159 Dwight Way between Shattuck and Fulton must be supported. The Dwight Way project was a SB 330 density bonus project with 58 new units for a total of 66 residential units onsite which is impossible to deny. 

Soli Alpert, who is on the Rent Board and was filling in on ZAB for the first time, questioned whether the City was following the law. In his reading of SB 330 when eight rent-controlled or affordable units are demolished, they need to be replaced with eight units onsite. The mix of units posted in the ZAB agenda description was 3 very low-income units, 2 very low-income units, 2 low income units and 1 moderate income unit. However, in the Findings and Conditions for approval from City staff, the eighth unit, the moderate-income unit was dropped and replaced with a market rate unit. Only seven units were going to be below market. It was a good catch by Alpert, but only Shoshana O’Keefe and Brandon Yung supported Alpert’s substitute motion, which lost, for the 8th below market unit. 

The 5-story project at 1652 University with 26 units including 2 very-low income units plus two live/work units approved the same evening comes with a history that was missed by city staff and the historian hired by the project. 

Fran Cappelletti, Archivist for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association found that in 1923, a permit was taken for the West Gate Masonic Association to build a building on that corner (University and Jefferson) for the Masonic Lodge for African Americans. Objections arose from the neighbors who did not want African Americans at this site in any form and went so far as to pressure the City to change the zoning. The City Council did not approve the zoning change, but the construction stopped and the lot sat vacant for twenty-four years until the current commercial building was constructed in 1947.  

At the Landmarks Preservation Commission, Commissioner Finacom asked for a plaque to be at the site to commemorate the history, but was met with pushback and objections from the Landmarks Preservation Commissioners including Chair Enchill. Encill’s statement that there is nothing particularly unique about the history of 1652 – 1658 University seems to be all the more reason to memorialize how racism ended building a Masonic Lodge for African Americans at the corner of University and Jefferson. How many other stories need to be told and memorialized?  

ZAB member O’Keefe thanked me for sharing the history and said that the developer didn’t need approval to include the history at the site.