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Erik Olson:
          
          Erik Landes-Brenman, city union representative, listens glumly as Council considers reopening the existing labor contract.
Erik Olson: Erik Landes-Brenman, city union representative, listens glumly as Council considers reopening the existing labor contract.
 

News

Nervous Council Tinkers With Parcel Tax Measure

By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR
Friday November 07, 2003

Amidst a growing uneasy restlessness throughout the city over Berkeley City Council’s proposed March money-raising ballot measure, an almost eerie quiet settled over the issue at this week’s Council meeting. Only a handful of citizens showed up to take advantage of what Mayor Tom Bates defined as “Your chance to weigh in on the issue.” 

Meanwhile Council itself tweaked and tinkered with details of the parcel tax measure, trying to find just the right fit to both balance the city’s imminent budget deficit and get past two-thirds of the city’s voters in the spring. 

Mired like most California cities in an escalating series of rolling budget crises, Berkeley is looking at a $9.5 million deficit in fiscal year 2005 that could balloon to $19.5 million in five years. And that doesn’t take into account incoming Gov. Schwarzenegger’s promised repeal of the state Vehicle License Fee and other potential state hits to city income, the net effects of which could be huge. 

Council has until Nov. 25 to give final approval to the language of the parcel tax ballot measure in order for it to appear on the March, 2004 ballot. A two-thirds voter approval is needed to pass the measure. 

On Tuesday night, with an eye towards citizen concerns that it be as serious about making budget cuts as it is about asking for a raise in taxes, Council essentially asked city Budget Manager Paul Navazio and Acting City Manager Phil Kamlarz to divide the current projected five-year deficit in half, with the proposed parcel tax written to take care of one half of the shortfall and Council committing to cut the budget to make up the other half. 

Council also tentatively approved a proposal by Councilmember Kriss Worthington to insert a similar trigger mechanism for any possible state impacts on Berkeley’s budget: For any loss of currently budgeted state money up to approximately $5 million a year, the parcel tax will be automatically increased to cover one-half, and Council will make up the rest in cuts. 

Responding to a complaint coming first from Councilmember Gordon Wozniak, then from other councilmembers, that the parcel tax measure might have been better received if a public hearing had been held, Council set a hearing on the matter for its Nov. 18 meeting. 

Council also agreed to Mayor Tom Bates’ request to hold a closed door session on Nov. 18 to discuss strategies for a renegotiation of the city’s labor contracts. Such a renegotiation may be necessary in order for the city to make the projected budget cuts. At Councilmember Worthington’s insistence, Council also set aside time as well on the Nov. 18 for a briefing before the public on labor contracts. 

During the meeting, Mayor Bates praised “the liberals and progressives” of Berkeley City Council for keeping the city in good fiscal shape in bad economic times, noting the city’s continuing excellent bond rating. 

After the meeting, both Worthington and Wozniak said that Council had not done a good enough job in making a case to the Berkeley public that City Council had already been tightening the city’s budget belt in anticipation of the current fiscal crisis. 

They said that Council has made a total of $6 million in budget cuts over the past two fiscal years. Wozniak said that after taking an e-mail survey of his constituents, he found “about a 50-50 split for an against the measure.” 

Wozniak said that given the fact that his council district has a larger percentage of homeowners than many other parts of Berkeley, the results were consistent with the findings of a recent poll undertaken at the request of the Mayor’s Revenue Task Force. 

Wozniak said he believed his constituents were taking the issue “thoughtfully and seriously,” and noted that a number of people opposed to the parcel tax “came up with some good suggestions for budget cuts that we had not thought of.” 

Mayoral aide Cisco DeVries said a day after the meeting that he believed a large number of citizens “may be waiting to be convinced about the parcel tax. If people had already made up their minds, they might have come out in larger numbers to the Council meeting to voice their opinion. I think that people are waiting to hear the arguments as we get closer to the actual vote. They’re listening.” 

DeVries also fended off criticism that the mayor and Council might have erred in not starting the process earlier to try to convince people for the need of a parcel tax increase, or might have waited to put the measure on the November ballot. 

“I came in here with Mayor Bates (when he was first elected a year ago) and that’s pretty much what we’ve been dealing with, the budget crisis,” DeVries said. “I think what’s happening is that because of an accumulation of events, [the budget crisis] is just now becoming a reality to the citizens. They’re just beginning to engage in it. I’m not certain that this could have happened any sooner. And if we had waited to put the measure on the ballot in November, Council wouldn’t be holding these discussions on it now—there wouldn’t be this sense of urgency.” 

DeVries also said that putting the parcel tax measure off until November would be fiscally irresponsible. “In the event that the measure didn’t pass at that time,” he explained, “we’d have to start making cuts midway into the fiscal year. That would make everything much more difficult.” 

At its Tuesday meeting Council also tinkered with the language of proposed ballot measures that would alter the way elections are conducted in Berkeley, including lowering the percentage a Berkeley candidate needs to win an election outright without triggering a runoff, lengthening the time between the initial election and a runoff, altering the number of signatures needed to land a slot on the ballot and add a filing fee to requirements for candidates who want a slot on city election ballots. 

In addition, Council is considering adding a ballot measure that would authorize Council to consider adopting Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) at such time as it becomes available in Alameda County. 

IRV can’t be implemented without changes in the city charter, the county and state election codes, and in the software installed in the county’s new touchscreen computerized voting machines, according to City Clerk Sherry Kelly. The process would take a minimum of two to three election cycles, she estimates, 

Language for all of these proposed March ballot measures must also be finalized by Council’s Nov. 25 meeting.


Berkeley This Week

Friday November 07, 2003

FRIDAY, NOV. 7 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Anthony Adamthwaite, Prof. of History, UCB, on “European and American Relations.” Luncheon 11:45 a.m. $11.50 - $12.50. Speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925 or 665-9020. 

“War on Terror: A War on the People of the Philippines” at 7:30 p.m. at Marian Hall, St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. 843-2244.  

“Are Americans Still Liberal After all These Years?” with Prof. David Tabb at 7:30 p.m. at Congregation Beth El, 2301 Vine St. 848-3988, ext. 26. 

“Rumi: The Way of the Heart,” with Dr. Andrew Vidich, at 7:15 p.m. St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Sponsored by the Science of Spirituality. 707-226-7703. www.sos-ca.org 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. wibberkeley@yahoo.com 548-6310, 845-1143. 

Meditation, Peace Vigil and Dialogue, gather at noon on the grass close to the West Entrance to UC Berkeley, on Oxford St. near University Ave. 496-6000, ext. 135. www.bpf.org 

Overeaters Anonymous meets at 1:30 p.m. at the Northbrae Church at Solano and The Alameda. 525-5231. 

SATURDAY, NOV. 8 

A Walking Tour of Gymnosperms, a diverse assemblage of cone-bearing plants, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. Cost is $5. Registration required, space is limited. Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. 643-8155. www.mip.berkeley.edu/garden  

Canoes in Sloughs Join Save The Bay as we explore Arrow- 

head Marsh, one of the Bay’s hidden gems, from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Cost is $25. Pre-registration required. 231-9430. www.aoinstitute.org 

“The Untold Story of the CIA Coup in Iran,” with Cyrus Bina, Professor of Economics at Univ. of Minnesota, Morris Mansour Farhang, Professor of International Relations at Bennington College, and Nikki Keddie, Emeritus Professor of History at UCLA, at 6 p.m. in the Valley Life Science Building, Room 2050, UC Campus. 684-4781. 

Practical Art Fair, from 1 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Article Pract, 5010 Telegraph Ave. 652 7435. www.articlepract.com  

An Unholy Pagan Feast Day of the Antlered One Potluck, with live Tribal Metal, at 8 p.m. at the Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave. 540-0751. 

Free Emergency Preparedness Class on Responding to Terrorism for anyone who lives or works in Berkeley, from 9 a.m. to noon at 997 Cedar St., between 8th and 9th Sts. Register on-line at www.ci.berkeley. ca.us/fire/oes or call 981-5506. 

Government Information and Participation, a workshop on how to use the City of Berkeley website and obtain information, at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. in the Central Library, 3rd floor electronic classroom. Sponsored by the City Clerk Dept. 981-6900. 

Pet Adoptions, sponsored by Home at Last, from noon to 5 p.m., Hearst and 4th St. 548-9223. 

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

Yoga for Seniors at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St., on Saturdays from 10 to 11 a.m. The class is taught by Rosie Linsky, who at age 72, has practiced yoga for over 40 years. Open to non-members of the club for $8.00 per class. For further information and to register, call at 848-7800. 

“Angst in the Moment: An Aesthetic Spirituality of Grief” with Rev. Dr. Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, at 10:30 a.m. at Congregation Beth El, 2301 Vine St. 848-3988, ext. 26. 

SUNDAY, NOV. 9 

Crush Festival, sponsored by the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce, from 2 to 5 p.m. at the Radisson Hotel, 200 Marina Blvd. 549-7000. 

David Cobb, Green Party Candidate for President at 5 p.m. at the Niebyl-Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave. Part of a series of “Green Sunday” discussions sponsored by the Green Party of Alameda County. 644-2293. 

Basic Computer Use and The Berkeley Public Library Catalog from 1 to 2 p.m. and “Finding It on the Internet” from 2 to 3 p.m. in the Central Library’s Electronic Classroom. Reservations required. Sign up at the 3rd floor Paging Desk or call 981-6221. 

“Jewish Voices of the California Gold Rush: A Documentary History,” with author Ava Kahn, at 10:30 a.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $4-$5. to register call 848-0237, ext.112.  

Tibetan Buddhism, Lama Palzang on “Padmasambhava: Founder of Tibetan Buddhism” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

Eckhart Tolle Talks on Video Free gathering at 7:30 p.m. to hear the words of the author of “The Power of Now” at the Feldenkrais Ctr., 830 Bancroft Way. 547-2024.  

MONDAY, NOV. 10 

“Abandoned” an exposé of the results of the 1996 immigration law, with two videos, “The Betrayal of America’s Immigrants” and “Of Rights and Wrongs,” at 7 p.m. Grand Lake Neighborhood Center, 530 Lake Park Ave., Oakland. Wheelchair accessible. $1 suggested donation. East Bay Community Against the War. 658-8994. 

Women’s Cancer Resource Center, volunteer training, every second Monday of the month, from 6 to 8 p.m. at 5741 Telegraph Ave. To sign up call Emily at 601-4040, ext. 109. emily@wcrc.org 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 6 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

TUESDAY, NOV. 11 

Veteran’s Day - City Offices are Closed 

Berkeley Honors Veterans in Martin Luther King Civic Center Park at a ceremony at 11:11 a.m. the same time when the guns fell silent in 1918 to end World War I. Country Joe McDonald, a Navy veteran and Vietnam era anti-war singer/ 

songwriter will host the event. 

“Tribute to Veterans” Spenger's Fresh Fish Grotto offers retired military personnel a complimentary lunch or dinner entrée. 1919 Fourth St. 845-7771. 

Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters (BACH) meets at 7 p.m. at the Rockridge Library, 5366 College Ave., near Rockridge BART. 835-6303.  

“A Blistered Kind of Love: One Couple’s Trial by Trail,” written in alternating voices by Angela and Duffy Ballard, covering the couple’s adventures in the wilderness, at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave. 843-3533. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers We are a few slowpoke seniors who walk each Tuesday, meeting at 9:30 a.m. in the Little Farm parking lot. 215-7672.  

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Blood pressure checks will be given by Dr. Helen Christensen. 845-6830. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. The meeting will include critique of prints. 525-3565. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 12 

“Berkeley’s Future History” with panelists Becky O’Malley, Executive Editor of the “Berkeley Daily Planet,” Patrick Kennedy, Berkeley developer, and Darryl Moore, Peralta Community College Trustee, at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge. 981-2924. 

Biodiesel 101 - A Clean Homegrown Alternative Fuel panel discussion about an alternative fuel from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave., near Dwight Way. Sponsored by East Bay Biodiesel Internship, a homebrewer co-op. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Iraqi WomenToday, Amal Al-Khedairy and Nermin Al-Mufti, will speak at Mills College, Student Union, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., at 7:30 p.m. Sponsored by the Women’s Leadership Institute. 430-2019.  

Government Information and Participation, a workshop on how to use the City of Berkeley website and obtain information, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. in the Central Library, 3rd floor electronic classroom. Sponsored by the City Clerk Dept. 981-6900. 

The Truth About the Meat and Dairy Industries with Lauren Ornelas of Viva!USA, a nonprofit vegan advocacy organization that campaigns on behalf of animals. At 7 p.m. at 2326 Tolman Hall, UC Campus. www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~boaa 

Fun with Acting class meets at 11 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Free, all are welcome. 985-0373. 

The Women’s Reader Theater will present “Changes and Challenges” at 1:30 p.m. at North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190. 

Bayswater Book Club meets at 7:30 pm at Liu's Kitchen, 1593 Solano Ave. 433-2911. 

Cancer Hope: Bridging the Gap Between Here and Hope with Karen M. Cooper, R.N., Holistic Health Education, at 6 p.m. Pharmaca Integrative, 1744 Solano Ave. 

Prose Writers Workshop We're a serious but lively bunch whose focus is on issues of craft, at 7 to 9 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut, at Rose. For information call 524-3034. 

Free Marketing Workshops, sponsored by Sisters Headquarters, for women entrepreneurs, every Wed. from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at 643 17th St. Oakland. For information call 238-1100. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Vigil at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities. 

com/vigil4peace/vigil 

Amnesty International Berkeley Community Group meets at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 1606 Bonita Ave., at Cedar St. 872-0768. 

Berkeley CopWatch open office hours 7 to 9 p.m. Drop in to file complaints, assistance available. 548-0425. 

Community Dances, traditional English and American dances, at 8 p.m. every Wednesday, $9. 7 p.m. first Sunday, $10. Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. 233-5065. www.bacds.org 

Free Feldenkrais ATM Classes for adults 55 and older at 10:30 and 11:45 a.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut at Rose. For information call 848-0237. 

THURSDAY, NOV. 13 

“Food: From Ground to Table” with Judith Redmond of Full Belly Farm, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the Graduate Theological Union, 2400 Ridge Rd. Part of the series of Topics in Ecology, Theology, and Ethics: Land and Agriculture. 649-2560.  

Equal Education “A Call to Action” on the unfulfilled promise of equal education with Elaine Jones, President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, at 4:30 p.m. in Boalt Hall’s Booth Auditorium, UC Campus. 642-6969. 

“A Path of Refusal and Building Peace in the Middle East,” with Amir Terkel and Ceclie Surasky from A Jewish Voice for Peace, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Gray Panthers, 1403 Addison St. 548-9696. 

Berkeley-Albany YMCA 100th Anniversary at 6:30 p.m. with a silent auction, dinner and awards ceremony at the Doubletree Hotel at the Berkeley Marina. Tickets are $75 and are available from 486-8406.  

UC Botanical Garden Docent Training at 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Fee and registration required. 643-1924. 

So How’d You Become an Activist? with Dennis Bernstein, KPFA Radio investigative reporter, and host of “Flashpoints” and K. Ruby, founder and director of Wise Fool Puppet Intervention, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St., at Bonita. Suggested donation $5. For more information call 528-5403. 

Gary P. Scott, international mountain guide, introduces “Summit Strategies: Secrets to Mastering the Everest in Your Life” at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Travel Shop & Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave at Rose. 843-3533. 

Conflict Resolution Workshop with Armand Volks and Liliane Koziol at 7:30 p.m. at International House, Home Room, Piedmont and Bancroft Aves. 642-9460. http://ihouse.berkeley.edu 

Grizzly Peak Flyfishers hosts a program on fly fishing the Missouri River in Montana. Trapper Badovinac, a professional guide and author, will present a slide show from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the Kensington Community Center, 59 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-0428. 

East Bay Mac User Group meets from 6 to 9 p.m. in the 3rd floor Community Room, Berkeley Central Library, 2090 Kittredge St. No admission or membership charge. http://ebmug.org 

ONGOING 

Current and Former Department of Energy Employees and Contractor Employees A joint U.S. Dept. of Energy and U.S. Dept. of Labor Traveling Resource Center will be in the Bay Area to assist current and former DOE and DOE contractor employees file claims under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act. The Traveling Resource Center will be at the Sheraton Four Points Hotel, 5115 Hop- 

yard Rd., Pleasanton, on Nov. 18 and 19, from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. For further information or to make an appointment to meet with a counselor please call, toll-free, 866-697-0841.  

We Give Thanks Month, Berkeley restaurants, Bar-Ristorante Raphael, Cold Stone Creamery, Downtown, La Note, Semi-Freddi’s, Skates, and Spengers will donate a portion of their proceeds to Berkeley Food and Housing Project during the month of November. 

Personnel Commissioner Sought for Alameda County School Board Responsibilities include administration of the Merit System. Meetings once a month. Applications must be received by Nov. 28. For details please contact Alameda County Office of Education, 670-7703. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Council Agenda Committee meets Mon., Nov. 10, at 2:30 p.m., at 2180 Milvia St., Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil/agenda-committee 

Commission on Disability meets Wed., Nov. 12, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Paul Church, 981-6342. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/disability 

Homeless Commission meets Wed., Nov. 12, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jane Micallef, 981-5426. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/homeless 

Library Board of Trustees meets Wed., Nov. 12, at 7 p.m. at 1901 Russell St. Jackie Y. Griffin, 981-6195. www.ci.berke- 

ley.ca.us/commissions/library  

Planning Commission meets Wed., Nov. 12, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Ruth Grimes, 981-7481. www.ci.berkeley. ca.us/commissions/planning 

Police Review Commission meets Wed., Nov. 12, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Barbara Attard, 981-4950. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/policereview 

Waterfront Commission meets Wed., Nov. 12, at 7 p.m., at 201 University Ave. Cliff Marchetti. 644-6376 ext. 224. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/waterfront 

Commission on Early Childhood Education meets Thurs., Nov. 13, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Marianne Graham, 981-5416. www.ci.berkeley. ca.us/commissions/earlychildhoodeducation  

Community Health Commission meets Thurs, Nov. 13, at 6:45 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. William Rogers, 981-5344. www.ci.ber- 

keley.ca.us/commissions/health 

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., Nov. 13, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/zoning


Letters to the Editor

Friday November 07, 2003

RENTAL LAWS 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Claremont-Elmwood Neighborhood Association president Dan Metzger’s commentary critical of the Berkeley City Council’s current parcel tax ballot measure proposal contained one very serious error (“CENA Gives Qualified ‘No” to Proposed Tax Hike,” Daily Planet, Nov. 4-6). 

In his op-ed article, Mr.Metzger states that rental property owners “cannot pass on any proposed parcel tax increase” to Berkeley renters. 

In fact, under the City of Berkeley’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance program, property tax increases—along with over a dozen other city, county and utility taxes, fees, assessments, etc,—are passed through to Berkeley renters as part of the “Annual General Adjustment” regulation. The AGA is the yearly citywide rent increase granted by the rent board to cover rental property operating expenses. 

Under the AGA regulation, all City of Berkeley parcel tax and assessment increases—for libraries, schools, parks, fire, sewer, etc.—are included as part of the yearly AGA formulation. 

Chris Kavanagh 

 

• 

SMALL SCHOOLS 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Over 30 years ago my son entered Berkeley High and was overwhelmed by its size. Then he joined Agora, a small school within the high school. Agora was devoted to the creative arts. There he found a group of friends and an education. 

Nancy Ward 

 

• 

CHALLENGING W. 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

When the fire broke out in California, Davis was out there on the front lines, putting his money where his mouth is. Schwarzenegger was not. Some leaders are courageous, some are merely dime store cowboys. 

Who among the Democratic candidates would be brave enough to go over to Iraq, talk with our troops and work to get them safely home? 

Kucinich would. Braun. Clark. Sharpton. Kerry. Gephardt. Who else? Graham would have gone. Clinton, Gore—they would have. Jimmy Carter? FDR would have been there, wheelchair and all. 

George Bush—the Commander in Chief of our armed forces—is definitely brave enough to attend hundreds if not thousands of Republican fundraisers on our time clock. He’s obviously brave enough to tell the whoppers that sent our troops to war. But is he brave enough to actually go to Iraq and see firsthand the human suffering and devastation that he alone has created?  

And is he brave enough to attend the funeral of even one American G.I.? 

Jane Stillwater 

 

• 

NO NEW TAXES 

An open letter to Councilmember Wozniak: 

Thank you for being a voice of reason regarding the upcoming ballot measure to once again raise our hefty property taxes. I would like to see a proposal to close city offices one day a month, as Oakland is doing, to save money. Furthermore, highly paid union employees could have the choice of giving up a portion of their generous salaries and benefits or face layoffs. 

Recently the City of Berkeley agreed to give Building Opportunities for Self Sufficiency (BOSS) a cash advance of $100,000 despite their irresponsible use of unqualified persons to do their bookkeeping and accounting which led to a fiscal nightmare. They also used up a $300,000 line of credit because “they didn’t want to let anyone go.” Yet, their union employees rejected future pay raises to keep things afloat. Will Berkeley ever be reimbursed the $100,000 advance? I doubt it. Most likely nonprofit BOSS is not paying Berkeley special taxes and fees in common with many or all Berkeley nonprofits, however irresponsibly managed. 

I am beginning to understand how Berkeley works. The progressive left stays in power by demonizing the small mom and pop landlords, which helps to win the vote of the students and others benefiting by rent control. Students are often highly idealistic and can afford to be since they never have to “foot the bill.” At the same time, multimillionaire developers like Patrick Kennedy get special breaks saving him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Low income homeowners get exemptions from many taxes, which leaves struggling homeowners stuck with the bill. 

On an end note, using the appeal that we must pass the tax increase in order to keep our fire stations open is just too transparent and an underhanded way to take advantage of a tragedy in drought-parched Southern California. Thanks again, 

Robin Wright  

 

• 

SUPPORT THE FCTC 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

In the midst of strife and division, the nations of the world have come together at the World Health Assembly’s 2003 meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, and unanimously adopted the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC)—a groundbreaking treaty aiming to curb the global tobacco epidemic which claims nearly five million lives worldwide each year. Although the FCTC has received 192 signatories, it must be ratified by 40 countries by June, 2004 in order for it to become international law. Should this happen, the FCTC will take measures to protect global public health, including: banning tobacco advertising and promotion; full disclosure of ingredients in tobacco products; and monitoring of tobacco transnationals’ political influence. 

As an intern with the City of Berkeley Tobacco Prevention Program, I urge your readership to take action and contact Senators Feinstein and Boxer, urging them to publicly support the FCTC, and to demand the Bush administration sign the treaty, so that the Senate can ratify it. 

Laura Miller 

• 

RECOMMENDATION 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

If you care about international politics, run don’t walk to see The Revolution Will Not Be Televised at the Shattuck in downtown Berkeley. This amazing documentary was shot in the middle of the (ultimately unsuccessful) right-wing coup last year to oust popularly elected Pres. Chavez of Venezuela. You’ll not only be enlightened and informed—you’ll be in suspense! 

Rhoda Slanger 

 

• 

ANARCHY AND BOREDOM 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Becky O’Malley may be correct that “anybody with an ounce of anarchism in their blood” felt a kind of clandestine joy at the very public mini-scandal that erupted in San Francisco with “Chris Daly’s one-day coup” earlier in the month (“Muttering in the Ranks,” Daily Planet, Oct. 28-30). If that’s true, it must also be true that anybody with more than an ounce would find the whole thing totally boring—if they paid any attention to it at all. Similarly, the recent governor’s recall election, which was a media delight was ultimately forgotten in the wake of other media events: the firestorms and the impending trial of Scott Peterson.  

These days, the average person of voting age who is interested in the electoral process must know—almost intuitively—that elections are bought and sold by the same people who buy and sell the politicians (and who are becoming the same people who own the electronic voting machines). The policies pursued by elected officials are the ones that never get on ballots (or if they are, their effects are either curtailed or canceled by judges); cabinet posts, judgeships, and the other critical executive appointments have been removed from the electorate from the beginning of the independent (from England) American political process. This process isn’t corrupt; to be corrupted, the system had to have been previously based on justice. 

Anarchism is not just some emotionally based system of morality (despite the ignorant self parodies of most modern day anarchists), a kind of common sense impolite liberalism. Anarchists have consistently been opposed to the electoral shell game, and for plenty of good reasons. The rivalries in the San Francisco city government are as relevant to the lives of anarchists as the medieval arguments about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Those who are interested will find plenty to talk about; those for whom such things are annoying distractions from living will act accordingly. 

If it is humiliating to be ruled by politicians, how much more humiliating is it to choose them? 

C. Boles 

 

• 

CORRECTION CORRECTION 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Justin Azadivar’s Nov. 4 letter to the editor is even more sloppy and irresponsible than the article he condemns. 

Azadivar states that the article about the recently charged Berkeley students “contained several irresponsible errors”, and yet he can only point out two, not several at all. Of the two errors actually cited, the first is merely a wrong date, and even Azadivar admits it’s a “mere technical” error. And his second “error” is not an error at all, but just a suspicion on Azadivar’s part. He argues that the estimate of more than 4,000 student at the rally where the three were arrested is not true. Azadivar has no proof of this. He does not point to any source that counters that estimate. He just feels that you cannot trust the rally organizers who provided the estimate. 

Two does not equal several. Suspicion does not equal an error. I’d say the definition of irresponsible is condemning a story without backing up the claims. 

Sherman Boyson 

 

 


Unusual Play Probes Neighborhood

By Ira J. Spitzer Special to the Planet
Friday November 07, 2003

Elia Arce was leading a rehearsal with five artists at San Francisco’s Galeria de la Raza on a recent Thursday evening when a trio of street musicians walked by, playing Mexican Norteño music. 

Arce invited them in. A few hours later they had become part of the performance, and by Friday night they were onstage. 

“I believe so much in process,” said Arce, a forty-two year-old native of Costa Rica, who is directing an experimental theater piece on immigrant identity. Known as the Fruitvale Project, it opens tonight [Friday, Nov. 7] at La Peña in Berkeley, thanks to a grant from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. 

Under Arce’s guidance, five Latino spoken word artists have spent the last eight months in East Oakland’s Fruitvale. They spent the time interviewing residents to find characters who portray the immigrant experience in California, where one in four residents is foreign born. 

Fruitvale itself began with an influx of Germans, Portuguese and Italians in the 19th Century. More recently, Latinos and Asians have moved into this neighborhood that runs east of Interstate 880 in the flatlands of Oakland.  

The cast developed characters around different neighborhood figures, including an older Puerto Rican man, who says he knows every Puerto Rican in East Oakland, a gay Latino hairdresser, and a Cambodian refugee who works as a neighborhood “ambassador,” patrolling International Boulevard and reporting violations.  

“I didn’t tell them, ‘You write about this person and you write about that person,’” said Arce. She told cast members to ask themselves, “What is interesting to you? Then extend it to the community, so that there’s a revelation for you and the audience throughout the piece.” 

Finding the right dialogue was easy for the spoken word artists; it was the acting that came hard.  

Many rehearsal hours were spent getting the artists—who were used to working with words—to focus on their bodies, Arce said. 

“Our bodies are our home,” said Arce, who was 21 when came to the United States and has been directing for 16 years. “There are memories trapped inside our bodies,” an idea she feels is especially important for immigrants “because home is usually somewhere far away.” 

The actors said the process worked. 

“I felt like Elia was the perfect person to lead this, because she gets people to believe in themselves and their own organic process” said Paul Flores, who had never acted, and spent days reviewing tapes of his interviews to create characters like Jose, a 16-year-old Chicano Raiders fan struggling with responsibility, and Joe, a homeless Native American with a drinking problem. 

He said Arce’s technique was unusual.  

“You have to be very patient,” said Flores. “She comes in with a general idea, but the means by which we accomplish our goal isn’t articulated. All of a sudden, we’re lying on the floor in rehearsal for fifteen minutes, asking ourselves what stories are in our knees, what stories are in our shoulder blades.” 

Meditation helped Flores to understand and create his characters. “It’s really important to me to track the dynamic of transition,” he said “I wanted to show how complex their experience was. I wanted to tell the story of how they got there. 

“She pushes you to places where you didn’t think you could go, where you’re not comfortable going at first,” said Pablo Rodriguez, who drew inspiration for one of his pieces from the selfless dedication of the staff of Fruitvale’s Spanish Speaking Citizens Foundation. The workers there reminded him of the “tamale makers” from his youth who made sure that everyone had enough to eat. 

“When I first started working with Elia, the subject was very general,” he said, “she pushed me to talk about personal issues—personal relationships at first and family secrets. It’s been a really cool process where you face some demons from the past, and grow as an artist. I don’t create in the same way I did two years ago because of Elia.” 

Arce has been doing community theater since 1986. In addition to her solo work, she’s worked on productions with HIV positive immigrants in Houston, and the homeless on Skid Row in Los Angeles.  

Six years ago she moved to a cabin in the Southern California desert near Joshua Tree National Monument, where she lives with her dog, cat, and musician boyfriend. 

“The desert has been my spiritual home,” said Arce. “The moment I got there, the connection to the land is immediate, and it’s almost like the land is in charge.”  

She handles preproduction work from her desert home, where she said she has “a computer, a fax machine, all the different gadgets that are necessary to get the work done. You just work at a different speed.” 

Arce said she joined the Fruitvale Project because “of the need to believe we can support each other as colleagues.” 

“It’s a way for me to empower a new generation of Latino artists that is coming behind me, and support them in their development as artists and in their access to more mainstream venues,” she said. 

The Fruitvale Project has had several public showings but remains a work in progress, so none of the cast is quite sure what the show will be like on opening night. 

That’s fine with Arce, who says she’s happy to let the cast decide what works for them. “Every artist’s process of creation is different,” she says. “You never know what’s going to happen until you do it.” 

The Fruitvale Project is showing Friday, Nov. 7, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center as part of the Hecho en Califas festival. Tickets are $10 in advance and $12 at the door. The next performance is at Fremont High School in Oakland Thursday, Nov. 13, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $1 at the door.


Berkeley Lawyer Fights To Restore Civil Rights

By Jakob Schiller
Friday November 07, 2003

With civil rights in retreat in the wake of the Patriot Act and the prosecutorial zeal of Attorney General John Ashcroft, venerable Berkeley activist/attorney Ann Fagan Ginger has launched a counterattack, starting with a contest to identify the most egregious examples of trampled rights in the Bush era. 

Ginger, founder and director of Berkeley’s well–known Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, will compile the worst examples into a new book, Challenging U.S. Human Rights Violations Since 9/11, which will form the centerpiece of a campaign to regain liberties lost to the war on terror. 

The Institute is offering a $50 reward for the clearest and most accurate description of a domestic post-9/11 human rights violation. 

Ginger said the book will serve as documentation for the Institute’s push to force local, state, and national bodies to respect the international laws protecting human rights.  

Throughout its history, the Meiklejohn Institute has played a leading role in documenting human rights abuses, and chronicled such well-known events such as the Angela Davis case and the Free Speech Movement. 

Ginger founded the Institute in 1965, but she’s been a dynamo on the Left since before the McCarthy period, drawing enough attention from J. Edgar Hoover’s Red Squads to amass a foot-thick FBI file documenting her work for the National Lawyers Guild (which once occupied a spot on the attorney general’s published compendium of subversive organizations), her organizing efforts for the United Electrical Workers, and her famous speech from atop a police car during the days of the Free Speech Movement. 

She’s written books, taught at universities and colleges—including San Francisco State, UC Berkeley and Hastings—and served as the first chair of Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission. 

It was law school that brought Ginger to Berkeley 44 years ago, when she started work on her master’s degree at Boalt Hall. Today, at 78, she’s working as hard as ever, pursuing the struggle begun long ago. 

“The Institute and I as a human being have been around a long time, and I am convinced that since 9/11 we have seen the worst violation of civil rights of my lifetime—and that includes the McCarthy period,” she said. 

The upcoming book and the attendant campaign are means to address the crisis. 

Ginger says documentation readily available to anyone leads to the conclusion that the Bush Administration is set on destroying the system as we know it, pushing aside human and civil rights. 

“[People like Assistant Secretary of State Paul] Wolfowitz and [Vice President Dick] Cheney and [National Security Council staffer] Elliott Abrams have contempt for democratic decision-making,” she said. All three are prominent neoconservatives and key figures in the Project for a New American Century, the organizational fountainhead of many Bush foreign and domestic policies. 

“I think there is a plan that has been written out. They have an open plan to destroy the democratic system of government and replace the capitalist system with a fascist military regime with a few monopoly corporations,” Ginger says, adding that she has the documentation to prove it. 

During the McCarthy era—when the State Department refused to give her a passport because of her activism—countless dissidents were illegally jailed, deported, fired, blacklisted, wiretapped and otherwise terrorized. 

“What people don’t realize is the Patriot Act made all of that stuff legal,” she said. “The good news is there is something called the U.N.,” she said. 

Her book will be used to help the United Nations monitor and end abuse by forcing compliance with already existing human rights treaties. 

It’s a complicated strategy, but Ginger spells it out in crisp, well-chosen words.  

First comes the compilation of the reports. Institute staff have already gathered more than 100 incidents from news reports and other sources, and more are coming from the public and through entries to the contest—which officially ends Nov. 10. 

Once the report is published, the Institute will formally submit each violation to the Office of the Inspector General of each government agency involved. 

Inspector General offices are internal enforcement agencies attached to every federal department and are charged with investigating and reporting on governmental fraud and misconduct. 

The Inspector General’s staff of the Environmental Protection Agency recently captured headlines for exposing the serious health risks faced by workers in the ruins of the World Trade Center—dangers long denied in public EPA pronouncements. 

The Meiklejohn Institute will also send its report to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is responsible for submitting reports to U.N. Committees that enforce the human rights treaties that cover the abuses Ginger cites.  

This is the crucial point in the Institute’s strategy and what she believes is the most effective way to create change through such treaties as the U.N. Charter, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention Against Torture, and the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination—all signed by a president of the United States and ratified by the Senate. 

Under the Constitution, treaty provisions are legally supreme to any local, state or national statutes, and the government is bound to comply. 

Though the treaties require the U.S. to submit reports to the U.N. committees that govern them, Washington has been consistently late and evasive in fulfilling those obligations, she says. Ginger points out that while the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination—passed by the U.N. in 1969 but not adopted by the United States until 1994—requires signatories to submit a report every two years, the U.S. delayed submission of its initial report until 2001, complying then only because the U.S. knew it would otherwise face a challenge at the upcoming U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. 

The Institute’s report will be tailored to augment the mandated reporters and force the secretary of state to comply with international obligations. 

After the reports have been submitted to the U.N. bodies, Ginger says, the next step is for concerned citizens to attend the committee meetings where the U.S. reports are reviewed and increase the pressure on Washington to comply. 

Ginger urges the media to attend and report on the proceedings, which she says would help persuade local, state and federal offices to carry out the U.N. Committee’s suggestions. 

The overall strategy is modeled in part on past campaigns focused on repressive regimes in South Africa and East Timor. 

Ginger notes that even though the Supreme Court ordered school desegregation in 1954, segregation remained widespread because the court lacked a mechanism to enforce their ruling.  

Even in Berkeley, seven more years passed before local schools were finally desegregated, she says, and it was lobbying by concerned citizens—including Ginger, who was prominently involved in the local effort—and not the court’s decision that finally brought change. 

Meiklejohn Institute staff will organize the rights violations they collect into 28 categories. Examples already documented include reports of abuse in prisons, violence against immigrants, and the police response to anti-war protest at the Port of Oakland. 

Ginger says she expects the book to be released early next year, though they haven’t yet found a publisher 

Anyone wishing to submit an instance for the contest can send their example by e-mail to award@mcli.org, by fax to 848-6008 or via snail mail to Box 673, Berkeley, CA 94701-0673. Entries arriving after Nov. 10 will still be considered for the report. 

For more information and to contact the center directly, mcli@igc.org or 848-0599.


Arts Calendar

Friday November 07, 2003

FRIDAY, NOV. 7 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Kathleen Flanigan, “Birds of a Feather,” recent work including furniture. Reception from 5 to 8 p.m. at Epoch Gallery, 2284 Fulton St. 849-4596. 

“Art and Activism” Reception from 5 to 8 p.m., featuring Madonna Thunder Hawk, landscape photographer Justin Carder Black and social commentary painter Joanna Salska. Exhibition runs to Nov. 30. North Gate Gallery, 1862 Euclid. 540-8508.  

THEATER 

Traveling Jewish Theater, “Windows and Mirrors” stories by Paley, Malamud and Biller, at 8 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Theater. Tickets are $20-$24. 415-285-8080.  

Impact Theater, “Macbeth” directed by Melissa Hillman, opens at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. www.impacttheater.com 

FILM 

Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival: “Football, Iranian Style” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“Weather Underground,” with a post-film discussion with director Sam Green, producer Carrie Lozano, at 7:30 p.m. at The College Preparatory School, Buttner Auditorium, 6100 Broadway (north), Oakland. Free, but reservations required. 658-5202. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Timothy and Ishmael Reed will host a book signing for both their latest works at 3 p.m. at Vista Community College, 2020 Milvia St., Rm. 1.  

Simon Winchester looks at “The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary” at 12:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Adam Thirlwell discusses “Politics,” a novel, not about politics, but about sexual etiquette and other comedic topics, at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

West Coast A Cappella Showcase, with the UC Men’s Octet and California Golden Overtones at Wheeler Auditorium, UC Campus. Tickets are $8-$10 and are available from 642-3880. www.mensoctet.com 

Pascal Rioult Dance Theatre at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $26-$46. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Stompy Jones plays small band music of the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Vanessa Morrison and Roberta Chevrette perform indy folk at the 1923 Teahouse at 8 p.m. Suggested donation of $7-$15. 644-2204. www.epicarts.org 

Asylum Street Spankers at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $14. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

The Fruitvale Project, a community-based experimental performance featuring Latino spoken word artists at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10 in advance, $12 at the door. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Henri-Pierre Koubaka performs ancient and contemporary mandingo music at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Sliding scale donation $6-$15. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Trio Paradisio, a dinner fund-raiser for the Jazz School, at 8:30 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Chris Smither, blues-based originals, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Seventy at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.becketts- 

irishpub.com 

Time for Living, Physical Challenge, Tarkaru, Wear the Mark at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Realistic at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

JND, Coby Brown, Shaken at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes On Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

SATURDAY, NOV. 8 

CHILDREN  

“The Wonderful World of Zaal,” a Persian legend, performed by Word For Word, at 3:30 p.m. at the Claremont Branch Library. Free, sponsored by the Friends of the Berkeley Public Library. 981-6224. 

Hillside Players, “Tangled Tales: Wishes, Witches and Weddings,” favorite fairy tales intertwined in comedy, at 2 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $7 for adults, and $4 for children under 12, seniors and students. 2286 Cedar St. 384-6418. 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Independent Designer Wearables and Accessories brings together twelve of the Bay Area’s most talented independent artists and designers. From 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., Sun. to 5 p.m. ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

THEATER 

Traveling Jewish Theater, “Windows and Mirrors” See listing for Nov. 7. 

Word for Word, “The Killing Blanket” a short story about the Choctaw Nation by Rilla Askew, at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge, at 1 p.m. Free. 981-6139. 

FILM 

A Short History of Polish Animation, Program 1, at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Paul Davidson discusses his research into customer service departments in “Consumer Joe: Harassing Corporate America, One Letter at a Time,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

The Bay Area Poets Coalition holds an open reading, 3 to 5 p.m., West Branch Berkeley Public Library, 1125 University Ave. 527-9905. poetalk@aol.com 

Alan Colmes, co-host of Fox News’s “Hannity and Colmes,” talks about his new book, “Red, White and Liberal,” at 2 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 

Bruce Balfour intruduces “The Digital Dead” at 2 p.m. at The Dark Carnival, 3086 Claremont Ave. 654-7323. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Music of Three Worlds Concert, Western, Arabic and African traditions, at 8 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. A conversation with Jacob Needleman will follow the performance. Tickets are $20-$30. 763-2869. www.musicofthreeworlds.com 

Pascal Rioult Dance Theatre at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $26-$46. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Choreographers’ Performance Alliance, “Works in the Works” at 7:30 p.m. at Eighth Street Studio, 2525 Eighth St. Cost is $10. 644-1788, ext. 2. 

Volti “OUR America is Singing!” at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $8-$20 and are available from 415-771-3352. www.voltisf.org 

Dick Hindman Trio, original music, jazz standards and Brazilian favorites at 8 p.m. at the Jazz- 

school. Cost is $10-$15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Industrial Jazz Group performs at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donation $10-$15. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Green Chimneys at 2 p.m. at Down Home Music, 10341 San Pablo Ave. El Cerrito. 525-2129.  

Lichi Fuentes, CD release party at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12 in advance, $14 at the door. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Chris Smither, blues-based originals, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Peter Tosh Tribute with Andrew Tosh and Sister I-Live at 9:30 p.m., at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Palm Wine Boys perform West African influenced folk at the 1923 Teahouse at 8 p.m. Donation of $7-$15. 644-2204. www.epicarts.org 

Brazilian Forro Party and Fundraiser for the Capoeira Institute, at 9 p.m. at Café de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck. Cost is $10-$12. 649-1686.  

Casey Nell and Little Sue at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

Rhonda Benin at 8:30 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Nicole McRory at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Thought Riot, F Minus, Affront, Go it Alone at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Rory Snyder, saxophonist, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

The Industrial Jazz Group, showcasing the music of Andrew Durkin at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donations of $6-$15 suggested. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.org 

Boys Gone Wild! and 20 Second Cycle at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes On Telegraph. Cost is $8. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Hacksaw to the Throat, Fighting Riley, Kamikaze Vespa, The Hep, Ditch Raymond at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes On Telegraph. Cost is $6. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

SUNDAY, NOV. 9 

CHILDREN 

Hillside Players, “Tangled Tales: Wishes, Witches and Weddings,” at 2 p.m. See listing for Nov. 8. 

EXHIBITIONS 

Art Show on Allston Way, between Shattuck and Oxford from noon to 7 p.m., featuring 30 artists and 15 poets. Sponsored by Jupiter and organized by A. Roberts of Guerrilla Gallery. 

THEATER 

Traveling Jewish Theater, “Windows and Mirrors” at 2 and 7 p.m. See listing for Nov. 7. 

FILM 

A Short History of Polish Animation, Program 2 at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“Tangled Roots,” with filmmaker and author Heidi Schmidt Emberling, at 2 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $5. 848-0237, ext. 112.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics, Curator’s Talk with Constance Lewallen at 1 p.m., and Lecture with Barbara Stafford at 3 p.m. Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Poetry Flash with Jacqueline Berger and Virginia Chase Sutton at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

“Going Home to a Landscape: Writings by Filipinas” with Marianne Villanueva, Barbara Pulmano Reyes, Michelle Macaraeg Bautista, Angela Narciso Torres, and Catalina Cariaga at 3 p.m. at Eastwind Books, 2066 University Ave. 548-2350. 

“Towards an Archeology of the Soul” lecture with Berkeley author/ritualist, Antero Alli, at 5 p.m. at Alaya Bookstore, 1713 University Ave. 548-4701. www. 

verticalpool.com/archeology 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, “Splendori Italiani,” with British soprano Emma Kirkby at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $29-$60. 415-392-4400. www.philharmonia.org 

Jazz/Avant Garde Mass at 10 a.m. at All Souls Episcopal Church, 2220 Cedar St. With Tom Bickley, recorder, Paul Hanson, bassoon, saxophone, Doug Morton, trumpet, John Schott, guitar, Ches Smith, percussion, and Marsha Thomas-Cooke, vocals. 848-1755. 

Life of the Worlds: Journeys in Jewish Sacred Music with Richard Kaplan in Concert at 7:30 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. $10 donation. 848-0237, ext. 112.  

Live Oak Concert with David Ryther, violin, at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center. Tickets are $8-$10. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

“Waging Peace” UC Alumni Chorus, featuring songs of nonviolence and reconciliation, at 3 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $10-$15, available from 643-9645 or at the door. www.ucac.net 

Emanuel Ax, pianist, at 3 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Hawaiian Music Environmental Benefit at 6 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Bill Amatneek and Charlie Chin, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Aya de Leon, one woman hip-hop show with Bill Santiago’s “Spanish 101” at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $6 for the matinee, $12 for the evening. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Montclair Women’s Big Band, celebrating the release of their first CD, at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

UpSurge, with Raymond Nat Turner and Zigi Lowenberg, performs jazz poetry at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Sliding scale donation $8-$15. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

MONDAY, NOV. 10 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Worth Ryder Gallery, “Hand Pulled: Independent Work in Printmaking” reception 4 to 6 p.m. 116 Krober Hall, UC Campus. 642-2582. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jim Campbell/Matix 208, Art Technology and Culture Colloquium at 7:30 p.m., Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Page to Stage, a conversation with playwright David Edgar and Frontline/World series editor Stephen Talbot on “Continental Divide” at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Poetry Express, featuring Dale Jenson and Wendy Brown, from 7 to 9:30 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

Mary Monroe reads from her new novel, “God Still Don’t Like Ugly” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www. 

blackoakbooks.com 

TUESDAY, NOV. 11 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Paula Gunn Allen decribes a heroine from the Native American perspective in “Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

The Whole Note Poetry Series, with Julia Vinograd and Debra Grace Khattab at 7 p.m. at The Beanery, 2925 College Ave. 549-9093. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Cesaria Evora, Cape Verdean chanteuse, at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $24-$48. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Courtableu at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Ken Waldman, Alaska’s fiddling poet, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50 advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Dayna Stephens House Jam at The Jazz House. Donation $5. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Mimi Fox, solo guitar, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 12 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Chiapas- At the Edge of Light” with photographer Jutta Meier Wiedenbach at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

FILM 

Standby: No Technical Difficulties, Program 2 at 7:30 p.m. Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa. 

berkeley.edu 

THEATER 

Senior Readers’ Theatre, “Changes and Challenges” written and produced by a Berkeley feminist group, at 1:15 p.m. at North Berkeley Senior Center, Hearst Ave. and MLK, Jr. Way. Free. 724-2779. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Café Poetry and open mic, hosted by Kira Allen at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Ron George introduces his anthology of 26 stories “The Kindness of Strangers,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Harsha Ram introduces, “Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire” at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7,  

$5 with student i.d. 841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

Wang Ping will read from “The Magic Whip, a collection of her poetry, at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Wednesday Noon Concert Voice Faculty Recital at the Chevron Auditorium at International House, corner of Bancroft and Piedmont Aves. Admission is free. 642-4864. 

Cesaria Evora, Cape Verdean chanteuse, at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $24-$48. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

NC Blue Connection at 9 p.m. with a West Coast Swing dance lesson with Nick and Shanna at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Terri Hendrix with Lloyd Maines, Grammy-winning “Texas square peg” at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50 advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Jules Broussard, Bing Nathan and Ned Boynton at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Muchas Bluegracias, Belle Monroe and Her Brew Glass Boys, Ho’Down Quartet at 9 p.m. at Blakes On Telegraph. Cost is $5. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Sam Bevan Trio at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Nicole McRory at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

THURSDAY, NOV. 13 

THEATER 

Alchemy Works, “Where There’s a Wil(l), There’s a Play” a collection of short works by, or inspired by famous Wils. At 8 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Theater. Tickets are $10-$15 and are available from 925-798-1300. www.juliamorgan.org 

FILM 

Exhibiting Signs of Age, screening of “Aging in America: The Years Ahead” at 5:30 p.m. and Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, “The Day I will never Forget” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Meredith Maran reads from her new book, “Dirty: A Search for Answers Inside America's Teenage Drug Epidemic,” in a benefit for Bay Area Community Resources at 7:30 p.m. at Diesel Bookstore, 5433 Colllege Ave. 653-9965.  

Gallery Talk: Ecuadorian Fiestas with Grace Johnson, curator of Latin American ethnography ath the San Diego Museum of Man, at noon at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, Kroeber Hall, Bancroft Way at College Ave. Free with museum admission. 643-7648.  

Exhibiting Signs of Age, Curator’s Talk with Beth Dungan at 12:15 p.m., Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“Going Home to a Landscape: Writings by Filipinas,” with several of the contributors in person, at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Word Beat Reading Series at 7 p.m. with featured readers Dorothy Jesse Beagle and Raymond Nat Turner, followed by an open mic, at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave., near Dwight Way. For information call 526-5985 or 205-1749.  

University Press Books Anniversary Party, with author Gerald Nachman, who will present his book, “Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s,” from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. at 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. 

Carol Bergman reads from “Another Day in Paradise: International Humanitarian Workers Tell Their Stories” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Tim Barsky and Everyday Ensemble, musical theater, at the 1923 Teahouse at 8 p.m. Suggested donation of $7-$15, no one turned away for lack of funds. 644-2204. www.epicarts.org 

Tin Hat Trio, chamber folk ensemble, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Liberian Schools Benefit with Sia Amma at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10-$20 sliding scale. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Alfonso Maya, CD release concert, at 7:30 p.m., at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $7. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Faraway Brothers and Bingo Band at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Keni El Lebrijano, flamenco guitarist, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Scott Hill performs modern jazz at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Sliding scale donation $7-$15. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

CV1 at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

O’Dab at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

www.beckettsirishpub.com 

 


Report Puts ‘Escaped’ Tax At $267,957

By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR
Friday November 07, 2003

Berkeley failed to bill more than $250,000 for what city staff calls “escaped” property tax assessments over the past four years on seven city developments, according to a report given City Council this week by Acting City Manager Phil Kamlarz. 

The report followed a citizen complaint and a later Daily Planet article reporting that at least two buildings put up and managed by prominent Berkeley developer Patrick Kennedy had escaped Berkeley fee and assessment billings for several years. 

Kamlarz’s report didn’t indicate when owners would be billed for the unassessed taxes. 

Four of the properties—the Gaia Building on Allston Way, the Berkeleyan on Oxford Street, Acton Courtyard on Acton Way, and the Artech Building on Milvia Street—were developed by Kennedy’s Berkeley-based Panoramic Interests. 

Kamlarz wrote that a staff investigation had revealed that Kennedy’s companies were underbilled a net total of $163,317 for the four properties since the 2000-2001 fiscal year, including more than $72,000 for the Gaia Building and more than $68,000 for the Berkeleyan. 

Staff also reported that the city had overbilled Kennedy’s company nearly $6,000 on the Artech Building, an amount factored into the developer’s $163,000 bill. 

“Mr. Kennedy and staff have met and reached agreement on the square feet to be taxed for each property, the dollar amounts calculated related to each, and the total amount due by property,” Kamlarz wrote. 

The other three properties on the “escaped assessments” list included Oak Court Apartments on Allston Way, developed by Berkeley developer Avi Nevo ($39,521 in unbilled assessments over the past two years), the Renaissance Apartments on University Avenue ($45,859 in unbilled assessments over the past four years), and the Bank of America Building on Shattuck Avenue near Andronico’s ($19,260 in unbilled assessments over the past three years). 

The Daily Planet told Budget Manager Paul Navazio about the Bank of America building’s possible status as an unbilled property two weeks ago. 

Kamlarz said that the Gaia, Oak Court, and Acton Courtyard buildings have not yet received final Certificates of Occupancy from the city. 

Last month, the city manager’s office, over the signature of retiring City Manager Weldon Rucker, issued a memo to the mayor and City Council indicating that city staff was currently holding off billing property fees and taxes while a building was operating under a Temporary Certificate of Occupancy (TCO). 

The October Rucker memo indicated that this policy was now being changed by city staff to bill such properties even before a final certificate was issued. 

According to the Kamlarz report, the Berkeleyan escaped assessments because its permanent Certificate of Occupancy, issued in 2000, “was not correctly entered into the system,” the Bank of America Building was overlooked “due to a staff data entry error,” and the Renaissance Apartment Building was improperly listed as residential, rather than mixed use. Kalmarz said that the Artech Building was improperly listed at the higher rate of commercial rather than mixed use, resulting in the overbilling to Kennedy. 

Kamlarz also listed three properties—a light industrial building at 1101 Eighth Street, a mixed-use commercial-apartment space at 2508 Channing Way, and the Redwood Gardens Senior Citizens apartments on Derby Street—where “significant amounts of either billable or lost revenue” may be discovered. 

A check of the Alameda County property assessment rolls shows that neither of these three properties paid Berkeley fees and assessments for the current tax year. Kalmarz said that there is an additional 121,000 square feet of small new construction, primarily single-family home additions, on which the city may be able to assess unbilled taxes. 

The Kalmarz memo said that city staff would “continue working on improving the various work processes and automated systems” of the city’s tax billings, and would report its progress back to Council “at regular intervals beginning in January 2004.”


Does City’s ‘Planner Wanted’ Ad Reveal Too Much?

By SHARON HUDSON
Friday November 07, 2003

A current job recruitment ad for a Berkeley city planner states that in Berkeley, “planners set the pace.” As one who once thought that the citizens and their elected representatives “set the pace” in Berkeley, I ask: Is this marketing hype, wishful thinking, or remarkable honesty from our enthusiastic planners? Is our planning department really a self-directed agency intent on implementing its own vision, an extreme version of “smart growth,” instead of Berkeley’s plans and laws? Let’s see…  

Berkeley’s General Plan states: “It is not the intent of the General Plan to upzone each zoning district to the maximum allowed within the range.” But this is exactly what our planners do—routinely. 

Example 1: The now notorious “flying bungalow” at 3045 Shattuck Ave. Here staff helped the applicant turn a one-story bungalow into a three-story roominghouse design without any public review, even though most expert observers agree that the project should have been sent to a public hearing on several legal grounds. But that might have resulted in a smaller building similar to its neighbors—so why risk it? City Council was not pleased. 

Example 2: Our new planning director, Dan Marks, and others have identified the transition zone between new big buildings on transit corridors and neighborhood homes as an unresolved problem. Does our planning staff have any aesthetically or socially sensitive plan for these areas? Evidently not. In fact, they have harassed and stonewalled a popular, award-winning developer, John Coreris, who specializes in multi-unit townhouses, a type of neighborhood-friendly, affordable, moderate-density development that might be just right for some of these areas. His projects meet all the zoning and smart growth standards, but they are not big enough for our planners, who prefer to place five-story buildings with tiny apartments next to neighborhood bungalows and Victorians, with the inevitable result that the bungalows, the Victorians, and the neighborhoods will all eventually disappear. Since Mr. Marks seems open to good ideas, and since the mayor has recently expressed an interest in better development, I recommend that Mr. Marks and the mayor meet with Mr. Coreris before our “pace-setting planners” drive him out of town completely.  

Example 3: The proposed American Baptist Seminary of the West development on Benvenue Avenue near Dwight Way. This project originally required five use permits and a variance, including: a permit to demolish historical buildings on a valued historical street; a permit to convert large apartments into tiny ones; a permit to introduce offices and classrooms onto an at-risk street slated for residential protection under the Southside plan; a permit to build a new building almost five times the size of the block average; and a variance to avoid residential open space requirements. 

How did staff respond to this grandiose project requiring so many “exceptions” to our local zoning goals? Did they say to the applicant, “I’m sorry, but we cannot endorse this project”? No, they fought ferociously for the project in ways both legal and illegal. A small example of staff’s attitude: Although the building—at 65 feet—is 17 feet taller than the tallest building on the block and twice the height of the average, staff wrote that the size of the building was ”not…out of context with its surrounding neighborhood.” It perverts reality to call such an extreme mathematical outlier “in context.” Then, when it was discovered that the seminary and its project were in gross violation of the Seminary’s existing use permit, staff continued to back the project, although City Council has been less enthusiastic about it.  

Example 4: The seminary neighborhood is a classic walking neighborhood. The Urban Land Institute, a smart growth group, states that buildings “need not exceed 3 stories to accommodate compact development,” and that “primary buildings in walkable neighborhoods shall not exceed 35 feet…” Smart growth urban infill guidelines recommend more open space, more parking, smaller buildings, and greater housing variety than Berkeley’s plans, codes, and decision makers now call for, and staff constantly pushes for exceptions even to our standards. What does this mean? It means that Berkeley, which has for decades been practicing real smart growth, accommodating a much higher density than other Bay Area cities, has now adopted an untested, extreme land use policy, masochistic in the short term and damaging in the long term. Many losses will not only be damaging, they will be irreversible. 

Example 5: The city attorney’s office also has a land use agenda. One of the primary attorneys assigned to land use matters, Zachary Cowan, is past-president and current board member of the Greenbelt Alliance, a group intent on undermining local land use laws. Under these circumstances, how motivated is Mr. Cowan to fight for Berkeley’s land use plans? You decide. More than a few people question whether Mr. Cowan should be handling land use cases at all, given this apparent conflict of interest. 

Example 6: Mr. Cowan has it in for Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Ordinance (LPO). Why has landmarking become such a hot issue? Because the state has passed a package of anti-neighborhood laws that make it almost impossible to stop bad developments; one of the few remaining tools citizens have to protect their urban environment is the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which is still fairly effective in protecting landmarks. Now extreme “smart growth” forces, backed by self-interested developers, are intent on eliminating this last obstacle to unexamined development. Even though landmarking is only involved in a tiny percentage of developments, and has resulted in some tasteful developments that protect Berkeley’s history, Mr. Cowan is vigorously undermining the LPO. Did City Council ask Mr. Cowan to do this?  

Ironic, isn’t it? “Smart growth” advocates claim to be environmentalists: after all, the whole point of smart growth is to save ecosystems. But CEQA is the original savior of ecosystems—including the urban ecosystem of which humans are a part. Many of us who attended the first Earth Day over 30 years ago are now shocked that people who call themselves environmentalists are fervently committed to circumventing CEQA. Even Mr. Marks (who I hope will be a moderating influence on our planning department) has publicly stated: “We’re going to look for a categorical exemption [to CEQA] for any project.” But CEQA merely requires us to study the environmental impacts of our development plans. So I can only conclude that our “pace-setting” planners don’t want anyone to know the impacts of their plans. I wonder why. Don’t you? 

Sharon Hudson is a neighbor of the Benvenue project.


Neighbors Defeat Disputed Seminary

By Matthew Artz
Friday November 07, 2003

Score one for the neighbors. After a dogged two-year battle, the American Baptist Seminary of the West has pulled its application to demolish two turn-of-the-century cottages and replace them with a five-story building. 

“This was David versus Goliath,” said David Baker of the Benvenue Neighbors Association (BNA), which fought the project. “I don’t know of any time in the history of Berkeley that renters have risen up to protect their neighborhood against a bad development and won.” 

The seminary told city staff last week that it lacked the funds to conduct the Environmental Impact Report (EIR), City Council mandated last April. 

The EIR, which would have studied the building’s impact on parking and traffic as well as the historic merit of the two cottages, costs between $50,000 and $100,000—too much for a religious school, according to seminary attorney David Levy of San Francisco law firm Morrison & Forester. 

The seminary retains the right to reintroduce the project if it amasses enough money to bankroll the EIR, but will have to start the permit process from scratch. 

“As far as we’re concerned, it’s dead,” said city Planning Director Dan Marks. 

The seminary had proposed three projects at its theological campus in the 2500 block of Benvenue Avenue, four blocks from the UC Berkeley campus. 

Council approved two projects for retrofitting and subdividing student dormitories, but—facing fierce neighborhood opposition—drew the line against the proposed 65-foot building at 2514 Benvenue Ave. 

The project would have included 23 new dwelling units, a 22-bed dormitory, classrooms, offices and a 48-car garage. 

“It was way out of scale and used up most of the open space at the north end of Benvenue,” said BNA President Sharon Hudson. 

For now, the site again belongs to the two cottages—one built in 1899, the other in 1906—that house seminary students and faculty members.  

Levy said it was too early for the seminary to decide if it wanted to stay at the property. “It’s been an expensive and draining process,” he said. 

Seminary President Keith Russell was not available to comment. 

The seminary is expected to move ahead with the two other projects at 2500 and 2508 Benvenue Ave. The project at 2500 Benvenue will add 12 housing units for a total of 24 and the project at 2508 Benvenue will add six units, for a total of 21. 

The two-year battle highlighted the contentious nature of Berkeley development. Neighbors accused the planning department of pushing through the building without giving adequate notice or acknowledging their concerns. 

Opponents of the project also claimed that the Benvenue expansion was nothing more than a profit center for the seminary which had rented most of their class space on the 2700 block of Hillegas Avenue to UC Berkeley. 

Neighbors fought to win landmark status for the cottages last year, but city council rejected the notion because of a state law that forbids the landmarking of buildings owned by religious institutions. 

Marks—who joined the planning department this summer— said he hoped new procedures in the works to notify neighbors earlier about planned developments improve relations between neighbors and his department.


First Time Homebuyer Loans Turn Into Economic Trap

Kent Brown
Friday November 07, 2003

The following letter was read during public comment at City Coucil’s Nov. 4 meeting.  

 

Honorable Mayor and City Council, 

I come before you tonight to ask for your assistance in bringing an end to the economic trap created by the City of Berkeley’s first-time homebuyers program that utilized HUD funding to provide $20,000 loans as down payment assistance. The laudable goal of providing assistance to low-income Berkeley families has been lost in an outcome that demands returns 10 times that of financing available on the open market. These fantastic returns were realized in part by disclosure practices that left first-time buyers unable to make an informed decision about the risk inherent in the city’s loans that effectively turn our homes into equity stocks. The loans grow at a rate that greatly outpaces the incomes of low-income families, creating an insurmountable debt that holds our homes hostage into perpetuity undermining our property rights. 

Homeowners are responsible for the astronomical maintenance costs of the mostly older rundown homes that often need thousands of dollars in repairs and are loaded with lead paint and other toxics. “Sweat-equity” upgrades work against homebuyer’s by further raising the value of the home. Currently the $20,000 loan on my home has ballooned to $50,000 in just five years. Another family is on the hook for over $81,000! Long-term residents are at the greatest risk to the hidden balloon payment upon repayment of the first mortgage that would likely lead to the loss of the home by then elderly owners. Based on the city loans past performance, it could demand hundred of thousands of dollars by then. 

These terrible loans work at cross-purposes to the mission of low-income assistance. I understand that the city will be considering adopting Oakland’s anti-predatory lending law. I ask that you start your work at home by amending the city’s FHAP loans to forgive the equity stranglehold after between five to 10 ten years as is done in most municipalities, providing for a proper recapture period without abusing low-income homeowners forever. 

Sincerely, 

Kent Brown


Homeless Survey Totals Provoke Hope, Surprise

By MATTHEW ARTZ
Friday November 07, 2003

There are fewer homeless people in Berkeley than previously believed, according to initial findings released Thursday from an Alameda County homeless survey. 

The survey—billed as the largest ever conducted in the United States—counted 835 homeless in Berkeley and 6,215 countywide. Previous estimates based on the 1990 census had between 1,000 and 1,2000 homeless in Berkeley and between 9,000 and 12,000 countywide. 

Researchers cautioned that the figures are only a snapshot and that during the course of a year, homeless ranks can double or triple. 

“This is good news,” said Megan Shatz, survey coordinator for the Alameda County-Wide Homeless Continuum of Care Council. She attributed the countywide decrease to the construction over the past decade of more than 4,000 beds designed either as permanent or transitional housing for the homeless. 

The eight-month survey cost $241,000—funded by public and private donations—and sent 155 trained community volunteers into 54 of the county’s 473 homeless service centers between January and August to interview 1,461 patrons. 

Interviewers read from a 43-page questionnaire, asking about a range of topics, including employment, substance abuse, income, criminal history and education level—all geared to provide a better understanding of the needs and backgrounds of the county’s homeless. 

One question not included in the survey was where the homeless person had lived before turning to the streets—always a controversial issue in Berkeley, where some attribute the large homeless population to migrants who utilize the city’s expansive array of homeless services. 

Researchers released only broad demographic data Thursday, saying that the analysis of findings from the personal questions won’t be completed until March. 

The survey found that 80.5 percent of Berkeley’s homeless are men, with 46 percent between the ages of 35 and 44 and 96 percent between the ages of 25 and 64. Fifty-five percent are white and 31 percent African American. 

By comparison, males comprised only 53 percent of the county’s homeless population, comprising 56 percent of Oakland’s homeless but only 30 percent in southern and eastern cities. 

Since most of Berkeley’s homeless are single men, the city has far fewer homeless children: six percent of the overall homeless population, compared to 28 percent countywide. 

The survey also revealed that one in five of the county’s homeless—twice the national rate—are classified as chronically homeless, meaning they are single, physically or mentally disabled, and have been homeless for more than a year. 

Berkeley homeless advocates split over the accuracy of the figures, with many insisting that homeless youth—listed as just 0.5 percent of the overall population in the report—had been undercounted. 

“That number is ridiculous,” said Berkeley attorney Osha Neumann, a volunteer who assists homeless youth. “A lot of the kids don’t use the services,” he added. 

Shantz conceded the point, acknowledging that more research is needed to accurately gauge their numbers. 

“Our methodology was based on going to service sites,” she said. “If youth don’t use them, they’re not going to be counted. 

Berkeley homeless advocate Michael Diehl, who conducted some of the interviews, thought the overall Berkeley tally seemed accurate, but suspected that African Americans may have been undercounted.  

He said his experience suggested that African Americans were less likely to agree to be interviewed—and when they did, were likely to give more guarded answers. “There’s a lot of distrust among black homeless when it comes to the white establishment and it’s hard to get around that.” 

City Housing Director Stephen Barton said the preliminary findings suggested that Berkeley was “on the right track” by reorienting services to the most troubled homeless and combining social services with housing assistance. 

The city spends about $1.2 million—three quarters of its homeless budget—on maintaining 250 emergency shelter beds as well as emergency support services such as meals, showers and drop-in centers. The city and its partnered homeless organizations also receive federal grants to reduce homelessness, money which has funded 93 units of transitional housing and 318 units of permanent supportive housing—160 for homeless with disabilities and 158 for homeless with mental illness or substance abuse problems.  

New transitional housing for homeless families is slated to open in 2005 when local nonprofit Building Opportunities for Self Sufficiency (BOSS) is scheduled to complete the first phase its expanded Harrison Street shelter. 

Since the early 90s, Alameda County has added 1,692 transitional beds and 2,311 permanent supportive housing beds. Roughly 400 new permanent housing beds are scheduled to open during 2004, Shantz said. 

Surveyors asked respondents which services they had used the past week, their last name and the last four digits of their Social Security number. Researchers then worked backwards through all 473 homeless service agencies, collecting attendance data to eliminate double counts. Anyone who reported sleeping outside their home—whether in a shelter, their car, or a friend’s house—was classified as homeless. 

Countywide, they found that approximately 4,025 marginally homeless people utilized services like soup kitchens. 

Homeless advocates feared that the “good news” could turn sour if local and federal agencies determined that homelessness was on the decline. “As someone who advocates for the great need of [the homeless], I have to be a little concerned about that,” Diehl said. 

But Jane Micallef, community services specialist in the Berkeley Housing Department, said more precise data should help the city and county “to get new resources. 

“I think this is cause for optimism,” she said. “This shows we are getting somewhere. We now know that providing services work and the call is now to augment services to not just manage homelessness, but to end it.”


Kamlarz Picks Key Aides for New Era at City Hall

By MATTHEW ARTZ
Friday November 07, 2003

The aftershocks surrounding former City Manager Weldon Rucker’s September retirement announcement continue to rumble at Berkeley City Hall. 

City Manager Phil Kamlarz consolidated the new chain of command Tuesday by telling City Council that he had picked Lisa Caronna, 51, the city’s director of Parks, Recreation and Waterfront, to succeed him as deputy city manager—a position now established as the training ground for future managers. 

He also promoted Chief of Staff Arrietta Chakos to assistant city manager, making her number three at city hall. 

Caronna’s promotion—she will serve as acting deputy city manager for six months starting Monday— marks the latest leap in her meteoric rise through city government.  

She joined the city in 1995 as a landscape architect in the Public Works Department, moved to the Parks Department in 1996 when that department splintered off from Public Works, and rose to director of the department in 1997.  

Caronna, who has lived in Berkeley since 1971, came to city hall after 20 years at a landscape architecture firm she co-founded. 

“It’ll be a big change,” she said. “We have big challenges ahead of us, and I’ll be here to help Phil Kamlarz work around those issues.” 

The city has still not settled on a temporary replacement to head Parks, and one well-placed source said the eventual successor would likely come from outside the city. 

Kamlarz passed over several more-experienced department heads and city officials in choosing Caronna.  

City officials said the announcement caught them off guard because Caronna had not actively lobbied for the job—but, added one, “The buzz is that everyone is happy Phil picked her.” 

Two well-placed sources said Finance Director Fran David had campaigned hard for the position, and that City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque had thrown her hat into the race as well. 

Councilmembers praised Caronna’s management of Parks, crediting her with improving field maintenance, renovating play areas and finding grant money to pay for refurbishing recreation centers. 

“Lisa’s really low key, but she gets the job done and doesn’t toot her horn around like some people,” said Councilmember Betty Olds. 

“That is a difficult, demanding position,” Councilmember Kriss Worthington said. “Now that she’s risen from one of the junior department heads—that’s a strong testament to her ability to bring people together.  

Caronna’s fans even praised the forthright way she handled perhaps the biggest disappointment of her tenure at Parks—the environmental problems that continue to plague the Harrison Skate Park. Currently park officials must close the facility during rain for fear of underground chemicals seeping into the park. 

“That was a hard project,” she said. “The professional engineering assumptions did not pan out to be true. We made the best decision at the time based on what we were told.” 

Caronna said she is still working out her job duties with Kamlarz, but said the challenge for them would be to get the city government efficiently on limited resources. 

“We kind of did the belt-tightening part. Now we need departments to start talking to each other about efficiencies between departments,” she said. 

The last two deputy city managers—Rucker and Kamlarz—rose to the top job, but Caronna refused to speculate on the prospect of one day becoming the first woman to serve as Berkeley’s city manager. 

“Right now, I’m here to help Phil. We’ll see how it goes after six months,” she said. “This will definitely be a challenging appointment.”


Police Blotter

By MATTHEW ARTZ
Friday November 07, 2003

Newspaper thefts 

Copies of the Berkeley Daily Planet and other free newspapers were stolen from West Berkeley news racks Saturday—obstensibly not because of controversial editorial content, but for recycling value.  

Planet employees called police after West Berkeley resident Dale Robinson called to report that—for the second time in the past few weeks—he saw a man empty newspapers from three sites along University Avenue and load them into a truck which was “filled with papers.” 

BPD Officer Rob Westerhoff said he had identified the culprit as a 69-year-old Berkeley man and that he was working to contact him and “reach a resolution.” 

Newspapers fetch three cents for every pound, said John Byes, supervisor of The Buy-Back—a Berkeley recycling plant contracted to receive unread Planets.  

“If anyone comes here, they have to show ID, but if they brought them to Oakland, [the recyclers] probably wouldn’t even trip, they’d just buy the stuff,” Byes said. 

Stealing free newspapers from a stand can be prosecuted under county law, but a law that will make it a city crime as well won’t go into effect until thirty days after City Council passes a second reading of the bill proposed by Mayor Tom Bates, the city’s best-known reformed newspaper thief. The first reading was approved unanimously Oct. 21. 

 

Attempted Robbery 

A Marin county teenager was arrested for attempted robbery Monday after police said he brandished a three-foot metal pipe and demanded a woman had over her cash. The woman said she was walking in the 2100 block of Dwight Way Monday evening when the 13-year-old confronted her and demanded her money. The woman told her would-be robber she didn’t have any cash, then continued walking. The boy didn’t follow, and the woman called police—who arrived within minutes, arresting the youth.


Singer, Mayor Join Forces to Honor Berkeley Veterans

By JAKOB SCHILLER
Friday November 07, 2003

In a city well-known for opposing wars, Tuesday’s upcoming Veteran’s Day ceremony has been designed to maintain the city’s traditional stance while ensuring that veterans are honored for their service to the community.  

Hosted by the Vietnam era singer/songwriter and Navy veteran Country Joe McDonald, the ceremony at Martin Luther King Civic Center Park begins at 11:11 a.m. Tuesday, the same time the guns fell silent at the end of World War I. 

This year’s ceremony is much larger than those of recent years, in part because of the efforts of McDonald—who approached Mayor Tom Bates to ask for increased recognition for the city’s vets. 

Mayor Bates said McDonald and other vets have been working closely with him on this year’s event. 

“Blaming soldiers for war is like blaming firefighters for fire,” said McDonald. “We are obligated to make ourselves aware of the veterans and acknowledge their service. The ceremony in meant to show our gratitude.” 

Hosted by McDonald, the ceremony will include patriotic music by the Piedmont High School Bagpipers, music by Joey Blake (a veteran and faculty member at Berkeley’s Jazzschool), the laying of wreaths by veterans and family members of currently deployed Berkeley residents, and a ceremonial retirement of old flags by the Color Guard of the UC Berkeley ROTC. 

Two Boy Scout troops, a Venture Scout Crew and a Cub Scout Pack will also participate. 

For more information please contact Calvin Fong at the mayor’s office at 981-7100.


Berkeley Hills Firestation Proposal Survives Couple’s Legal Challenge

By JAKOB SCHILLER
Friday November 07, 2003

Proponents of the proposed Berkeley Hills firehouse scored a victory Wednesday when an Alameda County Superior Court judge ruled against two homeowners suing to stop construction. 

The firehouse, funded through Measure G, a 1992 $55 million dollar city bond issue, has been mired in the litigation since early this year. 

The firehouse was initially proposed after the Oakland/Berkeley Hill fire tore through the area destroying 3,000 homes, and it had won the support of many neighbors before Peter and Andrea Cuckor filed suit. 

According to Zach Walton, an attorney with Neighbors for Fire Safety—the association formed to help develop the plan—the Cuckors’ suit disputed language in the bond measure that required the new firehouse to be mutli-jurisdictional. Two governmental entities, the City of Berkeley and the East Bay Regional Parks District, are partnered in the station, but the suit questioned whether two participants indeed qualified as “multi.” 

In a second lawsuit, the Cukors are challenging a proposed land exchange between the city and the parks district that must be completed before building can commence on the new site. While most of the building will sit on East Bay Water Company land, the front yard and a path to the building are on park district property. 

The Cukors brought their challenge under Measure L, a Berkeley law that says buildings can’t be erected on public park land or open space without voter approval. 

Walton said that because the proposed property doesn’t yet fall under city control, Measure L does not apply. A hearing on the issue is scheduled for next month. 

Neighbors say they are happy to see progress and hope the station will be completed soon. 

“This is one more legal hurdle out of the way, we are thrilled,” said Barbara Allen, one of the members of Neighbors for Fire Safety. “We need the station for our protection, but we also need it for the protection of all the hill residents for medical and earthquake protection.”


Berkeley Hills Firestation Proposal Survives Couple’s Legal Challenge

By JAKOB SCHILLER
Friday November 07, 2003

Proponents of the proposed Berkeley Hills firehouse scored a victory Wednesday when an Alameda County Superior Court judge ruled against two homeowners suing to stop construction. 

The firehouse, funded through Measure G, a 1992 $55 million dollar city bond issue, has been mired in the litigation since early this year. 

The firehouse was initially proposed after the Oakland/Berkeley Hill fire tore through the area destroying 3,000 homes, and it had won the support of many neighbors before Peter and Andrea Cuckor filed suit. 

According to Zach Walton, an attorney with Neighbors for Fire Safety—the association formed to help develop the plan—the Cuckors’ suit disputed language in the bond measure that required the new firehouse to be mutli-jurisdictional. Two governmental entities, the City of Berkeley and the East Bay Regional Parks District, are partnered in the station, but the suit questioned whether two participants indeed qualified as “multi.” 

In a second lawsuit, the Cukors are challenging a proposed land exchange between the city and the parks district that must be completed before building can commence on the new site. While most of the building will sit on East Bay Water Company land, the front yard and a path to the building are on park district property. 

The Cukors brought their challenge under Measure L, a Berkeley law that says buildings can’t be erected on public park land or open space without voter approval. 

Walton said that because the proposed property doesn’t yet fall under city control, Measure L does not apply. A hearing on the issue is scheduled for next month. 

Neighbors say they are happy to see progress and hope the station will be completed soon. 

“This is one more legal hurdle out of the way, we are thrilled,” said Barbara Allen, one of the members of Neighbors for Fire Safety. “We need the station for our protection, but we also need it for the protection of all the hill residents for medical and earthquake protection.”


Franklin School Plan Approved

Matthew Artz
Friday November 07, 2003

The Berkeley Unified School District Board unanimously approved changes to the site plan of the Franklin Adult School at their Wednesday meeting. 

The revised plan—pushed by neighbors of the proposed school site—reorients the project to face San Pablo Avenue, diverting most school traffic is diverted from residential streets around the school. 

Last week, Caltrans approved a driveway for the site, setting the stage for Wednesday’s board vote. 

The future of a proposed playground at the school remains in limbo, with neighbors planning to meet Nov. 17 to gauge the level of community support.  

—Matthew Artz


UnderCurrents: Heed the Meaning, Not Dean’s Clumsy Remarks

J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR
Friday November 07, 2003

A small sandy-haired boy was throwing stones at the master’s recently invented (and highly successful) plow. Benignly Jefferson watched the boy…who was now periously climbing a tree. 

“Your grandson is going to hurt himself,” [says Mr. Burr in the novel of his name by Mr. Gore Vidal.] 

Jefferson flushed deeply. “That is a child of the place. A Hemings, I think.” 

Two hundred years pass. And once again—ignorantly, clumsily—we find the nation stumbling into its recurring barroom-brawl argument on the issue of race, and afterwards, like the average drunk, we will teeter out into the rainy streets, battered, bloody, ought-to-be-embarassed, but not, blearily confident that we have satisfied some nagging responsibility that we wish would simply go away of its own accord. Race? Didn’t we fight that guy last year? 

The latest entry in the Continuing American Dialogue On Race And Other Impertinent Affairs comes in the form of the 2003-04 Presidential campaign. As does all candidates, Mr. Howard Dean, formerly the governor of the state of Vermont, would like for everybody all over to vote for him, and that would be that. But if he were to simply stand up and say, “Hey, everybody, vote for me,” someone, somewhere, would feel left out and offended and look elsewhere for leadership; and so Mr. Dean, like all candidates, must ask for particular votes, each and every one. 

This is not as simple as you might think.  

One can ask for all the African American votes, or all the Latino votes, or all the votes of women or the great working people of this nation. But one never asks for all the white votes these days. There seems to be something tawdry and improper about this particular subject, an uncomfortable reminder of a besotted past that makes folks shuffle and look uneasily over their shoulders as if in anticipation of the appearance of some pale and bony hand. And, so, American candidates must be creative.  

Richard Nixon had his Silent Majority. George Bush the Lesser has his Heartland. Now comes Mr. Dean, telling a reporter for the Des Moines Register Nov. 1, “I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks. We can't beat George Bush unless we appeal to a broad cross-section of Democrats.” 

You’d have thought he’d urinated in public. 

“It is simply unconscionable for Howard Dean to embrace the most racially divisive symbol in America,” says Senator John Kerry of Massachussetts, a rival of Mr. Dean’s for the Democratic nomination. “I would rather be the candidate of the NAACP than the NRA.” 

“He just has the wrong idea about how you should communicate with Southerners,” says a spokesperson for General Wesley Clark, another rival. 

A spokesperson for Senator Joseph Lieberman, a third rival, calls Dean’s remarks “irresponsible and reckless.” 

“I regret the pain that I may have caused either to African American or Southern white voters,” Mr. Dean is forced to admit. He adds that he had been trying to provoke a dialogue on race in America, but admitted that he had “started this discussion in a clumsy way.” 

Admit all you want, Mr. Dean, but that clumsiness long ago got claimed by a larger circle. 

In the recent trial of the Oakland Riders, a group of police who stand accused by the District Attorney of running rampant and roughshod and out-of-control on an African American community, it was widely reported that there were no African Americans on the jury. A majority of the jurors wanted to convict, but three jurors held out. Shortly after the verdict one of the majority faction telephoned Oakland Tribune columnist Brenda Payton and, apparently embarassed at the actions of his own kind, said he’d wished there had been African Americans on the jury, since all of the alleged victims of the cops were black. 

“Without them [meaning African Americans], people like me [meaning white people] were speaking for them [meaning African Americans],” Ms. Payton reports the juror as saying. “I believe them [meaning African Americans] and I know people it’s happened to [meaning police misconduct]. But when I was talking to those three jurors, as far as they were concerned, how would I know?” 

The African American alternate, Ms. Payton reports the anonymous juror saying, would have made a difference, adding, in the juror’s words, “To some, she might have added credibility through personal experience and to those others, she might have shamed them.” 

As if, like Mr. Jefferson’s grandson, it is the job of African Americans to hang around in a tree long enough to shame (other) folks into admitting the actuality of our existence. 

One wonders why my white friends, who, after all, have done many wonderful things down through the ages and contributed many valuable inventions towards the progress of the world, cannot gather among themselves and speak of this as adults might do? Why all the tittering and fumbling about as if someone has passed gas in a middle school classroom? 

“It’s always the darkies, always about the darkies,” laments the Confederate Legislator-General to the British attaché in Gettysburg, the movie, when the attaché inquires about slavery and what the Legislator-General really wants to talk about is matters of more serious merit. 

But the nation and all its inhabitants continue to find it difficult to move on to any other conversation until we have properly finished the first. Still, we wait to see, now, if Mr. Dean’s admittedly clumsy beginnings produces anything more than a polite clucking of his fellow politicians’ tongues.


Telegraph Tour Looks Back Through History

By STEVE FINACOM Special to the Planet
Friday November 07, 2003

150 years ago, when the first American settlers were arriving in what would become Berkeley, the area now south of the university campus was a grassy slope with views in all directions and perhaps a few of the Peralta family’s cattle wandering through.  

Even after urban settlement began in the 1860s, visitors encountered only scattered houses, unimproved streets, and farm fields close by. Presumably the scene gave little or no hint of the busy, boisterous, diverse, sometimes troubled but always intriguing, district that would later develop there—Telegraph Avenue. 

On Saturday, Nov. 8, I’ll be leading a free walking tour of the heart of the Telegraph Avenue neighborhood to trace its evolution. 

The tour is sponsored by the Telegraph Business Improvement District, a neighborhood business-based organization that works to improve one of Berkeley’s best known commercial districts. 

Abundant evidence of Telegraph’s multiple layers of history remains if you know where to look, or, more accurately, if you know what you’re looking at. There are interesting stories associated with many storefronts, houses, and even the street signs. 

Today, the neighborhood is most commonly associated with its role as stage set—and incubator—for the 1960s-era protest and social upheaval, which won’t be neglected on the tour. 

But the Southside was also the site of earlier events in local history, from the forced assembly of Berkeley’s Japanese American residents for World War II internment to the establishment of Berkeley’s first European-style coffee house to 1940s Big Game celebrations that got out of hand. The locations and stories associated with those events will also be described. 

Telegraph was shaped by multiple forces and influences as diverse the Trustees of the early College of California—who laid out the neighborhood’s streets and named them alphabetically for great men of science and the arts to help promote a high-toned residential suburb—to the flood of youth who arrived in the 1960s seeking cultural and political nirvana. 

The presence of the university has always ensured a steady supply of customers for the business district. Every generation of students had its favorite hangouts along Telegraph, some of which are still in operation and will be noted on the tour. 

Also, sometimes hidden amidst the storefronts and often converted for other uses, important examples of Telegraph’s early residential heritage remain. These include not only single family houses but also survivors of the era when the Southside contained no UC residence halls but was home to dozens of private rooming and boarding houses catering to students. 

The area was also an important social and cultural center of early Berkeley. 

Several of Berkeley’s first churches were established near or even on Telegraph Avenue and although none of the original buildings remain, the congregations do, occupying monumental edifices erected in the early 20th century. 

The churches are complimented by the buildings of several private clubs, social organizations, and other institutions that found the district next to the university a congenial setting. The neighborhood once boasted not only a large public school on Dwight Way but also one of the East Bay’s more prestigious private institutions, the Anna Head School.  

The free tour begins at 10:00 AM at the university campus at Sather Gate, where Telegraph Avenue once ended. It should last approximately two hours.


BHS Small Schools Plans Gather New Momentum

By Matthew Artz
Tuesday November 04, 2003

When Berkeley High School sophomore Ian Ericksen first enrolled at the roughly 3,000-student school, he didn’t like what he found. 

“I was really scared,” he said. “It’s big and there’s nobody to welcome you.”  

Ericksen quickly retreated to independent study before returning to the high school and enrolling in Communications Arts and Sciences—an independent, tight-knit collection of teachers and students that the district hopes could be a model for the school’s future. 

“It’s such a good community,” Ericksen said. “It may as well be its own school.” 

Soon it will be. 

Last week, Berkeley High School took a big step towards becoming a much smaller place. 

With the goal of placing half the students in autonomous small schools by 2005, 29 teachers, administrators, students and parents spent Sunday and Monday attending a two-day retreat that generated four ideas for small schools that could round out the new face of Berkeley High. 

But Jack Jennings, a researcher with the non-partisan think tank Center on Education Policy, said that the small school trend is still too new for authoritative nationwide studies equating smaller schools with equal higher achievement. 

Small schools first sprang up in big cities during the early 1980s, but the movement has mushroomed during the past few years, bankrolled with hundreds of millions of dollars from Microsoft founder Bill Gates. 

Participants in the Berkeley retreat called for small schools focusing on social justice and the environment, international studies, visual arts, and the already established program Community Partnership (formerly known as the Computer Academy) to join CAS as future independent schools. 

CAS received district approval to become a small school earlier this year, and will soon provide offerings in all core classes. 

Berkeley is on course to join hundreds of school districts across the country in subdividing mega high schools once touted as beacons for scholastic opportunity and choice, and replacing them with autonomous schools with enrollments between 250-400 that proponents say will give students and teachers an added sense of community and accountability. 

The plan calls for divvying up the high school into one large school and four to five small schools, each reflecting the larger school’s ethnic diversity. 

There are as many rationales for going small as there are small schools, but Berkeley administrators say their move is geared to address one of the district’s most intractable dilemmas. 

“The goal is to decrease the student achievement gap,” said Matthew Huxley, a vice principal helping to coordinate the transition to small schools. 

On most student scorecards from standardized tests to honors classes to grades, African American and Latino students have lagged behind whites, with Asians somewhere in the middle. 

Small schools’ emphasis on personal relations between students and teachers and a community of people dedicated to supporting students can help stop minority and poor students from falling through the cracks, said Victor Carey, Berkeley’s small schools transition consultant. 

Already some research supports Carey’s claim. A study by the Northwest Educational Laboratory found that the bigger the school the bigger the test score differential between rich and poor students. 

“The students who are most adversely affected by attending large schools are members of racial minority groups and those from low socioeconomic backgrounds,” wrote researcher Kathleen Cotton. 

Carey’s nonprofit Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools (BAYCES), which is helping to fund Berkeley’s transition, counts Gates’ foundation as a major donor and is helping 34 local schools go small, with the former Fremont High School in Oakland the first to complete the transition this year. 

Ben Schmookler, a former vice principal at Fremont and now Principal of Media Academy—one of Fremont’s six successor schools—said going small has invigorated parent involvement, improved teacher collaboration, decreased discipline problems, and, perhaps most importantly, improved attendance, which the state factors in determining money allocated to the schools. 

“It’s been a positive experience so far,” said Schmookler who serves as principal and dean for the 400-student school. 

Like Fremont High, Berkeley has decided to form focused schools that appeal to students and teachers with similar interests. Huxley said that, for example, a school with an environmental focus would not just offer electives on environmental topics put would weave environmental issues throughout the curriculum, including non-science core classes. 

Kalima Rose, mother of a CAS student and one of the parents pushing hardest for small schools, envisioned future schools partnered with Berkeley organizations that fit the school’s specialty. 

Noting that CAS—which focuses on media and social justice—has collaborated with the Pacific Film Archive and Youth Radio, she said, “The idea is to create an interesting curriculum combined with partnership institutions to provide students with a lot of skills.” 

Teachers and students appear open to the idea. A teacher poll conducted last year found 85 percent favored some form of restructuring the BHS into smaller schools.  

An unscientific poll conducted in 2001 by Bradley Johnson, Berkeley High’s current student representative on the Board of Education, found that 55 percent of the students “think that small schools are better in providing education than large schools,” while 86 percent “feel that there is more one on one contact with teachers in small schools.” 

Bill Pratt, a history teacher who helped found CAS after several years at the high school, is convinced small schools will benefit everyone. 

“It’s hard to overstate the difference for me,” he said. “It’s deepened my experience as a teacher. One key thing is to work with talented teachers and have a real collegial community to develop curriculum. 

“It’s also transformed my personal relationship with the kids,” he added, pointing to a trip to Cuba he organized in which wealthier kids raised money alongside other students to ensure everyone could participate. 

“I don’t think that would happen at Berkeley High at large,” he said. 

Nick Streets, one of Pratt’s students, said the small school has given him a sense of belonging. “I can name all 90 people in my CAS Junior Class, but I probably can name only about five people in my math class,” he said. 

A small band of parents has pushed for small schools, but Rose acknowledged they would have to increase their ranks to make future schools successful. 

“It’s been 2 million hours to form CAS,” she said. “Finding other people willing to put in those hours will be the challenge. 

“In Berkeley parents tend to be really involved in elementary school, in middle school less so, and by High School they get more and more alienated,” she added. 

Carey agreed that any successful Berkeley small school requires parent support. “There has to be a real partnership between the school and community,” he said. Schools that can’t sink their roots deep enough won’t be successful.” 

A 2000 study by Bank Street College found that while Chicago schools did raise achievement for minority students, many schools-within-schools were fragile. 

“The minute they became more successful than the host school, things like this happen,” researcher Patricia Wasley told Education Week. “The principal will want teachers to come and do coaching with the larger school faculty, or the host school staff becomes resentful of the smaller unit and works to undermine it.” 

Implementing small schools presents logistical quagmires. Will small schools be in charge of discipline? Will they have their own counselors? How will teachers be assigned? Will they cost more? What if some small schools are more popular and some students are forced into less popular ones? How about students who need English training, advanced or remedial classes? 

“There’s absolutely no way to answer them right now,” Carey said, noting that each school will negotiate its autonomy with the larger high school. 

On the issue of class choice, Berkeley’s grand plan calls for granting students “passports” to take advanced or specialized classes if their school doesn’t offer them. CAS, for example, does not offer students Advanced Placement classes. 

Filling in the details starts Nov. 5, the deadline for teachers to submit a letter of commitment to form a small school. From there, a design team of teachers, parents and students will work to build a curriculum—and, if all goes well—by next year the program will emerge as a “learning community” within the high school gearing up for small school status the following year. 

Huxley said the proposals generated at last week’s retreat might offer a head start, but that the administration is still open to more ideas. This week, new Principal Jim Slemp—who oversaw a similar transition at his last school in Oregon—will discuss the small schools transition with faculty. 

Streets, the CAS junior, said he was all for the switch. “You need [the community] to succeed,” he said. “I don’t know where I’d be without it.”


Berkeley This Week

Tuesday November 04, 2003

TUESDAY, NOV. 4 

“Begging Children: Their Hope, Their Future” with Abdoulaye Tall, Claude Ake Scholar from Senegal, at 4 p.m. in 652 Barrows Hall, UC Campus. Sponsored by the Center for African Studies. 642-8338. asc@uclink.berkeley.edu 

Berkeley Community Fund Celebrates Community Leaders at an awards dinner at 6 p.m. at Hs Lordship’s, 199 Seawall Drive, Berkeley Marina. Tickets are $45 and may be purchased by calling 525-5272. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers We are a few slowpoke seniors who walk between a mile or two each Tuesday, meeting at 9:30 a.m. in the Little Farm parking lot. To join us, call 215-7672. 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Flu shots will be given by the Berkeley Health Dept. 845-6830. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 525-3565. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

Morris Dancing Workshop Learn the basics of an English ritual dance form that predates Shakespeare. Free and open to all. From 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. at Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. at Oxford. www.talamasca.com/berkmorris 

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 5 

Meetup for Howard Dean at 7 p.m. at three Berkeley locations: Au Coquelet, 2000 University Ave.; Raleigh's (Generation Dean youth meeting), 2438 Telegraph Ave.; and Sweet Basil Thai Restaurant, 1736 Solano Ave. Free. Wheelchair accessible. 843-8724. 

Building a Portfolio, learn how to shoot slides of your artwork, matte and present your artwork, and write an artist statement, with Timothy Phelan, Wed. Nov. 5, 12 and 19, from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Cost is $45. For information call 644-6893. 

“Hepatitis C and Traditional Chinese Medicine” with Tatyana Ryevzina, L.Ac., MS, at 5:30 p.m. at Pharmaca Integrative, 1744 Solano Ave. 

“The Religious Imagination,” a talk by The Very Rev. Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral, with particular emphasis on the role of poetry in religion, at 7:30 p.m. at All Souls Episcopal Church, 2220 Cedar St. 848-1755.  

“Exploring the Heart in Judaism and Jewish Spirituality,” with Ron Bedrick, Wednesdays, Nov. 5, 12, 19 and Dec. 3, from 7:30 to 9 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Communiity Center, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $35 BRJCC members, $40 public. To register call 848-0237, ext. 112 or email info@brjcc.org 

“Through the Gates of the Alhambra: Revisiting the Question of Islam and Pluralism,” with Dr. S. Nomanul Haq, a Muslim scholar who holds appointments in both the History of Art and in Asian and Midddle East Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, at 7 p.m. in the Dinner Boardroom at the GTU Hewlett Library, preceded by a reception at the Badè Museum at PSR, at 5:30 pm. 649-2440.  

“Beyond Words: An Interfaith Ritual for Peace” at 8:30 pm, in the University Christian Church, 2401 Le Conte. The ritual incorporates movements and chant forms from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. Sponsored by the GTU's Center for the Arts, Religion and Education (CARE) and designed with Omega West Dance Company, under the direction of PSR's Carla DeSola. For more information, contact Joan Carter at joanlcarter@aol.com or Carla DeSola at carlart@mindspring.com 

North Berkeley Senior Center Advisory Center Council meets at 10 a.m. 981-5190. 

Fun with Acting class meets at 11 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Free, all are welcome. 985-0373. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Vigil at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities. 

com/vigil4peace/vigil 

Prose Writers Workshop We're a serious but lively bunch whose focus is on issues of craft. Novices welcome. Experienced facilitator. Community sponsored, no fee. Meets 7 to 9 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut, at Rose. For information call 524-3034. 

Berkeley CopWatch open office hours 7 to 9 p.m. Drop in to file complaints, assistance available. For information call 548-0425. 

Berkeley Communicators Toastmasters meets the first and third Wednesdays of the month at 7:15 a.m. at Hide-A-Way Café, 6430 Telegraph Ave. For information call Fred Garvey, 925-682-1111, ext. 164. 

THURSDAY, NOV. 6 

“Elections and the Media: From Florida to California and on to 2004” with BBC investigative journalist, Greg Palast, at 7 p.m. at King Middle School, 1781 Rose St. Tickets cost $10 and are available from 415-546-6334 ext. 300. www.media-alliance.org 

Ethnic Migrations to West Berkeley with Sonia Carriedo on immigration from the Mexican village of Chavinda, and Willie Phillips on African Americans in West Berkeley, at 7:30 p.m. at the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, 926 Hearst, at 8th St. Part of a lecture series commemorating the 150th anniversary of the beginning of Ocean View, Berkeley’s early settlement village. Tickets are $10, no one turned away for lack of funds. 841-8562. bahaworks@yahoo.com 

Government Information and Participation, a workshop on how to use the City of Berkeley website and obtain information, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. in the Central Library, 3rd Floor Electronic Classroom. Sponsored by the City Clerk Dept. 981-6900.  

Best Hikes in the Bay Area, a slide presentation and talk by Linda Hamilton at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

“We Interrupt This Empire” a collaborative work by Bay Area video activists providing a critique of the corporate media coverage of the Iraq war, at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. A benefit for the Pastors for Peace Caravan to Chiapas and Central America. 527-2522. 

“Deceptions and Cover-Ups: Fragments from the War on Terror” film showing, “Palestine is Still the Issue” at 6:30 p.m. in the Main Meeting Room of the Berkeley Central Public Library, 2090 Kittredge. Co-sponsored by Berkeley Peace Walk & Vigil. www.geocities. 

com/vigil4peace/vigil.html  

Scenic Photography Seminar with award-winning Bay Area freelance photographer Gary Crabbe at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Travel Shop & Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave at Rose. Cost is $20, pre-register to save a seat. 843-3533.  

“Uncovering Ancient Kabbalistic Treasures for Creating Success Now” with Jill Lebeau and Joy Thomas at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $10 general, $8 BRJCC members. To register call 848-0237, ext. 112 or email info@brjcc.org  

“Martin Luther and Shinran: The Presence of Christ in Justification and Salvation in a Buddhist-Christian Context,” with Dr. Paul Chung, lecturer in theology and Asian spirituality at 7 p.m. in the Chapel of the Cross, Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, 2770 Marin Ave. 559-2731. 

“Prostate Cancer: Prevention and Intervention Strategies” with Daniel Herman, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Natural Grocery, 1336 Gilman St. 526-2456. 

UC Botanical Garden Docent Training at 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Fee and registration required. 643-1924. 

Berkeley Liberation Radio 104.1 FM public meeting for all interested people at 7 p.m. at the Long Haul Info Shop, 3124 Shattuck Ave. 595-0190. 

St. John's Prime Timers Tap Dancing class meets on Thursday mornings at 9:15 a.m. at St. John's Presbyterian Church at 2717 Garber St. Class is free and open to anyone over 50. 527-0167. 

FRIDAY, NOV. 7 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Anthony Adamthwaite, Prof. of History, UCB, on “European and American Relations.” Luncheon 11:45 a.m. $11.50 - $12.50. Speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925 or 665-9020. 

“War on Terror: A War on the People of the Philippines” at 7:30 p.m. at Marian Hall, St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. 843-2244.  

“Are Americans Still Liberal After all These Years?” with Prof. David Tabb at 7:30 p.m. at Congregation Beth El, 2301 Vine St. 848-3988, ext. 26. 

“Rumi: The Way of the Heart,” with Dr. Andrew Vidich, at 7:15 p.m. St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Sponsored by the Science of Spirituality. 707-226-7703. www.sos-ca.org 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. wibberkeley@yahoo.com 548-6310, 845-1143. 

Meditation, Peace Vigil and Dialogue, gather at noon on the grass close to the West Entrance to UC Berkeley, on Oxford St. near University Ave. 496-6000, ext. 135. www.bpf.org 

Overeaters Anonymous meets at 1:30 p.m. at the Northbrae Church at Solano and The Alameda. Parking is free and is handicapped accessible. 525-5231. 

SATURDAY, NOV. 8 

A Walking Tour of Gymnosperms, a diverse assemblage of cone-bearing plants, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. Cost is $5. Registration required, space is limited. Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. 643-8155. www.mip.berkeley.edu/garden  

Canoes in Sloughs Join Save The Bay as we explore Arrow- 

head Marsh, one of the Bay's hidden gems, and the site of an ongoing restoration project. From 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Cost is $25. Pre-registration required. 231-9430. mary@aoinstitute.org, www.aoinstitute.org 

“The Untold Story of the CIA Coup in Iran,” with Cyrus Bina, Professor of Economics at Univ. of Minnesota, Morris Mansour Farhang, Professor of International Relations at Bennington College, and Nikki Keddie, Emeritus Professor of History at UCLA, at 6 p.m. in the Valley Life Science Building, Room 2050, UC Campus. 684-4781. 

Practical Art Fair, from 1 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Article Pract, 5010 Telegraph Ave. 652 7435. www.articlepract.com  

An Unholy Pagan Feast Day of the Antlered One Potluck, with live Tribal Metal, at 8 p.m. at the Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave. 540-0751. 

Free Emergency Preparedness Class on Responding to Terrorism for anyone who lives or works in Berkeley, from 9 a.m. to noon at 997 Cedar St., between 8th and 9th Sts. Register on-line at www.ci.berkeley. ca.us/fire/oes or call 981-5506. 

Government Information and Participation, a workshop on how to use the City of Berkeley website and obtain information, at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. in the Central Library, 3rd Floor electronic classroom. Sponsored by the City Clerk Dept. 981-6900. 

Pet Adoptions, sponsored by Home at Last, from noon to 5 p.m., Hearst and 4th St. 548-9223. 

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

Yoga for Seniors at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St., on Saturdays from 10 to 11 a.m. The class is taught by Rosie Linsky, who at age 72, has practiced yoga for over 40 years. Open to non-members of the club for $8.00 per class. For further information and to register, call at 848-7800. 

“Angst in the Moment: An Aesthetic Spirituality of Grief” with Rev. Dr. Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, at 10:30 a.m. at Congregation Beth El, 2301 Vine St. 848-3988, ext. 26. 

SUNDAY, NOV. 9 

Crush Festival, sponsored by the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce, from 2 to 5 p.m. at the Radisson Hotel, 200 Marina Blvd. 549-7000. 

David Cobb, Green Party Candidate for President at 5 p.m. at the Niebyl-Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave. This program is one of a series of “Green Sunday” discussions sponsored by the Green Party of Alameda County. 

Basic Computer Use and The Berkeley Public Library Catalog will be taught from 1 to 2 p.m. Finding It on the Internet will be taught from 2 to 3 p.m. in the Central Library’s 3rd floor Electronic Classroom. Reservations are required. Sign up at the 3rd floor Paging Desk or call 981-6221. 

“Jewish Voices of the California Gold Rush: A Documentary History,” with author Ava Kahn, at 10:30 a.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $4-$5. to register call 848-0237, ext.112.  

Tibetan Buddhism, Lama Palzang on “Padmasambhava: Founder of Tibetan Buddhism” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

Eckhart Tolle Talks on Video Free gathering at 7:30 p.m. to hear the words of the author of “The Power of Now” at the Feldenkrais Ctr., 830 Bancroft Way. 547-2024.  

MONDAY, NOV. 10 

“Abandoned” an exposé of the results of the 1996 immigration law, with two videos, “The Betrayal of America’s Immigrants” and “Of Rights and Wrongs,” followed by a question and answer period. At 7 p.m. Grand Lake Neighborhood Center, 530 Lake Park Ave, Oakland. Wheelchair Accessible. $1 suggested donation, no one turned away for lack of funds. East Bay Community Against the War. 658-8994. 

Women’s Cancer Resource Center, volunteer training, every second Monday of the month, from 6 to 8 p.m. at 5741 Telegraph Ave. To sign up call Emily at 601-4040, ext. 109. emily@wcrc.org 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 6 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

ONGOING 

We Give Thanks Month, Berkeley restaurants, Bar-Ristorante Raphael, Cold Stone Creamery, Downtown, La Note, Semi-Freddi’s, Skates, and Spengers will donate a portion of their proceeds to Berkeley Food and Housing Project during the month of November. 

International Circle K Awareness Week, Nov. 2 - 8. Students are invited to join a week of service. Look for the table on Upper Sproul, UC Campus. For informtaion call 849-1963. cki-publicrelations@uclink.berkeley.edu 

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tues., Nov. 4, at 7 p.m., with a Special Meeting at 5 p.m. in City Council Chambers, Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Commission on the Status of Women meets Wed., Nov. 5, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Ruby Primus, 981-5106. www.ci.ber- 

keley.ca.us/commissions/women 

Fire Safety Commission meets Wed., Nov. 5, at 7:30 p.m. at the Emergency Operations Center, 997 Cedar St. David Orth, 981-5502. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/firesafety 

School Board meets Wed. Nov. 5 at 7:30 p.m., in the City Council Chambers. Queen Graham 644-6147 or Mark Coplan 644-6320. 

Community Environmental Advisory Commission meets Thurs., Nov. 6, at 7 p.m., at 2118 Milvia St. Nabil Al-Hadithy, 981-7461. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/environmentaladvisory 

Housing Advisory Commission meets Thurs., Nov. 6 at 7:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Oscar Sung, 981-5410. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/housing 

Public Works Commission meets Thurs., Nov. 6, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jeff Egeberg, 981-6406. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/publicworks


Arts Calendar

Tuesday November 04, 2003

TUESDAY, NOV. 4 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Spirituality in Opera,” a talk by Kip Cranna, musical administrator of the San Francisco Opera at 7:30 p.m. at All Souls Episcopal Church, 2220 Cedar St. 848-1755. 

Leonard Shalin talks about “Sex, Time and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Anoush, music of Greece, Macedonia and Armenia at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Balkan dance lesson with Lise Liepman at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Dayna Stephens House Jam at The Jazz House. Donation $5. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Mimi Fox, solo guitar, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 5  

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Awakening: Buddhist Paintings from Tibet, China and Japan” opens at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. Gallery is open Wed.-Sun. 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thurs. to 7 p.m. 642-0808. 

FILM 

Standby: No Technical Difficulties, Program 1 at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Gregory Maguire introduces his new novel, “Mirror, Mirror,” and interpretation of the Snow White tale, at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

www.codysbooks.com 

D. A. Miller presents “Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style” at 5:30 p.m. University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585.  

Phil Cousineau will offer a multimedia presentation of his new book, “The Olympic Odyssey: Rekindling the True Spirit of the Great Games,” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Robert A. Scott will show slides and talk about his new book “The Gothic Enterprise: A Guide to Understanding the Medieval Cathedral” at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Travel Shop & Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave at Rose. 843-3533. 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with Nazelah Jamison and Karen Ladson at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7, $5 with student i.d. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Noon Concert New Berkeley Compostions at International House, at the corner of Bancroft and Piedmont Aves. Admission is free. 642-4864. 

Eliza Gilkyson, folk rock originals, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightand- 

salvage.org 

Shaman Trance Dance with Lotus Tribal Fusion Belly Dance Performers and DJ Amar at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $6-$10, sliding scale. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Nathan Clevenger, composer of new music and modern jazz at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Sliding scale donation $8-$15. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Nicole McRory at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Jules Broussard, Bing Nathan and Ned Boynton at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Bryan Girard Trio at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Breathe In, The Time Flies at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes On Telegraph. Cost is $5. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

THURSDAY, NOV. 6 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Charles Winstead, “Abstract Geometric Paintings” reception from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Doyle Street Café and Gallery, 5515 Doyle St, Emeryville. Exhibit runs until Jan. 5. 658-2989.  

THEATER 

Traveling Jewish Theater, “Windows and Mirrors” stories by Paley, Malamud and Biller. A collaboration with Word for Word. At 8 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Theater. Tickets are $20-$24 and are available from 415-285-8080. www.atjt.com 

“Continental Divide,” a two-play cycle examining a gubernatorial election in a fictional western state, by David Edgar, directed by Tony Taccone, at Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theater, today through Dec. 28. The two plays, “Daughters of the Revolution” and “Mothers Against” can be seen in either order. Tickets are $10-$55. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

FILM 

Experimental Short Films by Antero Alli and Friends, with the filmmaker in person, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $7-$12, sliding scale. 464-4640. 

“The Seventh Seal” directed by Ingmar Bergman, at 8 p.m. at the Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave. Wheelchair accessible. 540-0751. www.thelonghaul.org 

First Impressions: “The Good Wife of Tokyo” at 5:30 p.m. and Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival: “The New Boys” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Lunch Poems with Michael Harper at 12:10 p.m. in the Morrison Library in Doe Library, UC Campus. Admission is free. 642-0137.  

Guided Tour: Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics, at 12:15 and 5:30 p.m., Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808.  

Gallery Talk: “Recent Research on Inca Archeology in Ecuador” with Dennis Ogbun, at noon at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum, Bancroft Way at College Ave. Free with museum admission. 643-7648.  

Word Beat Reading Series at 7 p.m. with featured readers John Rowe and Rita Bregman, followed by an open mic, at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. 526-5985 or 205-1749.  

Tamora Pierce reads from her new novel for young readers, “Trickster’s Choice,” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. www.codysbooks.com  

Ken Croswell introduces his new book, “Magnificent Mars,” with a slide show, at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Bill Turner, former FBI agent specializing in assassinations, discusses his book “Farewell America” and “Rearview Mirror,” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 

Khaled Hosseini describes Afghanistan of the past thirty years in his new novel, “The Kite Runner” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Benefit for the Hope Flowers School in Palestine, with music by the La Peña Community Chorus, at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Donation $15-$25, no one turned away. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Jamie Isman, singer, songwriter performs at the 1923 Teahouse at 8 p.m. Suggested donation of $7-$15. 644-2204. www.epicarts.org 

Estero at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

George Pedersen and His Pretty Good Band at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

CV1 at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Grateful Dead DJ Night from 10 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $6. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

David Knopfler, originals from the co-founder of Dire Straits, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Keni El Lebrijano, flamenco guitarist, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

FRIDAY, NOV. 7 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Kathleen Flanigan, “Birds of a Feather,” recent work including furniture. Reception from 5 to 8 p.m. at Epoch Gallery, 2284 Fulton St. 849-4596. 

“Art and Activism” Reception from 5 to 8 p.m., featuring Madonna Thunder Hawk, landscape photographer Justin Carder Black and social commentary painter Joanna Salska. Exhibition runs to Nov. 30. North Gate Gallery, 1862 Euclid. 540-8508.  

THEATER 

Traveling Jewish Theater, “Windows and Mirrors” See listing for Nov. 6. 

Impact Theater, “Macbeth” directed by Melissa Hillman, opens at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. www.impacttheater.com 

FILM 

Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival: “Football, Iranian Style” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“Weather Underground,” with a post-film discussion with director Sam Green, producer Carrie Lozano, and other guests, at 7:30 p.m. at The College Preparatory School, Buttner Auditorium, 6100 Broadway (north), Oakland. Free, but reservations required. 658-5202. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Simon Winchester looks at “The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary” at 12:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Adam Thirlwell discusses “Politics,” a novel, not about politics, but about sexual etiquette and other comedic topics, at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

West Coast A Cappella Showcase, with the UC Men’s Octet and California Golden Overtones at Wheeler Auditorium, UC Campus. Tickets are $8-$10 and are available from 642-3880. www.mensoctet.com 

Pascal Rioult Dance Theatre at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $26-$46. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Stompy Jones, formerly the Swing Session Band, plays small band music of the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson with Nick and Shanna at 8 p.m. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Vanessa Morrison and Roberta Chevrette perform indy folk at the 1923 Teahouse at 8 p.m. Suggested donation of $7-$15, no one turned away for lack of funds. 644-2204. www.epicarts.org 

Asylum Street Spankers at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $14. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

The Fruitvale Project, a community-based experimental theater performance featuring Latino spoken word artists at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10 in advance, $12 at the door. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Henri-Pierre Koubaka performs ancient and contemporary mandingo music from Senegal, Mali, Guinea and Kongo, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Sliding scale donation $6-$15. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Trio Paradisio, a dinner fund-raiser for the Jazz School, at 8:30 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Chris Smither, blues-based originals, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $17.50 advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Seventy at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Time for Living, Physical Challenge, Tarkaru, Wear the Mark at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Realistic at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

JND, Coby Brown, Shaken at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes On Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

SATURDAY, NOV. 8 

CHILDREN  

“The Wonderful World of Zaal,” a Persian legend, performed by Word For Word, at 3:30 p.m. at the Claremont Branch Library. The free program is sponsored by the Friends of the Berkeley Public Library. For further information, contact the Children’s Library, 981-6224. 

Hillside Players, “Tangled Tales: Wishes, Witches and Weddings,” favorite fairy tales intertwined in comedy, at 2 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $7 for adults, and $4 for children under 12, seniors and students. 2286 Cedar St. 384-6418. 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Independent Designer Wearables and Accessories brings together twelve of the Bay Area's most talented independent artists and designers. 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527.  

www.accigallery.com 

THEATER 

Traveling Jewish Theater, “Windows and Mirrors” See listing for Nov. 6. 

Word for Word, “The Killing Blanket” a short story about the Choctaw Nation by Rilla Askew, at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge, at 1 p.m. Free. 981-6139. 

FILM 

A Short History of Polish Animation, Program 1, at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Paul Davidson discusses his research into customer service departments in “Consumer Joe: Harassing Corporate America, One Letter at a Time,” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

The Bay Area Poets Coalition holds an open reading, 3 to 5 p.m., West Branch Berkeley Public Library, 1125 University Ave. 527-9905. poetalk@aol.com 

Alan Colmes, co-host of Fox News’s “Hannity and Colmes,” talks about his new book, “Red, White and Liberal,” at 2 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 

Bruce Balfour intruduces “The Digital Dead” at 2 p.m. at The Dark Carnival, 3086 Claremont Ave. 654-7323. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Music of Three Worlds Concert, an encounter with Western, Arabic and African traditions, at 8 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Jacob Needleman will moderate a conversation with the audience after the performance. Tickets are $20-$30. 763-2869. www.musicofthreeworlds.com 

Pascal Rioult Dance Theatre at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $26-$46. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Choreographers’ Performance Alliance, “Works in the Works” at 7:30 p.m. at Eighth Street Studio, 2525 Eighth St. Cost is $10. 644-1788, ext. 2. 

Volti “OUR America is Singing!” at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $8-$20 and are available from 415-771-3352. www.voltisf.org 

Dick Hindman Trio, original music, jazz standards and Brazilian favorites at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10-$15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Industrial Jazz Group performs at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Sliding scale donation $10-$15. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Green Chimneys at 2 p.m. at Down Home Music, 10341 San Pablo Ave. El Cerrito. 525-2129.  

Lichi Fuentes, CD release party at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12 in advance, $14 at the door. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Chris Smither, blues-based originals, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $17.50 advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Peter Tosh Tribute with Andrew Tosh and Sister I-Live at 9:30 p.m., at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13.525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Palm Wine Boys perform West African influenced folk at the 1923 Teahouse at 8 p.m. Suggested donation of $7-$15, no one turned away for lack of funds. 644-2204. www.epicarts.org 

Brazilian Forro Party and Fundraiser for the Capoeira Institute, at 9 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck. Cost is $10-$12. 649-1686.  

Casey Nell and Little Sue at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

Rhonda Benin at 8:30 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Nicole McRory at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Thought Riot, F Minus, Affront, Go it Alone at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Rory Snyder, saxophonist, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

The Industrial Jazz Group, showcasing the music of Andrew Durkin at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donations of $6-$15 suggested. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.org 

Boys Gone Wild! and 20 Second Cycle at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes On Telegraph. Cost is $8. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Hacksaw to the Throat, Fighting Riley, Kamikaze Vespa, The Hep, Ditch Raymond at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes On Telegraph. Cost is $6. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

 

 

SUNDAY, NOV. 9 

EXHIBITIONS 

Art Show on Allston Way, between Shattuck and Oxford from noon to 7 p.m., featuring 30 artists and 15 poets. Sponsored by Jupiter and organized by A. Roberts of Guerrilla Gallery. 

THEATER 

Traveling Jewish Theater, “Windows and Mirrors” See listing for Nov. 6.  

Hillside Players, “Tangled Tales: Wishes, Witches and Weddings,” at 2 p.m. See ;isting for Nov. 8. 

FILM 

A Short History of Polish Animation, Program 2 at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“Tangled Roots,” with filmmaker and author Heidi Schmidt Emberling, at 2 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $5. 848-0237, ext. 112.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics, Curator’s Talk with Constance Lewallen at 1 p.m., and Lecture with Barbara Stafford at 3 p.m. Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Poetry Flash with Jacqueline Berger and Virginia Chase Sutton at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

“Going Home to a Landscape: Writings by Filipinas” with Marianne Villanueva, Barbara Pulmano Reyes, Michelle Macaraeg Bautista, Angela Narciso Torres, and Catalina Cariaga at 3 p.m. at Eastwind Books, 2066 University Ave. 548-2350. 

“Towards an Archeology of the Soul” lecture with Berkeley author/ritualist, Antero Alli, at 5 p.m. at Alaya Bookstore, 1713 University Ave. 548-4701. www.verticalpool.com/archeology.html 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, “Splendori Italiani,” with British soprano Emma Kirkby at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $29-$60. 415-392-4400. www.philharmonia.org 

Jazz/Avant Garde Mass at 10 a.m. at All Souls Episcopal Church, 2220 Cedar St. With Tom Bickley, recorder, Paul Hanson, bassoon, saxophone, Doug Morton, trumpet, John Schott, guitar, Ches Smith, percussion, and Marsha Thomas-Cooke, vocals. 848-1755. 

Life of the Worlds: Journeys in Jewish Sacred Music with Richard Kaplan in Concert at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. $10 donation suggested. 848-0237, ext. 112.  

Live Oak Concert with David Ryther, violin, at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center in Live Oak Park. Tickets are $10 general, $9 students/seniors and $8 BAC members. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

“Waging Peace” UC Alumni Chorus fall concert, featuring songs of nonviolence and reconciliation, at 3 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave., Oakland, near Grand and Harrison. Tickets are $10-$15, available from 643-9645 or at the door. www.ucac.net 

Emanuel Ax, pianist, at 3 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Hawaiian Music Environmental Benefit at 6 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Bill Amatneek and Charlie Chin, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Aya de Leon, one woman hip-hop show with Bill Santiago’s “Spanish 101” at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $6 for the matinee, $12 for the evening. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Montclair Women’s Big Band, celebrating the release of their first CD, at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

UpSurge, with Raymond Nat Turner and Zigi Lowenberg, performs jazz poetry at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Sliding scale donation $8-$15. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

MONDAY, NOV. 10 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jim Campbell/Matix 208, Art Technology and Culture Colloquium at 7:30 p.m., Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Page to Stage, a conversation with playwright David Edgar and Frontline/World series editor Stephen Talbot on the new production “Continental Divide” at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Poetry Express, featuring Dale Jenson and Wendy Brown, open mic from 7 to 9:30 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

Mary Monroe reads from her new novel, “God Still Don’t Like Ugly” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

 

 

 

 


Immigrant Death Case Ends in Plea

By Matthew Artz
Tuesday November 04, 2003

A guilty plea by the fifth and final member of a notorious Berkeley real estate dynasty may spell the end of a sensational case that began with a young woman’s death by carbon monoxide poisoning in an apartment building owned by the family. 

The case exploded into the headlines when the dead girl’s sister told police she and her sister had been brought over from India and subjected to unwanted sex and cheap labor. 

Prasad Lakireddy entered a guilty plea in federal court Friday to one count of conspiracy to employ unauthorized aliens. He will receive five years on probation, including one year of house arrest, pay a $20,000 fine and perform 300 hours of community service if U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken accepts the sentence federal prosecutors brokered with Lakireddy’s attorney, Paul Wolf. 

If Judge Wilken accepts the deal, Reddy will be the third member of his family to avoid prison time in return for a plea. 

Should the judge reject the plea bargain before the Feb. 9 sentencing hearing, Lakireddy could opt to stand trial. Conviction on one count of conspiracy carries a maximum prison sentence of five years. 

Lakireddy’s plea may end four years of prosecution against the family—a process some activists say has produced punishments too lenient for the crimes initially charged. 

The case surfaced in November, 1999, when 17-year-old Chanti Pratipatti died from carbon monoxide fumes caused by a blocked heating vent in a downtown Berkeley apartment owned by the Lakireddys. 

Her 15-year-old sister survived. 

“I think it’s a travesty of justice,” said Marcia Poole of the local group Women Against Sexual Slavery, who alerted police when she saw the dead girl being surreptitiously removed from the apartment building. “It’s gone from sexual trafficking and indentured servitude to visa violations with no jail time.” 

Wolf countered that new evidence, withheld from the public pending a civil claim against the family, vindicated his client of the more lurid allegations against him. “Once Judge Wilken has received all the facts, she will see that this is a fair and appropriate disposition,” he said. 

The U.S. District Attorney declined to pursue wrongful death charges against alleged ringleader Lakireddy Bali Reddy, Prasad’s father, settling for a plea bargain that sentenced him to eight years in prison for transporting minors for illegal sexual activity, conspiring to commit immigration fraud and filing a false tax return. 

Reddy’s brother, Jayaprakash Lakireddy, spent one year in a halfway house for conspiring to commit immigration fraud. His sister-in-law, Annapurna Lakireddy, served six months of home detention for the same offense. 

Prasad’s brother, Vijay, received a two-year sentence after he pled guilty last year to a single count of immigration fraud. 

Prasad had originally been charged with nine counts, including conspiracy to import aliens for immoral purposes and witness tampering.


Letters to the Editor

Tuesday November 04, 2003

CORRECTIONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Daily Planet’s Friday article covering the hearings of three Berkeley students charged with violation of the code of conduct contained several irresponsible errors. 

For one, on a more technical note, the protest in question is referenced as occuring March 23, which is not accurate. The protest was on March 20. 

More importantly, however, was giving a crowd estimate of “More than 4,000 students.” The only place where you can find this number, as far as I can tell, is in the full-page advertisement the protesters themselves bought in the Daily Californian, and the various activist papers and websites which followed their lead. While I understand that crowd estimates were not given by most major newspapers, it is grossly irresponsible to report the crowd estimate from the protesters themselves, who have a tendency to overestimate their numbers, without pointing out the source of the information. 

Justin Azadivar 

 

• 

FOR SUSAN PARKER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Wow, wow. What a picture you paint (“One Woman’s True Life Halloween Horror Tale,” Daily Planet, Oct. 28-31). I know more about you from your short, brilliant and entertaining article, than I do about some people I’ve know my whole life. The fact that I could relate to many of the times of your life didn’t hurt one bit. You are a great read, and when a book comes out with your name on it, I will be standing in line. I’ll be the one with the mask, the one I’m learning to recognize. 

Don’t stop (a closing to a letter that I’ve never heard, but seems to fit). 

Patti Hyland 

 

• 

IS MARTYRDOM A CRIME? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The currency of journalism is clear language. But clarity of language requires clarity of thought, a fact that seems to have escaped the attention of many journalists. Euphemisms like “collateral damage” abound. Self-absorbed bias—friends are killed but enemies lose their lives—and fuzzy categories like “supporters of the former regime” may be unavoidable but should be kept to a minimum. 

“Terrorist” is one of the most used words in journalists’ lexicon. A terrorist act is a crime and so we are led to believe that a terrorist is a criminal. Are journalists self-serving, servile or just plain lazy to habitually refer to suicide bombers as terrorists? Such labeling inexcusably denies the fact that to his countrymen the suicide is a martyr.  

Why is martyrdom ennobling for us but impossible for our enemies? 

If a person wants to spread fear then suicide is an extreme and stupid way to do it. Suicide is not done solely for the purpose of terrorizing. Were it so we’d have to interpret Patrick Henry’s famous cry, “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” as an endorsement of terrorism.  

Finally, referring to suicide bombers as terrorists implicitly ignores the central fact of Jesus’ life. According to St. John’s Gospel, Chapter 15, verse13, “Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friends.” 

Marvin Chachere  

San Pablo 

 

• 

HEALTHY FORESTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As the fires in Southern California demonstrate, it is critical that we focus scarce federal resources in the areas where they will protect communities at risk. Unfortunately, President Bush’s so-called “Healthy” Forests Initiative, which the Senate may vote on this week, fails to adequately protect communities at risk from forest fires.  

It places the care and upkeep of our National Forests in the hands of the logging industry, rather than our National Forest Service and the public, calling for fire prevention management by said industry.  

Will they really do the job, or simply log the biggest, oldest, most profitable, and most fire-resistant trees, rather than the smaller unprofitable underbrush and saplings. The management of our forests cannot be placed in the hands of those who profit greatest from it; that makes no sense at all.  

It also weakens environmental protections, interferes with the independent judiciary, and undermines public participation in decisions that affect our public lands. But the worst is that it authorizes logging of old growth fire-resistant trees, whose thick bark can stop fire. We need these old growth trees to act as a bulwark against catastrophic wildfires.  

To protect lives and communities at risk from fire, Senators Feinstein and Boxer should vote against this deal and instead focus federal funding and resources on protecting communities at risk of catastrophic wildfire.  

Sierra Barnes 

Oakland 

 

º 


State Official Challenges Builder Asbestos Claims

By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR
Tuesday November 04, 2003

A review of California Occupational Safety and Health (Cal-OSHA) documents relating to the temporary closing of Kimes Morris Construction’s Hayward building renovation site for asbestos violations two years ago reveals that another Berkeley businessman was cited in the violation as well. 

At the same time, an Oakland Cal-OSHA inspector who brought the charges against the Berkeley contractors cast doubt on assertions by the contractors’ attorney that the violations were unintentional. 

An appeal by Berkeley-based Kimes Morris Construction Company of 17 violations of Cal-OSHA regulations is pending before the Cal-OSHA Appeals Board. 

“There are only two explanations,” said Cal-OSHA Associate Industrial Hygienist Garrett Brown. “Either they are the densest guys in the world and don’t know that asbestos removal is a health hazard while everybody else does—or else they were trying to cut corners and pull something off.” 

Renovations on a 1948-era commercial building on Foothill Boulevard in Hayward were shut down by Cal-OSHA, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, and the Hayward Building Department in January of 2002 when it was discovered that Kimes Morris workers were illegally disposing of asbestos-laced ceiling tiles in an open dumpster next to the building.  

Work on the building was afterwards completed after Kimes Morris hired a licensed asbestos removal company to finish the job. Kimes Morris has admitted committing the violations, but said through their attorney that it did not know any asbestos was present in the building. 

Inhalation of asbestos fibers—even for short periods of time—is considered by most experts to be an extreme health hazard, leading to possible lung cancer and other cancers of the chest and abdomen. State law requires asbestos removal under strict health guidelines, including wetting down of the asbestos material and the wearing of surgical masks by workers. In addition, it should only be disposed of in sealed containers in order to prevent the public from breathing the airborne fibers. Cal-OSHA records show that none of these precautions were taken by the Kimes Morris workers at the Hayward site. 

While Andrew Kimes reportedly told Cal-OSHA officials that the ceiling on the Hayward building had been “worked wet,” a summary of the Cal-OSHA findings reported that “[o]f the interviewed employees only one said that, on one occasion, water was used in the demolition/renovation work. All the other employees stated unequivocally that no water was used on site. 

The Hayward Building Department confirmed that water to the building was shut off in January 2001 and, as of meter readings taken in December 2001, no water had been drawn on site during 2001 [the period in which the renovations took place].” 

Cal-OSHA also documents show that the Hayward building was originally purchased in January of 2001 by Richard Fishman and David Strykowski. Fishman is President of RAF Mortgage company in Berkeley, which specializes in construction loans. 

In 2002, Strykowski listed his business address as RAF Mortgage, and Cal-OSHA personnel identify him as a construction contractor. In October of 2001, Strykowski sold his 50 percent interest in the Hayward property to Coastal View Associates, a holding company owned by Kimes Morris owners Andrew Kimes and James Morris. 

Strykowski was not connected to the property when the asbestos removal violations were committed. 

The Kimes Morris renovation began shortly after the purchase. 

In January of 2001, the United Commercial Bank conducted a Phase One Environmental Site Assessment of the Hayward property for Fishman, which revealed that “Due to the age of the subject property buildings, there is a potential that asbestos-containing materials (ACMs) are present. … For buildings constructed prior to 1980, [federal law] states that all thermal system insulation … and surface materials must be designated as ‘presumed asbestos-containing material’ unless proven otherwise through sampling in accordance with the standards of the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act.” 

According to Kimes Morris attorney Fred Walter, Fishman testified at the Cal-OSHA appeals hearing that he never looked at the report and never gave it to Kimes Morris. Fishman was cited by Cal-OSHA and fined $350 for failure to “determine the presence of asbestos in the structure prior to the initiation of construction activities.” Fishman did not appeal his citation or fine. 

Cal-OSHA inspector Brown said it doesn’t matter whether Fishman showed the Phase One report to Kimes and Morris. “They should have known it already, from the age of the building. And they had already contracted out for similar asbestos removal at the Artech Building in Berkeley the same year.” 

Cal-OSHA documents show that Kimes Morris contracted with an environmental company to determine if asbestos was present in the exterior of the building where an awning was to be demolished, but failed to conduct a similar asbestos survey in the interior of the building. 

“I think they did it [that way] because they were in a hurry,” Cal-OSHA inspector Brown said. “Construction is a cutthroat business. Companies bid low, and then some of them try to cut the costs. Unfortunately, when they cut costs, the people who suffered were the workers. And in this case, any of the Hayward public that was exposed to the loose fibers in the dumpster.”


Gill Tract Should Be Used For Agriculture

Amy Kaplan
Tuesday November 04, 2003

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In your Oct. 28 story, “Scientist Mourns Gill Tract’s Demise,” Jeff Bond, planner for UC Capital Projects states that the Gill Tract “is not an agricultural area.” He says, “We’ve looked at the plan from all sides and we think we have the mix that the community wants.” 

As a concerned member of this community, I strongly disagree. The Gill Tract is an extraordinarily productive agricultural site that should only be used for agriculture. Furthermore, the Albany Teacher’s Union and the Board of Education do not agree with the planned development. On Sept. 9 the board passed a resolution in support of creating an educational, agricultural facility at the Gill Tract. UCB students and researchers need a site for research in sustainable urban agriculture. The Gill Tract is an ideal site, and the university has offered no reasonable alternative.  

The University Village Residents Association, as explained in the Daily Planet, also objects to aspects of the development, because rents will be unaffordable for graduate students. I have spoken with several Albany Little League parents who are going along with their fields’ move reluctantly, and wish to remain at their current site. The existing fields, which have been in their current location since the 1950s, have a small town, protected, community atmosphere.  

Local businesses should not welcome the development as planned. A large grocery store will take business from local independent markets like Berkeley Natural Grocery and the Tokyo Fish Market. 

If Jeff Bond had attended the Oct. Harvest Festival at the Gill Tract, he would have seen hundreds of attendees enjoying this valuable community agricultural resource. At several public meetings that Mr. Bond has attended, many concerned students and community members have repeatedly voiced their opposition to the development and presented alternative proposals. The San Pablo Avenue Mixed Use Development is definitely not “the mix that the community wants.”  

Urban Roots, a student and community organization, has developed a proposal for the Gill Tract that incorporates university and community needs with a working urban farm and gardens at the Gill Tract. A drawing of this vision, as well as the November 2002 proposal can be viewed at www.gilltract.com.  

Amy Kaplan


Development Committee Biased Toward Big Boxes

By Martha Nicoloff
Tuesday November 04, 2003

The mayor’s committee charged with cleaning up pesky development issues has just published its first draft. 

Since the group appointed by Tom Bates is heavily weighted with pro-development members, one can expect their recommendations will very likely reduce the ability of the public to have meaningful input. 

As was pointed out by members of the community some time ago, it was finally acknowledged that city planners had used fuzzy zoning when they granted State Density Bonuses to big box developers. The plain fact of the matter is that residential units in mixed-use R-3, R-4 and R-5 zones have no maximum number of units per building site. 

One wonders how the staff could have then determined a Density Bonus of 20 percent extra units beyond what is permitted, without having any real numbers serving as a base from which to make calculations. This situation causes great uncertainty and trouble—as the committee now realizes.  

One suggested way to patch up the inconsistency is to convince the lawmakers in Sacramento to accept Berkeley’s fuzzy zoning and make it legal. Berkeley could do as other cities have done and have the number of units permitted on each building site clearly specified in the zoning ordinance. 

The report contains news about a state bill already passed (Dutra AB-2392). It mandates that if densities are reduced in one area of the city, they must 

be increased in other areas. 

This is a problem for Berkeley because area plans for University Avenue and West Berkeley, though approved in the General Plan, have not had zoning ordinance changes in their unit density. The city has delayed acting for years. Is it now so late that the changes cannot still be made? 

The committee report wants more development and uses to be granted with a Zoning Certificate (ZC). That means there will be no notice to neighbors, no public hearings and no right of appeal. One suggestion is to allow construction of a single family house with only a ZC, if the footprint and height of the structure is smaller than current building standards. Where is the public’s right to have meaningful input? 

In several instances, the draft report refers to citizen’s comments about gross development as “acrimonious” (“harshness of temper, manner or speech”).  

It is to be expected that members of the public most immediately affected by detrimental aspects of a project would be critical in no uncertain terms. In fact, the neighbors have been well organized, well prepared and often correct in their criticisms. Describing their presentations of the opposition as “acrimony” is insulting, to say the least! 

One element causing problems not covered in the report is the propensity of developers to knowingly submit projects that far exceed the city’s building 

standards.  

For example: 1) Not allowing for necessary open space; 2) reducing the number of parking spaces for residents and shoppers; 3) encroaching on required set back from single family homes; 4) building heights that are out of scale and detrimental to adjacent communities. 

Developers know the zoning system very well and have exploited it to the maximum. 

Let it be noted that the report proposes some hopeful changes. For example, 1) notifying the community much earlier in the permitting process for large developments; 2) sharing information about staff meetings with developers, 3) putting up large, durable notice signs on project sites that illustrate the scale of the structure. 

Many thanks to the volunteer neighborhood supporters who attended meeting after meeting even though they were not appointed to the committee. The draft report will now be examined by various commissions for possible implementation.  

Will there be a public hearings? Ask your mayor. 

Martha Nicoloff is a former member of the Zoning Adjustment Board, the Planning Commission and is the author of the Neighborhood Preservation Initiative. 

 

 


Council Faces Eventful Agenda

By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR
Tuesday November 04, 2003

With a Nov. 25 deadline looming to finalize any measures to be placed on the March, 2004 ballot, continuing discussion over four proposed ballot measures will dominate tonight’s (Tuesday, Nov. 4) Berkeley City Council meeting when members return from a one-week vacation. 

Council is also expected to receive a report at Tuesday’s meeting from City Finance Director Fran David on “escaped tax assessments.” 

That report was requested by Mayor Tom Bates at Council last meeting two weeks ago after a citizen informed Council that prominent developer Patrick Kennedy hadn’t been billed Berkeley fees and assessments on the Gaia Building, a downtown mixed-use development. 

Later that week, the Daily Planet reported that a second Kennedy building, the Berkleyan, had also not been billed for city fees and assessments. 

Two proposed March ballot measures would lower the percentage a Berkeley candidate needs to win an election outright without triggering a runoff, lengthen the time between the initial election and a runoff, alter the number of signatures needed to land a slot on the ballot and add a filing fee to requirements for candidates who want a slot on city election ballots. 

Council asked city staff Oct. 21 to come to this week’s meeting with preliminary ballot language for the measures. 

Council is also scheduled to receive a report back from city staff concerning an Instant Runoff Voting charter amendment for the March ballot. Several Council members have expressed a desire to hold the measure until next November’s election. 

News of the Kennedy properties’ “escaped taxed assessment” issue comes at an awkward time for City Council, as one of the proposed ballot measures would ask Berkeley voters to approve a parcel tax increase in order to help make up a city budget deficit projected at $10 million to $16 million. Some observors have suggested that Berkeley voters might not look so favorably on assessing themselves new property taxes if they believed the city was lax in collecting existing property taxes on large city developments. 

Last week, the city manager’s office, under the signature of retiring City Manager Weldon Rucker, issued a memo to the mayor and City Council entitled “Gaia Building and Tax Assessments” to try to explain how the building escaped Berkeley fees and assessments. 

“This memo is in response to…the allegation [raised at the Oct. 21 Council meeting] that the owners of the Gaia Building did not pay Berkeley assessments since the issuance of a Temporary Certificate of Occupancy (TCO),” the memo read. 

“The allegation is accurate… Generally, when a property is developed, its building square footage and land use code are updated in the city’s land database when a final Certificate of Occupancy (CO) is issued. This information is then used to calculate the various taxes and assessments… However, it is a common practice to issue a TCO [Temporary Certificate of Occupancy] when a building is almost complete and safe to occupy, but when minor modifications are still required… 

“Prior to [the Oct. 21 Council meeting], the Finance, Planning, and Information Technology departments were already working together to modify our process to capture properties issued a TCO… Staff had already identified the Gaia property as being eligible for taxation, and the Finance Department was in the process of billing the property for the current tax year, and applicable past years as well.” 

The Rucker memo also said that as for the Berkleyan property, which was issued a final Certificate of Occupancy two years ago, “Taxes should have started to be assessed effective 7/1/01, but were not. This property will also be back billed immediately.” 

The memo continued that “Staff from [the Finance, Planning, and Information Technology departments] is working to develop cost-effective techniques to identify escaped assessments in a more timely fashion.”


CENA Gives Qualified ‘No’To Proposed Tax Hike

Dean MetzgerPresident of CENA
Tuesday November 04, 2003

Dear Mayor and City Council,  

Our neighbor association, Claremont Elmwood Neighborhood Association, (CENA) discussed the City of Berkeley’s fiscal crisis at our October Board of Directors meeting. The Board of Directors voted unanimously to oppose any parcel tax unless or until many other alternatives are considered. The Board of Directors will actively oppose the current proposal before City Council. We will ask our members and all of the residents of District 8 to oppose it as well. 

While we appreciate the efforts already undertaken to address our city’s budget deficit, we want to see efforts made in several other areas to generate funds before resorting to a tax increase. Given that passage of the parcel tax will only cure approximately 50 percent of the projected deficit, pursuing additional measures is required.  

1. With approximately 40 percent of Berkeley’s land area off the tax rolls because of nonprofit or institutional exemptions, any increase in assessments falls on a disproportionately smaller number of property taxpayers. Therefore, we want a concerted and systematic effort to negotiate payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT fees) from the major exempt landholders in Berkeley, as is done in other cities in similar circumstances. These fees must be proportional to the services received to eliminate the subsidy of these institutions currently paid for by property taxpayers. 

2. We believe that with approximately 75 percent of our general fund tied up in salaries, there has to be some limit on cost-of-living increases, which amount to about 5.5 percent per year. A negotiated reduction (or elimination for this year) would be preferable to other scenarios of layoffs and cutbacks in service. 

3. The city should explore other avenues of revenue generation, such as an entertainment surcharge on non-educational events, including at UC Berkeley. 

4. We urge City Council to establish a Nextus tax on all new development in Berkeley. This is a one-time tax correlated to the transportation and infrastructure modifications impacted by the development. The Transportation Department has been studying the legality of the Nextus tax and will be presenting this to City Council. 

5. The city must make a commitment to review all of its existing programs to make them more efficient. The city should continue a hiring freeze and staff reductions through retirements, until the budget is in balance. 

6. We want the city to review the PERS retirement system and change it to reflect the reality of the fiscal crisis. 

7. A large number of Berkeley residents who are voters are renters. The rent control laws must be changed to require these residents to pay their fair share of the city’s services they use. Under the current rules, the property owner cannot pass on any of the proposed parcel tax increase. 

We are proud to live in a city that has been so generous in supporting tax increases that have preserved our parks, enhanced our street lighting, given us a great library, supported our schools, and much more. Now, however, we feel we have reached the limit and cannot support the tax measure without serious and active consideration of alternatives. 

Thank you for your consideration, 

Dean Metzger 

President of CENA


Adult School Driveway Set By CalTrans

By MATTHEW ARTZ
Tuesday November 04, 2003

CalTrans officials have given the green light to plans by Berkeley school officials to include a San Pablo Avenue driveway in their plans for the controversial Franklin Adult School. 

City transportation officials and neighbors had insisted the driveway was essential to keep adult school students from clogging residential streets around the school, bounded by San Pablo to the west, Curtis Street to the east, Francisco Street to the south and Virginia Street to the west. 

The Caltrans decision—announced Friday—also paves the way for the district to implement changes to the original site plan that calls for reorienting the former elementary school towards San Pablo with the driveway and a pedestrian walkway. Because San Pablo is a state highway, Caltrans has final authority over new driveways. 

“I’m thankful that so many people worked hard to get this accomplished,” said BUSD Superintendent Michele Lawrence. 

Neighbors who have fought the proposed adult school said that while they’re pleased by the inclusion of the driveway, they are still not sold on the overall plan. 

“Obviously it’s going to help, but it’s still unclear even with this that the school can really fit in the neighborhood,” said James Day, a neighbor who is serving on site committee comprised of neighbors and district officials. 

Caltrans had rejected an earlier appeal from the district, citing that the district’s application lacked adequate transit studies.


Police Blotter

By MATTHEW ARTZ
Tuesday November 04, 2003

Paper Route Robbery 

A gunman robbed a man and woman as they delivered newspapers early Saturday morning. According to police, the two were making deliveries in the 2400 block of McGee Avenue when a gunman pulled up in a silver car and demanded their money. He grabbed the woman’s purse, the man’s wallet and a cell phone, then ordered them to close their eyes until he drove away. 

 

Robbery 

Two sound sleepers awoke to find that a robber had kicked open their front door and made off with their belongings. According to police, two roommates on the 2700 block of Durant Street went to sleep around 3 a.m. Sunday and woke up around 10 a.m. to find one’s wallet unfolded on the floor with $60 missing and the other’s $2,100 laptop computer gone.


From Susan Parker: Crab Competition Almost Too Much to Stomach

From Susan Parker
Tuesday November 04, 2003

Finally, a really cool assignment! I was asked to be a judge at the Third Annual Crabby Chef Competition. 

Hosted by Spenger’s Fresh Fish Grotto, with portions of the proceeds going to the Berkeley Historical Society, I prepared for my responsibilities by eating nothing and drinking only a large Peet’s Mocha (with no whipped cream) many hours before the event. 

And it WAS many hours. Held two Sundays ago at 2 p.m. in the Spenger’s parking lot on Fourth Street, I had to wait an extra 60 minutes because I forgot about the demise of Daylight Savings. I killed time by drinking an Anchor Steam, and interviewing some of the competing chefs. 

I spoke with Peter Scholte, Executive Sous Chef at Trader Vic’s and newly arrived to the United States from Holland, via Norway. He told me he was planning to prepare Pake Crab, a stir fry classic from the famous restaurant located near the Emeryville Marina. “A lot of fish in Norway,” he said and I nodded in agreement, not because I know much about the fish in Norway, but because the beer was going to my head. 

Next I spoke with Caffé Venezia’s Head Chef Cindy Deetz and Sautee Cook Nicole Grin. They had decorated their table with seaweed and sunflowers and they were the only competitors dressed, head to toe, in black. 

“You must be hot,” I said. 

“Compared to being in a cramped kitchen, this is heaven,” answered Cindy. “We’re getting ready to make a seafood dumpling soup with lobster, crab and the secret ingredient.” 

The competition allows the chefs 20 minutes to prepare a crab dish. They bring all their own ingredients and cooking equipment. Spenger’s provides the burners, two cooked crabs and a secret ingredient which the participants are not given until the competition begins. Every chef I spoke to had several alternative recipes planned, depending on the mystery ingredient. 

Charles Hochman, Executive Chef at California Cafe in Walnut Creek, was planning a crab and tuna “free-form” sushi with a Thai hot and sweet glaze, served with a mango and papaya salad. Lalimes Executive Chef Steve Jaramillo was scheming about something Spanish. “Maybe a tapa or a fajita,” he said, but I could tell he was purposely vague, not wanting to give anything away.  

Le Theatre’s Christine Mullen said she had brought along her lucky charm, Dan Rauch, also a cook at Le Theatre (at the old Gertie’s Seafood location). “He’s a Cancer,” she said with champion-like confidence. “The Sign of the Crab.”  

Brent Novotny, Executive Chef at Skates on the Bay, was defending last year’s first place status by doing something quite daring. “This is kind of a secret,” he whispered. “I’m going to make a lemon and roasted tomato sorbet to go with a chilled crab cocktail.” But like everyone else, he was waiting to find out the missing ingredient.  

A little after 2 p.m., organizer Tom Walton of Fortune Public Relations asked the judges to take their seats. Seven of us gathered around a small table covered with paper plates, napkins and plastic cutlery. Then Emcee David Michael Cane, who with his wife Rachel co-hosts the nationally syndicated food, wine and travel radio show “A Matter of Taste” (Saturdays KYCY-AM), told the chefs to get ready. Each was handed the secret potion, a bag of ripe green avocados. The cooking began! 

While the chefs chopped, minced, fried and boiled away, I met my fellow judges: several columnists from local newspapers, a travel writer, and Wade Daniels, Regional Correspondent for Nation’s Restaurant News. 

I sat next to Eric Schewe, Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Californian. 

“What brings you here?” I asked. 

“Crab,” he said. 

I walked around, watching the cooks at work. Some were diligent, their heads down, earnestly preparing their entrees, but others were gregarious, talking to the crowd, handing out samples, tasting as they cooked. 

Todd Kniess, Chef/Owner of Bistro Liaison on Shattuck Avenue, worked alone while his very pregnant wife, Natalie, watched. “When are you due?” I asked. “Any minute now,” she answered. 

Executive Chef Neil Marquis of the Pleasanton Hotel wore lobster-decorated draw string pants and Michael Zeiter, Executive Chef of Postino (located in Lafayette) sported a Cal Berkeley cap. I wondered if that would influence my fellow judge, Eric.  

The Rattle Cans, a San Francisco-based blues band, played music while the chefs cooked. The crowd milled around drinking beer, eating crab cakes and shrimp cocktails from the Spenger’s booth and the Pacific Seafood “Roadshow” an 18-wheeler, walk-in, refrigerated truck that was packed with all kinds of seafood delights.  

When the drums rolled, indicating that the cooking was over, I went back to my seat and was served fourteen different dishes, all of them with crab and avocado, but there the similarities ended. 

Paul Despotakis, Sous Chef of San Francisco-based McCormick & Kuleto’s, served up Asian wontons stuffed with cream cheese, shrimp, scallops and fennel. Executive Chef Frank Palmer of the Duck Club (Lafayette) presented an entrée of crab-stuffed trout wrapped in prosciutto. Kevin Weinberg, chef/owner of the Walnut Creek Yacht Club, gave us the final sample. “A sun-baked Cuban cocktail,” he said, referring not to his gas burner, but to the heat provided by the unnaturally hot weather.  

I was stuffed, but I had performed my duty with serious integrity. I marked my ballot, judging the chefs on presentation, creativity and taste. I gave thumbs up to the California Cafe sushi boys, but it was the stuffed trout prepared by the Duck Club that won.  

Better luck next year, foodies. I drove through West Berkeley slowly, and when I got home I lay on my stomach on the couch and went to sleep. It was a lot of hard work, but someone had to do it. I’ll probably just lie here quietly until next year, when my expertise will most definitely be needed again.


Qualified Praise for Solano Avenue Complex

By JOHN KENYON Special to the Planet
Tuesday November 04, 2003

In the last two or three years, the popular top end of Solano Avenue has seen noticeable improvement. The Oaks Theater, for ages just a marquee and a pylon, has stripped off its upper-level disguise of ‘mansard roofs’ to reveal a substantial office wing with matching Moorish windows. Round the corner on Colusa (heading north), an old Masonic temple, attractively remodeled as luxury condos, faces across the avenue to the sprawling new Thousand Oaks School, architecturally uninspired but lavishly landscaped and neighborhood-friendly. 

Now, finally, after 18 months of tedious-to-watch construction, a striking new building has replaced the abandoned Standard station on the corner of Solano and Colusa across from Andronico’s ‘Park and Shop.’ It is an ambitious 18,545-square-foot complex of shops and offices designed for developer Ari Nevo by the local firm Trachtenberg Architects. 

This generous corner site has allowed a more three-dimensionally complete building than most past infill development along Solano, and the architects have taken full advantage. 

Essentially, they have created a long commercial frontage of offices-over-shops, bent around the corner in a bold curve and terminated with a strong vertical features—on Colusa, the office entrance; on Solano, on the westerly end, a jaunty little tower. Already decidedly horizontal, the long pedestrian frontage has been further dramatized by facing the shop level with ceramic tile and the upper (office) level with stucco. 

Apparently, a limited budget dictated this half-tiling solution, but I personally see it as a blessing. My only reservation is about not totally tiling the little westerly tower to make a more dramatic statement at this important end. As for the handsome tiles themselves, they deserve closer inspection. Notice the interplay of the big square ones (smooth) and varying bands of narrow (rough), and particularly the elegant sill-like top. This subtly varied patterning, along with the positively glowing terra-cotta color, gives the project a level of quality beyond most speculative developments. It almost deserves to be a public building for a more enlightened time. 

But before going overboard with joy at the appearance of real architecture on this previously suburban gas station corner, let’s look at the new project’s weaker side—its relationship to the pleasant residential district next door. 

Not many years ago, some brave developer built a decently designed three-story block of condos immediately adjacent to the still-thriving Standard station, evoking some sardonic neighborhood comments. From Gray’s Books, of hallowed memory: “Who’d buy an apartment right next to that gas station, for Gods’ sake?,” forgetting that some units had actual Bay views from their back decks while living merely yards away from bookstores and coffee shops. 

Now the north side windows of those same pleasant condos face the blank “utility” wall of retail stores. The architects have at least carried the tiled Colusa frontage around the corner a few feet, and in an inspired move planted a bamboo hedge behind their new sideyard fence. But overall, we are still stuck here with the all-too-common brutal collision of residential and commercial. 

No such collusion occurs at the new building’s westerly end, where the windowless side of the big end store overlooks the parking lot of Wells Fargo. Architecturally, this is the most dramatic aspect of the design. The big blank wall projects out beyond the corner tower, relieved by a friendly-looking roof terrace. It’s all very impressive, but distressingly severe—for in a project noticeably short on street trees, this should be a great wall of greenery. Suitable flowering vines could have been trained onto a wall-sized trellis to create the grandest display of trumpetvine or bougainvillea in North Berkeley. 

But the most puzzling feature in Trachtenberg’s design is the projecting rail that runs around most of the building just below the flat roof. This assemblage of steel outriggers and mesh has a strangely arbitrary quality. A bit lower, and it could have been a glare-reducing canopy over the office windows. A bit higher, and it would be an updated “Maybeckian” overhang, effectively masking the roof’s undistinguished metal edge. Its main function would seem to be the casting of dramatic shadows on the stucco below, but this hardly works on the Solano frontage, which, inconveniently, faces north! Most irritating is the way this substitute classical cornice continues relentlessly across the projecting frontage of the office entrance on Colusa, reducing the effectiveness of that simple dignified facade, while failing to turn the corner at the garage end. Some Design Review! 

This anomaly somewhat takes the edge off the building’s truly impressive design achievement, which is the brilliantly handled relationship between twelve modest-sized office windows and five different shop-front conditions below, including rounding the novel but problematic corner. Stand across Solano and give it a hard look. You will find that all these openings are either centered, like the door and window, on the “corner” itself, or line up at the critical edges. Notice also how elegantly the shop-windows are recessed into the tiled wall and the delightful rhythms set up by the little clerestories (small windows) above the shade-giving canopies. 

Other masterful touches deserve listing: The friendly pivot-opening office windows and that remarkable dark gray-green trim used throughout, or the translucent panels in the big garage door that make it part of the night lighting; yet despite all the professional skill, this moment in time as uninhabited architecture is the building’s most severe test. 

To many, it is still an intruder, but when four lively retail businesses and their customers occupy the lower floor, and the offices show signs of life, attention will shift away from static design to human activity. Apparently, the much-admired French bakery La Farine will move in after Christmas, and that’s a promising start. Add to it that every month that slips by, the three new street trees on Colusa—Tristanias that grow to about 25 feet—will gradually mask and soften the less lively stretch of the public frontage. 

In the context of Berkeley’s conservative mindset about new architecture, the Trachtenberg building can be called “politically correct.” It is politely contextual. The signature rounded corner is a traditional feature of Solano Avenue, and occurs, for instance, at Frishman’s Berkeley Bakery at Peralta, the many-arched white-painted building at Modoc, and at many other intersections. 

This streamlined motif, along with the building’s distinct horizontality and quite old-fashioned windows, make it, essentially, a Moderne building that could well have been erected, visually at least, in the 1930s. The massive steel-framing inside could then be seen as Seismic Retrofit! It makes one long (me anyway!) for one of those less dignified metal-clad “workshop” buildings on Hollis, in barbarous Emeryville.


Opinion

Editorials

French Cuisine, Free Wi-FiAwait Bateau Ivre Patrons

By Becky O’Malley
Friday November 07, 2003

So you’re writing a novel. Or you wish you were writing a novel. Right away, you come up against Virginia Woolf’s famous Hard Saying: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Men as well as women have read that sentence, looked around at their living space, and abandoned worthwhile writing projects. 

Now you have one less excuse for not getting down to work. 

Thomas Cooper and Arlene Giordano, proprietors since 1972 of Le Bateau Ivre on Telegraph Avenue, invite writers of all descriptions, as well as people who use laptop computers for lesser purposes, to use their exceedingly comfortable premises as a place to work. 

Not only that, they’ve recently added wireless internet access, and it’s absolutely free, one of only four free wi-fi sites in Berkeley, and the only one on the south side of campus.  

On a sunny day, perhaps you’d prefer to work outdoors. Reception is great at any one of the approximately 20 patio tables. As winter approaches, a spot by the open wood fire inside the charming 1898 cottage, now converted to a café and restaurant, might be more appealing. 

If you get hungry while you work, you can order a bowl of authentic French onion soup. And after you finish a chapter of your novel, you might enjoy an elegant French-inspired dinner, heavy on the butter and cream. 

In deference to modern California tastes, lighter Mediterranean options are also on the menu.  

Even if you’re not up to writing a novel, Le Bateau Ivre would be a good place to stop for a cappuccino after a Telegraph Avenue walking tour. It’s also open late for the after-concert trade coming from Zellerbach. 

Thomas Cooper, known to many regulars just as “Cooper,” is a former merchant seaman who lived in Europe for seven years. When he and Arlene (who is the pastry chef) first had the idea of turning the house into a French restaurant, he wanted to call it simply “Le Bateau,” “the boat.” 

A French friend suggested that it would be even better to call it “Le Bateau Ivre,” “The Drunken Boat,” after a famous French poem by Arthur Rimbaud. The choice has undoubtedly endeared the café to generations of comp-lit majors. 

He and Arlene restored the house, built by a Frenchman named Bel-Audry, when it was on the verge of being torn down in 1971, and added the home-like furnishings and decorations. The chairs, very important for computer users, are substantial used wooden office chairs for the most part, with occasional rarer models like the bentwood café chair that’s 130 years old. Potted plants, period lighting, antique prints and original watercolors by Charlotte Britten and others contribute to the pink-tablecloth ambiance. Music is classy classical, not just top hits but the serious stuff.  

If this sounds too good to be true, it’s not. Cooper doesn’t worry—yet—about freeloaders tying up all of his tables without buying anything. “We have 29 tables inside alone,” he says, and he’s willing to rely on the good manners of free wi-fi users to ensure that they buy enough food and drink to cover his costs with a bit of profit.  

 

Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph in Berkeley, 510-849-1100. Opens at 11:30 a.m. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, 9 a.m. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Closes at about 11 p.m., sometimes a bit later. Closed Tuesdays.


Editorial: Southside Needs Public Space

Becky O'Malley
Tuesday November 04, 2003

There’s a for sale sign on the MLK-Dwight recycling lot. The BOSS community garden next to the South Berkeley branch library has been evicted (though it’ s found a new home for a while). Plans for Franklin School will turn a playground for families into a parking lot for adults. UC is taking over the Gill Tract garden for a shopping mall; its Oxford agricultural tract is already a building site. And there are several competing schemes for building on the BART lot which is now the Berkeley Flea Market on weekends. 

No individual one of these developments is exactly wrong in itself. But together they add up to a trend toward privatization of shared spaces which will eventually change the urban experience in Berkeley. Each of these sites, and others like them, have until now been used for activities that people do together. When the recycling lot first opened, it was a place for meeting friends and gossiping about community happenings. Curbside pickup is of course more efficient, but a point of human contact has been lost. Neighborhood-only schools gave way to the desirable goal of integrating students, but their playgrounds have remained as places where neighborhood children and parents could get together in an informal setting. The community garden movement, still alive and well in some parts of Berkeley, has been a good way for people to get to know one another by working side by side. The Berkeley Flea Market, though occasionally a thorn in the side of its neighbors, is a free gathering place for musicians and the most entertaining way to spend a Sunday afternoon in Berkeley.  

A few years ago, sociologist Robert Putnam made much of the decline of shared activities in his book Bowling Alone. He blamed easy scapegoats like television, computers, and the change in women’s roles, and he also included suburban living among his villains. But group activities like community gardens which flourished in the sixties and seventies were in part a reaction against urban isolation.  

The current push for infill development, if not properly managed, risks contributing to the privatization of public space. When the requirement that a building project incorporate a certain percentage of open space is translated into isolated rooftop gardens and gated courtyards, residents are encouraged to turn their backs on public life. At the same time that movements like the New Urbanism are preaching the gospel of building suburbs with shared common spaces, comfortable old streetcar suburbs like Berkeley are being pressured to convert their existing shared spaces into blocks of individual apartments, too small for families or voluntary affinity groups.  

A remarkable book captured many of the best lessons learned in the sixties and seventies about the way building and urban design affect people. A Pattern Language, written by Berkeley resident Christopher Alexander and others, is still in print, and should be required reading for members of Berkeley’s Planning Department, Planning Commission, Zoning Adjustment Board and City Council. Chapter 67, “Common Land,” states unequivocally that “without common land no social system can survive.” It further recommends that “common land must be provided separately, and with deliberation, as a social necessity, as vital as the streets.” The authors guess that “the amount of common land needed in a neighborhood is on the order of 25 per cent of the land held privately.” Our various planning decision makers should be made aware that most of Berkeley has a long way to go to meet this standard, and should at least be careful that their decisions don’t make things any worse.  

On Thursday the Zoning Adjustment Board will, perhaps, finally make their much-postponed decision on a massive five-story infill project for Durant Street above Telegraph. The building as proposed violates almost every one of the tenets established by Alexander et al. The first iteration had an unusable ten-foot courtyard at its center—the current version solves that problem by having no courtyard at all. The “studio apartments” are no bigger than dormitory rooms, but the building lacks even the shared dining commons which adds a social dimension to dorm living. 

A Pattern Language contends that “there is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy.” This is perhaps open to interpretation. However, the financial data provided for the Durant project proves once again the authors’ contention that such buildings “have no genuine advantages, except in speculative gain for banks and land owners.”  

The developers make the argument that this kind of construction, using every bit of available space right out to the sidewalk and to the property lines, is necessary for the project to “pencil out.” They provided ZAB with a laughable pro forma which purported to prove this point. It was based on data which actually refutes their financial claims if properly analyzed. In any case, the City of Berkeley’s Zoning Adjustment Board is not responsible for providing the investors with maximal speculative gain. Their job is to protect the public interest by insisting on good urban design, with a decent provision for common space, in the congested Southside Area. 

Becky O’Malley is executive editor of the Daily Planet.