Editorials

Vox populi is out in full throat after the proposed parcel tax, as anyone who reads the opinion pages of this paper will know by now. City Council’s hearing on Tuesday gave public voice to sentiments which have been circulating in small meetings and on the Internet for two months or more. 

Why should this be so? Have Berkeley voters, three decades after Proposition 13, suddenly become cheapskates? Has the economic downturn hit harder here than elsewhere? Has the rise in property values (the median home is now worth at least half-a-million) brought a flood of Republicans to town?  

The interesting thing about the current anti-tax outcry is the great variety of voices which have joined the chorus. The usual suspects—formerly known as the Grumpy Old Men, but now joined by a few women— are singing their usual refrain: taxes are too high, waste is everywhere, we’re coddling slackers, and we won’t put up with it. This is not new. What is new are the increasingly loud, though still sotto voce, comments from people who regard themselves as dedicated progressives, who have always been willing to pay the piper in order to buy government services which they regard as necessary. Why are such people lending their covert or overt support to criticisms of the proposed tax hike?  

First and foremost, the city’s current union contracts are regarded as ridiculously generous by those who understand such things. The Daily Planet has received spreadsheet after spreadsheet from people with local government experience and/or academic background in economics, designed to demonstrate that the built-in union wage increases over the next five years are what’s breaking the back of the budget. The consensus seems to be that city employees, even at middle management levels, have negotiated sweetheart deals for themselves, instead of representing the public interest in the employer-employee relationship. At last Tuesday’s Council meeting, one councilmember wailed that “we can’t do anything about it now.” Layoffs, of course, would bring the issue to the table in an unpleasant way. 

Berkeley employees, unlike those in other cities such as Oakland, maintain in the face of this criticism that they won the bargaining fair and square, and now the city will have to stick with it, regardless of reductions in state funding. The unions have come up with a package of proposals, as yet unexamined, which are supposed to balance the budget and still allow the wage increase deals to go forward. We’ll see how well they work. 

Another strong critical chorus comes from what an old City Hall reporter used to call “the Berkeley 400” (they probably number more like 2,000). These are the citizens who take a strong and active interest in what government is doing. They populate the city’s boards and commissions and turn out in droves for public hearings. They vote in every election, make generous campaign contributions, and talk to their friends and neighbors. Every city has people like this, but cities with well-educated populations like Berkeley, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz produce more of them per capita. 

People in this group have for at least 10 years been very annoyed with the ongoing culture of the city’s planning department (and its supporters in the city attorney’s office) which they have gotten to know intimately because of their involvement in a succession of controversies. Many of them believe that they have expended an enormous effort to take the creation of Berkeley’s General Plan and areas plans away from a city manager and a succession of planning directors who wanted to use Berkeley as a lab for the latest development trends. Some of them have clashed with the planning department or the city attorney’s office over particular development projects.  

Such critics may be adherents of either of Berkeley’s two putative parties, the Progs and the Mods, or they may disdain both. Some spearheaded the drive to draft Tom Bates for mayor and now regret it.  

The mayor’s Sacramento-style Government by Task Force bears a good deal of the responsibility for the angry mutterings now emanating from the Berkeley 2000. Planning groupies smoked out the developer-loaded Permitting and Development Task Force and have been making their voices heard. But the Task Force on Revenue managed to meet largely in private with few citizens in attendance, and with few discordant voices solicited. The results are predictable.  

And the stakes are high. If pressed, few angry citizens really want to shut down essential city programs. But they’re tired of being dissed by politicians and city employees, and opposing the parcel tax is one of the few ways they can express their frustrations. Recent revelations that the city hasn’t bothered to collect taxes on properties owned by well-wired developers didn’t help. If something isn’t done, and soon, to restore public confidence in government, we risk throwing out the baby with the bath water in the next election, if the parcel tax even makes it on to the ballot. 

Becky O’Malley is executive editor of the Berkeley Daily Planet.