Community leaders, labor rights activists and garment workers from Central America urged Berkeley city officials to pass a sweatshop-free ordinance at a Tuesday press conference at Old City Hall. 

City Councilmember Kriss Worthington said that he would be co-sponsoring, along with councilmembers Max Anderson and Jesse Arreguin, a sweatshop-free ordinance at the April 21 City Council meeting. 

The event was part of a week-long West Coast tour where human rights and labor organizations called on cities to join and support the Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium, which would end tax dollar support for sweatshop abuses and establish ethical standards for U.S. businesses. 

Although 39 cities in the country, including San Francisco, have adopted sweatshop-free ordinances, Berkeley has yet to pass one despite joining the Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium in July 2007. 

The city’s Peace and Justice Commission collaborated with numerous city officials and the Commission on Labor over the past three years to write an ordinance which was rejected by the City Council a year ago. 

“Sadly, Berkeley is way behind on this issue than other cities,” Worthington said at the press conference. “It’s long overdue for the City of Berkeley to put our money where our mouths are.” 

He said that although the ordinance is scheduled to appear before the council in three weeks, it still may not pass. 

“We as city officials have a moral responsibility to make sure that the goods that we are purchasing with taxpayer dollars do not support unfair labor practices,” said Councilmember Jesse Arreguin. “Doing business with companies that engage in sweatshop practices does not reflect the values of the citizens of Berkeley.” 

Elizabeth Gutierrez spoke about her experience working under unjust labor conditions at a Honduras factory. 

“Why is it that workers are paid only 10 cents when the products are sold for $25 or $35?” she asked. “Workers work long days but don’t have any right to organize. We have problems with our lungs and our backs.” 

Describing her 12-hour work days and unbearable daily production goals, Gutierrez said she hoped “cities would step up to support good jobs.” 

Rapfael Izirarry, who works for Propper International in Puerto Rico, which contracts with the United States for military uniforms, said he and fellow employees were organizing to improve conditions in their factory. He said sweat-free policies adopted by cities would protect the rights of workers by improving salaries and benefits. 

Berkeley’s proposed ordinance seeks to ensure that garments and other equipment, materials, supplies and services “procured by the City of Berkeley, its agencies or its employees through contracts, purchase orders or voucher programs, be produced in workplaces free of sweatshop conditions.” 

“To those who contend that the ordinance is but a symbolic resolution, we tell them that the workers who just spoke are not symbols, they are real people, and this is real life,” said Labor Commissioner Igor Tregub, a longtime advocate for the ordinance. 

“The intent of this ordinance is not to close down factories but to help vendors with which the city does business to take steps to get into compliance, and to award contracts to the most responsible but not necessarily the lowest bidder.”

Berkeley didn’t make the list of schools selected last week for outdoor air quality monitoring by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and a local environmental group isn’t happy about the omission. 

Mothers and Others for Measuring Metals in the Air (MOMMA), a group of parents and concerned citizens, has been pushing for the testing of emissions near local schools ever since a USA Today story last December identified three Berkeley schools in the top 1 percent of the country’s most at-risk sites for exposure to harmful chemicals.  

All three schools—Black Pine Circle School, Via Center and Nihaus School—are located close to Pacific Steel Casting in West Berkeley, which neighbors and environmental activists have singled out as the primary source behind the pollutants in the report. 

Neighbors have complained for decades about a burned copper-like smell from the steel plant, citing it as the cause of respiratory and heart problems. 

In response to the charges, Pacific Steel officials said the company should not be singled out for the problems reported in the article, given the schools’ proximity to a large freeway and other industries. 

Concerned citizens and parents of students who attend the Berkeley schools named in the USA Today report organized public meetings, created mailing lists and pressured the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for more information and air-quality testing. 

In a March 31 e-mail to the Berkeley community, EPA officials said recent media reports questioning air quality surrounding schools near large industrial facilities had prompted them “to swiftly investigate and monitor the air for specific chemicals at selected schools across the nation.” 

The agency announced that it had selected 62 schools in 22 states for the monitoring—the first program of its kind—but that Berkeley schools had not been included. 

Of the four California schools to be selected, the only Bay Area school that made the list was Stevens Creek Elementary School in Cupertino, which will be tested for the carcinogen Hexavalent Chromium. 

MOMMA co-founder Pear Michaels said she was disappointed that Berkeley schools did not make the list. 

“We are all so angry,” she said. “There are so many children living in West Berkeley, going to school there—and yet it’s an issue that hasn’t been taken seriously.” 

Michaels, who lives within a mile of Pacific Steel, said that her 3-year-old daughter developed respiratory problems a year after they moved to the neighborhood. 

“We find EPA’s decision very confusing,” she said, adding that MOMMA was circulating a petition seeking immediate testing of the air near Pacific Steel for manganese, nickel, chromium and other heavy metals. “I don’t understand why they can’t go and place an air monitor near these schools. This issue is not going to go away just because the city and the air district wants it to. We are going to take it to the state level—all the way to Sen. Barbara Boxer’s office if we have to.” 

Maggi Liftik, another MOMMA member, said she was frustrated by the news. 

“A lot of parents had been hopeful that Berkeley schools would be on the list because some of them tested so poorly in the original USA Today study,” she said. “Some of the schools had even been contacted, and that really got their hopes up. But the regulatory agencies have dropped the ball on what should be tested. We want some real answers to what our children are breathing.” 

Mike Bandrowski, chief of the Air Toxics, Radiation, and Indoor Air Office for EPA Region 9, said the schools had been selected based on USA Today’s results, EPA’s screening analyses using the National Air Toxics Assessment, and previous monitoring conducted by state, tribal, and local air pollution control agencies. 

Bandrowski said that although the EPA had considered the “strong response” from Berkeley residents advocating air monitoring around Pacific Steel, Berkeley schools had not been included for several reasons. 

The EPA’s initial screening analysis, he said, did not show place Berkeley’s air toxics levels among the highest levels nationally, even considering their proximity to a major freeway. The EPA will spend more than $2 million to sample air quality, focusing on schools near large industries and urban areas, where toxic emissions come from a mix of large and small industries, cars, trucks and other sources. Bandrowski said the sampling would take into account mobile air sources, which the USA Today study did not consider.  

“When we did our own assessment, Berkeley schools didn’t show up high on the list,” he said, explaining that the agency was only looking at the top 62 schools identified through the screening. “However, the EPA is still aware of the issues surrounding Pacific Steel Casting and we are working with the community to resolve them.” 

Another factor, Bandrowski said, was ongoing monitoring and health studies that were being done to identify toxic emissions from Pacific Steel Casting. 

He referred to an October 2008 health risk assessment released under California’s Hotspots Information and Assessment Act, which did not predict significant air toxics impacts at nearby schools. 

Bandrowski also pointed to an air toxics monitoring system set up by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District at Sixth and Camelia streets in Berkeley, which is located within 1,000 feet of the source. 

“So there is already comprehensive monitoring in place,” he said. “The information the EPA would have got out from the short, 60-day air monitoring at the schools would have been less information than what the community is already getting.” 

“We may decide to do a second round of testing in the future,” Bandrowski said. “But we don’t know for certain if that’s going to happen.” 

The City of Berkeley is expecting a small amount of budget relief this month—$289,000 in refunds for overcharges on office supplies by Office Depot. In a memo this week from City Manager Phil Kamlarz to Mayor Tom Bates and the Berkeley City Council, Bates said Office Depot had agreed to refund the money by April 17. 

“During the first term of this agreement,” Kamlarz wrote in his memo, “there was a lack of attention to the management of our account,” and that contributed to the overcharges. Kamlarz said his office will monitor the remaining three months of the Office Depot contract on a quarterly basis “to ensure compliance with the terms” of the original bid. 

The three-year, $550,000-a-year contract with Office Depot ends in June of this year, but in his memo Kamlarz said the city’s finance department intends to exercise the city’s option to extend the contract through June of 2010. 

The revelation about the Office Depot overcharges were first made to the City Council last October by Diane Griffin, president of Radston’s Office Plus supply store of Hercules and a member of the board of directors of the National Office Products Alliance. Griffin, whose company had bid on the city contract won by Office Depot, submitted a 100-page analysis to the city on her own initiative, documenting her allegations that Office Depot had overcharged the city. 

Councilmember Kriss Worthington, who helped Griffin get some of the city documents that helped confirm the allegations, said by telephone this week that Berkeley “owes [Griffin] a lot of gratitude. Who would have figured all of [the overcharges] out without her assistance?” Worthington already scheduled City Council consideration of a city honor for Griffin for the April 21 council meeting prior to receiving information about the Office Depot reimbursement. 

The California Court of Appeal upheld last week the Berkeley City Council's decision to revoke U-Haul's use permit for its San Pablo Avenue location. 

City officials announced the March 30 decision Friday, April 3 to the press and City Council members. 

The council revoked U-Haul's permit in October 2007. City documents indicate that the council declared the truck-rental business a nuisance after taking into account years of formal complaints charging the company with violating city law by parking more trucks on its lot than permitted and by allowing customers to park trucks in the neighborhood when returning vehicles after business hours. 

An investigation conducted by the city in 2006 revealed that U-Haul was "consistently parking as many as 30 of its vehicles on neighborhood streets adjacent to its property (sometimes blocking crosswalks or fire hydrants), and that it consistently had between 40 to 50 trucks on its property in violation of the permit's 20 truck restriction." 

U-Haul, the nation's largest renter of trucks and trailers, appealed the city's decision to the Superior Court in October, but the judge ruled in the city's favor at that time. 

In May 2008, the company sued the city for a second time, arguing that it should be allowed to stay open on environmental and civil rights grounds. 

But once again the courts sided with the city, explaining that the appellant had repeatedly violated the city's permit and failed to address neighbors' concerns in an appropriate manner, using "public rights of way for staging, and thereby expanded its business operations beyond the property in a manner contrary to the terms and conditions of the use permit." 

In an e-mail to city councilmembers Friday, Acting City Attorney Zach Cowan praised Deputy City Attorney Laura McKinney, who handled the case, for doing "an excellent job." 

"[I]n fact the decision was handed down only two days after oral argument, which is as fast as it gets, and indicates that based on the briefing and argument, the court felt the appeal had absolutely no merit," Cowan wrote. "We hope that this decision, once it is final, will speed up resolution of the city's case against U-Haul." 

Cowan also mentioned in his e-mail that the U.S. District Court last week dismissed what the city "suspects was a companion case," Lewis v. City of Berkeley. 

The plaintiff in this case alleged that "the revocation of U-Haul's use permit was part (the main part, apparently) of an alleged pattern of discriminatory practices by the city against African Americans." 

Cowan said the court dismissed the case for failing to "allege any facts that stated a claim."


Starting next year, Berkeley Unified School District’s food services program will have to pay for itself, but district officials say they won’t let finances undermine quality. 

Ever since chef Ann Cooper took the helm of the district’s nutrition services department three and a half years ago with the help of a grant from the Chez-Panisse Foundation, she has worked to make the program healthier and self-sustaining by increasing student participation. 

At a Berkeley Board of Education meeting last week, Cooper, who is leaving in June for Colorado’s Boulder Valley School District, told BUSD officials how far the program has come. 

“One of the things that I told you last year, that we have really managed to do finally, now that all the infrastructure is in place, is to raise the meal count, and we have,” a beaming Cooper announced. “That has been our major push because, raising participation is how we can raise our budget, and the budget we have is balanced.” 

Cooper’s projected budget for 2009-10 shows that the district will no longer be contributing money to food services in 2009-10 from its general fund. 

In 2006-07 the district gave $742,743 to the program. In 2007-08, the amount went down substantially to $217,723 before rising slightly to $300,000 this year. 

“Our plan is not to impact the general fund at all next year,” district Superintendent Bill Huyett told the Daily Planet after the meeting. “There will be a reduction in some staff and we are proposing a small increase in meal costs. We will have to continue to increase the number of students eating lunch. If it doesn’t break even, we will work on the fiscal end of it. We won’t compromise on quality.” 

Cooper said that for the program to become budget neutral, it was imperative to have a certain amount of kids eating lunch at school every day. 

Currently, middle and elementary schoolers can choose to bring lunch from home or eat lunches served at school. 

Students at open-campus Berkeley High School have other options—dozens of cheap fast-food restaurants right down the street. Just 10 percent of Berkeley High students eat school-provided lunches. 

But Cooper explained that the problem wasn’t “one school or the other—we have to increase the number in general.” 

Cooper, along with district Nutrition Services Manager Marney Posey and Executive Chef Bonnie Christensen, has been putting up banners, writing to parents and attending PTA meetings for the last few months to get the word out about the lunch program. 

She said that she would be able to talk more about the results of the outreach in May. 

“We have been in the newspaper, gone on the radio—done everything we could to promote the program,” she said. “And our numbers show we have done a good job.” 

Cooper said that the new Dining Commons at King Middle School—which replaced the aging facility at Jefferson Elementary School as the district’s central kitchen last fall—was now serving between 7,500 and 8,000 meals. 

“The numbers are significantly up since I came,” she said. “And the food is probably some of the best we have ever made. Last year we were serving canned pinto beans. Now we are cooking all beans from scratch because we have the equipment. That saves us money.” 

Cooper said that after she left in summer, Posey, Christensen and the rest of her team would carry on her work. 

“I have the utmost confidence in them,” she said. “The program is sustainable and systemic now that the budget is neutral.” 

Referring to a three-year budget comparison submitted to the district, Cooper said the district’s total meal count had gone up from 1 million in 2006-07 to 1.7 million this year. 

“We are continuing to see growth,” she said, explaining that the total number of free, reduced and paid lunch meals is up seven percent from this time last year. That number is projected to grow by 3 percent in 2009-10. 

Initial results from a three-year survey conducted by UC Berkeley’s Center for Weight and Health show that among schools participating in Berkeley’s School Lunch Initiative, students who ate lunch at school consumed more than three times as many vegetables as children who brought lunch from home. 

Cooper acknowledged that while revenue had increased from $3 million in 2006-07 to $3.5 million this year, food costs had gone up disproportionately. 

The district spent close to $1.5 million this year compared with $1 million dollars last year on food purchases, but is expected to reduce costs by 3 percent in 2009-10. 

Personnel expenses for the district’s nutrition services department increased from $1.6 million in 2006-07 to $1.9 million this year, something Cooper attributed to a retroactive pay adjustment for 2007-08.  

Staffing costs for next year are estimated to be $1.8 million. 

“We are trying to figure out ways to bring additional revenue for the department,” Cooper told the board. She is proposing an increase in lunch prices in 2009-10, which would see meals at elementary, middle and high schools increase by 25 or 50 cents. 

Cooper also said the program has contacted a camp about the possibility of providing meals during summer.

Directors of a regional agency voted to build a new pier south of the Berkeley Marina fishing pier to serve as the hub for a new ferry service. 

The five directors of the Water Emergency Transit Authority (WETA) voted unanimously Thursday afternoon, April 2, to build the pier and revamp the parking lot at H’s Lordships restaurant to accommodate commuters. 

John Sindzinski, WETA’s planning and development manager, said work will begin immediately on a final environmental impact report (EIR) that will focus solely on the site. 

The vote came less that 24 hours after Sindzinski was grilled by members of the Berkeley Planning Commission. 

During the Wednesday evening, April 1, session, Dan Marks, the city’s planning and development director, said WETA couldn’t build at the site without city approval. 

But Sindzinski didn’t agree. “That will be an interesting issue,” he said Friday. 

“Ultimately they have to come to us to get permission to build on city property,” Marks had told planning commissioners Wednesday. “They are not the University of California.” 

“So it will be up to us, the Planning Commission,” said commissioner Gene Poschman. 

“Is that correct?” asked Harry Pollack, acting commission chair and a land use attorney in private practice. 

“I’m not positive,” Sindzinski told them. “We’re researching that.” 

Sindzinski said Friday that a variety of public agencies will have to sign off on the final plans, including the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the Army Corps of Engineers and the state Regional Water Quality Control Board. 

“We’re anxious to work with anybody who has concerns,” he said. 

One former public official told planning commissioners that he believed the draft EIR was “fatally flawed and cannot be used to support any decisions, much less conclude that the site is superior.” 

James McGrath retired as environmental manager for the Port of Oakland and is currently president of U.S. Windsurfing, a national membership organization and vice president of the San Francisco Boardsailing Association. 

McGrath charged that the draft EIR was invalid for a number of reasons, including its failure to consider existing recreational uses at the site, which he said is protected by the city’s master plan for the marina. 

The Berkeley Waterfront Commission also had objections to the site, which it said would “have significant negative impacts on tenants, waterfront users and berthers,” according to a letter to WETA from City Manager Phil Kamlarz. 

The draft EIR had considered four sites, including two adjacent to Golden Gate Fields which Sindzinski rejected out of hand because of jurisdictional conflicts with East Shore State Park. 

That left two sites at Berkeley Marina, including a site inside the marina adjacent to the Doubletree Hotel, which was rejected because of “vehement” objections from the hotel, Hornblower Cruises and marina users, but primarily because WETA couldn’t afford to pay the city for the cost of revenues lost from berthing slips which would have to be removed to make way for the pier.  

To make way for the 400 parking spaces at the fishing pier site, the existing parking lot adjacent to the restaurant would be revamped, and the earth berm to the west leveled to accommodate additional spaces. 

Sindzinski said his agency will seek additional public and agency comments for the final EIR, which will be ready by late summer or early fall for a final review period before adoption.

Berkeley Unified School District is set to receive a healthy chunk of change next month. 

The district is going to get its share of $44 million in federal stimulus funds that the Obama administration made available Wednesday to states and schools for education reform, district officials said. 

The funds will go mainly to special education and toward helping socioeconomically disadvantaged students. 

Of the $1 billion released to California, Berkeley will receive $1,732,000 for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) program and $697,596 in Title I funds, which target students performing poorly in elementary and middle schools. 

Together the amounts make up the first 50 percent of Berkeley’s share of the IDEA and Title I funds, which the district will have to spend over the next two years. The district will receive the remainder in the fall. 

The State Department of Education called the funds a one-time increase for the IDEA and Title I programs, explaining that “the Obama administration had made it clear that the funding should be used for short-term investments that have the potential for long-term benefits rather than for expenditures that cannot be sustained once the recovery funds are expended.” 

“The IDEA money will be used to offset increasing costs,” Berkeley Unified Superintendent Bill Huyett said. “Even if we get it next month we can’t spend it all right away. The government has been very clear about that.”  

Huyett said special education expenses were rising at a much faster pace than the cost of living. 

Oakland Unified will receive an estimated $13 million, Fremont will receive $6 million and Albany Unified $446,000. IDEA funds were allocated to districts on the basis of their enrollment numbers, Huyett said. 

State educators indicated that the money could be used to purchase state-of-the-art assistive technology devices, find jobs for disabled youth, and provide intensive district-wide professional development for special education and regular education teachers to improve student performance. 

Special education expenses for Berkeley Unified reach $13 million annually, the superintendent said, most of which comes from the general fund. 

He said that although the federal funds could be used to thwart increasing expenditure, they would not eliminate the district’s $8 million budget deficit or prevent layoffs.  

The district issued more than 130 preliminary layoff notices to teachers last month because of state budget cuts, but has been able to rescind half of them, Huyett said. 

Huyett said that he was hopeful that the State Stabilization Fund—which makes up a big chunk of the recently released stimulus money—would offset the budget cuts and layoffs. 

States will have to apply to the federal government for their share of the $32.6 billion of the stabilization fund, which represents two-thirds of the stimulus money handed out. 

This includes $27 billion to save jobs and improve K-12 and higher education and a separate $6 billion in a Government Services Fund to pay for education, public safety or other government services. 

“We have been told that that states will get the money within two weeks of applying for it,” Huyett said. “But we don’t know how much it is or how it’s going to be allocated to the schools. We will find out more about that in May. Until then we will still have budget problems.” 

Two thirds of the stabilization money will be released in May and one third between July and October, he said. 

At a Wednesday meeting organized by Alameda County Superintendent of Schools Sheila Jordan, superintendents from several Alameda County school districts discussed implementation of the stimulus money with state department officials. 

“The stimulus money is supposed to be a bridge,” Jordan said. “Some of this money is for maintenance and effort and some of it can be used for the budget cuts. A certain amount has to be set aside for creating new projects and jobs. The goals are somewhat conflicting, since one way of creating jobs is to keep the old ones, which is hard to do at this time. So there is a lot of confusing messages.” 

As for U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s announcement Wednesday to state governors that school districts would have to release new information about student performance to the federal government in exchange of stimulus money, Jordan said that would not be a problem in California. 

“We are already working on those issues,” she said. “One of our goals as educators is to broaden the way we look at accountability. It’s imperative that students have reading and writing skills and an idea of the world around them—civic engagement, history and arts and music. We are actively working on increasing our limited assessment model now, but until that happens, an assessment model is already in place.”

An attorney for BART said in a legal filing today that the shooting death of Oscar Grant at the hands of BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle in Oakland on New Year’s Day was “a tragic error” and Grant’s own actions contributed to the tragedy. 

Responding to a $50 million lawsuit filed against BART by attorney John Burris on March 2 on behalf of Grant’s family in the wake of the man’s death at the Fruitvale BART station, BART attorney Dale Allen said the transit agency admits Grant was shot in the back but denies the officers were unprovoked when they tried to detain Grant. 

In a phone interview, Allen said witness accounts indicate that Grant, a 22-year-old Hayward man who had a criminal record, was involved in a fight on a BART train that caused the transit agency to send Mehserle and other officers to the Fruitvale station to quell the disturbance. 

Allen said officers were justified in pulling Grant from the train because witnesses had identified him as being involved in the fight and he also believes officers were justified in using force to detain Grant because he was resisting arrest. 

“There was a reason for officers to use force, but the amount of force is in question,” Allen said. 

Allen said there was no reason for Mehserle to shoot Grant, but he said the officer “made a terrible mistake” in firing his gun instead of a Taser in his effort to subdue Grant. 

Allen said more than six witnesses have said that after Mehserle shot Grant there was “surprise on Mehserle’s face,” indicating they think the officer didn’t mean to shoot Grant. 

Allen said he’s hoping that the lawsuit can go to mediation so it can be resolved before it goes to trial. 

Burris said there have been conversations about mediation but nothing has been determined. 

Burris hasn’t reviewed Allen’s answer, but he said he firmly believes Grant’s civil rights were violated in the incident. 

Mehserle, 27, resigned from the BART police force the week after the incident and has been charged with murder. He will have a preliminary examination May 18.

Pacific Ethanol, a partner with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in developing a pilot plant to turn plant fiber into fuel, may be heading for bankruptcy court. 

Warnings of the possible Chapter 11 filing were included in federal financial filings. 

The firm, chaired by former California Secretary of State William L. Jones, is deep in debt and unable to meet its loan obligations, according to filings with the federal Security and Exchange Commission. 

The Sacramento-based firm has partnered with LBNL’s Emeryville-based Joint Bioenergy Institute to develop a cellulosic ethanol plant in Broadman, Ore., with the help of a $24.3 million grant from the Department of Energy, the agency which founded JBEI with an initial $135 million grant. 

The ethanol firm reported operating losses of $193 million for 2008, and a net loss of $147 million, a ten-fold increase from the losses reported a year earlier. 

The firm’s stock has plunged, and it had delayed filing its report for the fourth quarter of 2008 until Thursday, April 2. 

Unable to meet loan obligations due March 31 to a variety of lenders, Pacific Ethanol received extensions only after Jones and CEO Neil M. Koehler made unsecured loans to the company of $2 million. 

The quarterly report wasn’t filed until the loan extensions had been signed. 

Among the companies owed are Wachovia Capital Financial Corporation, Amarillo National Bank, and the New York branches of WestLB AG, Cooperative Centrale Raiffeisen-Boerenleenbank BA, Rabobank Nederland, and Banco Santander Central Hispano S.A. 

The company had been unable to meet the federal deadline for filing its annual and fourth quarter reports, telling the SEC, “The Company was unable to file. . .in a timely manner without unreasonable effort or expense because management needs additional time to complete its procedures associated with the Annual Report.” 

The annual report was finally filed March 31. 

JBEI, headed by UC Berkeley bioengineer Jay Keasling, is seeking to develop patented microbes that will transform plant fibers into fuel, but the Oregon plant would use existing technology patented by BioGasohol ApS, a Danish company. 

Pacific Ethanol has been hit by a succession of crises, and has closed two 60-million-gallon-a-year plants in Stockton, Calif., and Burley, Idaho, as well as a 40-million-gallon plant in Madera. The company continues to operate a non-cellulosic refinery in Oregon and holds a minority interest in a still-operating plant in Colorado. 

Keasling and Pacific Ethanol have both protested pending state regulations that would force biofuel manufacturers to calculate the impacts of their fuels on land use. 

Critics, who refer to ethanol and similar products as agrofuels, have charged that growing plants to fuel cars, trucks, trains and plants will increase pressures on farmlands and drive prices up, creating a cascade of negative impacts in Third World countries where fuel crops will be grown.  

Biofuel boosters contend the calculations sought by the California Air Resources Board would yield a false picture of impacts, overshadowing the benefits the fuels might bring. 

JBEI is one of two plants-into-fuels projects now underway in Berkeley. Even larger is the $500 million Energy Biosciences Institute, funded by BP (formerly British Petroleum) and operating under the joint auspices of LBNL, UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 

With creditors clamoring in the wings and unhappy with plans to sell off Golden Gate Fields and other key assets of troubled Magna Entertainment, the company agreed Friday, April 3, to delay a key court hearing until April 20. 

Creditors have challenged Magna’s plans to sell the assets to a sister company through a so-called “stalking horse bid.” Magna Entertainment is North America’s largest owner of horse race venues, and has been plagued by massive debts. 

According to court filings, the company has debts of $959 million with assets worth about $1 billion in an uncertain real estate market. 

Bloomberg.com, the leading financial news service, reported that Magna agreed Friday afternoon to hire a restructuring officer and add new members to its board of directors during a hearing in federal bankruptcy court in Delaware. 

The company, which was stricken from the rolls of both the NASDAQ and Toronto stock exchanges, is in bankruptcy actions on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border. 

The company had proposed to sell some of its key assets to sister company MI Developments, which had raised the ire of major investors. 

Both companies are controlled by Canadian auto parts magnate Frank Stronach.

Friends and foes of the Planning Commission’s rewrite of the Downtown Area Plan can share their views with commissioners during a special hearing Monday night, April 6. 

The session, which begins at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave., follows on the commission’s three-hour tweaking April 1. 

The document—114 pages, of text plus an additional 14 pages of maps and diagrams—was prepared, as its cover notes, by the “City of Berkeley in cooperation with the University of California.” 

The Planning Commission and city staff have significantly revised the original version, prepared by the City Council-appointed Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC), dramatically heightening the skyline and expanding the area where taller buildings will be permissible. 

Both the DAPAC and commission versions will go to the City Council, with the university having veto power over the final version—the result of a controversial settlement agreement that ended a lawsuit between the city and UC Berkeley over impacts of 850,000 square feet of building the school plans off-campus in the heart of the city. 

The plan, minus the tables, is available for viewing online at www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ContentDisplay.aspx?id=10828.

City planning staff have dropped a bombshell on anxious West Berkeley activists: a proposal that would double the height of new buildings and potentially open the area to office complexes.  

The staff proposal, if enacted without changes, could mean a West Berkeley skyline studded with 90-foot-tall office towers—a host of buildings as tall as the area’s currently dominant high-rise, the Fantasy Records Building.  

Even some of the more developer-friendly commissioners had questions after Assistant Planner Claudine Asbagh presented the concepts, which are the latest round of a City Council-mandated effort to ease development rules in the only part of the city zoned for light industry and manufacturing.  

The area in question lies roughly between the city’s northern and southern boundaries and between the eastern side of San Pablo Avenue and Interstate 80. Development rules for the area were spelled out in the West Berkeley Plan, which was adopted by the city 16 years ago.  

The council’s directive to ease zoning alarmed some of the area’s small manufacturers, who range from makers of scientific glassware to an assortment of green businesses, including the owners of Inkworks and Urban Ore.  

Staff proposals target not only the handful of large sites specified in the 1993 plan, but would provide a new development procedure for all sites that are either three acres or more or comprise a full city block. The revised master use permit (MUP) process would allow developers to develop sites incrementally and alter use configurations as tenants change and expand.  

UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have their sights set on West Berkeley as the home of startup labs and businesses generated by the inventions of their scientists, a focus backed by Mayor Tom Bates, who is promoting the area as part of the “Green Corridor” first proposed by UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau in a meeting of mayors at his official residence.  

One powerful voice of support for more flexible zoning rules is Wareham Properties, the area’s largest developer and dominant landlord of high-tech facilities and landlord to UCB facilities in both Berkeley and Emeryville. Wareham is currently the owner of the Fantasy building.  

Chris Barlow, a Wareham principal, has been a regular at Planning Commission meetings on West Berkeley, and was present again at the latest session, Wednesday, March 25, where staff put forth their latest and most controversial set of proposals.  

Barlow is a strong advocate of the revised MUP, while members of West Berkeley Artisans and Industrial Companies (WEBAIC) say they have strong reservations.  

WEBAIC members turned out in force Wednesday, March 25, to register their concerns at the latest staff proposal, one which could radically alter the shape, skyline and economics of the last area of the city to welcome their businesses and members of the city’s endangered arts community.  

Bernard Marszalek of Inkworks, a West Berkeley printer that uses recycled paper and environmentally friendly inks, said the staff proposal to double the floor of lot area ratios for new construction would mean “millions of square feet” of additional development.  

Another concern, he said was the notion of possible waivers of parking requirements for new construction.  

“Traffic is a real issue, and so are greenhouse gasses,” Marszalek said. “Doubling the density of development the way they want is just ridiculous.”  

Barlow said he also wants the city to reject any thought of drafting a regional environmental impact report (EIR) that would evaluate the cumulative impacts of new development on streets the city has already acknowledged could hit gridlock within the next decade.  

But developers weren’t united in opposition to the regional review of traffic and air quality impacts of development. Darrel de Tienne, who spoke as a representative of Douglas Herst, owner of one of the area’s largest sites, said he favored the broader, “programmatic” EIR.  

Mark Gorrell, of the Ecology Center, said “it was fascinating to hear how staff wants to protect West Berkeley by having people come in, cut it up and change it.”  

The staff proposal would also allow developers to turn MUP properties into office parks, if the city’s Zoning Adjustments Board agreed—opening the area to a use specifically banned in the existing MUP.  

“This would mean we’re rewriting the whole plan,” said commissioner Patti Dacey.  

George Beier, who was sitting in for absent commissioner Harry Pollack, said he needed to see more information on possible sites as well as estimates of the impact of parking if waivers were granted. “I would like to see who the real winners and losers are in all this,” he said.  

Commissioner Victoria Eisen asked if offices would be allowed only as part of manufacturing or industrial uses. “I would like that clarified,” she said.  

“It’s discretionary,” Asbagh said. “It goes before ZAB and it’s appealable, but, yes, if ZAB approves 100 percent offices on the site, it’s a possibility.”  

Another concern for some WEBAIC members came from a Barlow plea to the city to include “a workable but practical definition of artisan and artist” to apply to any protections given for artisan space in the regulations.  

“We strongly believe this category should reflect those who earn their living from art and then any privileges should be tied to a requirement to regularly produce a portfolio of work that would be peer-reviewed.”  

That notion drew eye rolls from one member of the audience and a scowl from Rick Auerbach, who is WEBAIC’s staff member.  

Staff will report back to the commission with more details when the proposal comes before the commission in May, following an additional meeting with West Berkeley stakeholders.

State budget cuts will force the Berkeley Unified School District to cut more than $1 million from its adult education program.  

February’s state budget compromise slashed a significant percentage of the program’s categorical funding.  

The cuts will reduce adult education funds by 15 percent this year and by 20 percent in the 2009-2010 academic year, threatening services offered to 2,000 seniors, at-risk youth and disabled students who attend Berkeley Adult School to learn a trade or complete their high school education.  

“These are heavy cuts,” said District Superintendent Bill Huyett. “Adult education was one of the losers in the new budget—20 percent is a large cut. You can’t just trim around the edges with that kind of a cut. You have to make significant reductions to services.”  

In a unanimous vote last week, the Berkeley Board of Education allowed the district to dip into  

the adult education program’s reserves to help offset the nearly $750,000 shortage it faces this year.  

The district will take $718,827 from the reserve funds.  

Berkeley Adult School Principal Margaret Kirkpatrick said the school has about $900,000 stored away from last year’s budget that is being used to preserve programs and teaching positions this year.  

“Rather than close classes and fire people, we are spending money from our reserves to carry on the services until the end of the year,” she said. “Some schools had to make drastic changes in February. We are one of the lucky schools. The cuts are a huge concern for the adult school, but we are lucky that the board supports adult education. We are looking to be much more creative next year to save money.”  

Huyett said his Budget Advisory Committee would try to find ways to tackle the $1 million deficit the adult school faces next year.  

“We don’t know what the reductions are going to be in,” Huyett said on Friday, March 27. “My staff is still weighing in on that.”  

Huyett said that besides taking $8 million from the school district over the next two years, the state budget cuts affect Tier III programs in the district, which include adult education, school improvement and deferred maintenance.  

“There is nothing you can cut this year from the adult school,” he said. “They are spending their reserves, so we won’t see any effects on their program this year. Next year, however, they will have to cut programs. We are working on a plan to hold on to the core programs.”  

The superintendent said school districts may opt to cut funding for Tier III programs entirely in order to transfer dollars to the general fund.  

“And some districts are doing that right now,” he said. “They no longer have adult education programs.”  

Principal Kirkpatrick said the school is prioritizing to save four programs for next year: English as a second language, which makes up the largest group of students; vocational training, such as nursing and pharmacy; high school diploma courses; and continuing services for adults.  

Vice Principal Tom Orput said at the board meeting that he was hoping federal stimulus dollars would help the program. 

“A huge criteria for adult education is to get as much federal money as possible,” he said. “So we are going to aim for that.” 

Orput said that even as the school looked at increasing fees, it would also investigate ways of creating additional revenue. 

Established in 1891, the Berkeley Adult School offers free or subsidized classes at its San Pablo Avenue campus and at various other locations around the East Bay. The school graduates between 80 and 100 students with a high school diploma each year.  

The school is known for collaborating with the nonprofit Bread Project, which trains students to be self-sufficient and find competitive jobs in the culinary industry. Since 2001, the Bread Project has trained 621 individuals, some of whom previously had trouble finding employment because of homelessness, lack of prior work experience, limited English fluency or criminal records.  

“I am astonished that the state is doing something like this at a time when people need more resources to get a job in a challenging economy,” Kirkpatrick said. “We are anticipating many more calls about our services in the next few months, but I don’t know if we will have the resources to support more students.”

Safeway will unveil the latest design for its College Avenue store April 29 at the Claremont Hotel in Oakland, even as neighbors complain that they are being left out in the cold.  

The supermarket chain’s latest proposal comes in the wake of a long series of public meetings held to discuss community concerns about the scale of the proposed expansion and its threat to local independent businesses.  

In an e-mail to College Avenue neighbors Tuesday, March 31, Elisabeth Jewel of Aroner, Jewel and Ellis, the consultants hired by Safeway to do community outreach, said that “updated and modified plans” for a new store and retail space at College and Claremont would be shown at the meeting.  

“Come take a look at what we are planning for you in a new, light-filled, energy-efficient building with lots of free parking for everyone,” wrote Jewel, who is on vacation and did not return calls for comment.  

Safeway’s plans to remodel the existing 25,000-square-foot location met with loud opposition at a community meeting at the Peralta Elementary School last June, prompting company officials to arrange a series of “stakeholders meetings” to arrive at a consensus about the size, scale and design of a new store and accompanying small shops.  

Facilitated by Pamela Hop-kins, managing partner of Berkeley-based ENACT Global Consulting, the meetings saw representatives from the Rockridge Community Planning Council, the Claremont Elmwood Neighborhood Association, the Rockridge District Association, Concerned Neighbors of College Avenue Safeway and College Avenue merchants discuss and debate the proposed design with Safeway officials.  

Susan Shawl of Concerned Neighbors, a group opposing Safeway’s expansion plans, said that she had been disappointed by these meetings.  

“Safeway said they wanted to listen to us but they are totally stonewalling us now,” said Shawl, adding that the grocery chain had not yet rescheduled the last stakeholders meeting that was supposed to take place Dec. 10.  

Esperanza Greenwood, director of public affairs and government relations for Safeway’s Northern California division, did not return calls by the Planet's deadline.  

“Independent stakeholders have not had any word about this process ending,” Shawl said. “We really wanted to work with Safeway. We are not against them. If this was Whole foods, we would have done the same. It’s nothing personal—it has to do with out-of-scale development in a residential neighborhood.”  

More than two weeks after the fifth meeting on Oct. 22, Jewel sent the stakeholders an e-mail saying that Safeway had hired a new architect, Ken Lowney, for the project.  

Last April Safeway replaced architect Kirk Peterson with San Francisco-based MCG Architects.  

“After the most recent stakeholders meeting last November, the Safeway team decided to take a deep breath and evaluate next steps,” Jewel said.  

“We recommitted ourselves to taking the time needed to come up with the best-designed proposal we could—even if that meant delaying coming back to the stakeholders and community members with a new plan.”  

Lowney, Jewel said, would bring decades of experience to the project, having designed markets, offices and mixed-use developments all over the Bay Area, including converting the old Cadillac dealership on Harrison Street in Oakland into a Whole Foods store.  

“Safeway is confident that this local architecture firm can deliver a store that will be successful for Safeway while honoring the long-established values of College Avenue, Oakland,” Jewel said. “Ken is fortunate to have a detailed record of your comments and concerns expressed during each stakeholder meeting and in your many e-mails. He will use this record to inform the design, taking into account the unique needs and perspectives of neighbors, merchants, residents and many others who care very deeply about this neighborhood.”  

Lowney is scheduled to meet with a neighborhood architects group Wednesday to discuss the design.  

Shawl said Safeway had not discussed any details about the store’s design during the stakeholders’ meetings, spending time mainly on less important things, such as bicycle racks and landscaping.  

“We asked them what their bottom line was as far as size at the first meeting and they came back with a bunch of flowery words with nothing about the size,” Shawl said. “Some people think this was a waste of time. I am not sure whether it was or wasn’t but am disappointed at the way Safeway ignored neighborhood opinion.”  

Safeway officials said at earlier meetings that they would like to convert the building into a “lifestyle store,” a concept that involves softer lighting, sleek modern counters and shelves and earthier tones for the walls and floors.  

They have defended their need to expand by pointing to the store’s lack of a full-service meat counter, extensive organic produce section and flower shop—services some neighbors contend are already present across the street at the smaller niche shops.  

“I am very frustrated. All these meetings didn’t seem to have resulted in anything,” said Stuart Flashman, chair of the Rockridge Community Planning Council, which opposed the scale of the project.  

“I wish they would listen to the community first. Maybe the meetings were not heading in the direction they wanted, so they dropped it.”  

Shawl said she would still go to the meeting at the Claremont Hotel to see the new plans.  

“Of course I am going to be there,” she said.  

Safeway plans to submit a formal application to the City of Oakland to begin the entitlement process after the meeting.  

Safeway will be displaying the new drawings and architectural renderings for the College Avenue neighborhood store from 7-9 p.m. Wednesday, April 29, at the Claremont Hotel on Ashby Avenue. Neighbors are encouraged to walk to the meeting if possible.  

Parking will be available from 6:30-9:30 p.m.  

Citing a sudden rise in accidents involving Berkeley Unified School District students, Superintendent Bill Huyett announced at the Berkeley Board of Education meeting Wednesday, March 25, that the district would work with traffic safety groups to educate children about bicycle and pedestrian safety issues.  

The district met with the Safe Routes to School Alameda County Partnership program last week to discuss ways to initiate a traffic safety campaign in the public schools.  

District spokesperson Mark Coplan said that in addition to the two kindergartners injured in automobile collisions within a month—including 5-year-old Zachary Michael Cruz of LeConte Elementary School, who was struck and killed by a truck Feb. 27—three more Berkeley public school students had been involved in accidents on their way to school.  

The most recent accident happened Monday, March 23, when a Jefferson Elementary School student was walking to school with her mother and younger sister and was hit by a truck while she was in the crosswalk at Cedar and Acton streets.  

“The driver said that he had not seen her because the sun had blinded his eyes,” Coplan said.  

The student suffered minor bruises, according to Coplan, and was rushed to the hospital by her mother and Jefferson Principal Maggie Riddle.  

The girl was released after being treated the same day. 

Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Officer Andrew Frankel said the girl’s mother had looked back to check on her younger child while all of them were walking northbound on Acton when the Jefferson student, who was slightly ahead, stepped out and was hit by a slow-moving truck. 

On March 13, a man was dropping off his nephew, a Malcolm X kindergartner, on Ellis Street, right across from where school buses park, when the child collided with a moving car belonging to a woman who was dropping her granddaughter off at school, Coplan said.  

“He ran into the car instead of the car running into him, so he wasn’t injured,” he said. “But he was extremely shook up and his mother took him home.”  

On Jan. 30, the same day another Malcolm X kindergartner was hit by a Toyota 4 Runner when she darted into the crosswalk at Ashby and Ellis streets after hearing the morning school bell, an eighth-grader was seriously injured while riding her bike to Berkeley High School. Coplan said the girl was struck by a car and taken to Children’s Hospital in Oakland.  

“Her injuries were pretty serious and she still hasn’t returned to school,” Coplan said. “I understand she had to undergo operations and is going through a lot of physical therapy. Since this happened out of school hours, we didn’t get any information about it until much later.”  

Neither Coplan nor Berkeley police were able to provide information about the location of the incident or the nature of her injuries.  

“I think the number of accidents we have had in such a short time is startling,” Coplan said, echoing Superintendent Huyett’s remarks at the meeting. “From talking to transportation officials and organizations ... these numbers are a surprise, but the real surprise is that it’s not happening more often. We’ve heard that near misses and potential accidents occur a lot around drop-off and pick-up locations at schools.”  

Farid Javandel, the city’s transportation manager, said the Berkeley City Council had just approved a grant application that would award the city around $1 million to carry out traffic improvements, including installing flashing lights at Ashby and Ellis to warn drivers of pedestrians.  

“A cluster of accidents is always alarming,” Javandel said. “It brings the issues to the forefront. Whether these are statistically important, that will take some time to pan out.”  

He added that transportation officials were also in the process of updating the City of Berkeley’s bike and pedestrian plan, which includes upgrades to ADA ramps and crosswalks, among other things.  

“Drivers should also remember to watch out and yield at crosswalks—they need to see if people are approaching,” he said. “Children often act in an unpredictable manner. You definitely have to be very aware of the environment as a driver. It’s very important to keep a safe speed limit.”  

Berkeley recently received a grant through the city’s Health and Human Services Department that helped to purchase seven permanent speed-feedback signs.  

The City Council approved specific locations at the last council meeting based on recommendations by transportation officials.  

Susan Silber, education coordinator for Safe Routes to Schools, said that Berkeley Unified was eager to launch the traffic safety campaign as soon as possible.  

“The district is ultra concerned about the number of accidents that have been occurring,” she said. “The superintendent got in touch with me and wants to do a campaign about traffic safety and about getting drivers more aware, especially around kids and schools. We want to make sure that every school in the district is taking advantage of Safe Routes to Schools. We have been working in some schools but not all schools—we would like to get all the schools and parents involved.” 

Safe Routes to Schools is currently at nine of the 11 Berkeley public elementary schools.  

Silber said that a survey of how students traveled to the elementary schools showed a vast majority were either driven to school or took a school bus.  

About 10 percent walked and about 2 percent biked.  

“Berkeley Unified has a zoning plan, so most students don’t go to neighborhood schools,” she said, referring to the district’s student placement system, which assigns students from three geographic attendance zones in the city.  

“They want to diversify their schools so that you can send students from all across town,” she said. “Diversity is great, but unfortunately most kids don’t end up in schools in their neighborhood.”  

Coplan said that at the high school, which doesn’t have school buses, at least 500 to 1,000 students get dropped off by their parents. Others use public transit, BART or walk, and a very small number of students—about 200—drive themselves to school.  

He said that the majority of the students in elementary and middle schools who didn’t take the school bus were driven to school by their parents.  

The district’s transportation division is also taking steps to minimize accidents, Coplan said.  

“The good news is that everybody is looking at safety first, everybody wants to do something about it,” he said.

“Determination” was the word of the day at Malcolm X Elementary School Monday, March 30, the eve of Cesar Chavez’s 82nd birthday.  

First-graders raked and sifted compost in the school garden as part of Berkeley Unified School District’s week-long celebration of the legacy of the Mexican civil rights activist.  

Although Cesar Chavez Day is a state holiday in California, K-12 schools remain open. Most schools recognized Chavez through service, teaching students to honor his spirit of hard work and unity.  

All 16 Berkeley public schools had programs lined up for Tuesday, March 31, including special classroom projects, Latino speakers, parades and strawberry giveaways. Teachers regaled students with stories of Chavez’s efforts on behalf of farm workers and his campaign to abolish the use of pesticides in the growing of table grapes.  

At Malcolm X, students told each other stories about Chavez during a gardening class.  

“Let’s see, did you learn anything about this special man....” Even before Rivka Mason, the school’s gardening teacher, could finish her sentence, a tiny hand shot up.  

“Cesar Chavez?” asked Fae Reuber, a first-grader. “He helped our country because he wanted to stop brown people from getting hurt while they were picking grapes. The grapes had pesticides and their hands started bleeding.”  

“And if he didn’t do that, we would probably be eating grapes with pesticides,” classmate Samantha Myers chimed in. “Pesticides are poison.”  

Though students may have stumbled a bit in piecing together the fragments of Chavez’s life, it was easy to see they were having fun in the process.  

“There are four different parts to Cesar Chavez,” Mason said. “Courage, service, freedom and determination. Today we will learn about determination—can someone tell me what it means?”  

“To terminate something?” asked a 6-year-old with a puzzled look on his face.  

“It’s when you do something you want to do and don’t give up,” said Fay, getting a nod of approval from Mason.  

“Farm work is tough," said Mason. “The farmers had to bend over to harvest the strawberries in the sun. They called it the diablo, or the devil. In honor of Cesar Chavez, we are going to be sifting compost for half a minute more than we do every day. We are going to be determined.”  

As the day progressed students studied “bugology” (Mason’s word for the study of centipedes and roly-polys), harvested dragon carrots and made a snack for themselves from celery, broccoli and lettuce grown in the school garden.  

While working on the Cesar Chavez strawberry bed, the students were momentarily distracted by a helicopter flying overhead.  

“They are making sure we are using the electricity right,” said first-grader Owen Hayden-Joiner, looking up.  

“They are making sure we teaching kids about Cesar Chavez,” said Mason smiling.

Rather than wait for the government to jump-start a struggling economy, a group of merchants on Solano Avenue have decided to take matters into their own hands. 

The first Friday of every month will see art galleries, curio shops, restaurants and a smattering of other retail businesses keep their doors open until 9 p.m., a rarity on Solano, to promote themselves and encourage patrons to shop locally. 

Since its debut on March 6, Art Attack has grown from six businesses to 11, with others expressing interest every day. 

“Business has been down for many merchants on Solano,” said Serena Leung Baker, who launched the art walk along with several other businesses. “The shops and restaurants have been suffering because not as many people have been shopping or eating out. We felt that an art walk would lift everyone’s spirit a bit and make them feel good about shopping. Even if they just buy a small card or a trinket, it helps the local economy a lot—it’s a way of giving back to the community.” 

Hope springs eternal on this two-mile stretch in Berkeley and Albany, which is one of the main shopping arteries in the area, attracting visitors from all over the region. 

Leung Baker, who grew up in El Sobrante, gave up her corporate event planning job to start A Different Day Gallery on Solano Avenue two years ago. 

Her gallery, which sells everything from $5 original folk cards to $2,000 paintings, saw a 50 percent decline in sales compared with the same time last year. 

“Sadly, art is not a necessity,” Leung Baker said. “People are thinking a lot longer before purchasing paintings now. It’s been a lot slower for us and we are trying to figure out a new business model.” 

Leung Baker said the art walk was in step with a buy-local campaign Solano Avenue merchants had started last year, encouraging area residents to spend their money in independent specialty stores. 

“It puts a little life on the street past 6 p.m.,” she said, referring to the average closing time for most stores on Solano. “We had a couple come on their third date who were so happy they had something to do past 9 o’clock. Also, in these times, when you are broke and you can’t go anywhere, it’s nice to have a free event to go to.” 

On a recent Monday evening, Pennie Opal Plant, who owns Gathering Tribes on Solano, was planning the next first Friday artwalk in April. 

Plant, who has been on Solano since 1991, moved to a more prominent location in January. 

“I am taking part in Art Attack because it is a way to build a sense of community in this challenging economy,” said Plant, whose store features Native American handicrafts. 

As a small business owner, Plant has survived two recessions, the dot-com bust and 9/11. 

“My store is the kind of place people want to come to when the world is a little chaotic,” she said. “The first art walk was wildly successful. The neighbors had a place to come to instead of having to drive somewhere on Friday night.” 

Red lights on storefronts guide visitors to the stores taking part in the art walk, which have wine, chocolates, guest speakers and in-house artists entertaining for a good part of the evening. 

The event exceeded Plant’s expectations, with the store making more profit in two hours than the rest of the day. 

Three blocks down, at Casa Oaxaca, Antonio Robles was displaying psychedelic tin masks from Guanajuato, Mexico, something he said had been a big draw at the art walk. 

“We had over a hundred people,” said Robles, who manages the store along with his brother Guillermo, a retired Berkeley police officer. “Business is slow but we hope this will pep things up a bit.” 

Berkeley City Councilmember Laurie Capitelli, who represents a part of Solano Avenue, praised the group for their efforts. 

“It’s good they are being proactive,” said Capitelli, who has a real estate business on Solano. “We, as a group of merchants on Solano, need to be proactive. We need to spend money locally instead of on Amazon.com, Cosco and Target. Our motto should be ‘buy little and buy local.’” 

Berkeley city officials said that although quite a few shops have closed down on Solano over the past three months, vacancy rates were far better as compared to the city’s downtown district. 

“Downtown has much more serious problems than Solano,” said Dave Fogarty, the city’s acting economic development manager. “Vacancies are larger. The problems are more long-standing and difficult to resolve downtown than Solano. We’d have to write a book to explain it. In short, Solano is easily accessible to affluent residents who live nearby and gets visitors whereas affluent people tend not to come downtown—they come to the arts district but don’t shop at the stores. The city has not succeeded in revitalizing the downtown as a shopping area yet.” 

Solano Avenue in Berkeley reported a 5.35 percent vacancy rate for the third quarter of 2008, which translates to 9,931 square feet out of a total of 185,000 square feet. 

“It’s a little bit higher than what you would expect it to be during these economic times,” said Fogarty. “Zero vacancy is impossible. Renovations and property transfers after deaths always result in a certain amount of vacancy.” 

Third quarter figures for 2008 show that the avenue’s Berkeley inventory includes 101 ground-floor commercial spaces representing around 152,808 square feet. 

At 44 percent, retail makes up the biggest chunk of business on the strip, with food and beverage taking up 26 percent, and arts occupying about 8 percent of the space. 

Offices make up about 3 percent and other services 11 percent. 

Allen Cain, executive director of the Solano Avenue Association, said vacancy rates for the entire avenue in Albany and Berkeley were hovering between 6 and 7 percent, the highest it has ever been. 

Cain said that 15 stores had closed down so far, “the highest number ever.” 

Jamba Juice, Ritz Camera, Papillon Homes, a Child’s Place—one of the neighborhood’s prime locations—and O! Babybaby have all moved away from the avenue, with the space for Jamba Juice lying vacant for six months. 

“It’s very unusual for an empty food location to stay vacant for that long,” Cain said. “There’s always a yogurt person or a coffee guy who moves in. Right now, there’s no place to buy a smoothie on Solano.” 

The country’s uncertain economic future, as Cain put it, was making it more and more difficult “to pull in that casual browser.” 

“The economy is weak but part of it is competition with other commercial districts such as Fourth Street, which is thriving,” he said. “Also, the rents on Solano Avenue are inordinately high. Small businesses were already being challenged by being small businesses ... At the same time the street is clean, businesses are expanding and a couple of new stores have opened up. It’s not entirely a grim picture.” 

ART ATTACK 

6-9 p.m., Friday, April 3, on Solano Avenue. Red lights and signs on the windows signify participating shops. For more information, call Serena Leung Baker at A Different Day Gallery, 868-4904.1

Is the City of Berkeley moving in the direction of opening up more of its commercial business districts towards street-level office use? That seemed to be the indication during the last two months as the City Council considered, but ultimately rejected, granting a first-floor office space permit for a building on Solano Avenue. 

The owners of a building at 1820 Solano Ave. had requested a conditional use permit to allow them to rent one of the building’s four ground-floor spaces for general office use, a use which is normally disallowed in the Solano Avenue commercial district. The owners said they needed the variance because they’d been unable to find a retail customer to rent the space, and were concerned that it was unoccupied. In September, the city’s Zoning Adjustments Board approved the variance, but the Thousand Oaks Neighborhood Association (TONA) filed an appeal. Their appeal was supported, in what might have been a first, by the Solano Avenue merchants’ association. At a Feb. 24 public hearing on the issue, several councilmembers seemed inclined to side with TONA, but others leaned toward upholding ZAB.  

At the March 24 City Council meeting, Councilmember Laurie Capitelli, who represents Solano Avenue on the City Council, expressed some concerns about supporting TONA’s appeal. 

A proposed resolution read that “the proposed project is inconsistent with the purposes of the Solano Avenue commercial district. Generally office uses are not compatible with these purposes because they are not pedestrian-oriented, which is an important feature to ensure maintenance of the character of this business district. … The project proposes no specific type of office use. Therefore, the council has no information or other basis to find that the space would have a pedestrian-oriented use.” 

“It sounds like we’re saying that there isn’t any office use that we would find compatible,” Capitelli told city staff members. “Is there a way to leave some wiggle room in it?” 

But Acting City Attorney Zack Cowan said that he didn’t “read it as being such a broad statement” that completely banned first-floor offices in Berkeley’s commercial districts. And, in fact, at Councilmember Kriss Worthington’s suggestion (to make sure the resolution had enough votes to pass), the final resolution did have the “wiggle room” Capitelli had requested. Rather than an outright ban on first floor office use at 1820 Solano, the council upheld the TONA appeal “without prejudice,” specifically leaving the door open for the building owners to come back with a specific office use proposal that might pass council scrutiny. 

The vote on the denial was 5-2-2 (Maio, Anderson, Arreguin, Capitelli, Worthington yes, Wozniak and Bates, no, Moore and Wengraf abstain). 

There is actually no outright ban on first-floor office space in Berkeley’s Solano commercial district in the city’s zoning code. Instead, Section 23E.60.030 of the code allows such uses, but only with the issuance of a use permit following a public hearing, the most stringent requirements for an allowable use. 

But the recent downturn in the local economy, including the loss of many businesses on Solano Avenue and in other sections of the city, have caused some city officials to consider taking another look at that policy. 

During the Feb. 24 public hearing on the 1820 Solano appeal, Capitelli said that he had “struggled with this issue” ever since he’d heard it had come to ZAB.  

The zoning code sets aside Solano “to encourage the location of businesses on Solano Avenue that serve the everyday needs of local residents,” and discourages the location of businesses on Solano Avenue that “serve a larger regional clientele, and should more appropriately be located in the Central Business District.” Capitelli said that Solano isn’t “a neighborhood-serving commercial district in the sense of people being able to walk out their front door and support a business. I don’t think that’s realistic any more. Too many of my neighbors drive to Cosco to buy their chicken breasts and their toilet paper in bulk, or whatever.” 

Capitelli said that both the downturn in the economy and other factors have caused many commercial establishments to leave Solano Avenue in recent years, ticking off a list that included a hardware store that turned into a household goods store and then a children-oriented store, a shoe store in the same building that was requesting the office space, a dance studio, and a real estate office. 

“And we all know that the video store next to the post office, its days are numbered because of broadband Internet access,” Capitelli said. 

Capitelli noted that he owns a real estate office where “we have between 100 and 150 people who come into our office each day, not counting staff. We also have dozens of people who look at the displays in our windows to find out what houses are for sale in the neighborhood, and what prices their neighbors are charging for the sale of their homes.” He said that “while I don’t want Solano Avenue or any other similar district to turn into an office district,” he suggested that in the future the city might want to make adjustments to the zoning code to allow more office use in first-floor spaces on the street. 

Councilmember Susan Wengraf echoed that sentiment, saying that she would “like to see if we could figure out a way to allow some office use [on Solano], but to control it so the fears that it doesn’t become dominant are satisfied.” Wengraf said she wanted feedback from staff about possibly limiting first-floor office use to “a low percentage per block.” 

And saying that “we are in changing times,” Mayor Tom Bates, who voted in the minority, said that the city needs to look at the issue of the commercial-office mix in certain business districts “in a different way than we’ve been looking at it before.” The mayor said that Solano was a “vibrant district,” and bringing in a 1,500-square-foot office space to Solano Avenue as proposed in the 1820 Solano project was “not going to kill the district. I’m more flexible, I’m more in favor of saying that the market should take care of it.” 

While the City Council made no specific request to city staff or the Planning Commission to revisit the issue of opening up the ability to put first-floor office space on Solano Avenue and in other commercial districts, this is an issue that appears likely to come up again. 

Depending on the outcome of bankruptcy actions in U.S. and Canadian courts, the would-be owners of Albany’s Golden Gate Fields say that once they acquire the property, they intend “to immediately commence seeking all required approvals to develop the property for commercial real estate uses.” 

That announcement is included in the March 27 statement of 2008 earnings issued by MI Developments (MID), the company that holds most of the loans to Magna Entertainment Corp. (MEC), the track’s bankrupt current owner. 

While an initial announcement had proposed an April 3 auction, that date has been pushed back, possibly to July. 

A court hearing in Delaware on that date is now scheduled to rule on whether or not the auction can be held. Creditors of the racing company have filed objections to an MID plan to buy the Albany tracks and several other MEC holdings through a process known as a “stalking horse” bid.  

Both companies are the creation of Canadian auto parts magnate Frank Stronach.  

Magna means “big” in Latin, but the adjective doesn’t apply to the value of Magna Entertainment—which has dropped to pennies a share on the over-the-counter market—nor to its annual financial report. 

In fact, North America’s largest owners of horse racing tracks announced that there won’t be any annual report at all for last year. 

Preparation would be too costly for a company currently engaged in bankruptcy action on both side of the U.S.-Canadian border. 

Magna, which owns Golden Gate Fields in Albany, made the announcement in a notice released Wednesday afternoon, March 26. 

Magna announced that “the expense and effort involved in complying with annual and quarterly reporting requirements cannot, in the opinion of the company, be justified in light of MEC’s current and operational financial situation.” 

Both the NASDAQ stock exchange in the United States and the Toronto Stock Exchange to the north have stricken the company’s shares from their listings. 

More information on the bankruptcies is available at the corporate website at www.magnaent.com/restructuring.

Plans for one new building at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) were soaring this week, just one week after another had received a major cash boost, thanks to the lab’s former boss. 

Four yellow balloons, tossed by the breezes almost always present in Strawberry Canyon, rose from the hillside immediately above UC Berkeley’s Botanical Gardens to mark the site of the lab’s new General Purpose Building. 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the canyon, construction continues at the Advanced Light Source User Support Building, thanks to a $115.8 million grant funded by the Obama administration’s economic stimulus package. 

Secretary of Energy and former LBNL Director Steven Chu announced the grant as part of a $1.2 billion package of funds allocated under the American Recovery and Investment Act. 

In addition to bankrolling the support building, grant funds will also pay remaining costs for demolition of the lab’s Bevatron building and other projects at the UC Berkeley-administered Department of Energy lab in the Berkeley Hills. 

The “light” in the building’s title doesn’t refer to the spectrum visible to the human eye, but to intense ultraviolet and “soft” X-rays a billion times brighter than the sun’s, according to the facility’s website. 

The 31,000-square-foot project is being built by Overaa Construction, a Richmond contracting firm which also designed the building. According to the LBNL project website for the building, the construction project will cost $35 million. 

Garden woes 

The project that brought the balloons to Strawberry Canyon is the three-story, 43,000-square-foot General Purpose Laboratory building, designed to bring facilities now in leased space in West Berkeley back to the hillside. 

If approved, the project will arise immediately uphill from the 34-acre UC Berkeley Botanical Garden. 

The project has raised concerns from activists who say the university’s building surge along the canyon threatens wildlife. 

“It really feels like an ongoing assault on the canyon by the lab,” said Phila Rogers of Save Strawberry Canyon, an activist group which has filed legal challenges to lab projects. 

Rogers, who leads bird-watching trips at the garden four times a year, said she had been shocked by the placement of the building so close to the garden. 

She said garden staff were shocked as well, a fact confirmed in conversations with a reporter by staff members who declined to comment on the record because, as one said, “the lab is the 900-pound gorilla around here.” 

Rogers also faulted the university for using balloons instead of poles. “When I got up there (Tuesday afternoon), two of the balloons had already popped,” she said. 

“Balloons were chosen because they are quick and inexpensive and can help validate the visual simulations” that will be in the draft environmental impact report (DEIR), said lab spokesperson Lynn Yarris. “Also, balloons can be moved around as the design evolves.” 

During a session to gather public and city comments for preparation of an environmental impact review on the project, LBNL project manager Richard Stanton said the structure would hold office and “wet” labs. 

While about 100 of the staff assigned to the new building would come from offices to be vacated in West Berkeley, others will come from buildings at the lab scheduled for demolition because they are outmoded and seismically unsafe. 

Save Strawberry Canyon won a court victory in their challenge of LBNL’s proposed Helios building, designed to house labs funded by oil giant BP’s $500 million research grant to develop new fuels from genetically modified microbes and plants. 

While the Energy Biosciences Institute—the formal name given to the BP-funded project—is designed to develop cleaner fuels developed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the Helios environmental impact report was rejected by the court for failing to consider the project’s own greenhouse gas impacts as required by state law. 

During the January meeting, lab officials said completion of the review and approval by the UC Board of Regents are tentatively scheduled for December, with construction starting the following month and completion by March 2015. 

Yarris said “the plan is to circulate the draft EIR for public comment starting this summer.” 

While he didn’t offer a specific cost for the new building, Yarris said the overall budget for the seismic upgrade project is $97 million, including the proposed lab building. 

Another lab 

Another UC Berkeley DOE lab has agreed to pay a $165,000 fine for illegally shutting down a toxic waste cleanup facility, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday. 

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had shut down the cleanup operation, resulting in the loss of control over a contamination of underground water that had spread outside the lab’s perimeter. 

“We’re pleased to have reached an agreement with DOE to resume cleanup,” said Michael Montgomery, EPA regional assistant director for the Superfund cleanup program. 

In 2007, the EPA certified the cleanup facility, which treats both soil vapor and groundwater. But the lab shut the facilities down early in 2008 and laid off employees, claiming the move had been necessitated by congressional funding cuts. 

Though full funding had been restored in July, the 28 treatment systems weren’t restarted, prompting action by the EPA, which describes the lab as “one of the most contaminated sites in the county.”

State legislators representing Berkeley and Oakland constituents in Sacramento gave a mixed message on the upcoming May special election to local progressive activists last week, uniting in opposition to a proposition that would impose a permanent cap on state spending, but dividing over a ballot measure that would siphon money from the state lottery. 

State Senator Loni Hancock and State Representatives Sandré Swanson and Nancy Skinner spoke at a Thursday evening meeting of the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club. 

The split between the three progressive legislators over the May 19 ballot propositions reflects an uncertainty within California’s vast progressive-liberal-labor community over how best to handle the state’s massive budget deficit as well as a united conservative-Republican caucus in the Legislature that has pledged to block all solutions that include the raising of taxes. 

On Thursday, March 26, all three local legislators condemned the February budget itself, in which Republicans were able to carve out major concessions in return for enough votes to pass. Hancock called the negotiations “my lowest ebb,” describing it as “pain and humiliation to have to take the things that were being demanded of us [by the Republicans] and to decide which of our core values would have to be thrown out. It was infuriating and frightening. It felt like what it would be to be a hostage.”  

Swanson, who was stripped of a committee chairmanship by House Speaker Karen Bass for refusing to go along with the Democratic caucus on some of the budget measures, said that while California needs to generate more revenue to support its rapidly growing population, “we have a broken revenue system of taxes. There should be a sober discussion of exactly what kind of revenues the state will need to go forward, to adequately fund education, to adequately fund health care as we go forward. But that’s not the debate we’re having.” Skinner was more blunt, calling the negotiated budget package “a piece of shit.”  

Meanwhile, Hancock says the Senate Elections Committee, of which she is chair, is working on a state proposition that would eliminate the two-thirds legislative vote requirement for passage of the state budget, the main weapon Republicans have been using to force their will upon the budget. Hancock said that measure could be on the state ballot as early as next year. 

In February, in an effort to close a $42 billion shortfall in the current year’s budget ending the first of July, the Legislature passed a package that would balance the budget through various complicated stratagems, including a provision that California voters must pass a series of revenue-raising or revenue-shifting measures on the May 19 special election ballot.  

Since that time, state legislative analysts have said that the failing economy has added another $8 billion to this year’s state deficit that will have to be closed by legislators sometime in May or June. 

The biggest revenue measure on the May 19 ballot, Proposition 1A, would raise $15 billion in revenue for the state through fiscal year 2012-13, but little of that money would be available to help the state treasury this fiscal year. In addition, 1A would put a permanent cap on future state spending. Another measure, Proposition 1C, would borrow $5 billion from future state lottery profits to use to help close this year’s deficit. Two other measures, 1D and 1E, would provide minimal help to the budget. Measure 1B would shift some general fund money to education beginning in 2011-2012, but only goes into effect if 1A passes as well. Measure 1F withholds pay raises from state elected officials in budget deficit years. 

Hancock, Swanson and Skinner all spoke in opposition to 1A, saying the measure’s spending cap would cripple the state’s ability to operate in future years. Hancock called the cap “as dangerous as Proposition 13 and the three-strikes law.” But they took different roads on 1C and the lottery borrowing which, if it fails, would add another $5 billion to the $8 billion the Legislature is already going to have to find to balance the budget by June 30. 

“I don’t like gambling, as you know,” Hancock said. “Casinos, or lotteries. And particularly if it means we won’t have to cut an extra $5 billion this year, I will probably grit my teeth and vote for that.” 

Skinner initially agreed with Hancock, saying that “we should absolutely” vote for it because of the extra $5 billion hole its failure would leave the state in. “Without any ability to get these Republicans to vote for any more revenues,” she said, “we’ll have to find $13 billion in additional cuts, and there’s hardly anywhere to go for that.” But after Swanson spoke in opposition to the measure, Skinner backed off of her support, saying she hadn’t considered Swanson’s angle, and would have to rethink her position in the wake of his remarks. 

“The Republican leadership has said that they are not going to vote for taxes” to take care of the projected $8 billion hole the state is in, even if the May 19 ballot measures pass, Swanson said. “But if all of the propositions fail, and the hole is not $8 billion but $15 billion, maybe that’s too big to survive on cuts alone, and the Republicans will have to come back to the table around taxes. And maybe this time the taxes will be permanent and deal with the structural deficit. So I’m just not convinced that our only choice is to take it or leave it or we’ll find ourselves with devastating cuts.” 

Speaking specifically on 1C, Swanson said that “if I support the lottery (ballot measure), and I agree to give the Legislature an additional $5 billion to address this problem, then it’s easier for people to work on an all-cuts solution. If I don’t [support the lottery ballot measure], then maybe it forces them to come up with a real solution.” 

Swanson urged a no vote on 1C and all of the other budget-related ballot propositions. 

The disagreement between the three East Bay legislators—expressed in terms in which each legislator said they respected the opinions of the others—reflected a broader disagreement in the state’s liberal-progressive-labor coalition over how to approach the May 19 ballot measures. A handout by Skinner’s office reported that the state office of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the California Nurses Association have come out against the six budget-related ballot propositions (1A through 1F), while AFSCME Local 2620 (health and social services professional employees), the Bay Area Council, the California Teachers Association, and the Peace Officers Research Association of California were all in favor. The California Federation of Teachers is in favor of 1B and opposed to the rest, while the California State University Board of Trustees, the League of Women Voters, and the California Building Trades Council were all taking split positions on the measures. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has come out against 1A, but has yet to take a position on the other five measures. 

Correction: This story has been amended to give correct information on the California Federation of Teachers' positions.  

In 2008, reports Paper Cuts, a weblog that tracks U.S. newspaper closings and staff reductions cost, the country’s papers lost at least 15,859 jobs. 

So it’s an ominous sign for 2009 that cutbacks in the year’s first three months are nearly half of the total for all of last year. (See http://graphicdesignr.net/ papercuts) 

As of early Tuesday afternoon, March 31, the website was reporting at least 7,562 newspaper positions have vanished so far in 2009, a year in which major newsrooms have shut down their presses, including Denver’s Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. And that number had risen by 237 in the previous four hours. 

Another longstanding luminary in the American media constellation has largely abandoned print. The Christian Science Monitor printed its last weekday edition Friday, March 27, and now appears online daily and in print once a month. 

March came in lion-like and has shown no sheepish qualities, mauling media companies by the day. 

In Michigan, the 174-year-old Ann Arbor News announced March 23 that it will cease daily publication and be reincarnated under a new corporate ownership as a twice-weekly paper with a daily online presence. 

Reporters and other employees of the New York Times learned March 25 that they would either have to take a 5 percent across-the-board pay cut and 10 days of unpaid leave or face up to 70 newsroom layoffs. 

That was on top of 100 business operations workers who were handed their pink slips as the same time, and not counting the 2008 total payroll reductions of 1,364 positions, according to a story in the paper’s March 26 edition. 

One major reason for the layoffs was made clear in an announcement that same day from the Newspaper Association of America, which cited a 20.6 percent drop in advertising revenues for the fourth quarter of 2008 compared with the same period a year earlier.  

The ensuing layoffs have struck at more than 300 papers so far this year, with the 2009 total of publications certain to top the 428 chalked up by Paper Cuts last year. 

Between last year and this, the blog also counts more than 120 newspapers which have vanished, or like the San Francisco-based AsianWeek, migrated to an online-only existence. 

Closer to home, MediaNews, the corporate parent of most Bay Area newspapers, won major concessions from its newsroom unions in March, with layoffs, mandatory unpaid leave and pay concessions all thrown into the mix. 

The Media Workers Guild also announced March 24 that it had agreed to drop plans for a merger of the union’s East Bay chapter with the San Jose unit, a move which would have given the union greater bargaining power and restored a separation the chain had won after it bought the Mercury News and Contra Costa Times and unseated the union’s East Bay membership. 

The privately held, Denver-based company also won agreement from Moody’s, a bond rating service, to stop listing MediaNews bond issues, which Moody’s had just downgraded to a lower status on the junk scale. 

A large chuck of the junk-rated paper is held by the Bay Area’s other major publisher, Hearst, which is also privately held. 

The Hearst Corporation has also won similar concessions from employees to those won by publisher Dean Singleton for his own Bay Area papers—which include the Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, Alameda Times-Star, Fremont Argus, Hayward Daily Review, Marin Independent Journal, Milpitas Post, Vallejo Times-Herald and the Pleasanton Tri-Valley Herald. 

The Hearst employee concessions, approved by Media Guild members in a March 13 vote, followed the company’s repeated threats to close the paper unless unions knuckled under. 

The Bloomberg news service reported Tuesday that 120 San Francisco Chronicle employees have accepted buyouts in the latest round of layoffs, and KTVU reports that the paper’s editorial cartoonist, Tom Meyer, and Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Kim Komenich, both bought buyouts. 

The media mayhem hasn’t been restricted to the mainstream media. 

In California, the crisis has brought about the March 26 closing of Los Angeles CityBeat, a respected alternative weekly. 

Additionally, during 2008 at least 10 California newspapers reduced the number of days they print and distribute editions each week, according to a March 29 Associated Press story. 

Both the San Mateo Daily News and the Palo Alto Daily News dropped one printing day a week, while the San Francisco Examiner cut back free home delivery days to twice a week while still replenishing news racks with daily editions. 

The Mercury News is also following suit—at least in part—by eliminating all but Sunday delivery to subscribers in San Francisco and other communities outside the metropolitan San Jose area. 

Sunday papers will still be delivered, and subscribers can sign up for paid online-only subscriptions to the daily edition. 

According to a letter from the paper’s circulation department mailed to subscribers in the affected areas, “Economic factors force us to focus our delivery resources on our local market, so this change is being made on all subscription deliveries in this region.” 

Online access to the paper’s website may retreat behind a pay wall, the letter indicates, apparently reversing the paper’s May 18, 1998, announcement of free Internet access for all. The paper had previously restricted access to paid subscribers. 

California’s largest newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, is one of the two major stars in the Tribune Company’s newspaper constellation. The chain is based in Chicago and named for the flagship Chicago Tribune. 

The company, controlled by real estate magnate Sam Zell—who is also Berkeley’s biggest landlord—had filed for bankruptcy in December. Now its major Chicago rival, Sun-Times Media Group, has taken the same course, filing in Delaware bankruptcy court Tuesday, March 31. 

Nationally, the news for print papers isn’t good, with Rasmussen Reports polling results released March 4 finding that only 30 percent of U.S. adults read a newspaper daily, and only 8 percent read newspapers online on a daily basis. 

The woes of print media are reflected in a decline in the sales of newsprint, which dropped 14 percent overall last year, the New York Times reported March 20.  

According to an April 1 Bloomberg story, AbitibiBowater Inc., North America’s largest newsprint supplier, is struggling and may be forced to seek the protection of bankruptcy court, queueing up with many of their largest customers.  

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced the appointment of Paul D. Seeman of Berkeley to a judgeship on the Alameda County Superior Court bench. 

Seeman, 54, has served as a court commissioner for the Alameda County Superior Court since 2004 and previously served as a referee pro tem for the county’s Juvenile Court from 1991 to 2004. 

From 1990 to 1991, Seeman worked as a deputy county counsel for the Alameda County Counsel’s Office and from 1980 to 2004 he was a sole practitioner. 

Seeman earned his law degree from the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law and his bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz. 

Seeman, who is a Democrat, fills the vacancy created by the retirement of Judge Bonnie Sabraw. 

His salary will be $178,789 annually.

As the sun rises above the Berkeley Hills on the morning of Wednesday, April 8, some local Jews will gather at the Berkeley Marina to greet it and carry out, atop Berkeley’s newest piece of land, an ancient religious ritual held at 28 year intervals.  

The local “Blessing of the Sun” ceremony will take place at dawn on the 14th day of the month of Nissan in the Jewish calendar year, 5769, at the Cesar Chavez Park in the Berkeley Marina.  

The ceremony is jointly organized by Kehilla Community Synagogue in Oakland and Chochmat HaLev, a South Berkeley based Jewish meditation center and synagogue, as well as a new group, “Wilderness Torah.” Rabbi David Cooper of Kehilla will officiate on April 8.  

The event begins with “preparatory songs, prayers and chants” at 6 a.m. for those who wish to arrive that early. The Blessing of the Sun or Birkat HaChammah ritual itself begins at 6:44 and will last several minutes.  

The official time of sunrise in the Bay Area is about 6:44 am that morning, but viewed from the Marina it will take several minutes for the sun to crest the Berkeley Hills over Strawberry Canyon. The blessing can’t be said until the full disk of the sun is visible. The last occasion for this particular blessing was 1981 and the next will be in 2037.  

After the blessing, the organizers plan a “generations circle” where older participants can share wisdom with younger ones, followed by a period in which followers of various Jewish traditions can conduct their own version of morning services.  

Attendees at the Berkeley ceremony need not be Jewish. “Anyone can come”, Rabbi Cooper says, an invitation that he then somewhat facetiously qualifies to “only people who live within the orbit of our sun are allowed to come.”  

“Giving thanks for the light and energy of the sun and new beginnings is something we can all share,” adds Chochmat HaLev congregant Julie Wolk, also an organizer of the April 8 event.  

Cooper has distributed information to East Bay rabbis, and hopes for attendance from throughout the Jewish community. “It’s a lovely program and we are delighted that Rabbi David Cooper and others have stepped up to organize a celebration of this rare occurrence on the Jewish calendar,” Rabbi Yoel Kahn, of Berkeley’s Congregation Beth El e-mailed me this week.  

The ceremony takes place every 28 years because that’s the time, according to tradition, when the sun stands at the point in the sky where it was when first created. In the Jewish calendar, the 28-year cycle has repeated more than 200 times.  

Readers with a Jewish or Christian upbringing may recall that Genesis says God created “light” on the first day of Creation, but the sun, moon, and stars were not made until the fourth day.  

Cooper enthusiastically narrates the intricate analysis over the centuries that led to the April 8 date for this year’s ritual. He recently summarized the reasoning in a written message to his congregation.  

“The old rabbis believed that the sun was created…on a Tuesday night-Wednesday morning…some of them also came to believe that the sun was created in its Spring Equinox position when the sun reached that position within the first six hours after sunset on a Tuesday night. By their reckoning this would happen only once every 28 years. Inaccuracies in their calculations have resulted in calendar drift after 18 centuries, and thus the “official” rabbinic equinox date has drifted from March 21 to April 8. Although everyone now agrees that the date has no astronomical significance, we use the day to affirm our gratitude for the gifts we receive from being in our sun’s orbit.”  

“While we acknowledge that most do not look to the first chapter of Genesis to teach them the facts of cosmology or physics, for many of us, the truth of the story lies in getting us to consider our place in this wondrous universe and to accept our responsibility to act as good stewards within this world and upon this planet”, he concluded.  

Many years ago “I’d heard something about (the ceremony), but totally forgotten,” Cooper says. Later, while studying the Talmud, he was reminded by a reference to the blessing, and put a notation into his Palm Pilot. About a year ago, while checking approaching dates in the Jewish calendar, he saw his entry and thought, “I’m glad I left myself a note about this!”  

The solar calendar site in Chavez Park “is most absolutely the perfect place” for the ceremony, Cooper says. Not only does it have a good view of the sunrise, but the calendar “is very much laid out like the ones our ancestors would have used” to track the cycles of the seasons and interpret the heavens without benefit of telescopes.  

The Berkeley event organizers have also focused on the environmental message of the occasion. They hope that participants will see the gathering not only as an age-old honoring of creation, but a call to end environmentally destructive human practices that are unbalancing the natural world.  

“I hope people will leave with their own particular inspiration”, Cooper adds, but also “with a sense that our energy comes from the sun, and the question is how do we utilize the sun in ways that benefits the earth and all of its species.”  

“When we see that sun, we’re going to know that we’re renewed”, says local rabbi Daniel Lev, who will be another leader of the ceremony. “That’s my hope and blessing for everyone who’s coming.”  

The short prayer that will be offered on the 8th is simple; in one translation, “Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of time and space, Doer of the deeds of Creation". It’s not reserved for this ritual alone, but also appropriate when an especially uncommon or spectacular event of nature, like a meteor, is seen.  

As Rabbi Lev told me, “remember in ‘Fiddler on the Roof’, the comment, “There’s a blessing for everything”?”  

Lev was one of 30 or so participants in 1981 when the ceremony was held at Inspiration Point in Tilden Park, in the hills back of Berkeley. Word of the gathering was spread “sort of grassroots”, he recalls, and an eclectic group of Jews came together before dawn at the edge of the parking lot there to watch the sunrise. “The event in 1981 was somber compared to what we do this April 8!” he says.  

This year there will be gatherings around the country and world, from a parking lot in North Carolina to Jerusalem. Several may take place in California.  

“It looks like there are celebrations happening all over the country”, says Julie Wolk. However, many Jews have not necessarily heard of it. “I think the reason no one knows about it is because it happens so infrequently,” Wolk surmises. This year, April 8 also happens to be the first day of Passover, and observant Jews are focusing on that important annual ritual.  

And for some, a pre-dawn nature of the gathering is a challenge. As I asked Jewish friends and acquaintances if they knew of this ritual, one passed along this wry observation from another friend. “I think (this) may be an ancient and wise tradition…if I was ever able to get out of the house before dawn, I’d go.”  

“If you miss this event, come back on April 8, 2037” Cooper writes. “How far will we have advanced by then in our efforts utilize the sun’s gifts so as repair the harm we have caused our planet?”  

By 2037 of course, global warming, sea level rise, and the inevitable approaching Hayward Fault earthquake may have radically reshaped the Chavez Park site. But whatever the local site, the organizers hope the tradition itself will be renewed again in a world significantly improved from 2009.  

Birkat HaChammah – Blessing of the Sun – will be celebrated Wednesday, April 8, 2009 at the solar calendar in Chavez Park at the Berkeley waterfront.  

The organizers suggest bringing something to put on the wet grass so you can sit comfortably, and a “box breakfast” if you’d like to stay and eat after the ceremony.  

“Pre-ritual preparation” begins at 6 a.m., and the blessing of the sun ritual starts at 6:44, and concludes at 7:15 after the sun is up. A “Generations Circle” will follow, then, at 7:45, morning services held separately in various Jewish traditions, and a bring-it-yourself breakfast after that. Participants can arrive or leave at any point.  

El Cerrito police are asking for the public’s assistance in locating a 24-year-old woman who was reported missing March 10. 

Qianhe “Maggie” Zhang, a Chinese citizen who was living in El Cerrito while attending graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, has not had contact with her roommates or her family in China since February, police said. Her roommates reported her missing to UC Berkeley police. 

Zhang may suffer from psychological issues and may be in need of a mental health evaluation, according to police. 

Anyone with information about Zhang’s whereabouts is asked to call their local police department. 

The last three suspects in a home-invasion robbery and torture case in the Berkeley hills last month have turned themselves in, Berkeley police spokesman Andrew Frankel said today. 

There were a total of eight suspects in the incident in the 600 block of Santa Barbara Road in the hour-long incident that began at 8:20 p.m. on Feb. 24. Five suspects had been arrested previously. 

Frankel said brothers Vern Town Saelee, 21, and Vern Sio Saelee, 18, of Fairfield, as well as 24-year-old Chiew Chian Saeturn of Fairfield surrendered to Berkeley police detectives in Fairfield at 9 p.m. Monday. 

Frankel said detectives had served a search warrant at a residence in the 5600 block of Alameda Street in El Cerrito earlier on Monday and although the suspects weren’t found at that time, police believe the constant pressure they placed on the suspects proved to be too much. 

“They were tired of running,” Frankel said. 

A male and a female were bound, pistol-whipped and carved on with kitchen knives in the brutal home invasion robbery. 

The victims were taken to a local hospital where they were treated and released, Frankel said. 

Three suspects, Buk Khansuwong, a 46-year-old Richmond man, Tien Vo, a 29-year-old San Pablo woman, and a 16-year-old boy from Richmond, were arrested in early March. 

A fourth suspect, 18-year-old Anthony Ray Douglas of Richmond, surrendered at the Richmond Police Department on March 18 and a fifth suspect, another 16-year-old Richmond boy, was arrested last week. 

Frankel said police believe the suspects chose the victims at random. 

He said the suspects have been charged with torture, which carries a life in prison term upon conviction, as well as home invasion, which carries up to six years in state prison. 

The Saelee brothers and Saeturn are expected to be arraigned in Alameda County Superior Court on Thursday, according to Frankel. The first five suspects have already made their initial court appearances.

Three high school-age couples parked on a romantic spring Saturday night on a Grizzly Peak Boulevard turnout suddenly found themselves in a most unromantic encounter—a stick-up. 

According to UC Berkeley police, the couples were parked near South Park Drive about 11:30 p.m. when another couple pulled up nearby in a small white or gray four-door sedan with California plates. 

According to the UCPD report, a man got out of the newly arrived car and walked over to where the three couples were parked, striking up a conversation before returning to his car. 

That’s when things got dicey. 

Back at the car, the new arrival grabbed a pistol and returned to the high school youths, where he pointed his weapon at the students and demanded their valuables and car keys, then ordered them to hike downhill and into the woods. 

After they heard the bandit speed away, the youths hiked back up the hill and managed to flag down a passing motorist. 

Officers from both the Berkeley and campus police departments searched for the bandits without success. 

The victims described the gunman as a Hispanic man in his 20s, about 5’10” with black hair and a goatee. He was wearing a black beanie and a long white baggy tee shirt. His companion was a blonde woman, with “not short” hair, according the police crime alert. 

UCPD asks anyone with information about the crime to call their Criminal Investigation Bureau at 642-0472 during regular office hours or 642-6760 at other times.

Berkeley police are in Tilden Regional Park in the Berkeley hills for a second straight day to look for evidence in an old case in which new information has emerged, police spokesman Officer An-drew Frankel said Wednesday. 

Frankel would not say which case the search is tied to, but said it is not a homicide. 

Police are searching locations close to the Mineral Springs picnic area, near South Park Drive, he said. 

Berkeley police are leading a team that includes members of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office and the East Bay Regional Park District Police Department, Frankel said. 

Frankel said he won’t say anything more about the investigation because it’s still ongoing.

At a March 20 hearing, Judge Morris Jacobson of the Alameda County Superior Court ordered a witness to appear for the May 18 preliminary hearing of Berkeley resident Andrew Hoeft-Edenfield. 

Hoeft-Edenfield was charged by the district attorney’s office for murdering UC Berkeley engineering student, Chris Wootton, outside an university sorority house last May. 

Hoeft-Edenfield’s bail had been raised from $2 to $2.5 million by the judge at an earlier hearing. 

The preliminary hearing will take place at the Rene C. Davidson Courthouse in Oakland at 2 p.m.  

This year’s annual Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA) Spring House Tour takes place Sunday, May 3. The tour extends broadly over the architectural spectrum, with homes from the Maybeck era to the “Mid-Century Modern” period, all concentrated in the North Berkeley hills. 

Although they range from severely geometric, glass-walled houses to rustically organic shingled cottages, these residences are united by some commonalities, including careful placement in the natural landscape, responsiveness to the mild local climate and the spectacular bay views, and the desire of both architects and owners to express a particularly informal Berkeley style of living.  

Three lectures before the tour will help frame the tour houses in the context of the eras in which they were created.  

Robert Judson Clark gives the first lecture next Wednesday, April 8. Clark, a professor emeritus of Art and Archaeology at Princeton, fairly bubbles with enthusiasm about his areas of expertise. He’s the author of The Arts and Crafts Movement in America 1876–1916, among other scholarly works.  

On April 8 his topic will be “Buena Vista: Maybeck and the Year 1907.” That was a “watershed year” for Maybeck’s residential design work in the Berkeley hills, although many of the homes he built on or near Buena Vista Way would later burn in the 1923 fire. 

Clark is followed on Wednesday, April 22, by Henrik Bull, speaking about Bay Area architecture of the 1950s and 1960s. This was a period when “Mid-Century Modern” was in vogue, with its own unique expressions in the Bay Area. Many of the development gaps that remained in the Berkeley Hills were filled in with homes of Modern design in the post-war building boom.  

Bull, founder and principal of Bull Stockwell Allen / BSA Architects, was one of those in practice here during that era. 

The series concludes Wednesday, April 29, with a talk by Waverly Lowell, “Greenwood Common: Living Modern.” Greenwood Common, with some homes on the tour, is a remarkable enclave with a central common lawn, and perimeter homes designed by several important mid-century architects, from Joseph Esherick to Donald Olson and John Funk, on a piece of land owned by William Wurster. 

Lowell, who heads the College of Environmental Design Archives on the UC Berkeley campus, is an expert on the history of the Common and has authored Living Modern: A Biography of Greenwood Common, which will be published by William Stout this spring. (Information on purchasing the book will be available at the lecture and the house tour). 

Lowell is a thoughtful and meticulous student of design history and manages a treasure house of architectural resources. 

BAHA Spring House Tour 

For more information, see www.berkeleyheritage.com/calendar.html and scroll down to “From Maybeck to Modern.”  

Lectures cost $15 each, $40 for a series ticket. All take place at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club in Berkeley. 

To order tickets, print and fill out the order form on the website and mail it with a check made out to BAHA and a stamped, self-addressed envelope to BAHA, Maybeck to Modern Lectures, P.O. Box 1137, Berkeley, CA 94701.  

Tickets can also be purchased by PayPal through the website, and at the door, if seats remain available. 

The CED Archives website is www.ced.berkeley.edu/cedarchives. Information on Lowell’s book on Greenwood Common can be found at www.stoutbooks.com/cgi-bin/stoutbooks.cgi/64579. 

Steven Finacom is a BAHA board member and a regular contributor to the Daily Planet.

During my midlife career break, which lasted about 18 years, we ran a small software development group. We started on Telegraph in the late 1970s, upstairs in the brick building which now houses Rasputin’s at the corner of Channing. At that time the building was owned by a southern California cheap- clothing chain which absolutely didn’t get Berkeley. They attached no value to the upstairs offices, so we were able to rent vast spaces with high ceilings, big windows and crown molding for about 30 cents a square foot, with no lease. We bought some used metal desks and a big table, and we were in business. 

Then as now, Telly was mighty funky. Weird people, noisy people, rude people—and that doesn’t even cover the dogs. The people commonly known as homeless, mostly “substance abusers” who slept outdoors and begged for a living, were as abundant then as now. As always, the alcohol addicts were mostly pleasant and polite, but those who had chosen crack or meth were sometimes nasty.  

Some merchants blamed the ambiance for their lack of success, even the ones whose merchandise targeted disaffected and surly youth in attitudinal poses as customers. These kids tended toward mari-juana, with their anti-social activities usually no worse than making themselves look ugly and blocking the sidewalk, with an occasional graffiti excusion. Graffiti and litter abounded then as now.  

For us, it was a great place to do business. The seedy setting kept the rent down. There were at least five bookstores and three cafes in a two-block stretch. Staggeringly brilliant computer science graduate students dropped in regularly from the UC campus to do a bit of programming. It was an easy walk from our house, and our kids could stop on their way back from Berkeley High to do their homework. From my desk, I had a glorious view of the hills.  

But the 1989 earthquake made it necessary to think again about our choice of location. Our unreinforced building shimmied and shook in a truly scary way, and the landlord showed no interest in fixing it. We decided to move, and, since we couldn’t find anything as large or as nice around Telegraph, we looked next at West Berkeley. 

We found a suite in a converted pump factory on Sixth Street. There was no view, but there were flowers and a café in the courtyard. Aquatic Park was a short walk for a picnic lunch. We couldn’t walk to work from home, but there was an ample parking lot, and even free street parking. We were moving from strictly R&D to tasteful licensing, and we could entertain foreign customers there without frightening them. Since we were still not making much in the way of profits, the comparatively reasonable rent helped us make payroll for 15 or 20 people. 

Besides low rents, West Berkeley in those days had other advantages. Chief among them were the sky, the air and the sunshine. Once in a great while some industrial venue (Pacific Steel?) produced a smell like burning Bakelite, but there was usually a fresh breeze from the bay. There were also quite a few private homes around, several with gardens featuring old roses and wisteria, inhabited by multiethnic families.  

There were no bookstores in our south-of-University neighborhood, but there were numerous galleries, craft workshops and artists’ studios to visit. Vik’s Distributors opened an Indian grocery and then a popular Indian lunch spot. Lots of interesting things were going on in West Berkeley, including other small businesses like ours. 

Our landlords, the Abrams-Millikan architectural firm, had cleverly adapted the pump plant for modern use, and were well on their way to converting part of the historic and charming Ocean View neighborhood to Berkeley’s most successful shopping area, which now produces millions of dollars in sales tax revenue for Berkeley every year. It had barely escaped redevelopment’s wrecking ball—dead-stupid city planners in the ’60s thought West Berkeley would make a nice office park, something like Dublin, perhaps. 

I was working much too hard to follow local land-use politics, but unbeknownst to me civic-minded souls were working on the West Berkeley Plan, designed to stabilize and protect what seemed to be an optimally effective situation. From the plan summary: “Because West Berkeley is a successful area, the Plan seeks to guide its evolution, rather than radically reshape it.” After years of work and many compromises, it was adopted by the City Council. 

That was then, this is now. Now the stupids are at it again. A number of rapacious forces are eager to, as our government used to say in Vietnam, “destroy the village in order to save it.” University of California energy researchers envision West Berkeley’s wide open spaces as ideal for a new—you guessed it—office park, this time cum laboratory space. Never mind that San Francisco is awash in empty high-rise offices at the moment—Berkeley needs its own version, they think, close to the freeway for the convenience of the bridge-and-tunnel suburban commuters, which many of them will be. 

This group has entered into a marriage of convenience with a few property owners who have amassed big parcels in West Berkeley, supported by builders who hope to profit from massive projects on these sites. And our dingbat city planners, once again, are egging them all on. From our story on the last planning commission meeting: “The staff proposal, if enacted without changes, could mean a West Berkeley skyline studded with 90-foot-tall office towers—a host of buildings as tall as the area’s currently dominant high-rise, the Fantasy Records Building.” Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? 

Not surprisingly, currently successful West Berkeley businesses and residents are appalled. The politicians on the City Council, at least those elected thanks to big-time builders’ bucks, are not likely to bite the hands that fed them, so it may already be a done deal. So much for charm . . . and don’t believe the “jobs” mantra either. Construction jobs typically don’t go to Berkeley residents, and the anticipated businesses will employ more Ph.D.’s than working-class people, count on it. And with no sales tax revenue… 

Soon, if we’re not careful, there will soon be no place for small businesses like ours to get started in Berkeley, and there will be no room for the kind of retail shops which are so successful on Fourth Street. Rents on Telegraph are now sky-high, resulting not in more businesses but in more empty spaces. Central Berkeley is rapidly being colonized by the University of California, with more and more buildings being taken off the property tax rolls for UC offices and big sites being built out as what are effectively luxury private dorms for UC students. And now West Berkeley is being turned into a plantation for the university’s British Petroleum-dominated energy industry schemes.  

Can anything be done to reverse these trends? In theory, the Planning Commission has the authority to plan Berkeley’s future, but it’s been packed by council appointments of people who work in the building business, so don’t count on them to do the right thing. The City Council is more of the same, a majority of councilmembers are beneficiaries of big campaign contributions, loans and favors from builders and their allies.  

Eternal vigilance, as always, could make a difference. FYI, the Planning Commission meets at 7 p.m. on some Wednesdays (usually alternate but not always) at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Meetings are listed and usually previewed in this paper. If their vision for the future of Berkeley is different from yours, go there and tell them about it before it’s too late, or write them a letter. Can’t hurt, might help.

MARINE RECRUITING CENTER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In reference to your article, “Vandals Strike Berkeley Marine Recruiting Center,” I think that the reasoning behind the City Council’s assertion that the recruiting center is “uninvited and unwelcome” should have been included in the article. 

In December 2008, the City Council decided by a majority vote that they were against the presence of the recruiters due to the illegitimacy of the Iraq war and the military’s sexual orientation discriminatory policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” 

In addition, the council supports efforts by Code Pink to circulate petitions to put a measure on the November ballot in Berkeley to impede the possibility of establishing recruiting offices near homes, parks, schools, churches, libraries, or health clinics. 

I support the actions of the City Council and believe that it is unfair to simply recount the vandalism of the recruiting center without first explaining the legitimate claims that many Berkeley citizens have against the center. This would contextualize the vandalism by acknowledging its probable cause, rather than representing these acts as irrational and unprovoked destruction. 

Kristina Borrman 

• 

ABAG—HOW COSMIC! 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I read with disgust the remarks by Ms. Gibson, president of Association of Bay Area Governments, that the “ongoing concern (of ABAG) is how do we protect our planet in the context of the Bay Area.” It is that kind of “super hero,” pseudo-cosmic, pompous thought that has brought my country to the sad state it is in today.  

“Stop the overpopulation of America? Oh, we can’t do that without fixing global overpopulation.” “Reduce American homelessness? Can’t do that without solving it globally.” Etc, etc.  

Is my taxpayer dollar going to ABAG so it can “protect our planet”? It is this now—thankfully—fading delusional belief in the omnipotence of American power and benevolence that has allowed America’s domestic propels to grow unchecked.  

And while we’re at it, the biggest cause of California’s population growth—and all the resultant problems Ms. Gibson wrings her hands about—is immigration and its resultant high birth rate. Oh, but we must never talk about that. Safer to spin a globe around and keep our cushy jobs. 

Ken Silver 

Oakland 

• 

WRONG WAY IN AFGHANISTAN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Do you remember? 

What ever happened to the white paper Colin Powell was going to produce proving al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden were responsible for 9/11? 

This was what the Taliban were waiting for before they would turn over Osama Bin Laden, and possibly also his associates, top al Qaeda members, to the United States. 

Instead, we are now fighting the Taliban, as well as al Qaeda and Osama. Why not work WITH the Taliban against al Qaeda and Osama? All we need is to give the Taliban proof of Bin Laden’s culpability and involvement in 9/11. Don’t we have proof? And, if not, what are we doing? Let’s reinvestigate 9/11! And, this time, let’s have a thorough and honest investigation that is not led by a close Bush ally like Robert Zelikow (who had just completed a book with Condoleezza Rice). 

Richard Tamm 

• 

BUS FEEDING THE FERRY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Sure, buses can save the Berkeley Ferry. Paul Kamen is right—on with his scheme to have people board the ferry directly from the bus. We should not provide any Marina parking for ferry patrons—none at all. The ferry is public transit. If people want to warehouse their car while they visit the city, let them use Center Street Garage and catch a bus. I’d be glad to see the 51 bus once again terminate at the Marina. I look forward to an expansion of Bus Rapid Transit to run down University Avenue and connect with the ferry. 

Steve Geller 

• 

BARBARA LEE AND AFGHANISTAN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A bipartisan letter from 14 Congress representatives—six Republicans and eight Democrats—was sent to President Obama protesting U.S. military action in Afghan-istan. The letter urges President Obama to “reconsider the decision to send an additional 17,000 troops and to resist pressure to escalate even further.” In fact, agreeing with a study by the Carnegie Foundation, the letter advised that that the only meaningful way to halt the insurgency’s momentum is to start withdrawing troops.  

Among the signers were Representative Kucinich of Ohio and Representative Conyers of Michigan. Unfortunately, Barbara Lee did not sign the letter. Undoubtedly, Barbara Lee is among the most progressive members of Congress. But the lesson we are reminded of is the necessity of “eternal vigilance.” The pressures in office are enormous, which can tempt even the best and the brightest to slide somewhat. We must be persistent in our efforts to assure that progressive officials, including Barbara Lee, stay the course, particularly on the vital issues of war and peace. Even a 90-percent track record is not enough. 

Harry Brill 

El Cerrito 

• 

CROCODILE TEARS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Human nature being what it is, the death of the five men in Oakland last week was formulaic. 

If a community is poor (little money and therefore little power over their own lives), the community will usually become corrupt. A few will grab power and use violence to coerce from the others what little they have. Let us call this community “Poor Town.” 

If another community, which is not poor, becomes paranoid enough about the potential violence spreading to their community, they will try and contain the problem. Let us call this community “Privilege Town.” 

Privilege Town tries to control the violence and corruption in Poor Town, by using force and punishment. 

The people, who are acting on behalf of Privilege Town, are viewed as the enemy by most of the people in Poor Town. 

The effectiveness of Privilege Town in quelling the internal violence in Poor Town will not much change the opinion of people in Poor Town. After all, they are still poor and powerless. 

Violence begets violence. 

The killing is inevitable. 

Our country is playing this out in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Oakland. Our agents, the young men and woman of our military/police forces who bring no hope, just control, are being sacrificed on the pillar of our paranoia. If we only cry for them and not the poor and the downtrodden they control, we are crying crocodile tears. 

Harry Wiener 

• 

NEWSRACK BRIGADE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Here’s a possible solution to the impending City of Berkeley crackdown on the Daily Planet for damaged or graffiti-covered newsracks: Put out a call for volunteers to check the newsracks in their neighborhoods once a week and paint them if necessary or call the Planet if extensive repair is required. It wouldn’t take long to create some “newsrack districts” and have volunteers sign up to check the racks in their own neighborhood. In this land of joggers, dog walkers, and cyclists, it shouldn’t be much of a job to check the corner Planet rack while doing your outdoor thing. 

We’re ready to check racks, and we’re sure that many other progressive supporters of the Planet will join too. 

Don and Laura Santina 

• 

NEWSRACKS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Becky’s editorial remarks in the March 26 edition regarding Berkeley’s approach to dealing with the intractable problem of newsrack vandalism greeted me personally and professionally. 

As the Planet’s distribution manager in its earliest years (née 1999), no aspect of my duties was as pointless and frustrating as dealing with vandalism to our newsracks. I spent many a lovely day and weekend restoring as many as I could to ordinance acceptability, armed with my kit of paints, solvents, adhesive dissolvers, hardware, and plastic windows. The burned-out ones required extra attention. One of the few people I hired to assist me reported that, after fixing up 10 or so, he’d go back to the first to find it wrecked anew. While we got along man to man, working rationally and realistically with the then “Mr. Stick” (and the city) was futile. Ordinances were staff-originated rubber-stamp affairs summarily passed by the council, in a time when this issue was minor at best. And how many boxes did I pull from the corporation yard, after forking over a per-offense fine? (Many, in the company of other vendors’ yanked racks.) And how often did the city’s finest bust vandals, or their buddies who stole our papers to sell to recyclers? (Not at all.) I felt like Gary Cooper in High Noon, without the badge. 

Back then, the Planet had a sister paper, the San Mateo Daily Journal; its racks were depressingly pristine, but for elemental weathering. 

I sense First-Amendment class-action for this long-ignored, out-in-the-open issue. It soured me then. Now, the Free Republic of Orwell reminds me to renew my acid-blocker medication. Should occasion arise, please consider me as an expert witness on the subject. 

Phil Allen 

• 

COUNCIL RAISING PARKING FEES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I read your article by J. Douglas Allen-Taylor and cannot resist responding. Mayor Tom Bates is a piece of work, and every once and a while, he worries me by some of the stupid things he says and does. With regard to raising parking fees, the mayor is quoted as saying, “I think it’s unfortunate that the state, sort of in the middle of the night, would basically just rip off $4.50 from every parking ticket in the State of California.... It’s pretty unconscionable...” 

The mayor makes it sound like he has no clue how this could have happened and that this occurred completely without his knowledge. Give me a break! Does the mayor ever talk to his wife, our state senator, Loni Hancock? Given the fact that his wife has been serving in the state Legislature for the last seven years, the mayor’s comments appear a bit disingenuous. 

George Collins 

• 

SMOKERS IN BERKELEY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I thought a law was passed last year to curb smoking in public areas. 

Well, I work and go to school in Berkeley, and I enjoy eating my lunch outside in Constitution plaza, yet it seems people like to light up toxic tobacco almost constantly. The real issue is I’m not the only person I know who has an adverse reaction to cigarette smoke. Most of the people I know (including myself) can get asthma attacks and severe migraines. This makes the problem a severe health hazard. It also pushes out other people from using public places. 

Should the people who decide to use public space in Berkeley only be smokers? Let’s have a war on smoking in Berkeley, Let’s harass smokers for once! Smoking is a choice and a habit, people who want to stop can make an effort, but I shouldn’t get migraines for your bad habit. 

Stop with the cigs, Berkeley! Stop polluting our air! It would be nice to see the Berkeley police write a ticket or two. 

Gregg Horton 

• 

IMAGE TO THE EDITOR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Many thanks to Steven Walstead for his image to the editor last week (March 19, page 17), proposing “improved sculptures for the pedestrian bridge.”  

Now instead of groaning each time I pass under that double nightmare, I laugh out loud imagining Double Doggie Diner heads proudly displaying Berkeley’s sense of humor to the world, instead of its leaden disregard for the drivers below. Presumably our tax money was used for this crass amendment to a public work, which on its own was a bold and proud achievement for Berkeley.  

Neil Kellman 

• 

ARTIFICIAL TURF AT BUSHROD? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Three days before her February community meeting (on going green), Oakland City Council President Jane Brunner announced she would spend $3.3 million of Measure WW park funds on an artificial turf soccer field to be placed on top of the blacktop play area behind the old Washington School, now Sankofa Academy. It appears from her announcement that Jane has the power over park expenditures in her North Oakland district. 

Bushrod Park, perhaps the largest park in North Oakland, already has three baseball fields, a soccer field, tennis courts, outdoor basketball courts and a recreation center. In fact, nearly 90 percent of the park is given over to organized sports. There is no dog run, no natural area, few picnic facilities, a poor children’s playground and little flat space for unorganized play. Now Brunner wants to cover, not remove, a large section of blacktop that in the winter floods onto Shattuck Avenue. 

Artificial turf has become controversial across the United States for many reasons, including: Friction between skin and artificial turf causes abrasions and/or burns to a much greater extent than natural grass; turf-toe is a medical condition often associated with playing on artificial turf pitches; a higher incidence of MRSA infections because pathogens are not readily broken down by natural processes and periodic disinfection is required; artificial turf can become much hotter than natural grass when exposed to the sun, because cushioning it requires infill such as silicon sand and/or granulated rubber made from recycled car tires which may carry heavy metals; it has a short life span (10 year or less) and can fail earlier; and finally, artificial turf contributes to the loss of parks jobs and local funds are spent out of state for a manufactured petroleum product, and more petroleum is needed for shipping and installation. 

Artificial turf is not guaranteed against accident, machinery, spiked shoes, animals, misuse, fire, flood, chemical reactions, acts of God, static or dynamic loads exceeding the manufacturers specifications at time of installation, improper or faulty subsurface preparation, failure of the subsurface after the installation including settling of the surface, and the use of dry cleaning fluids or other improper cleaning methods. Artificial turf is subject to vandalism and even if the up-front costs are said to be cheaper. 

It is great that Councilmember Brunner is seeking to improve Bushrod Park, but there has never been a task force to analyze the wishes of the neighborhood and park users. In addition, Brunner will likely  

be forced to do spend additional funds for an environmental impact report on the project. 

Hank Chapot 

• 

CRT BUILDING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Many persons believe it is completely irresponsible for BP (British Petroleum) and the University of California to knowingly put people in harm’s way by locating the proposed CRT (Computational Re-search Theory Facility), Helios Project, and General Purpose Laboratory buildings in Strawberry Canyon and the adjacent Blackberry Canyon.  

It is well documented 1) that this ground is unstable and could slide westward at any time, 2) that this is a hazardous wildfire area, and, 3) that it is in close proximity to the Hayward Earthquake Fault. 

There are alternative sites that would not endanger peoples’ lives. These warrant a study and subsequent decision. Such an alternative site should address these ecological concerns. 

Sylvia McLaughlin  

• 

COURAGEOUS JOURNALIST 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

That Conn Hallinan has been accused of anti-Semitism is not surprising. Pro-Israeli organizations often use accusations of anti-Semitism to silence or invalidate legitimate criticisms of Israeli policies and actions. 

In recent writing Hallinan criticized the massive killing and destruction in Gaza, and the spreading popularity among Jewish Israelis of the view that loyalty oaths and/or expulsion of Arab Israelis are legitimate means to achieve security in Israel. Hallinan has strong views based in evidence and analysis. He states them plainly. 

As a Jew I want to hear a wide range of points of view from knowledgeable writers on the issues that keep the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy from peaceful resolution. I do not want views silenced or softened through the intimidation that comes with equating points of view critical of the Israelis with anti-Semitism. 

Conn Hallinan’s voice, views, and knowledge are important contributions to our understanding of the barriers as well as the pathways to peace and justice between Israeli Jews and Palestinians and Arabs. We need his voice! 

Barbara Haber  

• 

CREDIBILITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

First of all, though I do not live in Berkeley, I have felt the necessity to write of my concerns to your newspaper.  

My ties to Berkeley have been through my father’s relatives who lived in Berkeley during the late 1800s, my mother who was born in Berkeley in 1913, my great uncle, father, and I who attended UC, and my son who was born in Herrick Hospital in 1962. I left Berkeley for Oakland in 1989. Berkeley used to register much pride with me for its beauty, intellectual openness, and pleasantness—a city of true quality. But reading the Berkeley Daily Planet during the past few years easily changed this positive perspective. 

I deem it an intolerable matter when I read editorials that contain an anti-Semitic attitude, and letters to the editor and particular articles in your newspaper of this same ilk.  

I understand that your defense of what you have published has been that controversy is an important component in any news item and that this can readily be defended within our Constitutional rights. This sounds genuinely credible. However, make no mistake: What you have been writing and the letters and articles that you have been publishing have messages that stir up the pot of hateful relations among your readers. Those kind of messages have no place in Berkeley, California, or in any other part of the United States. 

Disagreement with any policy of any country (yes, including Israel) is one matter, but carrying out streams of muddied ideas that can only produce resentment and hatred is an odious matter.  

I am sure that with increased awareness of your intentions, your readership will be greatly reduced. However, with a change of heart, you may be able to bring pride and restore credibility to the Daily Planet. 

Susan Heller-Somerville 

Oakland 

• 

GUNS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Amidst the outpouring of grief at the horrific shooting of those fine Oakland policemen, I scan the papers and listen to news broadcasts in hopes that our elected officials will demand tighter gun control laws, particularly handguns—demands from Obama, Schwarzenegger, Congress, Mayor Dellums, and Senators Pelosi and Boxer. But their voices are strangely silent. No doubt they’re unwilling to risk the wrath of the National Rifle Association. How sad that the NRA makes our cities killing fields. 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

• 

BANNING GUNS:  

A MODEST PROPOSAL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

After the laws banning all guns are passed, there should be an amnesty period that would allow all gun owners to voluntarily turn in their guns. After that, a system of rewards for informants could be put in place, with upgraded rewards for turning in family members who still own guns.  

We should not only get rid of the guns in circulation now, but melt down those in museums, as well; they have no place in our world. When all guns are gone, everywhere, the world will return to the peaceful, nurturing society that existed before the scourge of firearms made us violent.  

Of course, warrantless personal/vehicular/home searches would be necessary, but what a small price to pay for a safe, orderly, peaceful society! 

Jeffrey L. Suits 

Kensington 

• 

HUBRIS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Last week I watched the KQED presentation of Marie Antoinette. Then I watched the news, which showed our own self-important bloated rich. They didn’t wear huge wigs or jeweled dresses, but their attitudes matched perfectly. 

Ruth Bird 

• 

REINDUSTRIALIZING AMERICA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

“Reindustrializing America,” by Harry Brill—right on. I would like to expand on it. It just makes me sick when I see large steel sections floated in from China, for the upgrade of the Bay Bridge. AC Van Hool buses made in Holland paying for this with our tax money, while thousands are getting laid off, at GM, Ford, and Chrysler, etc. I don’t really think they’re saving any money in the first place, if you figure every worker is going to be paying 40 percent in taxes. The company that employs these workers will also be paying taxes. These employees in turn will be spending money which, would create more jobs. 

Maybe we have a problem, that we don’t have enough skilled workers, so this leads me to the education system. I went through the Berkeley school system 51 years ago, and they had shop classes then. I even had shop classes in junior high—sheet metal, wood, and print shop. In high school there was general, wood, machine, radio, and auto shop. I have a son who is 30 now and the closest he came to a shop class was some sort of cafeteria class. 

Historical note: The barn at the animal farm in Tilden Park was built by the Berkeley High wood shop, I believe in 1957. 

Fred Perry 

• 

SCHOOL BUDGETS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

At a time when most of us feel we can only watch with growing dismay as the state of California decimates school budgets, we seek some sense of power and control. We wish there was some small thing we could do to make a difference. 

There is: Participate in the Berkeley Unified School District’s (BUSD) school lunch program. By purchasing a school lunch you not only feed your child, you contribute to the health and well being of every child in the district. School lunch programs thrive only with robust participation. Withdraw your participation—whether you pay full price or receive a free or reduced-price lunch for your child—and the quality of food offered diminishes for all children. 

We are extremely fortunate to be part of BUSD—home to a daily $3 miracle. In the face of a government commodities program anxious to foist corn byproducts, cheese, and “chicken” nuggets upon our schools, Chef Ann Cooper and her team resist the pressures and manage to fuel our children’s potential with nutritious meals made from scratch and featuring a bounty of fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and a share of organic and locally sourced ingredients. 

Instead of nuggets, you’ll find chicken tamales, made with organic brown rice and slow-cooked pinto beans. Or fresh-roasted chicken with real mashed potatoes and steamed broccoli. 

The certainty that BUSD school children can continue to access these menu items, along with fresh salad bars, hormone-free milk and other high quality lunches rests upon you: Upon your $3 for a school lunch. Upon your participation in a free or reduced-lunch program that receives funding based on participation rates. 

We don’t get many opportunities to do good for the larger community simply making a choice for our own child—a choice that is affordable, nutritious, tasty, and vital to our child’s performance throughout the school day. It’s not just lunch—it’s learning power. 

And it’s not just a choice that feeds your child, it’s a choice that goes toward nourishing all children in your district and community. 

Valerie Gilbert-Perens 

Washington Elementary parent 

• 

OUTRAGED 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Our family is outraged by Jim Sinkinson’s claim that Conn Hallinan’s writing is “often” anti-Semitic For years we have shared Jewish holidays and Jewish rites of passage with Conn and his family. We have learned from his deep knowledge of Judaism. His critique of Israeli policies is rooted in his profound humanitarian instincts. Challenge his documentation, challenge his research, but this kind of dishonest smear does not deserve publication. 

Danny Beagle, Lisa Rubens, 

Julie Beagle, Matthew Beagle 

• 

SMEAR CAMPAIGN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Jim Sinkinson picks a pretty snide way to smear Conn “Ringo” Hallinan. He characterizes Hallinan’s writing “ as falling into the category” of anti-Semitism. That’s supposed mean, what? That only his writing is anti-Semitic, not the man himself? 

The whole conjecture either way of Sinkinson is swill. Hallinan is a journalist, and a scholar who pores over foreign publications, keeping track of the buzz and the thinking in many places of the world, including Israel and Palestine. He quotes extensively from his wide reading and reports often on Israeli opposition to government policy, which tends to be under-reported in the U.S. He regularly makes a valuable contribution to those who are trying to stay abreast of issues, conflicts and wars in other countries. Hallinan may examine Israeli government positions on the occupation with which he disagrees, but he has always supported the right of Israel as a nation to exist. 

To accuse Hallinan of anti-Semitism—or anti-Semitic type of discourse—is laughable both from a professional standpoint of his reporting but in his private and political life as well. His children, his wife, and many of his friends are Jewish. He heartily partakes in Jewish rituals—shabat, Passover seder dinners, and so on, making a mockery of the charge. 

His politics are honest, not spieling propaganda or with any agenda other than justice—and pragmatic justice, at that. He has, in fact, fought those who are anti-Israeli and would drive the Jews into the sea, whether from their soap box on KPFA or in the world of the pro-Palestinian and rabidly anti-Israel leftist front that has been vocal and activist in the Bay Area generally.  

There will always be a right-wing pro-Israeli position that states that any criticism of the Israeli government is anti-Semitic. I resent hearing this charge raised against Mr. Hallinan. It is not true. 

Kate Coleman 

• 

SLANDER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have known journalist Conn Hallinan professionally as a colleague at UC Santa Cruz, where he was admired as an inclusive college Provost and award-winning teacher. And I have known him as a long-time friend, and the husband of my even longer-time friend, Anne Bernstein. 

To call Hallinan an anti-Semite is slander. Hallinan’s world is inclusive rather than restrictive and is the antithesis of religious or racial prejudice. Hallinan is a critic of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians. This no more makes him an anti-Semite than my criticism of President Obama’s policy toward faith-based organizations makes me a racist. 

Further, not only are some of Hallinan’s best friends Jews, his wife is a Jew, as are all his children. 

Hallinan is a proud Irish-American who has forged his professional and personal life in the most American of ways—with integrity, and among persons of diverse races and religions. 

David Swanger 

Professor Emeritus 

University of California, Santa Cruz 

• 

HEALTH CARE FOR ALL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Yes, the U.S. could provide health care for all citizens. During the 1950s, when I was in high school, I remember President Eisenhower vetoing the “Foran” bill because it would provide “socialized medicine.” I don’t remember the details, but It struck me as ironic and even hypocritical. From the time he entered West Point and all through his long military career, he used government-supplied medical facilities and staff. Indeed, while he was president he had a heart attack and of course he went to Walter Reed Army Hospital.  

During the 1970–90s, while I worked as a U. S. Civil Service employee in a federal agency in downtown San Francisco, I was able to obtain routine medical exams and flu shots at the U. S. Public Health Service in the same building. What’s good enough for Ike and good enough for civil service employees should be good enough for everyone. 

Dick Lerner 

• 

JOBS FOR YOUTH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

“Section 8 Tenants Go on Rampage!” No matter how hard I searched our many local and regional newspapers I couldn’t find such a story.  

That’s what left me so perplexed about a meeting I attended recently at the Francis Albrier Center in Berkeley. The meeting was ostensibly about the recent occasions of violence in my neighborhood. In my work with disabled people that are left homeless on our streets, I have often had to fight the demonization of people who in essence are actually being ripped off by the very government that had promised to be there for them (and us) if some misfortune should befall us. And with this promise they take from the fruits of our labor, and the sweat of our brow.  

Think on this. On the corner of Sixth and Hearst stand a group of men. Cars sometimes come up and the occupant says to these men, “I need two men to paint, mow some grass, dig a ditch ... whatever.” These men are eager to do the car’s occupant’s bidding. They are poor. They need the money.  

Meanwhile, on the other side of town on the corner of California and Ward, another group of men stand. A car comes driving up (sometimes it’s the same car that approaches on Sixth and Hearst). He wants these men to work, too. He wants them to find him some drugs so he will not be exposed to arrest or some other embarrassment. It never crosses his mind that some of these young men would like the dignity of making the money they need, through an honest day’s work. They too are poor. They too need the money. How many choices do they really have?  

When I was young and in high school, there was a contractor in my neighborhood. He would come looking for me down at the park. “Hey Dan, you wanna work today?” “Sure!” I would reply. It made me feel great to swing a hammer and do a good job. I see a contractor that lives across the street from me today. Not one of his workers is a kid from the neighborhood. I have a friend who works for a well-known pizza chain on University Avenue. He is up front at the register. All the other employees, are out of sight in back. They are undocumented folks being paid what amounts to slave labor.  

I worked at a pizza joint in high school, in the back, cutting veggies and making pizzas. These jobs are not available to our kids here in the neighborhood. So before we start the Scapegoat Game so popular here in Berkeley, let’s think about it for a second or maybe even two. Is that $2-cheaper pizza really worth leaving these kids out on the corner? Does it really make you feel good to see a group of young men at work and not one of our local young men being represented? I know I for one would love to see a few of my neighborhood young people in the back of my neighbor’s truck heading off to a job. Maybe we should ask when we are getting these cut-rate deals to cut our grass or paint our homes, “How many local young people do you have working for you?” Maybe the City of Berkeley should have a registry of such contractors and issue a sticker on their vehicles identifying them as such. I’m just saying that we need to give these young people the same opportunities that I remember having when I was young and needed a start in life. 

Dan McMullan 

Disabled People Outside Project

Sometimes when a large majority of a group holds the same opinion, the opinion takes on the aura of fact. It can even become a group mantra. Such is the case with the supposed fact that “Berkeley is dense.” 

In the February 12–18 issue of the Planet, Richard Brenneman, in his article on SB 375, reiterated our municipal mantra with some supporting statistics. He compared Berkeley’s density at 9,822 persons per square mile with the San Francisco/Oakland metropolitan area at 7,004 and the LA area at 7,068. Wow, Berkeley is 40 percent denser! Well, of course it is. Comparing a central city to a metropolitan area is misleading if not downright disingenuous. This is worse than comparing apples and oranges; it is more like comparing apples and fruit salad.  

More accurate would be to compare Berkeley with other core communities that lie in the shadow of their namesake central city. Near New York City, Union City, NJ, has a population density of 52,978 per square mile, well over five times that of Berkeley. West New York, Hoboken, Passaic, Cliffside Park, and Irvington, all also in New Jersey, have densities between 20,000 and 45,000 persons per square mile. In the LA area, Maywood, Cudahy, Huntington Park, West Hollywood, Bell Gardens, Lawndale, Hawaiian Gardens, Bell, Linwood, Hawthorne, South Gate and Hermosa Beach all have densities of more than 13,000, i.e., they are about one-and-a-half-times greater than Berkeley or denser. Maywood is over 23,000. Even in the Bay Area, where San Francisco has the greatest density (16,433), Berkeley is not second as is often assumed. Daly City has a density of 13,704, or 40 percent above that of Berkeley.  

Density is in some ways an arbitrary extension of the capricious way in which municipal boundaries are drawn. If Tilden Park was within rather than abutting the city limits of Berkeley, the city’s density would drop in half and yet nothing would be different. In that sense, the density of a city within a major metropolitan area is meaningless. In terms of the feel and function of urban life, we live in a metropolitan area. 

Consider Berkeley fifty years ago when many would say it was a more livable community. The density was about the same as now, but the Bay Area had half as many people. Berkeley’s density doesn’t matter nearly so much as that of the whole Bay Area.  

Objective measures of density notwithstanding, “too dense” is really a matter of opinion. Many, if not most residents, of Berkeley may think the town is too dense, but I could argue the opposite with equal justification. The 1955 Master Plan called for a population of 150,000 and expected Berkeley to house over 200,000 people well before now. This was not considered alarming. Berkeley’s population was 102,743 in 2000, almost identical to its 1990 population (102,774) but down from 103,328 in 1980 and 116,716 in 1970. The American Community Survey, an effort by the Census Bureau using sampling techniques, estimated the city’s current population at 90,432. If this is true—it does seem questionable—the population is down by almost a quarter from its 1970 level. However, even with a greater population forty years ago, Berkeley felt no more dense then than it does now (my opinion).  

A Berkeley with 200,000 people might be less livable than what we now have but not necessarily. Greater density has its advantages. Localized public transportation, which generates a whole lot of talk but no transport, would be facilitated by greater density. It is notable that Manhattan is virtually the only community in this country where even the well-to-do are more likely to not own a car. It is the extreme density of Manhattan (over 100,000 per square mile) that makes that the case. Adequate public transit and density are a chicken-and-egg phenomenon. However, whichever comes first, they continue to support and enhance each other. It is interesting that Mahattanization is a pejorative in the Bay Area and yet virtually every true urbanite I know loves Manhattan. 

It takes hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, living in relative proximity to each other, to support the many diverse cultural and economic opportunities we treasure here in the Bay Area. San Francisco alone has built four new museums in the last few years. The Bay Area has two MLB teams and two NFL teams. Count the universities. Name a hundred restaurants worthy of your business. Marvel at the recreational opportunities. Only a large and prosperous community has the critical mass necessary to support these things. Density brings some inherent problems, but it is also responsible for all that is wonderful about urban living.  

Arguably, Berkeley should encourage people who work and/or attend school in Berkeley to live here. More people is not nearly so great a problem as more cars, but surely there are ways to encourage population growth without a concomitant growth in traffic. UC has become much more a commuter school rather than the residential campus it used to be. Rent control has reduced the density of all rental housing and denied students access to apartments that would turn over on a regular basis were it not for bargain rents to which city law entitles long-term tenants. Not facilitating more population in Berkeley as a matter of city policy (or at least city politics) is nimbyism born of selfishness. There is no reason Berkeley could not comfortably house 150,000 or even 200,000 people and be a more interesting and dynamic place as a result. You can touch your index fingers to your thumbs and chant “Berkeley is too dense” all you want, but the truth of the matter (okay, my truth) is that Berkeley is not all that dense and density is not all that bad.  

Albert Sukoff is a Berkeley resident.

In late November, 2008, the California Humboldt County Registrar of Voters and a group of citizen volunteers working together as the Election Transparency Project detected an error in the November 4 final vote tally: 197 ballots had been eliminated by the Premier (formerly Diebold) electronic election system. How was this possible? The quiet story of the Election Transparency Project demonstrates that true election transparency is possible now, given the winning combination of strong commitment by a County’s Registrar of Voters and generous volunteer citizen effort, including volunteer technical expertise. 

Responding to public concern about the reliability of election results produced by opaque proprietary corporate technology, Humboldt County Registrar Carolyn Crnich had invested about $25,000 of her budget to purchase an off-the-shelf, high-speed scanner to scan all the ballots and to place their images on a publicly available website. This approach was tried for the first time in the June 2008 primary election, and again in the general election of November. To see the ballots yourself, go to http://hum.dreamhosters.com/etp/. 

Fortunately, the Registrar was able to intervene with the Secretary of State to correct the error. In a subsequent investigation, the Secretary of State’s staff found additional flaws in the Premier (Diebold) technology, including a button that erased parts of the audit logs—something that never should happen. An audit log must preserve evidence of every step taken in an election, including any erasures and re-scanning. Furthermore, the audit log erasures occur-red without knowledge of the person pressing the button. Reports on this matter and the Secretary of State’s hearing on March 17 may be found at the Secretary of State’s website: http://www. sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_vs_premier. htm. 

I attended the March 17 hearing in Sacramento, along with other colleagues in the Voting Rights Task Force of the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club. We had the pleasure of talking with Registrar Crnich as well as citizen members of the Election Transparency Project. I am deeply impressed with the success of this elegantly simple and affordable project which has instantly made possible in Humboldt County what amounts to an unofficial recount of 100 percent of the ballots cast in all contests in all elections. If such a project could be replicated in Alameda County, not only would the Registrar of Voters be able to conduct independent checks of the results. Any citizen with access to a computer and willing to spend the time and energy to count the votes also could conduct his/her own hand recount of as many of the ballots as might be of interest. Those who say hand-counted ballots are the only way to go would be able to conduct such hand counts. A candidate whose contest yielded surprising results could enlist the aid of supporters to do a quick count of those ballots; such a count might facilitate a timely request for an official recount or might convince the candidate that, although surprising and disappointing, the results appeared to have been accurately counted. 

Although some people object to any use of electronics in elections, the Humboldt County ETP has a number of features that seem to me very reassuring. First, the technology is off-the-shelf. The scanner is just a scanner. It is not part of an election package of hardware and software leased by a corporate vendor who refuses to allow county elections personnel to inspect or look inside it. It seems wildly implausible to me that an off-the-shelf scanner would have flaws that would systematically change, drop, or add ballots. The scanner doesn’t count the ballots. The scanner simply scans (makes copies of) the ballots for posting to a website. 

Humboldt County’s ETP uses its own software, developed by a local citizen and available as open source to conduct its independent analysis of the ballots. Although it is possible that a malicious person might at some point become part of the Registrar’s group (as could happen at any time—it is possible that a malicious person could manage to be hired and entrusted and could later violate that trust), the beauty of the Election Transparency Project is that the ballot images would be viewable and analyzable on a public website. Any citizen could conduct an independent analysis. That analysis might be simply viewing the ballots and hand-tabulating them with paper and pencil. Any citizen with computer skill could conduct his or her independent analysis of the data, using his or her software. Citizen groups could divide up the work and compare results. Additional information about the ETP and the open source ballot scanning and tallying system it uses can be found at www.mitchtrachtenberg.com. 

With an Election Transparency Project real transparency is possible. Any motivated citizen can and may look at the ballots and come to his or her own conclusions. If the results seem questionable, those results could and should be brought to the attention of the Registrar of Voters and to elected officials for appropriate action. 

Currently we hear that new county (and state) accomplishments are impossible because there is no money. But Humboldt County established the Election Transparency Project with a modest outlay from its budget and with volunteer help from dedicated citizens. Alameda County’s Registrar of Voters Dave Macdonald is computer savvy—he is the county Information Technology head as well as the Registrar. Alameda County’s citizenry includes many who already have demonstrated a willingness to contribute hard work to increase election transparency. 

Humboldt County has achieved Proof of Concept: it can be done: they did it. We can do it, too. And we should, in my opinion. 

Dr. Judy Bertelsen is a member of the Voting Rights Task Force, Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club.

This perspective might be very hard for many sociopolitically naive white people to read. But it’s very important to understand the sheer depth of negative feelings that many people of color (even those with no criminal record) have against the police. This is due to lifelong and often unpredictable, almost always potentially life-threatening, negative experiences (from petty to lethal), that they or their loved ones and friends, as people of color, have had from the police. 

Most people of color know that the cops, and police departments as institutions, historically represent the street enforcement arm of white American racism. Indeed, the police were born out of the white slave patrols. 

People of color and conscious white people have seen how cops have wantonly brutalized many members of the black and brown community—the police murder of Oscar Grant (who was brutally assaulted by more than just the one potentially legal “sacrifice” cop who murdered him) being just the latest in a long series of notorious cases that have become epidemic in the Bay Area and all across the nation. Such is the arrogance of police power that sometimes this police abuse reaches other communities: Asians, members of the Arab community (recently in San Francisco, women and children at a peaceful political march), and peaceful political protesters of all ethnicities. 

Relatively recently, in Oakland, 11 cops were fired for falsifying a whole series of search warrants to bust into people’s homes. And the OPD Chief of Internal Affairs was put on leave, pending an investigation for his having viciously beaten a Latino suspect in his custody to death years ago.  

In the weeping and mourning over the deaths of these four cops, how soon we forget the Oakland Riders case: the political damage control performed there kept the focus of the investigation just on those specific corrupt street cops, but did nothing to clean up the department in whose culture and corruption they were spawned. It is said that Oakland alone in the Bay Area pays out (at least averaged over time) about $2 million a year in police brutality cases—and many more millions soon yet to come. Surely that is money that could be spent on education and job training. 

American flags were officially flown at half-staff for those killed cops—summarily tried, sentenced and executed in the streets, just like they do with people of color. But no flags were flown at half-staff over City Hall by the black mayor of Oakland for Oscar Grant or any of the other innocent minority victims of police summary executions. Mayor Ron Dellums (and Congresswoman Barbara Lee) took a week before he (or she) said anything about Grant, and even then only in the most indirect and tepid terms, and Dellums only after his finally being confronted by the people in front of City Hall. (See YouTube videos: Davey D on Ron Dellums; Ron Dellums Gets Confronted; Oscar Grant Tribute; and Jerry Amaro.) 

Yet Dellums immediately, personally and vociferously, condemned the killings of the cops, and without any prompting by citizen demands. (And at least one of the cops’ family still wouldn’t let Dellums speak at the funeral. Good.) So much for “the new age of Obama” and “Change we can believe in!” So much for the illusion, mindlessly repeated—wherever there is a camera or a microphone—by some of those docilized middle- and upper-class Negroes, who always want to gain white people’s approval as “the good blacks,” that “all human life is equal!” 

“The good blacks” (especially top black politicians) will, at best, once again, call for some kind of touchy-feely police “sensitivity training” and “dialogue”— but never for the best training: quick effective prosecutions, sound convictions, and serious criminal sentences against rogue and killer cops. But since when, right from this country’s founding when it was genocidally and otherwise horrendously established upon generations of millions of red, black, yellow and brown lives, has all life ever “been equal” in the history of Amerikkka? 

At least a couple of the TV local news stations have shown a servile Rev. Philip Ellinberg, some Negro (probably what we blacks call “a jackleg / bootleg preacher” since he seems to be absent from any telephone or online directory listings) who was supposed to (and apparently did) sing for Massa at the killed cops’ funeral. Where was he at Oscar Grant’s funeral—or those of any other police-executed minorities? Where is he at the Oscar Grant Movement meetings held almost every Saturday afternoon in Oakland at the Olivet Missionary Baptist Church? 

Where were the flags at half-staff, much less the state and mass media-covered funeral, for Oscar Grant and all the other unarmed, innocent victims of killer cops’ vigilantism and street executions? All the Bay Area people have to do is to look at all the names on the boards of the Stolen Lives Project (started by Danny Garcia) and its portable mural of names: men, women (even grandmothers), and kids shot to death (sometimes in a hailstorm of bullets, even against innocent people just minding their own business), choked to death, or smothered to death, truncheoned to death, and, of course, sustain-tasered to death—and not those unhandcuffed, little, quick, light two-second tap shocks cops sometime demonstrate on another cop (with two cops on both sides carefully catching the one as he buckles) for television PR purposes (“See? It doesn’t really hurt.”). Do you think that any of the Bay Area cities would even fly their flags at half-staff for just one day for, collectively, ALL of those victims of police executions? 

This is especially noteworthy given that a cop who was wounded (but not killed) by Mixon was Sgt. Pat Gonzales, who narrowly escaped karmic justice, but who, as a repeat offender, last shot a young (black) Gary King Jr. in the back and killed him. The media lauds this man while his repeated brutality and violence are ignored. And cops up in Sonoma county even went and gratuitously killed the adopted black kid (Jeremiah Chass) of an affluent white married couple, right in their home driveway, who made the mistake of calling the cops to help calm down their very well-liked but sometimes emotionally distraught son. About a thousand people attended his memorial, but you didn’t see that on TV. 

There’s a sarcastic old saying, known among blacks, “When the White Man is hurt, evvverybody must cry.” But lots of people aren’t cryin’ over four killed cops —including even many politically conscious white people—and AREN’T MOURNING along with that state mass propaganda funeral. While the cops and the media come up with suspiciously last-minute (and technically unconfirmed) stories to try to tell us just “how bad” Lovelle Mixon was (how about research into those dead cops’ background to see how abusive and dirty they were?), many of us see it as karmic justice, regardless of what person killed the four (and almost five!) cops, all in a brief afternoon’s work. 

Lovelle Mixon’s name will be legendary in the Bay Area—long after people forget the names of the four cops he killed in one afternoon. And it’s karmic justice that just as many blacks in America have been murdered by cops during a “routine” traffic stop, these cops were killed during a “routine” traffic stop. 

The cops called Lovelle Mixon “a cold-hearted individual who doesn’t have any regard for human life.” Well, the cops should know: they too, often against minorities, behave exactly the same way. 

So, now, as far as many, especially, black and brown Bay Area people feel, there’s finally karmic justice. 

Berkeley resident Joseph Anderson is a longtime progressive activist.

The Oakland Police Department suffered a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the foot when it further racialized the March 28 shootings by rescinding Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums’ invitation to speak at the public funeral of the four officers who were gunned down. 

Initial reports indicated that at least two of the families of the slain officers requested that Dellums not be allowed to speak at the March 28 public event. One reason given was that the families didn’t want the funeral to become merely a platform for politicians. 

Since the major media outlets, in their rush to canonize the dead officers, have been negligent in following up this story, one is only left to speculate why Dellums was excluded. 

But there are other concerns as well. 

Casual observers of the Oakland political scene will say that even though Mayor Dellums has led a fight to get more Oakland police hired, relations between him and the department are not good. This is hardly surprising, especially to those who remember Dellums’ close relationship with the Black Panther Party decades ago. 

Even so, Dellums recently was in the forefront of the struggle to have more police cadets hired and worked closely with wide sectors of the Oakland law-and-order support community until those good citizens realized their property taxes might go up in order to pay for the increased levels of police protection. Then much of Dellums’ support for that measure seemed to evaporate. 

Given all the history and the internal politics that likely exist, the OPD and the families had every right to rescind Dellums’ invitation. No problem there. 

But here is the larger issue. 

If Dellums is to be excluded from a public memorial service, why not ask another African-American elected official to speak? Congresswoman Barbara Lee was in attendance. She wasn’t asked to fill in. State Assemblymember Sandré Swanson was there. He was not asked. Nor was Keith Carson, a member of the Alameda County Board of Supervisors. 

Instead, and despite the families’ disingenuous protests, they didn’t want the event to become a political platform; four white politicians, Attorney General Jerry Brown, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, received the blessings of the OPD and the families. Nor was a Latino or Asian elected official asked to participate. 

By excluding elected officials of African- American descent, while including whites only, the OPD and the families racialized the shootings in a way the ultra-left only could have dreamed. 

This is not say African-Americans didn’t participate in the memorial, but all were members and leaders of the OPD. 

Is the OPD so insulated from the communities it attempts to patrol that it thinks it is representative of those communities? Is it that out of touch? 

Are the major media outlets also so out of touch that they think the people who attended the public memorial represent the masses of those with whom the police come into contact? 

Here is an instructive story. An online journalist from the Bay Area was attending a major Hip Hop conference in Texas. When television news stations there broadcast news of the four OPD members being shot and killed, cheers erupted. 

That tells you all you need to know about the great racial divide that exists in this country—a divide apparently unseen by the OPD, the families, and white America in general. 

Jean Damu is a Berkeley resident.

What a difference a week makes! In the previous issue of this paper, I criticized Rep. Barbara Lee for, among other things, failing to speak out promptly and strongly after Israel forces critically injured one of her constituents, Tristan Anderson, by firing a high-velocity tear-gas canister at his head in the aftermath of a non-violent demonstration in the occupied West Bank. 

Since that column appeared, the Congresswoman has: 

• Issued a new and much stronger press release, in which she declared, “It’s obvious that something went horribly wrong in the Village of Ni’ilin and I am determined to get to the bottom of this tragic incident.” (The only problem with that release was that the headline referred to the “Tristan Anderson incident in Israel.” With a little more practice I’m sure she and her staff will get it through their heads that the West Bank isn’t Israel!) 

• Met with the No. 2 and No. 3 officials in the State Department, Deputy Secretary James Steinberg and Deputy Secretary for Management and Resources Jacob Lew, to question them about the incident. 

• Spoken by phone with Tristan’s parents, Nancy and Mike Anderson of Grass Valley, CA, who are now at his bedside in Israel. 

• Taken part in a conference call with East Bay activists seeking justice for Tristan and Palestine. 

• Addressed the issue on the floor of the House, where she said that she had asked the State Department for a public report on the incident and declared, “Those responsible for this tragedy—whether through negligence or intentional misconduct—must be held accountable.” 

• Posted a video of her House speech to her YouTube channel: http://tinyurl.com/ LeeOnTristan. 

In short, at least on this issue, Barbara Lee has begun again to speak for me and, I hope, for you. I’m still sorry she didn’t stand up for Tristan sooner, but better late than never—in my book she deserves a lot of credit for what she’s done in the last week. 

Maybe—we’ll never know—she would have done the same even if friends of Tristan and of Palestine hadn’t mobilized to demand some action from her, but the timing certainly suggests that the grassroots pressure made a difference. It’s heartening to see that determined constituents can still have some effect on their representatives.  

Which is not to say I have any illusions that her efforts will have much influence on the State Department, much less on Israel. After all, the two Deputy Secretaries of State she spoke to were both selected by Hillary Clinton, who declared last year that “The United States stands with Israel now and forever.” Steinberg, according to the Wall Street Journal, was one of the principal authors of the shamelessly groveling speech Barack Obama delivered before the key Zionist lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), last June, just hours after he had locked up the Democratic presidential nomination. And Lew, who previously worked as Chief Operating Officer of Citigroup’s “Alternative Investments” unit, has substantial holdings in Israel bonds, according to his State Department financial disclosure statement. 

Altogether, it’s not likely that these characters are going to lean very hard on the Israelis, no matter what Lee says to them, and even if they do put in a few words, Israel will obviously blow them off. Hell, if the Israelis could get off scot-free when they killed 34 U.S. naval personnel and wounded another 170 aboard the U.S.S. Liberty, what reason is there to think the U.S. government will exact any price from them for attacking one lousy demonstrator? 

Still, it can’t hurt for Messrs. Steinberg and Lew and, with luck, their Israeli interlocutors to be reminded that there’s a growing constituency in this country that’s fed up with such atrocities. 

As for Tristan himself, he remains in the Tel HaShomer Hospital on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. “At this point,” his partner Gabrielle Silverman said on Tuesday of this week, “Tristan has been in the Intensive Care Unit for 18 days. He has had multiple life-saving surgeries, and is in critical condition although becoming more stable daily. We remain highly concerned about Tristan, considering his brain injuries, yet we know he is resilient and we hope he will recover.” Amen to that. 

For those of us who have worked to push Ms. Lee to stand up for Tristan, the challenge now is to get her to look beyond his case to the larger issues behind it—to acknowledge that the violence the Israelis inflicted on him is just a taste of what they do every week to the Palestinians, that that violence is part of a systematic, decades-long campaign of ethnic cleansing, and to recognize that it’s political support and economic assistance from Washington that make it all possible. 

I’m looking forward to the day when Lee heads to the House floor, and to YouTube, to say something like that. Or, better yet, the day she starts to use her House committee positions to challenge the billions of dollars the U.S. delivers to Israel annually and instead to demand economic sanctions until there’s justice for the Palestinians. 

That’s the day I’ll really be able to say that Barbara Lee speaks for me. 

Henry Norr, who is Jewish by background, can be reached at henry@norr.com.

When it comes to Berkeley rental property owners, the more things change the more they remain the same. At the council meeting of March 24, the agenda included a proposed increase in the yearly fee landlords pay to maintain the Rental Housing Safety Program. Other agenda items covered discussed a common theme, the state of the economy, local unemployment and how it affects small businesses. The council went as far as helping developers allowing the deferral of permit fees up to $200,000. This is essentially an interest-free loan to large developers for the duration of a project. One member of the public objected and claimed the city ran the risk of never collecting these fees as had been the case with a large developer. One council member eloquently defended a local electrical contracting business which threatened to leave its Berkeley location. The councilperson added how the city must be willing to work with the business community in these rough economic times. 

However, when it came time for the 53 percent increase in the RHSP fee that only landlords pay, the gloves came off. The statistic that the average Berkeley landlord owns fewer than 2.5 units was ignored. The arguments about the recently passed and proposed fee and tax increases that cannot be passed on to tenants had no effect on the council. A member of the HAC heartily endorsed the increase; a member of the rent board cited the handout prepared by his board stating that rents on average had increased $2,200 per month since 2003. The only voice of sanity came from Gordon Wozniak in the form of a challenge to this last preposterous claim by the rent board. He correctly pointed out that in order for this to be true, then the average tenant must be paying a $100,000 a month rent. A representative of the Housing Department explained the increase is needed to hire an extra inspector. What she omitted was the starting salary of this inspector: $110,000 per year including benefits. Given the high rate of unemployment in the city, I am sure this position could be filled for half that price. The proposal for the increase was approved nevertheless without further debate. 

Most people will say, who cares if taxes are increased on landlords. But renting is like any other business where costs are just passed to the consumer. In this case the consumers are mostly students who are facing massive increases in registration fees. 

In the face of a weak economy, rent control, and a wave of tax increases, landlords are holding out for higher rents on available apartments to cover these increases on rented units where the additional fees and taxes cannot be passed on. Vacant units mean revenue loss for the city and the need to raise taxes on homeowners to cover the shortfall. 

Berkeley's vacancy rate is 6.5 percent according to a recent survey of 600 units. One property manager of over one thousand apartments reports that vacant units that previously took up to six weeks to rent now require three months. 

This is the first time that Berkeley experiences a high vacancy deflationary period under rent control with a possible inflationary period in the horizon. The danger posed by this toxic perfect storm is embodied in the Rent Ordinance itself: it states that if the vacancy rate increases above five percent, then the rent board can request the council to rescind rent control. As rental demand spirals downward, owners are reluctant to lower rents because of rent control. Once a rent is established and the tenant becomes long term, additional costs such as the increased RHSP cost or the upcoming refuse collection fee increase cannot be passed on. The annual increase allowed is only sixty percent of CPI, so that with time the erosion of income is self-evident. 

The head of the rent board (who must have approved the above mentioned flyer claiming the preposterous $2,200 average monthly increase in rents) understands income erosion perfectly well: his salary of $11,000 per month has an automatic yearly increase of $5,000 dollars through 2011. 

In the absence of rent control, owners would charge less rent knowing it could be recouped later when the economy improved. Students would benefit most of all. The city of Berkeley needs to rethink its approach to rental housing and allow the market to operate unhindered by this economic dinosaur (rent control) that has never worked anywhere it is tried according to most economists. By the way, at the same meeting the council raised parking tickets 17 percent. The typical expired meter citation goes from $30 to $35 dollars. 

Robert Cabrera is the president of the Berkeley Property Owners Association.

Can’t tell you what I learned from school 

But I could tell you a story or two. 

Um, yeah, of course I learned some rules 

Like don’t pass out with your shoes on 

And don’t leave the house till the booze gone 

And don’t have sex if she’s too gone 

When it comes to condoms put two on 

Then tomorrow night find a new JAWN 

Hold the beer bong 

Nothing wrong with some fun 

Even if we did get a little just too drunk 

… Man, I love college. 

No, your eyes are not playing tricks on you: that is actually the new hit from a Pennsylvania Rapper named Asher Roth. His song “I Love College” illustrates for us that college binge drinking is still an accepted social norm in our society. And behind the funny lyrics of a song such as Roth’s lies a much scarier reality. Binge drinking among college students 18-24 is a serious public health problem in the United States. According to the Na-tional Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, every year, 599,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 are unintentionally injured under the influence of alcohol, while more than 696,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 are assaulted by another student who has been drinking. Some 1,700 college students between the ages of 18 and 24 die each year from alcohol-related unintentional injuries, including motor vehicle crashes. With the aforementioned statistics in mind we cannot ignore the role of music and media in shaping today’s beliefs and perceptions about alcohol use among youth. The media have played a crucial role in creating an environment in which high-risk activities have become the norm.  

The technological advances of the last few years have resulted in youth listening to an average of 2.5 hours of music per day. With a third of popular music including references to alcohol and drugs, today’s youth are receiving about 35 references to substance abuse for every hour of music they listen to, according to the New York Times. Most disturbing is that consequences of alcohol abuse are being portrayed in a positive light 68 percent of the time. 

In fact, youth are being targeted by the alcohol industry through all types of mass communications. Pay attention to sponsors at the next concert you attend, product placements in the next movie or TV show you watch, or advertisements in magazines targeted to teenagers, and you will see the presence of alcohol marketing infiltrating mediums less obvious than popular music. 

For example, in an attempt to increase revenue during the current economic downturn, the NBA recently voted to repeal an 18-year-old ban on courtside hard liquor advertising. The decision was made in the same week that a British medical journal published a review concluding that alcohol advertising increases the likelihood that adolescents will start drinking. 

If an increased exposure to these messages has resulted in high-risk behaviors and environments becoming normalized in our culture, perhaps our most powerful tool against the negative effects of such messages is to educate youth on how to recognize the media’s potential to influence their choices, spending behaviors, relations to others, and to become more critical consumers of the media in general. And the truth is that youth entering college have already been exposed to mass media that has normalized high risk drinking behaviors, many students have already developed their drinking behaviors by the beginning of high school. It is time we admit that underage and high-risk drinking problems persist among youth because we refuse to hold the alcohol industry in this country accountable. And when will we force the media to be more responsible for the messages they send to youth? Let’s face it folks, enough is enough.

In 1941, the Almanac Singers made famous the 1930s protest song, “Which Side Are You On.” 

Don’t scab for the bosses 

Don’t listen to their lies 

Us poor folks haven’t got a chance 

Unless we organize.  

Which side are you on? 

Which side are you on? 

In the face of debilitating recession, more and more workers understand they don’t have a chance unless they organize. The Employee Free Choice Act guarantees this right. 

Since 1945, U.S. union membership has declined from 35 percent of workers to 12 percent—a misleading figure since most union members are public employees and only 7.5 percent of private employees are organized. Aligned with the Republican Party, big business has mounted a series of successful attacks on unions. The National Labor Relations Board has been weakened and until the appointment of new Secretary Hilda Solis, the Department of Labor neutered. There have been several paths of attack: Many states passed “right-to-work” laws, making it difficult for unions to function. Although federal law guarantees the right of workers to organize, lack of enforcement encouraged employers to harass or punish workers engaged in pro-union activities. As anti-union activities gained momentum, businesses hired professional union busters. 

As a result, violence against union organizers increased as well as the use of replacement workers or “scabs.” Last year, more than one-third of employers refused to negotiate with a union after workers approved it. 

At the heart of this decline was the deliberate weakening of the National Labor Relations Act. Under current law, workers can select union representation either through an election process or through majority sign-up—“card check.” However, businesses decide whether to use the election process or card check. Corporate executives typically select the election process and use the pre-election period to harass pro-union workers; typically, employers fire 20 percent of workers who advocate a union. 

The Employee Free Choice Act strengthens the card check process. It dictates that if a majority of workers in a workplace sign cards authorizing a union, then they get a union. However, the EFCA preserves the right of workers to call for a secret ballot election and strengthens that process. The EFCA also provides for arbitration so businesses cannot ignore the union. 

“Which Side Are You On” recalled the bitter 1931 strike in Harlan County, Kentucky. 

They say in Harlan County 

There are no neutrals there 

You’ll either be a union man 

Or a thug for J. H. Blair. 

Which side are you on? 

Which side are you on? 

In the union-busting tradition of the era, the coal companies hired thugs to terrorize the miners and paid the local sheriff, J.H. Blair, to jail strikers. 

Over the past 70 years, little has changed. In the 21st century, U.S. corporations rarely beat and jail dissidents, but workers continue to be denied their fair share of corporate profits. Over the last 16 years, the wages of corporation executives grew by 393 percent while the wages of working Americans were flat. In 2008, the average CEO’s salary was 300 times that of the average worker. 

With the outrage over AIG executive bonuses, public sentiment has finally turned against the humongous salaries commanded by the few at the top of the corporate food chain. But the other shoe has yet to drop; coupled with anger at excessive executive pay should be outrage at the poor compensation being offered to hard-working, middle-class Americans. Over the past 35 years, worker salaries—adjusted for inflation—have declined from $41,198 in 1973 to $37,606 in 2008. 

During this period, only union members have seen their salaries and benefits increase. In 2008, unionized workers earned 11.3 percent more than non-union workers and were more likely to have health care benefits. That’s why making it easier to join a union will benefit all working Americans. 

Predictably, big business and Republicans have described the Employee Free Choice Act as “a job killer” and “a threat to one of the fundamentals of democracy.” They’re trying to use scare tactics to keep Americans from understanding the bitter truth: maintaining the status quo benefits only corporate executives and their political lackeys. Anti-labor voices attempt to paint the Employee Free Choice Act as undemocratic, saying it prohibits the secret ballot. It doesn’t. Instead it makes it one of several options for certifying a union. 

President Obama supports the Employee Free Choice Act, as do most liberal members of Congress. Predictably, most Republicans will oppose it. The critical votes are those of so-called “Blue Dog Democrats” like Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Evan Bayh of Indiana. If Democrats stick together, the Employee Free Choice Act will pass and give a gigantic boost to the prospects of working Americans. As the song goes, 

Come all of you good workers 

Good news to you I’ll tell 

Of how that good old union 

Has come in here to dwell. 

Which side are you on? 

Which side are you on? 

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer. He can be reached at bobburnett@comcast.net. 

One universal human truth has been made manifest—once more—by the MacArthur shootings. While we can accept and even embrace flaws in our heroes, we are only comfortable when we can place those we wish to consider villains beyond all possibility of redemption and understanding. We wish no complications to dampen the fires of our rage. We want our bad men unsympathetic and monstrous, abandoned even by God and all the angels, like Grendel, the creature in Beowulf: 

Thus Hrothgar’s thanes reveled in joys, 

feasting and drinking, until their foe started his persecutions, 

a creature of hell. 

Grendel, they called him, this grim spoiler, 

a demon who prowled the dark borderlands, moors and marshes, 

a man-eating giant who had lived in a lair 

in the land of monsters ever since God had outlawed him 

along with the rest of the line of Cain. 

Abel’s murder had angered the Lord, 

who avenged that deed of violence on Cain, 

driving him far from the dwellings of men. 

Spooks and spirits are spawned from his seed, 

elves and goblins and evil ghouls and those bold giants 

who rebelled against God, asking for trouble. 

Witness how the San Francisco Chronicle dealt with Lovelle Mixon, the villain of the MacArthur tragedy. 

Normally, you would think that criminals and suspected criminals in Oakland have little background other than their criminal records, our local newspapers most often dealing with such people almost as if they sprang, like Grendel, directly from the wrath of God. But on March 23, two days after the shootings and shootout that left Mr. Mixon and four Oakland police officers dead, the Chronicle published two stories exclusively on Mr. Mixon. One, “Gunman Had Spent Years In and Out of Prison” by reporter Demian Bulwa, gave what could be construed as sympathetic details of Mr. Mixon’s family life, saying that his estranged wife was an Army veteran who had served 15 months in Iraq, attributing to family members the assertion that “prison had seemed to make [Mr. Mixon] calmer and more respectful,” and offering an explanation of Mr. Mixon’s attitude towards police by his sister, Reynete, who was quoted as saying, “He didn’t have no hate for them. He feared them as much as they feared him.” 

Reynete Mixon was the young girl who was in the East Oakland apartment that was stormed by Oakland SWAT officers in the final shootout that killed two of the officers and Mr. Mixon. Reynete Mixon was slightly wounded by stun grenades thrown into the apartment by the SWAT officers. 

A companion article, “Family’s Account of Oakland Parolee Who Killed the Four Police Officers,” by Ms. Bulwa and fellow reporter Jaxon Van Derbeken, included a plea by another sister of Mr. Mixon’s, Enjoli Mixon, who was quoted as saying that her brother was “not a monster.” The Bulwa-Van Derbeken article also included information that Mr. Mixon’s wife had been his “childhood sweetheart” whom he married while he was still in prison, and added the family’s assertion that Mr. Mixon may have broken parole because of a feud with his parole officer stemming from Mr. Mixon’s allegations that that parole officer had missed several appointments, causing Mr. Mixon to lose the chance to get a job. 

While neither of these Chronicle articles attempted in any way to justify the shooting deaths of the four Oakland police officers by Mr. Mixon—one of them, in fact, characterized the family explanations as “excuses”—they did seek to paint a picture of him as a human being, troubled and flawed, but human. 

But this was in the period when the community was still in shock over the shooting deaths of four police officers by a single individual, and the Chronicle appeared to be attempting to understand what sort of individual might be capable of such an act, and what might drive him to it. 

But you could feel all of that change the following day, when the Chronicle published an article reporting that the day before the MacArthur shootings, Oakland police had matched Mr. Mixon’s DNA to a rape that had occurred earlier this year. A day later, the Chronicle reported that the rape victim had been a 12-year-old girl, and that Mr. Mixon “might have committed as many as five other rapes in the same neighborhood in recent months, investigators said.” 

The allegation that Mr. Mixon may have been a rapist—a serial rapist, and the rapist of a 12-year-old—appeared to end all further attempts by major Bay Area media to look into Mr. Mixon’s background. We had our monster. We were convinced we understood him, and needed to know no more. Though what actually may have driven Mr. Mixon to kill four Oakland police officers in a span of two hours remains a mystery, a Google search shows no other articles following the rape allegation that seek to discover more of Mr. Mixon’s background or what may have been in his mind. 

In fact, the allegations of rape are generally regarded as true and settled, even though the March 26 Chronicle article indicated that “police could not (even) have issued an arrest warrant immediately for Mixon (for the rape of the 12-year-old victim after the initial DNA match) because investigators first would have needed to gather another sample of his DNA for comparison purposes.” 

In other words, standard police procedures dictate that the first DNA match could have—and we stress the words “could have”—been a mistake. But that line of query seems to have been put aside, at least in the media, at least for now, in a community-based decision that we feel we already “know” Mr. Mixon, so why bother? 

So we are left with the question, what would lead a man to such violence? 

A hundred years ago, a writer tried to describe a similar period of violence in the city of Oakland, and to explain its causes and the effects upon its participants. The participants in the city’s violence in those days were striking union workers, not drug dealers, but the writer described the attitude of the wife of one of the striking workers in much the same tones as you hear in the flatlands neighborhoods of East and West Oakland today. After seeing police hunt and shoot down several strikers in her front yard, the writer says of the wife of the striking worker that “the police were new and terrible creatures to her now. She had seen them kill the strikers as mercilessly as the strikers had killed the scabs. And, unlike the strikers, the police were professional killers. They were not fighting for jobs. They did it as a business. They could have taken prisoners that day, in the angle of her front steps and the house. But they had not. Unconsciously, whenever approaching one, she edged across the sidewalk so as to get as far as possible away from him.” Seeing an old classmate on the street, she realized that “he was now a policeman, and [her husband] Billy was now a striker. Might not Ned Hermann some day club and shoot Billy just as those other policemen clubbed and shot the strikers by her front steps?” 

The writer of a century ago described an even more profound effect of the Oakland strike upon Billy, the woman’s husband, who was routinely going out and beating up the men who had been shipped in to take the striking men’s jobs. 

“He was rarely unkind to [her]” the writer explained, “but, on the other hand he was rarely kind. His attitude toward her was growing negative. He was disinterested. Despite the fight for the union she was enduring with him, putting up with him shoulder to shoulder, she occupied but little space in his mind. When he acted toward her gently, she could see that it was merely mechanical, just as she was well aware that the endearing terms he used, the endearing caresses he gave, were only habitual. The spontaneity and warmth had gone out. Often, when he was not in liquor, flashes of the old Billy came back, but even such flashes dwindled in frequency. He was growing preoccupied, moody. Hard times and the bitter stresses of industrial conflict strained him. Especially was this apparent in his sleep, when he suffered paroxysms of lawless dreams, groaning and muttering, clenching his fists, grinding his teeth, twisting with muscular tensions, his face writhing with passions and violences, his throat guttering with terrible curses that rasped and aborted on his lips.” 

The 1913 book from which these accounts were taken, The Valley Of The Moon, were semi-autobiographical. The character of the wife was taken from Charmian London, and Billy was, of course, based upon her husband, Jack, who was the author, and who escaped the violent streets of Oakland a century ago to become a writer of some fame.  

This is not to suggest that Lovelle Mixon might have been a Jack London, or that there are exact parallels to his life and the world in which he lived to that of the noted author. It is not a call for sympathy for Mr. Mixon, or an offer of excuse. It is only to suggest that we should not be satisfied with what we think we now know, and that our probing should not end, because at the end of that probing lies a better understanding of what Oakland actually is, not just what we would like, or believe, it to be.  

In some sections of some Oakland flatlands neighborhoods, Lovelle Mixon has risen to the status of folk icon, an object of awe, the man who took out four cops. In other parts of Oakland and in the greater Bay Area, especially in the east-of-the-hills cities where the fallen officers lived, Lovelle Mixon is a demon, an object of utter despisement, the man who took out four cops. Somewhere, in the middle, there is the man, who still remains to us, a mystery that remains to be solved. 

Or do we think it no longer matters?

I miss shrikes. The loggerhead shrike, the local representative of this anomalous family of killer songbirds, used to be easier to see in the East Bay. This winter it was noteworthy when a single bird showed up at the Berkeley Meadow. We can still reliably find them in rural areas like the Altamont Hills, but they’ve become less common along the coast. 

Students of North American birds rely on two main indicators of abundance: the spring Breeding Bird Survey and the Audubon Christmas Count. By both measures, loggerhead shrike numbers in the Bay Area have been trending down for about the last 40 years. That also holds for most areas of the state, although some desert populations appear stable. The California Department of Fish and Game lists the mainland shrike population as a “species of special concern.” Two endemic subspecies in the Channel Islands are in even worse shape. 

The phenomenon is nationwide. Loggerheads no longer nest in New England, are rare in Pennsylvania, and have declined drastically in Quebec. Several Midwestern states have listed the species as endangered or threatened.  

I first encountered loggerhead shrikes when I was living in southwest Georgia, near a patch of longleaf pinewoods. They were hard to miss: mocker-sized birds boldly patterned in black, gray, and white, with bandit’s masks across their eyes. Someone has suggested that the shrike was what Mississippi-born sportscaster Red Barber had in mind when said a player was sitting in the catbird seat. That’s possible, but I’ve never heard anyone in the South call a shrike a catbird. Texans used to refer to them as “French mockingbirds.” Mostly, though, they were called butcherbirds, and with good reason. 

Shrikes, which are relatives of crows and jays, are stuck with mismatching equipment: they have the raptorial beaks of falcons—and dispatch their prey the same way, with a bite to the base of the head—and the feet of robins. Larger creatures are difficult to hold down. To that end, they’ve evolved the habit of impaling their prey on thorns or sharp twigs. Barbed wire, of course, was a godsend. 

The shrikes—there must have been a pair—lived near a wire fence, and on slow summer days I would go out and check their line. The catch, as I recall, was mostly insects: dragonflies, big fat cicadas, the gaudy but klutzy grasshoppers called lubbers, or Georgia thumpers. But there was the occasional field mouse or fence lizard, and once a green snake. With all that, I never actually got to see a shrike make its kill or stake out its prey. 

Shrikes’ affinity for fencelines may be one reason for their decline. One Texas study found a disproportionate number of road-killed shrikes, and vehicle collisions accounted for 29 percent of winter mortality in a Virginia sample. The birds fly low, with a distinctive undulating motion, at about the right height to collide with oncoming traffic. Nests along roadsides may also be more accessible to feral cats and other predators. 

More than that seems to be going on, though. Changes in land use have had a major impact on shrikes. Ironically, these birds may have benefited at first when the eastern forests were replaced by a mixed landscape of small farms, pastureland, woodlots, and hedgerows. But the rise of the megafarm left no room for them. In California, shrike-friendly habitats like oak savanna and coastal sage have given way to orchards, vineyards, and housing. Shrikes, which winter from California south to Chiapas, may be affected by changes in wintering areas as well, but the dynamics are unclear.  

Predatory birds, even smaller ones like shrikes, eat relatively high on the food chain, so pesticide effects have been implicated. But the evidence is less than conclusive. One California study found no difference in eggshell thickness before and after DDT was banned. In Illinois, however, thinner eggs had higher concentrations of the DDT breakdown product DDE. Overall, the loggerhead shrike’s decline coincided with the use of organochlorine pesticides beginning in the 1940s. Dieldrin exposure has been shown to delay the development of hunting behavior in young shrikes. Beyond direct effects on the birds, insecticides may also have reduced the prey base available to feed nestlings. 

For reasons that remain unclear, loggerhead shrikes seem particularly vulnerable just after fledging. A researcher in Indiana found that 46 percent of young shrikes died within a week of leaving the nest, and there’s comparable data from Alberta and Virginia.  

This is beginning to look like one of those Murder on the Orient Express situations: too many suspects, no smoking guns. 

Until causation becomes clearer, it’s going to be hard to recommend conservation measures. Let’s hope the economic crunch has left a pot of money somewhere for shrike research.  

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a series on Captain R.P. Thomas and La Loma Park. 

If you walk five blocks due northeast of the UC Berkeley campus, you’ll find yourself in the hilly tract named La Loma Park. Enclosed within Cedar Street to the south and Rose Street to the north, the picturesque district is centered on the curvy intersection of La Loma Avenue and Buena Vista Way. 

This is Maybeck Country, also known as “Nut Hill.” It was at the heart of La Loma Park that the famed architect built his family home in 1907, as well as houses for other new residents attracted by the area’s beauty and sweeping vistas. 

After his house burned down in the 1923 Berkeley Fire, Maybeck built a cluster of smaller homes for his growing family. These, as well as surrounding homes influenced by Maybeck’s sensibilities, will be open for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association’s May 3 Spring House Tour. 

Maybeck, however, was not the first resident of La Loma Park. Nor did he find the terrain in its original state. The open grassy hills had already been forested by the man who had occupied the land since 1880, and who may have owned it considerably earlier. This man was Richard Parks Thomas (1826– 1900), best known as the owner of the Standard Soap Company, which operated a huge factory in West Berkeley from 1876, manufacturing hundreds of different kinds of laundry and toilet soaps. 

A Civil War veteran, Thomas was a member of the Grand Army of the Republic. A capsule of his fascinating biography was published in the G.A.R.’s 1886 Records of Members. There we learn that Thomas was born in Berne, Albany County, New York. In his early years he was apprenticed to a merchant in Ithaca but abandoned that job and left for New York. There, in 1846, he entered the U.S. Navy. 

What happened next is unclear. The G.A.R. Records of Members relates that “being under age, his parents obtained his discharge.” Berkeley historian Richard Schwartz maintains that Thomas served two and a half years on a man-of-war in the Mediterranean. What IS known beyond dispute is that Thomas moved to Syracuse, where he established a small soap factory. On June 28, 1859, while in Syracuse, he obtained a patent entitled “Improvement in Frames for the Manufacture of Soap.” 

After his factory was destroyed by fire in 1860, Thomas went to the oil district in Pennsylvania. He was engaged in boating oil in a flat-boat when news of the firing on Fort Sumter reached him. Having served as lieutenant of cavalry in the state militia, he returned to Syracuse and “opened a recruiting office for raising a company of cavalry, which was offered to the Secretary of War, who declined to accept it, as there was then no call for cavalry.” 

A few months later, Thomas received an order to report to Col. Andrew T. McReynolds, who was authorized to recruit a regiment of volunteer cavalry. The colonel informed Thomas that the government would not equip the cavalry. Recruits were required to furnish their own horses and equipment, and the government would pay them a rental fee of 40 cents per day. Being without means, Thomas teamed up with a wealthy citizen who agreed to furnish horses on condition that his son be made captain of the company. The latter was mustered in as Company F, Lincoln (First New York) Cavalry, reportedly the first volunteer cavalry recruited for the Civil War. 

Thomas was commissioned as first lieutenant in August 1861. When the regiment was divided into battalions, Lieutenant Thomas was commissioned adjutant of the 2nd Battalion, serving in that capacity during McClellan’s Peninsular campaign. He took part in the battles of Yorktown, Williamsburg, Mechanicsville, Cold Harbor, Fair Oaks, Games’ Mills, Savage Station, White Oak Swamp, Harrison’s Landing, Fredericksburg, Bull Run, and Antietam. Wounded in the leg by a rifle ball at White Oak Swamp, he was honorably discharged in November 1863. 

Seeking his fortune in California, the war veteran joined Cogswell’s Standard Soap factory in San Francisco. He wasted no time in becoming a partner, and soon acquired the business, making it grow by further acquisitions. Wanting to consolidate his operations in a single location, Thomas chose the West Berkeley waterfront, where both water and transportation were within easy reach. Constructed in 1875, the Standard Soap Works occupied a full block on Third Street between Addison and Allston Way (the site is now occupied by the Takara Sake Company). 

Until the rail tracks were built along Third Street, transporting freight by water was the only economic option. Thomas got into the transportation business by acquiring the ferry Mare Island, which not only carried his goods and those of other firms but had a virtual monopoly on the Berkeley-San Francisco route for many years. In 1891, after numerous complaints were voiced about the high rates charged on the Mare Island, a rival surfaced in the form of Piper, Aden & Co., which introduced a newer, faster steamer, the Hope. Piper’s lower rates quickly captured much of the freight business, and by March 1892, it had taken over the Mare Island and withdrew the Hope from the route. 

This wasn’t the last salvo in the ferry war. On March 2, 1894, the San Francisco Call announced, “Hereafter the Standard Soap Company will operate the Berkeley ferry, in place of Piper, Aden & Co.” The next day, it was rumored that Standard Soap would reduce wages on the Mare Island. Before too long, its rival, now renamed Piper, Aden, Goodall & Co., had reintroduced the Hope into the route. Thomas, apparently anxious to sell his transportation interests, tried to force his rivals’ hand in early October 1895 by denying them access to the wharf. Yet it turned out that eviction was not within his power, since the wharf’s owner, William B. Heywood, had not authorized him to do so. 

By the end of October, the two companies had reached an understanding, the 25-year-old Mare Island was withdrawn from service, and it was announced that in the future all goods shipped to and from Berkeley would be charged a uniform rate. 

Standard Soap made its owner rich, and by the mid-1880s he was casting about for new ventures. In October 1886, he founded the California National Bank of San Francisco, located in the Palace Hotel building on Market Street. The bank was incorporated as a joint stock organization; its authorized capital was $1 million, of which $200,000 was subscribed in currency. 

Its trajectory was swift. The annual statement filed on July 1, 1887, showed total resources and liabilities of $641,133.57. On Dec. 15, 1888, the bank abruptly suspended payments. In a story foreshadowing the current economic crisis, it was revealed that the bank’s cashier, C.H. Ramsden, acted recklessly, building a portfolio of bad loans that ultimately resulted in a loss of almost $170,000. 

The U.S. Treasury’s Comptroller of the Currency placed a receiver in charge of the bank, assessing the stockholders $75,000, all of which was paid except $20,000 assessed against the bank’s president, our friend Richard P. Thomas. 

Naturally, some stockholders were not pleased with this state of affairs. One of them, attorney John Chetwood, Jr., brought legal action against the bank’s executive committee, comprising president Thomas, vice-president Robert A. Wilson, and director Robert R. Thompson. The charge brought against the three was that they were negligent in their duties and permitted the cashier Ramsden to manage the business as he saw fit, lending money without adequate security, which resulted in the bank’s failure. 

In December 1892, Judge Finn entered a judgment in favor of the plaintiff, and the case was referred to a master. But before a final judgment had been rendered, Chetwood settled with Wilson and Thompson, who paid $27,500. The suit against them was dismissed, leaving a net loss to the bank of $139,419. Judgment for this amount was rendered against Richard P. Thomas alone. 

Thomas didn’t think this was entirely fair. Nor was he the capitulating sort. He wasn’t about to hand over the money quietly and took appropriate measures. 

Daniella Thompson publishes www.berkeleyheritage.com for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage  

Association (BAHA).

A Buddhist walks up to the hot dog vendor and says “make me one with everything.” (Long pause). The vendor takes his money but fails to return his change. The Buddhist says, “Hey buddy, where’s my change?!” to which the vendor replies, epicanthically, “Change must come from within!” 

Change is hard. I’m not much good at it myself, but in these carbon-footprint-concerned times, change is essential. The change I’m suggesting today is really very simple, but I suspect that it will not be well-received by many because it involves pushing a button. Although we are a button-pushing nation, we certainly aren’t used to pushing buttons before we use hot water, so this will be a new and frightening concept, and there will doubtless be screams of “Socialism!” and wailing and the gnashing of teeth. There are also many people in the world who do not push buttons, but they are not part of the problem, so we’ll leave them out of it. 

Water heating is an imperfect science. Water heaters, as we think of them today, aren’t much more than about 120 years old, and they tend to reside downstream of our showers and sinks by many yards of pipe. So, when we turn on the hot tap, the first thing that we generally find ourselves doing is flushing several gallons of cold water out of the piping before the hot water can arrive. This wastes both energy and water in a number of ways. First, it clearly wastes clean, treated water, an increasingly rare and expensive commodity. Global warming is simultaneously decreasing the Sierra snow pack and increasing evaporation, thus decreasing the amount of water that will be available to waste. California is expected to increase in population by over 30 percent in the next 20 years. If you think you’re waiting a long time to get into the bathroom now, just wait. 

But, as usual, I digress. The point is that we waste a great deal of water, as well as the energy to deliver it (which is about 19 percent of our state energy usage) every time we stand around waiting for the water to finally get hot. If you only waste 20 gallons of water a day, this will amount to 7,300 gallon a year at an expense of about $150 including the extra gas heating you waste in the process. Some claim as much as 17,000 gallons for a family of four. If this is true, you could save about $400 a year. 

As I’m quite sure you were expecting, I have a solution for you and it’s really quite simple and fairly inexpensive. 

Someone got all the way out of the box on this one. What if you didn’t mind a little warm water in your cold water pipes for a short while? If it didn’t matter, you could use the fact that you already have a “return loop” in the form of a cold pipe adjacent to all the hot lines throughout the house. All you have to do, to avoid wasting several gallons every time you want to heat water, is to run the hot water back through the adjacent cold line for a very short period (usually about 30 seconds) to fill up the hot line with fully hot water. No water is wasted at all, and in a very short while the cold pipes will cool off. It doesn’t really matter anyway unless you’re after a cold drink from the tap right around that time. The potential losses are tiny, but the gain is very large.  

Several companies are now making devices that do this. Actually, there have long been installations done by smarter plumbers or builders in which circulating pumps would run either all the time or on a timer, and this would do something similar. However, while these systems might save water and were intended for convenience more than anything else, they wasted a lot of energy by forcing the water heater to run far more often. The newer systems, such as Metlund’s D’MAND system, run only for a very short while once you ask the system to get ready for you. When you get ready to get into the shower (or do the dishes or the laundry) you push a button mounted near their device and it will run just long enough to heat up the pipes and then will shut itself down. (It has a little thermostat inside that triggers a relay that turns the pump off. Nice.) 

The whole item gets installed under the sink in the bathroom furthest from the water heater and connects to the hot and cold lines under the sink. An outlet is needed and may add to the expense of installation if one isn’t near enough. The whole device is about half the size of a loaf of bread and is nearly silent. A button, much like a doorbell, is mounted near the unit but there are remotes that can be put in other rooms where hot water gets used. If you don’t mind wasting a little energy, a motion sensor can be installed that will automatically turn on the device when you walk into the bathroom. Since you’re likely to be using some hot water when you enter the bathroom, this doesn’t seem so egregious a sin. 

On-demand water heaters are all the rage these days, and those of you who follow my birdcage liners know that I favor these—with some minor complaints. Our novel little pump-and-bypass is a good fit for any on-demand water heater as it can decrease the water loss and delay, which is a sore spot with some on-demand owners. I would now recommend that anyone buying an on-demand water heater look into some version of this bypass technology. BUT, these devices work just fine on all water heaters, including the old and sluggish. 

Grundfos also makes a similar system with the possible advantage of being able to place the pump in a location separate from the bypass valve. This might mean an easier installation if there’s not an outlet near the sink in the far bathroom. It’s worth a look. Plumbers will readily recognize the Danish pumpmaker’s name as it has produced an extremely high quality product for over 50 years. 

Whether you choose the Metlund, D’MAND, the Grundfos Comfort System, the Autocirc1 or any other system, this is a very smart choice for any of us and an easy way to decrease our water and energy usage right now. For the home handywoman, it’s also a manageable job. If you can install a faucet, you can probably do this job. The cost for the kits runs between $350-$600 depending on the type and and the supplier. 

The cities of Peoria and San Antonio are both offering rebates for the installation of these items and I cannot imagine what’s keeping California cities from doing the same. Maybe we have to speak up and demand that our legislators recognize this as a solution to promote and to offer economic incentives for. So now you have two things to do today. One is to head over to Moran Supply in Oakland, talk to my friend Ron and take a look at the Metlund models. The other is to write to our dear Loni (Assemblymember.hancock@assembly.ca.gov) about introducing some legislation to rebate the cost of recirculating systems.  

Change is never easy, but it can be good for you. I’m not sure you can say that same thing about the hot dog. 

ASK MATT 

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor at mgcantor@pacbell.net.

THURSDAY, APRIL 2 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet” Converstaion with ecologist Gretchen Daily and Artist Iñgo Manglano-Ovalle at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Catherine Ramirez in conversation with Jose Saldivar on her new book “The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory” 6 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. www.universitypressbooks.com 

Holloway Poetry Series with Cyrus Console at 6:30 p.m. in the Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall, UC campus. http://holloway.english.berkeley.edu 

Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza of Culture Clash read from their new anthology “Oh Wild West” at 7 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th, Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Rubber Soldiers Revue with The Rowan Brothers and David Gans at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

3rd “Not-A-Seder” Passover Cabaret at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave.Free. Hosted by the Progressive Jewish Alliance. 

Bill Evans & Megan Lynch at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Kelly Park Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Luce Band, Annie Bacon and her O-Shen, The Wicked Oysters at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082  

Dave Stein Hub-Bub at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

FRIDAY, APRIL 3 

THEATER 

Altarena Playhouse “Gypsy” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Altarena Playhouse, 1409 High St., Alameda, through April 5. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Black Repertory Group “Mrs. Streeter” Fri. at 8 .m., Sat. at 2:30 and 8 p.m. at 3201 Adeline St., through April 25. Tickets are $15-$20. 925-812-2787. www.blackrepertorygroup.com 

Brookside Rep “Basha Rubenchek from Minsk, Comrade of Petaluma” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, through May 3. Tickets are $19-$24. www.BrooksideRep.org 

Destiny Arts “Dreaming Awake” Movement theater work created by young artists Fri. at 7:30 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 7:30 p.m., and Sun. at 2 p.m. at Laney College Theater, 900 Fallon St., Oakland. Cost is $12-$20. www.brownpapertickets.com 

Masquers Playhouse “The Last Five Years” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, and runs through May 2. Tickets are $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

“Memories and Dreams of the Twentieth Century: stories and a couple of songs” A one-man show by Michael Brown, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Da Silva Ukulele Co., 2547 8th St., Suite 28, in the Sawtooth Bldg., through April 4. Suggested donation $15. 868-3280. 

Round Belly Theatre Co. “Twelfth Night” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. Subterranean Art House, 2179 Bancroft Way. Suggested donation $8-$10. 415-728-5975. 

Shotgun Players “Skylight” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., though April 26. Tickets are $25. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Descent” Photographs by Peter Tonningsen. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at A Different Day Gallery, 1233 Solano Ave. Albany. 868-4904. 

“Earth Days” Works by Tyrell Collins, Ralph Singer, and John Wood. Opening reception at 7 p.m. at Oakopolis, 447 Twenty-fifth St., Oakland. oakopolis@gmail.com 

“Intersectionality of Sisters” Panel discussion and poetry at 5:30 p.m. at Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St., Oakland. 465-8928. 

“Myth Magic Mystery: Art of the Inner Worlds” Group show. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at The Red Door Gallery and Collective in the Warehouse, 416 26th St., Oakland. 292-7061. 

“Confluence” Painting and sculpture by Margaret Chavigny and Laura van Duren. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Mercury 20 Gallery, 25 Grand Ave. at Broadway, Oakland. 701-4620. www.mercurytwenty.com  

“Modality Room” Installation by Renee Gertler. Reception at 7 p.m. at Blankspace, 6608 San Pablo Ave., Oakland. 547-6608. www.blankspacegallery.com 

“Beyond the Studio: Community Collaborations” Community-based Public Art Projects and Final Exhibition through April 5 at Work-in-Progress Gallery, John F. Kennedy University’s Arts Annex, 2956 San Pablo Ave., 2nd Flr. 486-8118. 

Keiko Nelson Spring Art Show with sculpture and fine art Fri.-Sun. from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m at Keiko Nelson Art Studio, Cotton Mill Studio #115, 1091 Calcot Place, Oakland. www.keikonelson.com 

FILM 

“An American in Paris” at 7 p.m. at the Paramount, 2025 Broadway. Tickets are $5. Box office opens at 6 p.m.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Teen Poetry Slam Semi-Finals with eighteen semi-finalists from across the Bay Area, Fri. and Sat. at 7 p.m. at The Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $6-$10. 800-828-3006. www.brownpapertickets.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Friday Noon Concert with Dept. of Music students at Hertz Hall, UC campus. Free. 642-4864.  

Elliot Randall, southern rock/alt country, at noon on Lower Sproul Plaza, UC campus. Free.  

“Cal Band Spring Showcase” a variety of acts from rock bands to dances to comedy skits at 7:30 p.m. at Haas Pavilion, UC campus. Tickets are $5-$10. 642-3436.  

Sergio Caputo Quartet at 8 p.m. at 155 Dwinelle Hall, UC campus. Free.  

San Francisco City Chorus “Spring Rhapsody” choral works from the Romantic Period at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $18-$25. 415-701-7664. www.sfcitychorus.org 

Bill Crossman, First Fridays Free Jazz and Improv at 7:30 p.m. at OPC Music, 1616 Franklin St., Oakland. Cost is $5, free for ages 16 and under. 836-4649. 

Clifton Burton’s Upside Down & Backwards at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

The Phenomenauts, Peelander-Z, The Secretions, Tabaltix at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10-$12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Mark Hummel with Jerry Zybach at 9 p.m. at Bobby G’s, 2072 University Ave.  

Bob Frank with John Murray & the Lansky Brothers at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Beth Nielsen Chapman, singer/songwriter, at 8 p.m. at Rudramandir, 830 Bancroft Way, at 6th. Cost is $15-$25. 486-8700. www.rudramandir.com  

Marcus Shelby Trio at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Lloyd Family Players, Alex-Lee, The Rad Girls at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

The Green Machine at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Danny Torres & Friends at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7-$10. 597-0795. 

SATURDAY, APRIL 4 

CHILDREN  

John Weaver, storyteller, Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave., Oakland. Cost is $7. 452-2259. www.fairyland.org 

“Orca, The First Whale” A puppet show based on a tale from Native Americans in the Northwest, at 11 a.m., and 2 and 4 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave., Oakland. Cost is $7. 452-2259. www.fairyland.org 

Arts at St. Alban’s Storytelling and Music with Joyce Parry Moore and Jack Hayes, a multi-disciplinary series for children, ages 5-10. Parents invited. From 10 to 11:30 a.m. at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington Ave., Albany. Free, donations accepted. To register call 525-1716. info@st-albans-albany.org  

EXHIBITIONS 

“RE/FORMATIONS: Disability, Women and Sculpture” Opening reception at 2 p.m. at the National Institute of Art & Disabilities, 551 23rd St., Richmond. Exhibition runs through May 11. 620-0290. www.niadart.org 

THEATER 

Stone Soup Improv Comedy at 8 p.m. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St. at Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $7-$10. www.stonesoupimprov.com 

TheatreFIRST “Old Times” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way, through April 18. Tickets are $23-$28. 436-5085. www.theatrefirst.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Teen Poetry Slam Semi-Finals with eighteen semi-finalists from across the Bay Area at 7 p.m. at The Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $6-$10. 800-828-3006. www.brownpapertickets.com 

Poetry Reading with Ariana Reines at 7 p.m. at Alphonse Berber Gallery, 2546 Bancroft Way. 649-9492. 

Benito M. Vergara, Jr. on “Pinoy Capital: The Filipino Nation in Daly City” at 3:30 p.m. at Eastwind Books of Berkeley, 2066 University Ave. www.asiabookcenter.com 

Bay Area Poets Coalition open reading from 3 to 5 pm. at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St. Park on the street. 527-9905. 

Thaddeus Rutkowski on “Tetched: A Novel in Fractals” at 7 p.m. at Eastwind Books of Berkeley, 2066 University Ave. www.asiabookcenter.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“Gloria” Combined Choirs and Symphony at 8 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Road, Kensington. Suggested donation $15-$20, no one turned away for lack of funds. 525-0302, ext. 309. www.uucb.org 

American Bach Soloists at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way, at Dana. Pre-concert lecture at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10-$44. 800-838-3006. americanbach.org 

Yolanda Rhodes, jazz standards, arias, spirituals and art songs, at 8 p.m. at Trrinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864. 

San Francisco Bay Area Chamber Choir “Tonight My Heart Sings” at 7 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Alameda, 2001 Santa Clara at Chestnut, Alameda. Suggested donation $10-$15, children under 13, free. 522-1477. www.AlamedaChurch.com 

Las Bomberas de la Bahía at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

V Note Ensemble at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Steve Freund at 8:30 p.m. at Bobby G’s, 2072 University Ave.  

Beat Box Showcase with The Vowel Movement and others at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Sotaque Baiano at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Bill Tapia at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $20.50-$21.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Disappear Incompletely and Kapowski at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15-18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Zarate Pollace Brazillian Band at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Planet Loop at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Celu Hamer & Friends at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7-$10. 597-0795. 

Mitch Marcus Quartet at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Berkeley Guitar Festival with Michto Pelo, George Cole and Vive le Jazz, The Terrence Brewer Group at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $12. 841-2082.  

SUNDAY, APRIL 5 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Prints and Posters” Reception at 5:30 p.m. p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Sale and auction runs through April 12. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

“Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet” Guided tour at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“The Lyrical Line: Embracing All & Flowing” Works by Salma Arastu on display from 2 to 5 p.m. at Numi Tea Gardens, 2230 Livingston St., Oakland. 261-1315. 

FILM 

Earth Dance Film Festival at 6:30 and 8:30 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th, Oakland. For ticket information call 701-4019. www.earthdancefilms.com 

From Riches to Rags: Hollywood and the New Deal “Wild Boys of the Road” Introduced by Harvey Smith, board member of the National New Deal Preservation Association, at 6 p.m. at Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Talk Cinema Berkeley Preview of new independent films with discussion afterwards at 10 a.m. at Albany Twin Theater, 1115 Solano Ave., Albany. Cost is $20. http://talkcinema.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Diane di Prima, Maichael McClure and David Meltzer at 3 p.m. at Diesel, 5433 College Ave., Oakland. 653-9965. 

Small Press Distribution Poetry Blow-Out with readings by Clark Coolidge, Norma Cole, Graham Foust, Tennessee Reed and many others, from noon to 4 p.m. at 1341 7th St. at Gilman. 524-1668. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Pocket Opera “La Favorita” at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $20-$37. 415-346-7805. www.pocketopera.org 

San Francisco Renaissance Voices “All Allegri Concert” at 4 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $15-$20. 845-6830. www.SFRV.org 

Moira Smiley & VOCO at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is 18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Fiesta de Marimba with Ana Nitmas and Ixim Tinamit at 7 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $12-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Jennnifer Jolly Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

California Coast Music Camp Spring Dance at 4 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $$15-$25. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Clairdee at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15-$18. 845-5373.  

MONDAY, APRIL 6 

THEATER 

Woman’s Will 11th Annual 24-hour Playfest Playwrights, directors and actors race to wirte, rehearse, and perfom seven new plays in 24 hours. Final performace at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$25. 420-0813. www.womanswill.org 

FILM 

“Andy Goldsworthy: Rivers and Tides” film screening hosted by the Townsend Center for the Humanities at 7 p.m. in the Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley campus. Free. 643-9670. http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/depthoffield.shtml#Rivers 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

David Wesley on “State Practices and Zionist Images: Shaping Economic Development in Arab Towns in Israel” at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. www.universitypressbooks.com 

TUESDAY, APRIL 7 

FILM 

“An Evening of Argentine Experimental Films” with filmmaker Federico J. Winhausen at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“What Obama Should Learn from his Predecessors” with Ivan Eland and Andrew R. Rutton at 6:30 p.m. at The Independent Institute, 100 Swan Way, Oakland. Admission: $10 member, $15 non-member. Tickets can be purchased by phone at 632-1366, ext. 118. 

Marcial Gonzalez on “Chicano Novels and the Politics of Form: Race, Class and Reification” at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. www.universitypressbooks.com 

Paul McGeough on “Kill Khalid: The Failed Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas” at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $5-$10. berkeleyarts.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

CZ & The Bon Vivants at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Singers’ Open Mic with Ellen Hoffman at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Russell Moore at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Diablo Valley College’s Night Jazz Band at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8 

FILM 

“Killer of Sheep” at 3 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Buena Vista: Maybeck and the Year 1907” with Robert Judson Clark at 7:30 p.m. at The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Tickets are $15. Sponsored by Berkeley Architectural Heritage Assoc. 841-2242. berkeleyheritage.com 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082 .www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Wednesday Noon Concert, with students in the Contemporary Improvisation Ensemble at Hertz Hall, UC campus. Free. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

“It’s Not a Folk Harp” A concert with Mitch Landy, Natalie Cox, Dianna Rowan and Laura Simpson perfroming on Celtic harp at 7:30 p.m. at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington Ave., Albany, Tickets are $10-$15. 758-0959. 

Matt Moorish Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Steve Lucky Quartet at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Avance at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa dance lessons at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Shan Kenner Trio at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Rory Block at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

THURSDAY, APRIL 9 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet” Guided tour at 12:15 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

FILM 

“How to Dig a Hole” Films by UC Berkeley students at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Story Hour in the Library featuring novelist Vendela Vida, at 5 p.m. at 190 Doe Library, UC campus. 643-0397. 

Truth Be Told Spoken word with Rico Pabon at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5. 849-2568.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

UC Berkeley’s The Movement Spring Showcase Thurs. and Fri. at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Young People's Performing Arts Center, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $8 in advance from ucb.movement.showcase@gmail.com 

Dead Guise at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $7. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Kalman Balogh Gypsy Cimbolam Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Kelly Park and His Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Country Joe’s Open Mic with singer/songwriter Jo D’Anna at 6:30 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Hall, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. Donation $5-$10. 841-4824. 

The Crooked Roads Band, The Z-Train Electric Band, In Rare Form at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

The Sacred Profanities at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

FRIDAY, APRIL 10 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre “Miss Julie” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m., at 2081 Addison St. to May 10. Tickets are $40-$42. 843-4822. auroratheatre.org 

Black Repertory Group “Mrs. Streeter” Fri. at 8 .m., Sat. at 2:30 and 8 p.m. at 3201 Adeline St., through April 25. Tickets are $15-$20. 925-812-2787. www.blackrepertorygroup.com 

Brookside Rep “Basha Rubenchek from Minsk, Comrade of Petaluma” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, through May 3. Tickets are $19-$24. www.BrooksideRep.org 

Masquers Playhouse “The Last Five Years” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, and runs through May 2. Tickets are $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

Round Belly Theatre Co. “Twelfth Night” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. Subterranean Art House, 2179 Bancroft Way. Suggested donation $8-$10. 415-728-5975. 

Shotgun Players “Skylight” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., though April 26. Tickets are $25. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

TheatreFIRST “Old Times” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way, through April 18. Tickets are $23-$28. 436-5085. www.theatrefirst.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Mahmood Mamdani describes “Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror” at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Cost is $5-$10. berkeleyarts.org 

Charles Blackwell, Selene Steese, and Bob Booker will read their poetry at 7 p.m. at Nefeli Caffe, 1854 Euclid Ave., a little north of Hearst, in Berkeley, as part of the Last Word Reading Series. There is also an open reading. 841-6374. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

UC Berkeley’s The Movement Spring Showcase at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Young People's Performing Arts Center, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $8 in advance from ucb.movement.showcase@gmail.com 

Teslim at Utunes Coffe House at 8 p.m. at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St., Oakland. Tickets are $10-$18. www.brownpapertickets.com 

Womansong Circle An evening of participatory singing for women, with guest artist Annie Patterson, co-author of “Rise Up Singing” at 7:15 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, Small Assembly Room, 2345 Channing St., at Dana. Suggested donation $15-$20, no one turned away. www.betsyrosemusic.org 

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

Salvadora Galan, flamenco guitarist and singer, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$14. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Ed Neumeister at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Alex Calatuyud’s Brasil! at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $115. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Zulu Spear, The Palmwine Boys at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Los Cenzontles at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Happy Clams, Yard Sale at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Naomi and the Courteous Rudeboys at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

East Bay Funk and Soul Revue at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $8. 548-1159.  

Will Blades Quartet at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

SATURDAY, APRIL 11 

CHILDREN  

Family Film Series “Ever After” Cinderella with a strong woman and no magic Sat. and Sun. at noon at Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College Ave. at Ashby. Tickets are $4. 433-9730. 

Maggie the Clown, Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave., Oakland. Cost is $7. 452-2259. www.fairyland.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry and the Planet with Camille Dungy, Robert Haas, Brenda Hillman and many others at 3 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“The New BAM/PFA Facility” with architect Toyo Ito at 7 p.m. at Wheeler Auditorium, UC campus. Free, tickets available at 6 p.m. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Barbara Claire Freeman, Alice Jones, and Nguyen Do will read their poems from the latest Parthenon West Review at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320, pdtevents@gmail.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

UC Berkeley Danceworx Spring Showcase at 8 p.m. at The Julia Morgan Young People’s Performing Arts Center, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $8-$10. dwxshowcasecoord@gmail.com 

Grupo Falso Baiano at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$14. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Faye Carol & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Trio Garufa, Argentine tango at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Tango lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $12-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

House Jacks at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $20.50-$21.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Gateswingers Jazz Band, at 7:30 p.m. at 33 Revolutions Record Shop amd Cafe,10086 San Pablo Ave. at Central, El Cerrito. 898-1836.  

Taylor Eigsti, solo piano, at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $20. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Paul Manousos at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

The China Cats, Pat Nevins Acoustic Trio at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Jinx Jones Trio at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Grayceon, Mammatus, Giant, Tides at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $8. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, APRIL 12 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet” Guided tour at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

San Francisco Chamber Orchestra “Bach to Bach” at 3 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Free. www.sfchamberorchestra.org 

Berkeley New Music Project at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC campus. Tickets are $5-$15. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net 

Carlos Oliveira’s Brazilian Opus, featuring Harvey Wainapel, at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Kickin’ the Mule, featuring Freddie Hughes, at 5 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Under a street sign reading “Abbey Road,” the stage is lined with hanging ukeleles, as proprietor Mike Da Silva of the Da Silva Ukelele Co.—and host to an unusual series of performances on Eighth Street—introduces Michael Brown, performing his solo show, Memories and Dreams of the Twentieth Century: Storeis and a Couple of Songs, which runs again this Friday and Saturday, April 3 and 4. 

“The second half of the 20th Century is fast becoming the stuff of legend,” Brown begins, “the Second World War, the ’50s, ’60s—even the ’70s ... but not just newspaper stories.” It’s a storytelling show, a very reflective one about memory, about the almost-forgotten sensibilities of the ’60s versus the media events, tags and cliches that now identify it, and the ripening of one man’s—or perhaps his generation’s—own sensibilities, from the romanticism of experiencing it all into something like the wisdom of experience. “I have stories about the big events; I was at Woodstock; I met Fidel, Che, Malcolm X—but that’s not how I remember it.” 

Opening the same weekend as Sun & Moon Ensemble finished up another, more theatrical one-man storytelling play, with an inseparable accompaniment in music and song, Brown’s piece—or pieces, each separately announced by supertitles—seems very spare, with a minimum of gestures or enactment, just straight recitation of his tales with a few aptly placed songs, either self-accompanied on guitar or delivered a capella.  

At first, there seems to be a lot of exposition, but the audience quickly responds to Brown’s thoughtful, easygoing style, absorbing what he spins out, which comes up again in later episodes, the meaning made plain, if sometimes by refraction. Brown, veteran of the Moving Men and other notable troupes and projects of the times he talks about, knows his voice and presence, eschewing illusion, relying instead on the audience’s absorption in his words and his unfolding intention to extract the crystal of meaning from the ore of his reminiscences. 

There’s the story of his successful uncle Benny in Newark, who the young Michael Brown speculates might be in with the Mob, offering at a Seder (“a secular event in my family”) to set his nephew up in politics, only to get tartly rebuffed by the young idealist—who later questions his own attitude when a conservative Christian jailkeeper helps him out of a bind when he’s arrested hitchhiking in Wyoming.  

There’s the almost time-lapse image of a woman Brown meets when he sees her prancing through the viewfinder of his 8-mm moviecamera while taking crowd shots for an experimental film. She reappears randomly in his life for years, coast to coast, a Ruby Tuesday kind of thing amid crashing with the Mime Troupe and a bearded horde from mantra-like Mendocino, until he finally loses track of her after a last glimpse through windshield wipers as she dances exuberantly again for him, stepping out of his car. The telling is patently contemporary but captures, somehow, the almost ultraviolet aura of the times, something unspoken (and absent from all the revivals and retellings of yore), both subliminal and self-conscious.  

There’s the story of boyhood, of “the first time beauty entered my soul.” And there’s a funny deadpan tale of determinedly fixing a vintage toaster instead of buying a new one, juxtaposed with Artaud’s image of theater as “victims at the stake, signalling each other through the flames,” and following the Living Theater around, who declared they were inspired by Artaud, propagating the myth—as Brown keeps on fixing his old toaster! 

And finally the “Pièce de Resistance,” a finely told recollection of going to the races, maybe in search of that magical sense of spontaneity lost with the ’60s, and encountering The Great John Henry, then famous 9-year-old gelding in one of his final races, a horse of real heart whose career seemed to defy time, with the blue-collar-hero announcer Bob Gibson calling the race like poetry, drawing out the first syllable of the horse’s name—“Looks him in the eye and goes on by!”—with a happier ending for the noble horse, “coming home on the bit,” than for his legendary African-American namesake with the hammer, whose song Brown periodically intones, trying to beat the machine, both fulfilling a quote Brown recalled about “the personal life” from Anais Nin, an author he never read. 

Just like that vicarious sense of satisfaction of winning at the track, like being told, “You were right; here’s your money,” Brown’s careful style of storytelling pays off in change along the way, every time a stray image hits home—but the dividends ripen as his show progresses, “though you can’t make withdrawals right away.” 

MEMORIES AND DREAMS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: STORIES AND A COUPLE OF SONGS 

Written and performed by Michael Brown. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at Da Silva Ukelele Co., Sawtooth Building, Suite 28, 2547 Eight St. $15 suggested donation. 868-3280.

Kenya, 1912. The young Jewish woman from Russia stands with a suitcase, concerned about the man staring at her, trying to talk to her—until he shows a picture he has of her. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, it’s you!” she exclaims. “I believe I have the wrong party,” he replies, a Talmudic scholar wondering if this could be his promised bride ... 

Later, introduced to an African man, the young woman says, “They call me Comrade Basha. You can call me Basha. Is that a problem?” 

Mae Ziglin Meidav’s play, Basha Rubenchek from Minsk, Comrade of Petaluma, playing at the Berkeley City Club through May 3, is a tribute to her “firebrand great-aunt, a chicken farmer in Petaluma infamous in the family for having tried to start a utopian enterprise in Africa.” Visiting from her native St. Louis, Meidav recalls being taken aside, at 12, by her aunt, who told her to “be aware of the ‘anti’ forces in the world, anti-Communism foremost among them.” After moving to the Bay Area with her own family years later, Meidav took her still upright 88-year-old relative into their home. 

The subject of a book, Comrades and Chicken Farmers, by Kenneth L. Kann, and a musical, Chutzpah, by Pauline Pfander, Meidav’s play shows—right after intermission—Basha and her partner (Shimon; the two never married) arriving from Africa in 1916 under a sign, “Welcome to Petaluma”—and Shimon remarks, “I wonder if we should’ve gone to Palestine?” (Earlier, speaking of how Jews were urged to settle in Kenya as a new homeland, Basha says, “You can’t always rely on the fickleness of a British invitation.”)  

“We can be pioneers here, too,” she replies. 

But Shimon worries, “We know nothing of chicken ranching.”  

“You knew nothing of cattle ranching in Kenya.”  

“That was the tragedy.” 

The play, which follows Basha as she leaves Minsk, against her father’s wishes, where she worked for social causes and witnessed pogroms by the cossacks, is peppered with Meidav’s sprightly wit. But the conditions the Jewish immigrants were up against, everywhere, were are harsh as Basha’s hopes—and determination—ran high. 

“The real Basha changed her name back and forth,” Meidav said, “to confuse the Federal agents in the days of the Palmer Raids and later the fascist American Silver Shirts ... they deported Emma Goldman and others.”  

Scene by scene, the play delineates the background out of which Comrade Basha came, her progressive beliefs joined to a youthful, feminine spirit (deftly portrayed by Sarah Eismann), keeping her active, open to the world in the midst of adversity. 

Lia Metz has directed her cast—Reuben Alvear II, Al Badger, Biko Eisen-Martin, Theresa Miller, Brian O’Connor, Jeff Trescott and as understudy for Basha, originally from Kyrgyzstan, Yelena Segal—with care, giving the episodic story both epic and intimate overtones. The excellent designers—Don Cate, set and lights; Bradford Chapin, sound; Jessie Amoroso, costumes—more than enhance these qualities.  

There are nice touches that bring in the great events of the times: a visitor asks about the pictures of Lenin and Trotsky on the ranchhouse wall, “Nice pictures; those your relatives?” And there’s some fictionalization that hints at other issues. Biko Eisen-Martin, a self-proclaimed “red-green-black diaper baby,” who teaches Social Studies  

and Black Studies at Berkeley High, plays a Kenyan tribesman as well as itinerant African-American farm laborer, Nathaniel, who Basha teaches to read—and who proves crucial when the local American Legionaires and other reactionaries decide to take matters into their own hands, part of the post-World War I backlash against immigrants, blacks, Catholics and Jews—and leftist sympathizers. 

“I had to collapse a great deal of history into six or seven years onstage,” said Meidav. “And I wanted to incorporate the Jewish immigrants with the black community in Basha’s relationship with the farm worker, show how contrary to racism they were. All of it has to be shown onstage as interaction, the excitement of live theater.” 

Meidav has had a rich, “zig-zag career,” working as an assistant to the chief engineer at BART for 21 years, where she set up a lunch hour creative writing group with “P.R. people, industrial engineers, a graphic designer” that still meets at her house. Meidav worked in computer analysis for aircraft companies: MacDonald-Douglas, De Havilland, Israel. She’s also studied and taught sociology, at one point as a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. In theater, she’s done solo shows, eventually putting together a two-act play out of “these little vignettes,” produced by Stanley Spenger for Subterranean Shakespeare at La Val’s as Delicate Pinstripes and Other Tales. Spenger also produced and starred in Franz Kafka’s Love Life, which Brookside Rep produced in a newer version last year. Basha Rubenchek from Minsk, Comrade of Petaluma received a California Living History Center grant. 

Brookside executive producer John McMullen, who directed Kafka, commented on the timeliness of Basha: “When we do a play, it doesn’t start out topical, but it ends up that way. And now we do one about Comrade Basha and Jewish chicken ranchers in Petaluma—and if you turn on Fox News, every 15 seconds you hear ‘socialism, socialism!’” 

Basha Rubenchek from Minsk,  

Comrade of Petaluma 

8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; 5 p.m. Sundays through May 3 at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. $19-$24. 

(800) 838-3006. www.BrooksideRep.org. 

Donald Pippin started performing with chamber and Renaissance music and one-act operas in 1954, first staging Pocket Opera at North Beach’s Old Spaghetti Factory, in the back—or “flamenco”—room, in 1960. In 1968, he introduced his own translations of operas, now numbering something close to the scriptural three score and ten, four volumes of which are now available from Pocket Opera Press (As the Lights Go Up: Tales from the Opera), along with his oral history of the intrepid little company, A Pocketful of Wry, sponsored by the Bancroft Library, as well as sales (and rentals) of various individual libretti. 

In his foreword to As the Lights Go Up, Joshua Kosman writes, “With the discerning dexterity of the master jeweler, Pippin winkles out the essential elements of a scene ... and renders these into clear, concise and often witty English.” 

After becoming a nonprofit in 1977, Pocket Opera sallied forth from the salon of benches and water glasses of wine in the Spaghetti Factory into the theaters of the Bay Area, with its first spring subscription season in 1979.  

At the start of his company’s 30th year, Pippin shared some thoughts with The Daily Planet: 

On La Favorita and Donizetti: “His career was relatively brief, but he composed about 70 operas, about a dozen of which get performed at all, including some lesser known. La Favorita still counts as lesser known, though acknowledged as one of his greatest. They profit by intimacy. All the nuance can be lost trying to fill a cavernous hall with sound. We have four major soloists for La Favorita, all superb—and our excellent tenor’s sung in Pocket Opera productions for seven years. I don’t know why he’s still working with us!” 

On Pocket Opera’s staging and the company’s development, Pippin said: “We pay more attention now to the production as a whole, without abandoning our original mission of simplicity, concentrating on the singing, the interaction of character. Our staging is very much like Elizabethan theater, I think. Opera directors tend these days to fill up the stage with a lot of irrelevant business, especially with Handel, whose stories are static, wracking their brains to distract the audience with all that business. 

“We’ve decidedly not gone in that direction,” Pippin said. “And I think I’ve grown as a musician and artistic director. I don’t do the stage direction. We now have access to more singers, with auditions every year, where we hear about a hundred. So a constantly fresh supply, though women more than men—which is sad, because there are more roles for men than women.” 

On choice of composers, Pippin said: “Our three mainstays are Handel, Offenbach and Donizetti—all three prolific, all three very famous but for a small part of their output. We explore their underrated work. So much depends on interpretation. On the page, Donizetti’s melodies look insipid but are beautiful when played and sung. With Handel, beauty’s more apparent in his Italian operas (about 40) than in his maybe 20 English oratorios. 

“Although we’ve done The Rake’s Progess, I’m leery of latter-day 20th century works, which are so dependent on orchestral color,” he said. “With 19th century music, you lose something with our kind of orchestration, but also gain something. Like in chamber music, the transparency is there, you follow the individual voices. With eight instruments, we do quite well, even with Puccini and Verdi, which can be quite grandiose.” 

On notoriety and the press: “In the ’80s, we had good press coverage. In those days, the Chronicle had four music critics; now just one beleaguered critic,” Pippin said. “We’ve had fewer and fewer reviews the past dozen years. Through exhaustion, I suppose, they don’t come anymore. And during the same time, the two big record stores, Tower and Virgin, have closed. It really does starve us, you know.” 

On himself, on stage, Pippin said: “What was I thinking when I originally started? Where to put my foot next! I had no long vision of it, ever. One step at a time. Sometimes I feel I’m casting myself as the Fool, or like some character in Shakespeare—those characters who stand by and comment, like the Duke in Measure for Measure, who’s presumably absent, but is there all the time. Hovering over all—that’s me! 

"We do keep exploring. I’m feeling very positive, going forward,” Pippin said. “We’ve grown over the years; there have been high points. But we’ve always had an extraordinary group of singers, even at the beginning. And I’m having even a better time than I used to. I think I’ve become much more conscientious about my narration. When I’m praised, I get increasingly anxious and try to improve. I’m cursed with the inability to rest on my laurels.” 

On the next production (May 9 at the Julia Morgan), his new translation of Moniuszko’s The Haunted Manor: “It’s much revered in Poland—the composer considered second only to Chopin—though unknown here. It reminds you a little of Czech operas, like The Bartered Bride. A delight. Exuberant, ebullient, full of life—with melodies of Polish dance forms, and a good story." 

La Favorita  

Presented by Pocket Opera at 2 p.m.  

Sunday at Julia Morgan Center, 2640 College Ave. $20-$37. 

(415) 346-7805. www.pocketopera.org.

Masquers Playhouse, in Point Richmond, has its own pleasing community-theater style, which they’re bringing to the unusual off-Broadway musical of 2002, The Last Five Years, by Jason Robert Brown (Parade, Songs for a New World, 13). The show is about the marriage of a novelist and an aspiring actress—from his point of view, from first meeting to break-up; from hers, backwards, from the end to the beginning. The score’s been called “one of the brightest of the 21st century.” Director Daren A. C. Carollo says it’s perfect for the Masquers, “with one of the most intimate venues in the Bay Area—and this is an intimate musical.” Musical direction by Pat King. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays through through May 3; 2:30 p.m. this Sunday. 105 Park Place, across from Hotel Mac. $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a series on Captain R.P. Thomas and La Loma Park. 

If you walk five blocks due northeast of the UC Berkeley campus, you’ll find yourself in the hilly tract named La Loma Park. Enclosed within Cedar Street to the south and Rose Street to the north, the picturesque district is centered on the curvy intersection of La Loma Avenue and Buena Vista Way. 

This is Maybeck Country, also known as “Nut Hill.” It was at the heart of La Loma Park that the famed architect built his family home in 1907, as well as houses for other new residents attracted by the area’s beauty and sweeping vistas. 

After his house burned down in the 1923 Berkeley Fire, Maybeck built a cluster of smaller homes for his growing family. These, as well as surrounding homes influenced by Maybeck’s sensibilities, will be open for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association’s May 3 Spring House Tour. 

Maybeck, however, was not the first resident of La Loma Park. Nor did he find the terrain in its original state. The open grassy hills had already been forested by the man who had occupied the land since 1880, and who may have owned it considerably earlier. This man was Richard Parks Thomas (1826– 1900), best known as the owner of the Standard Soap Company, which operated a huge factory in West Berkeley from 1876, manufacturing hundreds of different kinds of laundry and toilet soaps. 

A Civil War veteran, Thomas was a member of the Grand Army of the Republic. A capsule of his fascinating biography was published in the G.A.R.’s 1886 Records of Members. There we learn that Thomas was born in Berne, Albany County, New York. In his early years he was apprenticed to a merchant in Ithaca but abandoned that job and left for New York. There, in 1846, he entered the U.S. Navy. 

What happened next is unclear. The G.A.R. Records of Members relates that “being under age, his parents obtained his discharge.” Berkeley historian Richard Schwartz maintains that Thomas served two and a half years on a man-of-war in the Mediterranean. What IS known beyond dispute is that Thomas moved to Syracuse, where he established a small soap factory. On June 28, 1859, while in Syracuse, he obtained a patent entitled “Improvement in Frames for the Manufacture of Soap.” 

After his factory was destroyed by fire in 1860, Thomas went to the oil district in Pennsylvania. He was engaged in boating oil in a flat-boat when news of the firing on Fort Sumter reached him. Having served as lieutenant of cavalry in the state militia, he returned to Syracuse and “opened a recruiting office for raising a company of cavalry, which was offered to the Secretary of War, who declined to accept it, as there was then no call for cavalry.” 

A few months later, Thomas received an order to report to Col. Andrew T. McReynolds, who was authorized to recruit a regiment of volunteer cavalry. The colonel informed Thomas that the government would not equip the cavalry. Recruits were required to furnish their own horses and equipment, and the government would pay them a rental fee of 40 cents per day. Being without means, Thomas teamed up with a wealthy citizen who agreed to furnish horses on condition that his son be made captain of the company. The latter was mustered in as Company F, Lincoln (First New York) Cavalry, reportedly the first volunteer cavalry recruited for the Civil War. 

Thomas was commissioned as first lieutenant in August 1861. When the regiment was divided into battalions, Lieutenant Thomas was commissioned adjutant of the 2nd Battalion, serving in that capacity during McClellan’s Peninsular campaign. He took part in the battles of Yorktown, Williamsburg, Mechanicsville, Cold Harbor, Fair Oaks, Games’ Mills, Savage Station, White Oak Swamp, Harrison’s Landing, Fredericksburg, Bull Run, and Antietam. Wounded in the leg by a rifle ball at White Oak Swamp, he was honorably discharged in November 1863. 

Seeking his fortune in California, the war veteran joined Cogswell’s Standard Soap factory in San Francisco. He wasted no time in becoming a partner, and soon acquired the business, making it grow by further acquisitions. Wanting to consolidate his operations in a single location, Thomas chose the West Berkeley waterfront, where both water and transportation were within easy reach. Constructed in 1875, the Standard Soap Works occupied a full block on Third Street between Addison and Allston Way (the site is now occupied by the Takara Sake Company). 

Until the rail tracks were built along Third Street, transporting freight by water was the only economic option. Thomas got into the transportation business by acquiring the ferry Mare Island, which not only carried his goods and those of other firms but had a virtual monopoly on the Berkeley-San Francisco route for many years. In 1891, after numerous complaints were voiced about the high rates charged on the Mare Island, a rival surfaced in the form of Piper, Aden & Co., which introduced a newer, faster steamer, the Hope. Piper’s lower rates quickly captured much of the freight business, and by March 1892, it had taken over the Mare Island and withdrew the Hope from the route. 

This wasn’t the last salvo in the ferry war. On March 2, 1894, the San Francisco Call announced, “Hereafter the Standard Soap Company will operate the Berkeley ferry, in place of Piper, Aden & Co.” The next day, it was rumored that Standard Soap would reduce wages on the Mare Island. Before too long, its rival, now renamed Piper, Aden, Goodall & Co., had reintroduced the Hope into the route. Thomas, apparently anxious to sell his transportation interests, tried to force his rivals’ hand in early October 1895 by denying them access to the wharf. Yet it turned out that eviction was not within his power, since the wharf’s owner, William B. Heywood, had not authorized him to do so. 

By the end of October, the two companies had reached an understanding, the 25-year-old Mare Island was withdrawn from service, and it was announced that in the future all goods shipped to and from Berkeley would be charged a uniform rate. 

Standard Soap made its owner rich, and by the mid-1880s he was casting about for new ventures. In October 1886, he founded the California National Bank of San Francisco, located in the Palace Hotel building on Market Street. The bank was incorporated as a joint stock organization; its authorized capital was $1 million, of which $200,000 was subscribed in currency. 

Its trajectory was swift. The annual statement filed on July 1, 1887, showed total resources and liabilities of $641,133.57. On Dec. 15, 1888, the bank abruptly suspended payments. In a story foreshadowing the current economic crisis, it was revealed that the bank’s cashier, C.H. Ramsden, acted recklessly, building a portfolio of bad loans that ultimately resulted in a loss of almost $170,000. 

The U.S. Treasury’s Comptroller of the Currency placed a receiver in charge of the bank, assessing the stockholders $75,000, all of which was paid except $20,000 assessed against the bank’s president, our friend Richard P. Thomas. 

Naturally, some stockholders were not pleased with this state of affairs. One of them, attorney John Chetwood, Jr., brought legal action against the bank’s executive committee, comprising president Thomas, vice-president Robert A. Wilson, and director Robert R. Thompson. The charge brought against the three was that they were negligent in their duties and permitted the cashier Ramsden to manage the business as he saw fit, lending money without adequate security, which resulted in the bank’s failure. 

In December 1892, Judge Finn entered a judgment in favor of the plaintiff, and the case was referred to a master. But before a final judgment had been rendered, Chetwood settled with Wilson and Thompson, who paid $27,500. The suit against them was dismissed, leaving a net loss to the bank of $139,419. Judgment for this amount was rendered against Richard P. Thomas alone. 

Thomas didn’t think this was entirely fair. Nor was he the capitulating sort. He wasn’t about to hand over the money quietly and took appropriate measures. 

Daniella Thompson publishes www.berkeleyheritage.com for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage  

Association (BAHA).

A Buddhist walks up to the hot dog vendor and says “make me one with everything.” (Long pause). The vendor takes his money but fails to return his change. The Buddhist says, “Hey buddy, where’s my change?!” to which the vendor replies, epicanthically, “Change must come from within!” 

Change is hard. I’m not much good at it myself, but in these carbon-footprint-concerned times, change is essential. The change I’m suggesting today is really very simple, but I suspect that it will not be well-received by many because it involves pushing a button. Although we are a button-pushing nation, we certainly aren’t used to pushing buttons before we use hot water, so this will be a new and frightening concept, and there will doubtless be screams of “Socialism!” and wailing and the gnashing of teeth. There are also many people in the world who do not push buttons, but they are not part of the problem, so we’ll leave them out of it. 

Water heating is an imperfect science. Water heaters, as we think of them today, aren’t much more than about 120 years old, and they tend to reside downstream of our showers and sinks by many yards of pipe. So, when we turn on the hot tap, the first thing that we generally find ourselves doing is flushing several gallons of cold water out of the piping before the hot water can arrive. This wastes both energy and water in a number of ways. First, it clearly wastes clean, treated water, an increasingly rare and expensive commodity. Global warming is simultaneously decreasing the Sierra snow pack and increasing evaporation, thus decreasing the amount of water that will be available to waste. California is expected to increase in population by over 30 percent in the next 20 years. If you think you’re waiting a long time to get into the bathroom now, just wait. 

But, as usual, I digress. The point is that we waste a great deal of water, as well as the energy to deliver it (which is about 19 percent of our state energy usage) every time we stand around waiting for the water to finally get hot. If you only waste 20 gallons of water a day, this will amount to 7,300 gallon a year at an expense of about $150 including the extra gas heating you waste in the process. Some claim as much as 17,000 gallons for a family of four. If this is true, you could save about $400 a year. 

As I’m quite sure you were expecting, I have a solution for you and it’s really quite simple and fairly inexpensive. 

Someone got all the way out of the box on this one. What if you didn’t mind a little warm water in your cold water pipes for a short while? If it didn’t matter, you could use the fact that you already have a “return loop” in the form of a cold pipe adjacent to all the hot lines throughout the house. All you have to do, to avoid wasting several gallons every time you want to heat water, is to run the hot water back through the adjacent cold line for a very short period (usually about 30 seconds) to fill up the hot line with fully hot water. No water is wasted at all, and in a very short while the cold pipes will cool off. It doesn’t really matter anyway unless you’re after a cold drink from the tap right around that time. The potential losses are tiny, but the gain is very large.  

Several companies are now making devices that do this. Actually, there have long been installations done by smarter plumbers or builders in which circulating pumps would run either all the time or on a timer, and this would do something similar. However, while these systems might save water and were intended for convenience more than anything else, they wasted a lot of energy by forcing the water heater to run far more often. The newer systems, such as Metlund’s D’MAND system, run only for a very short while once you ask the system to get ready for you. When you get ready to get into the shower (or do the dishes or the laundry) you push a button mounted near their device and it will run just long enough to heat up the pipes and then will shut itself down. (It has a little thermostat inside that triggers a relay that turns the pump off. Nice.) 

The whole item gets installed under the sink in the bathroom furthest from the water heater and connects to the hot and cold lines under the sink. An outlet is needed and may add to the expense of installation if one isn’t near enough. The whole device is about half the size of a loaf of bread and is nearly silent. A button, much like a doorbell, is mounted near the unit but there are remotes that can be put in other rooms where hot water gets used. If you don’t mind wasting a little energy, a motion sensor can be installed that will automatically turn on the device when you walk into the bathroom. Since you’re likely to be using some hot water when you enter the bathroom, this doesn’t seem so egregious a sin. 

On-demand water heaters are all the rage these days, and those of you who follow my birdcage liners know that I favor these—with some minor complaints. Our novel little pump-and-bypass is a good fit for any on-demand water heater as it can decrease the water loss and delay, which is a sore spot with some on-demand owners. I would now recommend that anyone buying an on-demand water heater look into some version of this bypass technology. BUT, these devices work just fine on all water heaters, including the old and sluggish. 

Grundfos also makes a similar system with the possible advantage of being able to place the pump in a location separate from the bypass valve. This might mean an easier installation if there’s not an outlet near the sink in the far bathroom. It’s worth a look. Plumbers will readily recognize the Danish pumpmaker’s name as it has produced an extremely high quality product for over 50 years. 

Whether you choose the Metlund, D’MAND, the Grundfos Comfort System, the Autocirc1 or any other system, this is a very smart choice for any of us and an easy way to decrease our water and energy usage right now. For the home handywoman, it’s also a manageable job. If you can install a faucet, you can probably do this job. The cost for the kits runs between $350-$600 depending on the type and and the supplier. 

The cities of Peoria and San Antonio are both offering rebates for the installation of these items and I cannot imagine what’s keeping California cities from doing the same. Maybe we have to speak up and demand that our legislators recognize this as a solution to promote and to offer economic incentives for. So now you have two things to do today. One is to head over to Moran Supply in Oakland, talk to my friend Ron and take a look at the Metlund models. The other is to write to our dear Loni (Assemblymember.hancock@assembly.ca.gov) about introducing some legislation to rebate the cost of recirculating systems.  

Change is never easy, but it can be good for you. I’m not sure you can say that same thing about the hot dog. 

ASK MATT 

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor at mgcantor@pacbell.net.

THURSDAY, APRIL 2 

Toy Testing Clinic offered by the Center for Environmental Health which recently found high levels of lead in children’s jewelry and other products at stores such as Wal-Mart and Target. CEH is offering free testing to help parents in the Bay area know if their children’s toys are safe. From 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. at Kaiser Permanente Oakland Medical Center, Dept. of Pediatrics, 11th Floor Conference Room, 3505 Broadway, Oakland. 752-7397. www.ceh.org 

Shorebird Migration A Thurs. evening class with Sun. field trips on the migration and reproduction strategies of shorebirds, reviews worldwide shorebird taxonomy, and identification issues of our local shorebirds. Held at the Oakland Museum of California. Cost is $70. Registration required. 843-2222. www.wingbeats.org 

“From Gaza to Cuba: Let’s Break the Blockade” with John Wallers of Pastors for Peace, and Paul Larudee of The Free Gaza Movement at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St. Donation $5-$10. 841-4824. 

“Four Actions to Resolve Conflict Inside & Out” at 7:15 p.m. at Center for Transformative Change, 2584 Martin Luther King Jr Way. RSVP to register@transformativechange.org 

3rd “Not-A-Seder” Passover Cabaret at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave.Free. Hosted by the Progressive Jewish Alliance. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Holy Names Univ., Brennan Lounge, 3500 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. To schedule an appointment go to www.BeADonor.com 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at Kaiser Center Lobby, 300 Lakeside Dr., Oakland. To schedule an appointment go to www.BeADonor.com 

Improv Acting Class Play fun games that unleash your imagination, creativity, and confidence. Meets 6:45 p.m., Thurs. at YWCA, 2600 Bancroft Way. Beginners welcome. Improv perfromance class at 8:15 p.m. Cost is $10. BerkeleyImprov.com 

“High Power Laser Therapy: A New Advancement in the Treatment of Neuropathy” with Colle Hunt, Jr. at 1 p.m. at Seventh Day Adventist Church at 278 Grand Ave., Oakland. 653-8625. 

Circle of Concern Vigil meets on West Lawn of UC campus across from Addison and Oxford, Thurs. at noon and Sun. at 1 p.m. to oppose UC weapons labs contracts. 848-8055. 

Fitness Class for 55+ at 9:15 a.m. at Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

Buddhist Class on Shikan Meditation at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, Cedar at Bonita, through May 28. http://caltendai.org 

FRIDAY, APRIL 3 

Golden Gate Audubon Soicety Walk Around Jewel Lake in Tilden Park. Meet at 8:30 a.m. at the parking lot at the north end of Central Park Dr. for a one-mile, two-hour-plus stroll through this lush riparian area. Breeding birds are returning, and we may be treated to some wonderful bird song. Heavy April showers cancels. www.goldengateaudubon.org 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Richard C. Boly, National Security Affairs Fellow, Hoover Institution, on “Promoting Entrepreneurship as US Foreign Policy: Good for Business & and Our Image.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $15, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 524-7468. www.citycommonsclub.org 

Ferment Change A celebration of urban agriculture, food justice, fermented food and community. A benefit for City Slicker Farms in West Oakland, at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall,390 27th St., Oakland. Cost is $10-$30, no on turned away. fermentchange.wordpress.com 

“NASA 100 Hours of Astronomy” free viewing through the telescopes Fri. and Sat. from 7:30 to 10:30 p.m. at Chabot Space & Science Center, 10000 Skyline Blvd., Oakland. www.chabotspace.org 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Waste Management, Large Training Room, 172 98th Ave., Oakland. To schedule an appointment go to www.BeADonor.com 

April Fool’s Weekend At Playland-Not-At-The-Beach Celebrate April Fools with our crew of professional jokesters, play pranks and get them played on you from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fri. and Sat. at Playland-Not-At-The-Beach, 10979 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. Cost is $5-$10. 592-3002. www.playland-not-at-the-beach.org 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

Three Beats for Nothing Mostly ancient part music for fun and practice meets every Fri. at 10 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, Hearst at MLK. 655-8863.  

Berkeley Chess Club meets every Fri. at 7 p.m. at the Hillside School, 1581 Le Roy Ave. 843-0150. 

SATURDAY, APRIL 4 

Sustainable Gardening Class for Children Have fun getting your hands dirty and come away with seeds & ideas for your garden. For ages 4-9 and their parents from 10 a.m. to noon, rain or shine, at East Bay Waldorf School, 3800 Clark Rd., El Sobrante. Cost is $10 per family. Call to reserve a space, 223-3570, ext. 2101. 

Creating Year-Round Edible Gardens Learn how to garden care, reducing chores and using as few resources, from water to fertilizer, as possible. This hands-on workshop will offer vegetable gardening basics including: soil preparation, when and what to plant for our local climate, companion planting and pest control, plus creative ways to use your bountiful harvest. Seeds, catalogs, regional food source information, and other handouts will be provided. From 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Ploughshares Nursery, 2701 Main St., at the old naval base, Alameda. Register online. www.stopwaste.org/home/index.asp?page=625 

“Spring Blooming Perennials and Shrubs” a talk by Aerin Moore, at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-2351. www.magicgardens.com 

“Afghanistan: What is A Progressive Solution?” discussion led by Conn Hallinan at 10 a.m. at Niebyl-Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave. between Alcatraz and 66th, Oakland. 595-7417. 

Wildcat Summer Camp Open House A preview of games and activities from the summer from 1 to 4 p.m. at East Bay Waldorf School, 3800 Clark Rd., El Sobrante. 223-3570.  

Artists’ Marketing Workshop “How To Find and Keep Collectors” from 10:30 a.m. to noon at Frank Bette Center for the Arts, 1601 Paru St., Alameda. Cost is $15 members, $25 non-members. 523-6957.  

Arts at St. Alban’s Storytelling and Music with Joyce Parry Moore and Jack Hayes, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington Ave., Albany. Free, donations accepted. To register call 525-1716.  

“David Ramadanoff, This is Your YPSO Life” A night at the movies celebrating David’s 20 years as music director, at 7:30 p.m. at Auctions by the Bay Theater, 2700 Saratoga St., Alameda. Tickets are $10-$15. RSVP to 849-9776. 

Preschool Storytime, including crafts and finger plays at 11 a.m. at The Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720 ext. 16. 

Passover Celebration for Young Children at 10:30 a.m. at Jewish Gateways, 409 Liberty St., El Cerrito. Free. 559-8140. www.jewishgateways.org  

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

Lawn Bowling on the green at the corner of Acton St. and Bancroft Way every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. for ages 12 and up. Wear flat soled shoes, no heels. Free lessons. 841-2174.  

SUNDAY, APRIL 5 

A Peak Hike Join a vigorous 3-mile nature hike to Wildcat Peak for a view of the Bay and beyond, from 10 a.m. to noon. Bring water and snack. Call for meeting place. 525-2233. 

Spring Spiders Learn about the life of a spider, then explore the meadow for wolf spiders, jumping spiders, crab spiders and more, from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

East Bay Tracking Club meets every first Sunday of the month in the East Bay to share tracking, survival, wilderness, nature awareness and naturalist skills from 8:30 a.m. to noon at Seabreeze Market, University Ave. and Frontage Rd. To subscribe to the group email eastbaytrackers-subscribe@yahoogroups.com  

Berkeley Hiking Club goes to Muir Woods Meet at Shattuck Ave. and Berkeley Way at 8:30 a.m. or meet at Mountain Home at 9:30 a.m. We will hike a variety of trails at a moderate pace for approx 7-8 miles. Rain cancels. 654-3148. 

Solo Sierrans Berkeley Big People Sculptures and Aquatic Park Walk Meet at 10:30 a.m. in front of Sea Breeze Market and Deli, University Ave. and Frontage Rd. for an easy 90 min. walk to learn about the sculptures and Aquatic Park. 234-8949. 

Report Back: International Labour Conference in Iraq with Michael Eisenscher, and Donna and Darlene Wallach, at 7 p.m. at Universalist Unitarian Church, 1924 Cedar St. 436-5738. 

Eggstravaganza: The Wonder of Eggs A family exploration event from 1 to 4 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th, Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200.  

“Naturally-Dyed Easter Eggs” A workshop to introduce children to natural dyes from 1 to 2 p.m. at UC Botnical Garden. Cost is $15-$20. Registreation required. 643-2755. 

Berkeley Rep Family Series “Fools, Clowns and Jesters” from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Nevo Education Center, 2071 Addison St. Free, but bring a book to donate to a school library. 647-2973. 

Camp Kesem Berkeley Auction Fundraiser “Make the Magic” to raise money for a summer camp for children who have or had a parent with cancer, at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Hillel. 909-618-8555. 

“Pesach for Preschoolers” for children ages 2-5 and their grown-ups from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at . Kehilla Community Synagogue, 1300 Grand Ave., Piedmont. Learn with your child about the joy and meaning of the Passover holiday and enjoy an age-appropriate model seder. Cost is $18 per family. Pre-registration required. 547-2424, ext. 100. www.KehillaSynagogue.org 

Personal Theology Seminars with Beth Glick-Rieman on “The Scared Scriptures and How they Shaped my Life” at 10 a.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Bob Byrne on “Developing Inner Ease” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 809-1000. 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

MONDAY, APRIL 6 

“Blue-Green Building” A slide-show and discussion on East Bay projects, from rain gardens to green roofs, at 7 p.m. at Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin. Free. 848-9358. www.fivecreeks.org 

“The Conservation of Open Space in the San Francisco Bay Area” with UC Prof. of Geography Richard Walker, author of “The Country in the City” at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St at Arch. Free. 843-8724. 

“How to Bring Solar Energy to Seven Billion People” with Cyrus Wadia, Ph.D., Senior Research Associate, Berkeley Lab, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. Free. www.lbl.gov/friendsofscience 

Teen Wild Guide Orientation An opportunity for teens ages 13-18 to become volunteers in the Children’s Zoo, at 5 p.m. at the Oakland Zoo. To register call 632-9525, ext. 201. 

“Andy Goldsworthy: Rivers and Tides” film screening hosted by the Townsend Center for the Humanities at 7 p.m. in the Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley campus. Free. 643-9670. http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu 

“State Practices and Zionist Images: Shaping Economic Development in Arab Towns in Israel” with author David Wesley at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. www.universitypressbooks.com 

“Castoffs” Knitting group meets at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-3043. 

Community Yoga Class 10 a.m. at James Kenney Parks and Rec. Center at Virginia and 8th. Seniors and beginners welcome. Cost is $6. 207-4501. 

Small-Business Counseling Free one-hour one-on-one counseling to help you start and run your small business with a volunteer from Service Core of Retired Executives, Mon. evenings by appointment at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. For appointment call 981-6148. www.eastbayscore.org 

ASUC Student Legal Clinic provides free legal research and case intake. Drop-in hours Mon.-Thurs. 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. anfd Fri. 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., UC campus. 642-9986. asuclegalclinic@gmail.com 

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group, for people 60 years and over, meets at 9:45 a.m. at Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave, Albany. Cost is $3.  

Dragonboating Year round classes at the Berkeley Marina, Dock M. Meets Mon, Wed., Thurs. at 6 p.m. Sat. at 10:30 a.m. For details see www.dragonmax.org 

Free Boatbuilding Classes for Youth from 10 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. at Berkeley Boathouse, 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. Classes cover woodworking, boatbuilding, and boat repair. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

TUESDAY, APRIL 7 

Sweatshop Worker Event with garment workers and David Bacon, labor journalist, photographer, and author of “Illegal People” at 7 p.m. in the Tilden Room, MLK Student Union, UC campus. 525-5497. 

“Growing Sustainability in a Low-Carbon World” Speaker series sponsored by Inst. for Urban and Regional Development at 5:15 at Wurster Hall, UC campus. http://iurd.berkeley.edu 

“The Great Depression: The Science Behind Depressive Disorders” at 7 p.m. at Cerrito Theater, 10070 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. Cost is $3. www.sciencecafesf.com 

“Financial Fitness” A five-week series on Tues. from 6 to 8:30 p.m. at The HomeOwnership Center, 3301 East 12th St., Suite 201, Oakland. To register call 535-6943. homeownership@unitycouncil.org. 

“Climbing Mount Shasta: Tips for the Novice and the Expert” at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Spring Week at Lawrence Hall of Science with special activities “Water Works” and “Animal Grossology” from noon to 2 p.m., through April 16. Cost is $6-$11. 642-5132. 

Lawyer in the Library at 6 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. Cosponsored by the Alameda County Bar Association. Advance registration required. 526-3720 ext. 5. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Come use our tools as well as receive help with performing repairs free of charge. Youth classes available. Tues., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. from 2 to 6 p.m. at at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991.  

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 845-6830. 

Ceramics Class Learn hand building techniques to make decorative and functional items, Tues. at 9:30 a.m. at St. John's Senior Center, 2727 College Ave. Free, materials and firing charges only. 525-5497. 

Bridge for beginners from 12:30 to 2:15 p.m., all others 12:30 to 4 p.m. Sing-A-Long at 2:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190. 

Rhythm Tap Exercise Class Tues. at 5 p.m. at Redwood Gardens, 2951 Derby St. Donation $2. 548-9840. 

Wheelchair Yoga at 4:30 p.m., Family Yoga on Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at Niroga Center for Healing, 1808 University Ave. between MLK Way and Grant St. All classes by donation. 704-1330. www.niroga.org 

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8 

“Stop AFRICOM” The new U.S. Military Command for Africa with Daniels Volman, Dir., African Security Research Project and Dr. Amina Mama, Nigerian Distinguished Prof. of Ethnic Studies, Mills College at 6 p.m. at La Peña, 3105 Shattuck Ave. 238-8080, ext. 309. 

“The Crash Course” Part II. A documentary on the consequenses of having a monetary system that must grow tied to an energy system that can’t grow, at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. www.Humanist Hall.org 

“Jewish Blessing of the Sun/Birkat HaChammah” The East Bay Jewish community celebrates this once in 28 years holiday from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Chavez Solar Calendar, at the Berkeley Marina. wildernesstorah@gmail.com  

Foreclosure Prevention A six-week class that meets Wed. at 6 p.m. at the The HomeOwnership Center, 3301 East 12th St., Suite 201, Oakland. To register call 535-6943. homeownership@unitycouncil.org. 

Basic Bike Maintenance at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation from 10 a.m. to noon at 6230 Claremont Ave., Oakland. Registration required. 594-5165. 

Confused by Computers? Novice computer users can get one-on-one assistance from noon to 1:45 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. Sign up for an appointment at the reference desk or call 526-3720 ext. 5. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. 548-9840. 

Theraputic Recreation at the Berkeley Warm Pool, Wed. at 3:30 p.m. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at the Berkeley Warm Pool, 2245 Milvia St. Cost is $4-$5. Bring a towel. 632-9369. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at 6:30 p.m. at the Berkeley BART station followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

Teen Chess Club from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at the North Branch Library, 1170 The Alameda at Hopkins. 981-6133. 

Berkeley CopWatch Drop-in office hours from 6 to 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. 548-0425. 

Stitch ‘n Bitch at 6:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

THURSDAY, APRIL 9 

Berkeley Hunger and Homelessness Conference from 5:30 to 8 p.m. at Pauley Ballroom at MLK Student Union Bldg, UC campus. Free, food donations encouraged. Hosted by Cal Berkeley Habitat for Humanity, Suitcase Clinic, and CalPIRG. 

“Abolish Corporate Personhood” An organizing meeting at 7 p.m. at 2105 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., between Center and Addison, in the building shared with East Bay Cohousing Clubhouse. 705-1432. 

“Four Actions to Resolve Conflict Inside & Out” at 7:15 p.m. at Center for Transformative Change, 2584 Martin Luther King Jr Way. RSVP to register@transformativechange.org 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Claremont Resort, Horizon Ballroom, 41 Tunnel Rd.. To schedule an appointment go to www.BeADonor.com 

Circle of Concern Vigil meets on West Lawn of UC campus across from Addison and Oxford, Thurs. at noon and Sun. at 1 p.m. to oppose UC weapons labs contracts. 848-8055. 

Fitness Class for 55+ at 9:15 a.m. at Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

Buddhist Class on Shikan Meditation at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, Cedar at Bonita, through May 28. http://caltendai.org 

FRIDAY, APRIL 10 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Gail Feldman Sustainable Energy Program, City of Berkeley, on “Berkeley’s Solar Energy Project: Leading the Nation through Creative Strategies.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $15, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 524-7468. www.citycommonsclub.org 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

Three Beats for Nothing Mostly ancient part music for fun and practice meets every Fri. at 10 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, Hearst at MLK. 655-8863. asiecker@sbcglobal 

Berkeley Chess Club meets every Fri. at 7 p.m. at the Hillside School, 1581 Le Roy Ave. 843-0150. 

SATURDAY, APRIL 11 

Berkeley Historical Society Spring Walking Tour “Rose Walk and Tamalpais Road” led by John Underhill, from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $8-$10. For reservations and starting point call 848-0181. 

Old-Fashioned Egg Hunt with bunnies and games from noon to 3 p.m. at the Dunsmuir Hellman Historic Estate, 2960 Peralta Oaks Court, Oakland. Tickets are $2-$5, or $12 for the whole family. 562-0328. www.dunsmuir.org 

El Cerrito’s Annual Egg Hunt at 10 a.m., sharp, at Arlington Park, 1120 Arlington Blvd., El Cerrito. 559-7000. www.el-cerrito.org 

American Rhododendron Society Annual Show and Sale from noon to 4 p.m. at Lakeside Garden Club, 666 Bellevue, Oakland. Flower show viewing from 10 a.m. to noon. 223-0443. 

Friends of the El Cerrito Library Book Sale from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at 6510 Stockton St., El Cerrito. www.ccclib.org 

Arts at St. Alban’s: Visual Arts with Reena Burton A multi-disciplinary series for children, ages 5 to 10, parents invited, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington Ave., Albany. Free, donations accepted. to register call 525 1716. info@st-albans-albany.org  

Preschool Storytime, including crafts and finger plays at 11 a.m. at The Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720 ext. 16. 

“Red Highways: A Liberal’s Journey into the Heartland–Implications for the Obama Administration” with journalist, author and political commentator Rose Aguilar, at 7 p.m. at the Alameda Free Library, 1550 Oak St., Alameda. Suggested donation $5. www.alamedaforum.org 

“Grieving is a Revolutionary Act” Seminary of the Street and First Congregational Church of Oakland present a “funeral for the empire” at 7 p.m. at 2501 Harrison St., Oakland. www.seminaryofthestreet.org 

Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation from 10 a.m. to noon at 6230 Claremont Ave., Oakland. Registration required. 594-5165. 

Life Goes On Foundation “Comedy Jam” Benefit Show at 7 p.m. at The Bayside Pavilion, 2203 Mariner Square Loop, Alameda. All proceeds will go to raise funds for spinal cord injuries and promote non-violence. www.lifegoesonfoundation.org 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

Lawn Bowling on the green at the corner of Acton St. and Bancroft Way every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. for ages 12 and up. Wear flat soled shoes, no heels. Free lessons. 841-2174.  

Oakland Artisans Marketplace Sat. from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Jack London Square. 238-4948. 

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

SUNDAY, APRIL 12 

Little Farm Open House Come grind some corn to feed the chickens, pet a bunny, groom a goat or help out in the Kids Garden, from 2 to 3:30 p.m., at the Little Farm, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Toddler Nature Walk Little ones and their grown up friends explore the meadows and trails, from 10:30 to 11:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Rabbit Rendevous Come meet the rascally rabbits at the Little Farm and learn about lagomorphs, from 11 a.m. to noon at the Little Farm, at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Old Time Radio East Bay Collectors and listeners gather to enjoy shows together at 4 p.m. at a private home in Richmond. For more information email DavidinBerkeley at Yahoo.com. 

Personal Theology Seminars with Cathleen Cox on “Why Jesus Matters” at 10 a.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Tibetan Buddhism with Judy Rasmussen on “Blessings on the Wind: The Tibetan Prayer Flag” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 809-1000. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

Sew Your Own Open Studio Come learn to use our industrial and domestic machines, or work on your own projects, from 2 to 6 p.m. at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. Also on Thurs. from 2 to 6 p.m. Cost is $5 per hour. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

CITY MEETINGS 

Community Environmental Advisory Commission meets Thurs., April 2, at 7 p.m., at 2118 Milvia St. 981-7460.  

Housing Advisory Commission meets Thurs., April 2, at 7 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5400.  

Landmarks Preservation Commission meets Thurs., April 2, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7429. 

Police Review Commission meets Tues., April 7, at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-4950.  

Homeless Commission meets Wed., April 8, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5431. 

Waterfront Commission meets Wed., April 8, at 7 p.m., at 201 University Ave. 981-6737.  

Community Health Commission meets Thurs., April 9, at 6:45 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5356.  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., April 9, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. 981-7430.