Editorials

One More Round with the Berkeley City Council

Becky O'Malley
Friday June 23, 2017 - 02:04:00 PM

Second verse, same as the first, a little bit louder and a whole lot worse!

Just call me Cassandra. The above bit of summer-camp doggerel expresses today’s theme. I hate to say I told you so, but folks, I told you last week that voting on controversial topics in the last minutes of a heated public hearing was asking for trouble. If you can’t get to it before 10:30, for heaven’s sake, postpone the vote.

You will see in both last week’s issue and this one very heated diatribes from people who are well known respected Berkeley activists over what happened at Tuesday night’s special meeting on Berkeley’s participation in various federally sponsored police programs.

It’s a good thing the Planet is not printed on paper anymore, because it might burst into flames with this stuff. We’d be happy to run contrary opinions, but as yet we haven’t gotten any submitted for publication.

This isn’t even the topic I warned about last week. That one is due to come up next Tuesday: possible remedies for over-production of speculative luxurious apartment blocks at the expense of affordable housing and to the detriment of existing residents in lower-income neighborhoods in South and West Berkeley.  

And I’m not even going to re-hash the multiple objections to the programs which were up for decision on Tuesday night. I’m going to leave that to our inflamed correspondents. As of now, what they’ve said in this space is NO NO NO, which pretty much reflects what the assembled citizenry told the council on Tuesday night I gather. 

I’m sorry to say I can’t tell you for sure what was said, because contrary to ordinary practice the video of the meeting hasn’t yet been posted, and I was not able to watch the proceedings in real time. 

I have learned that three of the councilmembers who were elected with the support of the Berkeley Progressive Alliance (and this publication) voted with the three holdovers from the previous regime to buy the whole package, including the pricey and pointless armored vehicle pitched to Berkeley courtesy of the now-Trumpified h Homeland Security team. 

If you’d like to know more, here are links to stories in other publications: 

Berkeley council meeting ends in chaos after protests on police Urban Shield program: Tom Lochner , Bay Area News Group 

2 arrests in protest of Berkeley council vote on Urban Shield

SFGate 

Berkeley city council votes to continue participation in Urban Shield
KTVU San Francisco- 

Protesters Take Over Berkeley City Council Meeting
Patch.com 

Protesters Clash With Police After Berkeley's Decision to Stay With ...
NBC Bay Area 

Protesters arrested after City Council votes to continue Urban Shield
Daily Californian 

Outcry, arrests after Berkeley City Council votes to stick with Urban ...
Berkeleyside 

All in all, it looks like it turned into the usual mess with which we’re all too familiar from the previous council. Berkeleyans didn’t work so hard to elect new councilmembers just to have them fall into the same stupid traps as their predecessors did.  

Boring as it is, I’ll just repeat myself at this point: 

…, no decisions should be made at these meetings. And the councilmembers must commit to actually listening, courteously.  

Speakers from the public should be given a decent amount of time, enough to make a well-thought-out case for their issues, perhaps three minutes increased to six if someone else yields their time or a councilmember requests it.  

It makes absolutely no sense to get people all riled up, give them no time to say anything except to shout slogans, and then vote when everyone’s tired and angry. The resulting chaos last Tuesday was 100% predictable, and I predicted it, though my warning was aimed at what’s scheduled for next Tuesday. 

For both of these issues (participation in federal police programs and controls on appropriate housing development) things have been made even worse by—oh, as a longtime veteran of civil rights actions, how I hate to use this phrase, but it’s descriptive—outside agitators. It’s noteworthy that the two people arrested on Tuesday don’t live in Berkeley, for what it’s worth. One observer told me she recognized most of the audience early in the evening, but later on the faces were not as familiar. It is true that militarization of police forces harms people who don’t happen to live in town as well as those who do, but still… 

The expected outside agitators for next Tuesday’s vote on housing options are riding horses of another color. By and large they appear to be excessively entitled upper middle-class twenty- and thirty- somethings, mostly White, some claiming degrees from pricey colleges, who wish someone would make it possible for them to live in Berkeley RIGHT NOW at the same level of comfort they enjoyed when living at home with Mom and Dad.  

This crowd is not afraid to advocate building projects which push the older long-term non-White residents of South and West Berkeley out of the way to make room for their own sweet selves. Their pronouncements are larded with ageist references to those who challenge them.  

Proving once again that a little learning is a dangerous thing, they expound the simplistic high-school Econ 1 version of market efficacy, what is pejoratively labelled neo-liberalism in some circles. This is despite a whole flock of recent studies showing that speculative entrepreneurial market rate construction takes at least a generation to trickle down to the lower income brackets, if indeed it ever does. 

Another out-of-town group in the sheep-like Build-Anything-Anywhere (BAA, BAA, BAA) camp consists of paid representatives of the well-paid construction unions, who appear to think that the only purpose of building luxury apartment blocks in prime near-transit locations is to make work for their members, most of whom live elsewhere in comfy single family suburban houses. The building trades have traditionally put a lot of money into candidates who carry water for them—but it’s the job of the Berkeley City Council to put the general welfare first, to be vigilant especially on behalf of those who work here whose wages are not good enough to live here. Can they do that?  

Although the public hearing on Councilmember Kate Harrison’s proposal to require would-be developers to make meaningful contributions to Berkeley’s pressing need for less expensive housing has been formally closed, there will still be the required public comment period when the item comes up on the agenda. People who want to support the idea that new buildings should be required to offer a substantial proportion of units affordable to very low income occupants or instead (“in lieu”) pay a significant fee toward the construction of public affordable housing can and should show up to express their opinion.  

Of course, they did that at the last meeting, didn’t they? Will their voices be heard this time? 

Did the councilmembers who courted progressive support in the recent elections get the message? We’ll see on Tuesday.