Page One
Letters to the Editor
PROTECT CREEK
Editors, Daily Planet:
If you went to the Live Oak Fair, you may have caught a glimpse of the last remains of the most beautiful creek site in Berkeley, just east of the park. The largest trees on the Codornices Creek bank are to be felled this week so the creek can be nudged northward to accommodate a driveway and bus parking lane along the south bank.
Most cities now protect creeks. Oakland, Santa Rosa, Walnut Creek and many more make them an essential element of their urban design. Berkeley even protected this creek on this site when the site was owned by a different religious institution.
As of today, a grading and landscape plan for the complete site has yet to be approved by the city (a requirement of the use permit and any submittal for a 35,000-square-foot building). But obliteration is almost complete.
Eva Bansner
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BUDGET CRUNCH
Editors, Daily Planet:
As Dan Peven noted in his letter to the editor on June 6, Berkeley only has one library that lends tools. That makes it especially difficult to see it lose any of its hours.
One of the things that makes the Tool Lending Library the special place that it is, is that the workers there are all tool specialists. They have passed tests and can answer questions about tools and how those tools work. No other employee in the library possesses those specialized skills.
In March, we began to freeze positions in anticipation of the budget deficits coming in July. Unfortunately, one of our tool specialists left at that time. The others have been trying to operate regular hours while lacking about 25 percent of their staffing.
Unless the budget crisis is averted, the branches and central library will also begin cutting hours after July 1. In addition, the budgets to buy books, videos, CDs and, yes, tools will be severely affected. No part of the library will be without cuts in service.
We regret the inconvenience to our patrons and will work with the community to make the reductions in service as painless as possible.
Jackie Y. Griffin
Director of Library Services.
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OUT OF ORDER
Editors, Daily Planet:
Art Goldberg’s characterization of Berkeley’s director of planning as a “duplicitous insect” (Letters to the Editor, June 6-9 edition) is out of order. I do not know whether Mark Rhodes has kept neighbors in the dark about upcoming projects, as Mr. Goldberg charges. I do know that he created a monthly report, sent to neighborhood organizations, that for the first time listed and described upcoming projects and their status months in advance.
And I strongly believe that personal or dehumanizing attacks on one’s opponents (of which I, too, have been guilty) corrode community life and institutions. In both public and public servants, it nurtures an “us versus them” misapprehension, fosters disregard or distortion of positive efforts, withers the search for compromise and common ground, and drives many people of good will from contributing to dialogue and democracy.
Susan Schwartz
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DEFAMATION
Editors, Daily Planet:
The Daily Planet’s biases are evident for all to see. But to allow Art Goldberg to refer by name to a Planning Department employee as a “duplicitous insect” introduces a degree of defamation and viciousness that no newspaper should ever allow to be printed.
Revan Tranter
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UNJUST SYSTEM
Editors, Daily Planet:
Chris Kavanagh, of the Berkeley Rent Board, doesn’t get it. In an effort to explain and defend this unjust, wasteful agency he invokes the obfuscating specter of bureaucratic minutia.
It is hardly worth responding to his misrepresentations, but it is worth noting that the Rent Board on numerous occasions hired “experts” to determine annual rent increases and then ignored the paid experts’ recommendations, approving significantly lesser rent adjustments. The Rent Board’s commitment to injustice is only outweighed by its willingness to waste public money.
The facts are simple—rent control is unjust and unfair.
Because rent control has no means testing (it does not consider the finances of those who receive its benefit) it grants subsidies (artificially low rent) to a random group of citizens. The granting of these subsidies tends to inflate the rent of those not lucky enough to be of this privileged class.
There are tenants from economically advantaged backgrounds with higher incomes than the property owner(s) compelled to subsidize their rent. The enthusiastic willingness of the Rent Board to administer a system so profoundly unjust further demonstrates the moral bankruptcy at the root of this wasteful agency.
Rent control is ineffective and counter-productive. It has resulted in the loss of rental housing units contributing to our housing shortage and increasing rents for those not of the random benefactor class. New housing is built in Berkeley only because new housing is exempt from rent control.
Rent control has reduced the number of small scale (mom-and-pop) type landlords, causing a consolidation of ownership in the hands of large property owners who can afford to “wait out” or legally maneuver this Kafkaesque system. Essentially, rent control promotes the corporate ownership of housing.
Rent control has created a bureaucracy that has wasted 24 million dollars of public money and never created a single housing unit but rather created regulations discouraging the creation of housing.
Rent control usurps the fundamental right of citizens to negotiate contracts, thus undermining the social weave created by person to person agreements—a weave crucial to the fabric of civilized life. Rent control presumes the inability of the individual to choose and negotiate and opts instead for the imposition of bureaucratic authoritarianism. It is the insulting assumption of citizen as child and government as mommy-daddy.
As Kavanagh and his cohorts continue on their self-deluded path, imagining they are doing good, they instead do harm, not only to individuals but to the psyche of the Commons. They promote policy that creates polarity. They perpetrate injustice that erodes fundamental faith in government. They lead the assault against the creative on behalf of slothful and wasteful bureaucracy.
If the Rent Board had any commitment to justice or common sense it would conduct one final vote—it would vote to abolish its own existence. With this Byzantine bureaucracy gone we could redirect the wasted money to a housing fund that provides subsidies to those who need it and allows the creativity of the marketplace to do the rest.
John Koenigshofer
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VETERANS’ BUILDING
Editors, Daily Planet:
Workers under contract to Alameda County are now removing beautiful Spanish-style clay roofing tiles from the Albany Veterans’ Building in Memorial Park in Albany and replacing them with asphalt shingles. The county never gave Albany citizens notice of this, nor did they let the Albany city government know about it.
The tiles, worth $4 a piece, were a freebie to the contractor, and many have already been sold, although some are still sitting on pallets on-site.
John Kitchening, deputy director for building maintenance with General Services Administration in Alameda County, is the official in charge. He says he made a mistake in not considering the architectural significance of the building and its Spanish tiles. That admission, however, does little to remedy the problem.
Ironically, the very day the Alameda County roofing contractor showed up last week, a contractor for the City of Albany broke ground on a $950,000-plus Memorial Park beautification project. Two central goals of the beautification project are to create a Spanish-style plaza in front of the Veterans’ Building and to remove trees in front of the building so as to better feature its Spanish architecture. When it’s finished, the Spanish tiles will be gone, rendering those efforts fruitless.
According to Kitchening’s staff, during the past year Alameda County completed a historic renovation and seismic upgrade to the Veterans’ Memorial Building in Fremont. They were able to preserve 85 percent of the tiles, and had the remaining 15 percent custom manufactured to match the originals.
Why isn’t Albany being treated the same way? Who issued the contract? What public notice did they give? Was the project reviewed by the county architect or historic preservationist? Who approved the contractor’s getting the tiles for free? Did the county know the tiles are worth $4 a piece and that the roof had at least 30,000 tiles on it? That’s a $120,000 freebie! Even the company that delivered the asphalt shingles thinks the loss of the Spanish tiles is a crying shame.
My fellow citizens in Albany need to know this is happening and make the county replace the Spanish-style roof, in keeping with the adjacent city building (which was built seven years ago with Spanish tile roof to match the Veterans’ Building) and the Memorial Park beautification effort now under way.
Leif Magnuson
Albany
